He was gratified to see that the crowd standing around him at the bulletin board shared his enthusiasm. “I heard not a single expression of regret or of apprehension,” he wrote, “but on the contrary, many of gratification that things would now be brought to an issue.”

  * * *

  —

  In Montgomery, where James Chesnut was helping organize the provisional government of the Confederacy, his wife adopted the same daily routine she exercised back in South Carolina. She made frequent visits to the homes of city residents and delegates alike, then received the obligatory return calls. In her diary, she kept up a withering fire of snipery, describing one woman as “fat and stupid,” another “cross eyed,” still another “ugly as sin.” After a dinner at one home she wrote, “I can give a better dinner than that!”

  One caller, former South Carolina governor John Manning, took a liking to Mary, one that would soon develop, on his side at least, into an undisguised flirtation. Mary was accustomed to this kind of attention. “I never was handsome,” she wrote; “I wonder what my attraction was, for men did fall in love with me wherever I went.”

  Mary also paid a call at the rooms occupied by Jefferson Davis and Varina, soon to be a close friend. Varina “met me with open arms,” Mary wrote. “What a chat that was, two hours. She told me all the Washington news.” They avoided politics, however. Much of the conversation centered on Varina’s encounter with Queen Victoria’s son, Edward Albert, the Prince of Wales, during his visit to Washington the preceding October, including his penchant for exclaiming, “Oh, uncommon fine!”

  Mary noted, “I could only get away by promising to come back every day.”

  On Inauguration Day, while making her rounds in Montgomery, Mary encountered a scene that occurred routinely in the city and throughout the South but that left her feeling heart-sunk and unnerved, so much so that she had to sit down on a stool in a nearby shop.

  “I saw today a sale of Negroes,” she wrote.

  She had come across a slave auction in progress. A mulatto woman stood on a raised platform high enough to be seen above the crowd. “Mulatto women in silk dresses—one girl was on the stand. Nice looking—like my Nancy”—this a reference to her own enslaved maid. In a later much-modified version of her journal meant for publication, she added detail: “She was magnificently got up in silks and satins. She seemed delighted with it all—sometimes ogling the bidders, sometimes looking quite coy and modest, but her mouth never relaxed from its expanded grin of excitement.”

  Something about the moment caved Mary’s spirits. “South Carolina slave holder as I am my very soul sickened,” she wrote. “It is too dreadful. I tried to reason—this is not worse than the willing sale most women make of themselves in marriage—nor can the consequences be worse. The Bible authorizes marriage and slavery—poor women! poor slaves!”

  The next day, March 5, she read Lincoln’s address. By now the full inaugural had been telegraphed to newspapers around the country. “Means he war or peace,” she wondered, this an allusion to an 1808 ballad by the beloved Sir Walter Scott featuring the knight Lochinvar, who uses trickery to steal off with his future bride. “O come ye in peace here, or come ye in war,” Scott wrote, “Or to dance at our bridal, young Lord Lochinvar?”

  “An insidious villain,” Mary wrote. “I fear he only means, if he can, to get away from us the border states.”

  She was taken aback by how quickly the men around her became bellicose. “The cry today is war,” she wrote on March 6. “Still I do not believe it.”

  The White House

  First Day

  March 5

  On Tuesday, March 5, Lincoln’s first day in office, he received a letter from William Seward confirming that he would in fact accept appointment as secretary of state.

  Seward explained his turnabout to his wife, Frances, after first congratulating himself on having “slipped quietly out of Congress, without getting any bones broken.”

  Lincoln, he told her, “is determined that he will have a compound Cabinet; and that it shall be peaceful, and even permanent”—a reference to the fact that Lincoln’s cabinet choices not only had clashing personalities but that a number of them, including Seward himself, had competed against him for the Republican presidential nomination. “I was at one time on the point of refusing—nay, I did refuse, for a time to hazard myself in the experiment. But a distracted country appeared before me; and I withdrew from that position. I believe I can endure as much as any one; and may be that I can endure enough to make the experiment successful. At all events I did not dare to go home, or to England, and leave the country to chance.”

  That morning when Lincoln arrived at his office, as his friend Orville Browning would later recall, “the very first thing placed in his hands” was a letter from Major Anderson at Fort Sumter, accompanied by a note from outgoing war secretary Joseph Holt. This was Anderson’s report summarizing the estimates made by his officers as to the number of troops and the quantity of supplies that would be necessary to sustain the fort against Confederate attack.

  Lincoln immediately forwarded these materials to Gen. Winfield Scott, who read them promptly and returned them the same day. On Holt’s letter he scrawled: “I see no alternative but a surrender.”

  Scott went so far as to draft an order to that effect, to be issued to Anderson. “Sir: The time having been allowed to pass by when it was practicable to fit out an expedition adequate to the succor of your garrison, before the exhaustion of its means of subsistence—you will, after communicating your purpose to His Excellency, the Governor of So. Carolina,—engage suitable water transportation, and peacefully evacuate Fort Sumter.”

  He did not send it.

  * * *

  —

  On that Tuesday, March 5, the new U.S. Senate, now under Republican control because of Southern defections, confirmed Lincoln’s full slate of cabinet nominees, among them Seward as secretary of state.

  Lincoln wrote to Seward: “Please give me an interview at once.”

  Fort Sumter

  Activity and Determination

  March 5

  The men at Fort Sumter would not learn the contents of Lincoln’s inaugural address for two days, but they saw visual evidence of a fresh surge of activity at the batteries around Charleston Harbor, which they attributed to both the speech and the contemporaneous arrival of General Beauregard.

  On March 4, Sumter’s Captain Foster observed three steamers deliver troops and supplies to the Iron Battery at Cummings Point. A large force was also landed the next night, followed soon after by a shipment of nine new cannon. Portable “hot shot” furnaces were delivered to some batteries, these used to heat cannonballs to the point where they would set fire to whatever flammable materials they struck. The number of new troops apparently exceeded the available shelter at Cummings Point, or so Foster assumed after seeing large numbers of soldiers gathered around their “bivouac fires.” They arrived during a period of fine weather, but this changed abruptly on the night of March 5. Foster was sympathetic. “Their suffering must have been considerable during the night, for the weather suddenly changed from the warm temperature of the preceding days to a high degree of cold for this climate, the wind blowing fresh from the north.”

  Despite only being able to watch from afar, Foster thought he detected a change in the tenor of the work at the Carolina batteries: “more earnestness.” Major Anderson noticed it as well. He understood, further, that the batteries were now in very capable hands. He knew Beauregard; he had taught him artillery tactics at West Point. Beauregard in turn rated Anderson his favorite teacher and had worked for him briefly as his assistant. The two men considered each other friends.

  Anderson wrote to Adjutant Cooper in Washington, “Everything indicates activity and determination.”

  There was a small glimmer of positive news, however. Bits of intelligence and some diligent spyglassing caused Captain Foster to conclude that the much-feared “floating battery” was not so fearsome after all. The barge by itself had a draft of seven feet, which alone would make positioning it close to the fort difficult; but this was before the addition of heavy guns and iron shielding. Even now the barge was clumsy and unwieldy, Foster observed; its tendency to tip forward required the placement of a counterweight at its stern.

  Foster reported his assessment to Washington: “I do not think this floating battery will prove very formidable.”

  * * *

  —

  General Beauregard needed all the time he could get to accumulate the guns and powder he would need to repel enemy ships and conduct an effective artillery siege against Sumter, let alone gather and train volunteers. “I am of the opinion that, if Sumter was properly garrisoned and armed, it would be a perfect Gibraltar to anything but constant shelling, night and day, from the four points of the compass,” he wrote to the Confederacy’s new secretary of war, Gen. L. P. Walker. “As it is, the weakness of the garrison constitutes our greatest advantage, and we must, for the present, turn our attention to preventing it from being re-enforced.” If the time came to open fire on Sumter, he told Walker, he wanted to be as ready as possible. “All that I ask is time for completing my batteries and preparing and organizing properly my command, which is still in a more or less confused state, not having yet my general staff officers around me.”

  His chief engineer, Major W.H.C. Whiting, felt that given the scarcity of men and equipment, the immediate priority should be to prevent a federal fleet from reaching Sumter in the first place.

  The labor problem would soon be resolved, as Charleston’s planters, inflamed by patriotism toward their new nation, volunteered to become regimental officers and, more importantly, donated the labor of their enslaved workers.

  But in this crucible of tension, inexperience raised the prospect that an accident could ignite a war.

  Washington

  Relief

  March 8

  For months, Inauguration Day had stood in the temporal distance as a day to be dreaded, girded for, and survived. It seemed an endpoint in itself, like an assignation for a duel: one dared not look beyond. First the inauguration had to take place; only then could the nation get back to constructing its future, with the helm of state securely in new hands. Now that March 4 had come and gone and no secret force had seized the Capitol and no assassin had leapt onto the East Portico, relief supplanted disquiet.

  Without knowing it, on March 8, Frances and William Seward wrote each other a letter, she from freezing Auburn, New York, where the day before, the temperature had fallen below zero; he from an unusually warm Washington, where temperatures over the preceding five days had reached as high as eighty-three degrees. Frances opened with grim news about a family friend, fifty-seven years old, who lay ill and was not expected to survive, a victim, she believed, of worry over the inauguration. “Ethan Warden is still living,” she wrote, “but I think there is no ground for expecting his recovery—I believe his anxiety about you [on] the 4th injured him, but I went to see him Tuesday and found him composed and sensible though exceedingly feeble. He talked of you continually with reverence and affection. ‘Well the Governor is Safe’ were his first words.”

  After a few more references to family matters, she turned to William himself. “Now that the season of our greatest apprehension has gone by I see the almost insurmountable difficulties by which you are surrounded,” she wrote. “Without being able to see how, I have faith and hope that you will be able to surmount them.”

  * * *

  —

  William’s letter to Frances confirmed that now the hard work had begun. He had been to his office for nine hours on each of the previous two days, he wrote—his office consisting of two rooms on the northeast corner of a simple two-story brick building with six white columns on its north façade. A good portion of his day was spent parrying the crush of office seekers, “an hundred taking tickets where only one can draw a prize.” He placed his son Frederick, now assistant secretary, in an office across the hall; Frederick handled most of the patronage entreaties. “I do not know what I should do without him,” William wrote.

  But his son could do little to ameliorate the overall strain of establishing a new government in the midst of a national crisis, especially when Seward saw himself as that government’s primary bulwark. “Last night,” William told Frances, “I broke down, and sent for Dr. Miller. I have kept my chamber today, except an hour, when I went on a necessary errand to the White House.

  “I wish I could tell you something of the political troubles of the country; but I cannot find the time. They are enough to tax the wisdom of the wisest”—implying here that he was among the wisest. “Fort Sumter in danger,” he wrote. “Relief of it practically impossible. The Commissioners from the Southern Confederacy are here. These cares fall chiefly on me. The country will, before long, come to a severe trial of its patience and patriotism.”

  Seward’s son felt his condition sufficiently serious as to merit a telegram to Frances, who was immediately alarmed. Even the press had got wind of it, with one source noting that he had been “detained from the Department by physical disability.” On the morning of March 9 Seward wrote to Lincoln, telling him, “I am yet kept indoors, but I would muffle up and ride to your House if necessary at anytime today.”

  Seward appeared to be suffering from “a severe attack of lumbago,” according to a contemporary’s account. Although a century later lumbago would be rendered a comical term, in 1861 it was a diagnosis for disabling back pain believed to arise from any number of potential causes, among them rheumatism, gout, tuberculosis, tumors, intestinal inflammation, even syphilis (though this appears not to have been suspected in Seward’s case).

  At ten o’clock Saturday morning, March 9, Frances wrote to Frederick in reply to his telegram. “My dear Son, We have your telegram this moment—I knew your Father must be ill if he was not super human.” She was ready to leave immediately for Washington, she told him: “Do send for me if your Father is not entirely well when this reaches you.”

  She urged Frederick to keep nothing from her. She closed, “With best love to your Father and a prayer that he may not be crushed by upholding a nation—Do not fail to tell me the truth and the whole truth.”

  Three days later Frederick wrote back to assure his mother that the intensity of work seemed about to lessen. “The pressure of visitors, applicants for office, is enormous, but the Department fortunately is much more defensible against intrusion either in person or by letter than a private house is, and I think after the first two or three weeks his life will be much more pleasant than while he was in the Senate. It would be one constant levee now”—a term for a formal reception—“if he would see everybody, but he sets apart three hours a day for the purpose and so gets some time for thought and for recreation, as well as for work.”

  * * *

  —

  In Charleston the likelihood of war dominated conversation. One knowledgeable soul predicted “flagrant war” within three days. Even so, Edmund Ruffin began to experience a degree of tedium. “I already find the passage of time heavy, for want of some employment,” he wrote on March 5, the day after the inauguration.

  He managed to acquire a permit to visit Confederate-held Fort Moultrie, “which now is a difficult matter, and rarely conferred.” Upon entering the fort, he was pleased to have his need for appreciation at least partially fulfilled. He was warmly greeted by the fort’s new commander, Col. Roswell S. Ripley, and noted in his diary that he “received much attention from him and other officers.” As he had done back in January, Ruffin also toured other Confederate batteries and found preparations for battle considerably advanced. The floating battery appeared to be nearly completed.

  Flagrant war did not occur, however—much to Ruffin’s disappointment. Bored, he left the city on Saturday, March 9, to visit friends in the surrounding countryside and to inspect their farms. Three days later a rumor reached him that Lincoln had ordered Major Anderson to surrender Fort Sumter. Ruffin doubted this, but soon more reports arrived. The morning’s newspapers seemed to corroborate the news. One dispatch held that a messenger was on his way now from Washington to deliver the order.

  Ruffin did not want to miss a moment’s action. Although still skeptical, he returned to Charleston the next day. He found the city awash with rumors of the imminent surrender but also got a whiff of something he found far more compelling. “Another report is that several ships of war, with soldiers, have set off for the south, and, as supposed, to reinforce Fort Sumter.”

  He doubted this as well but loved the prospect. The resulting conflict would, he was certain, bring Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina into the Confederacy.

  For the moment, however, Ruffin found conditions in Charleston far too peaceful. On Saturday morning, March 16, he boarded a steamer for a tour of the federal forts now under Southern control, led by South Carolina Secretary of War Jamison. On board he found “a large party of ladies as well as gentlemen,” including two former governors—all in a festive mood.

  Ruffin once again wondered at the lack of violence thus far. He found it strange, and demoralizing. He was dismayed to learn that Major Anderson was still able to send and receive mail. It was said that Anderson and General Beauregard were actually friends.