Fox had extensive service on transatlantic civilian ships but little experience with naval combat, and he was now the manager of a decidedly landlocked fabric mill in Massachusetts. He was, however, an ambitious man with a powerful need for recognition. He was also Postmaster Blair’s brother-in-law. As early as February he had imagined himself leading an expedition to rescue Major Anderson and his men and on February 6 had presented a plan to General Scott. To make sure he got all the credit, Fox insisted on full control. Scott liked the plan; so did then war secretary Holt. That day Fox wrote to his wife, “Anderson’s fame will be nothing to mine if I succeed.”

  But President Buchanan had rejected it, apparently fearing a repeat of the Star of the West debacle, and, more to the point, hoping to shove the whole crisis forward to the next administration. Fox went back to his mill.

  Since then Fox had revised his plan, and now, on March 14, he presented it to Lincoln and his cabinet, including Fox’s brother-in-law, the postmaster. Lincoln found it compelling; similarly he found the thirty-nine-year-old Fox to be a forceful, dynamic evangelist for its execution. At a meeting the next day, March 15, the cabinet debated the plan; afterward, Lincoln sent each member a brief note asking a single question: “Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort-Sumpter”—that p again—“under all the circumstances, is it wise to attempt it?”

  Some answered that day, others the next. Together the responses demonstrated how complex the issue was. Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase said he would oppose reinforcement if it meant civil war, but that seemed unlikely to him, so he offered a qualified endorsement. Secretary of War Simon Cameron voted no: He agreed with General Scott and Major Anderson’s officers that an attempt now was impossible. Attorney General Edward Bates voted no as well. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles—whom Lincoln referred to as “Father Neptune”—argued that from both a political and military perspective, it would be “unwise.” Interior Secretary Caleb Smith ventured that “the probabilities are in favor of the success of the proposed enterprise” but believed “it would not be wise under all the circumstances.”

  Postmaster Blair offered a nuanced view: He blamed the spreading rebellion on “the connivance of the late administration” and argued that the responsibility for ending it now lay in the hands of the inhabitants of the seceded states; that to achieve this, Lincoln needed to act forcefully. The secessionists, he wrote, already believed the North to be “deficient in the courage necessary to maintain the Government.” It was time to prove otherwise. “You should give no thought for the commander and his comrades in this enterprise”—an allusion to the relief expedition and its officers, including presumably his own brother-in-law, Fox. “They willingly take the hazard for the sake of the country and the honor which, successful or not, they will receive from you and the lovers of free government in all lands.”

  The seventh and most influential member of the cabinet, Secretary of State Seward, voted against reinforcement. “If it were possible to peacefully provision Fort Sumter, of course I should answer that it would be both unwise and inhuman not to attempt it,” he wrote. But as things stood, an attempt to do so seemed likely to trigger civil war and drive the border states from the Union. He argued that maintaining a defensive posture was the best way to retain them. At the moment, he said, those states “indicate a disposition to adhere to the Union, if nothing extraordinary shall occur to renew excitement and produce popular exasperation.”

  He also made the point that any expedition would be impaired from the start by the impossibility of keeping it secret. “In this active and enlightened country,” Seward wrote, “in this season of excitement, with a daily press, daily mails, and an incessantly operating telegraph, the design to reinforce and supply the garrison must become known to the opposite party at Charleston, as soon, at least, as preparations for it should begin. The garrison would then almost certainly fall by assault, before the expedition could reach the harbor of Charleston.”

  In sum: five noes, one definitive yes, and one qualified yes. The cabinet’s position was clear, but Lincoln was unsure: On an instinctive level he felt that giving up Sumter would be wrong, “utterly ruinous,” as he would later put it, arguing that “at home, it would discourage the friends of the Union, embolden its adversaries, and go far to insure to the latter, a recognition abroad; that in fact it would be our national destruction consummated.”

  He remained intrigued by Fox’s plan but wanted more information, intelligence of a more direct and observational nature, and directed War Secretary Cameron to help him get it. Cameron in turn assigned the task to General Scott. “The President requires accurate information in regard to the command of Major Anderson in Fort Sumter, and wishes a competent person sent for that purpose,” Cameron wrote to the general on Tuesday, March 19. “You will therefore direct some suitable person to proceed there immediately, and report the result of the information obtained by him.”

  Scott proposed Gustavus Fox, possibly the least objective agent he could have chosen.

  Lincoln approved.

  Montgomery

  Of Spiders and Entrails

  March 11

  In Montgomery, Mary Chesnut kept up her social spelunking. Delegates and their wives often gathered at her boarding house. “In full conclave tonight,” she wrote, on Monday, March 11, “—the drawing room was full of judges, governors, senators, generals, congressmen.” Story after story flew past, flurries of gossip: the deep piety of John C. Calhoun; one attorney’s confessed admiration for a beautiful woman back in Washington who was not his wife. Then came a random story told by Judge Withers, Mary’s daunting uncle, of a married couple “who quarreled on a bridge and the man said, blubbering, ‘Nancy, take the baby; I will drown myself.’ But she said, ‘No, take the baby with you. I want none of your breed left!’ What a tale.”

  The tale telling that night went on a little too long for Mary’s husband, James, who had retreated upstairs. “Mr. Chesnut making such a stamping over head,” she wrote. “I knew his patience at my long stay was exhausted.” She ignored it. She and several other women then turned to the subject of the laws governing divorce. “These women had studied it thoroughly,” Mary wrote. “One especially seemed to have so exact a knowledge of its various provisions in every state, her husband seemed to dislike the suspicion such knowledge cast upon her.”

  The marital excavations continued. One woman, Mrs. Lafayette Borland, suddenly went quiet as Mary “expatiated on the folly of a woman’s leaving her husband.”

  As Mary now learned, Mrs. Borland had left her husband several years before.

  “Here after,” Mary wrote in her diary, “I deal in generalities!”

  They eventually circled to her own husband, James, who claimed to have felt hurt by a chance remark from a Georgia man who had accused him of keeping things to himself.

  “Mr. C, thinking himself an open, frank, confiding person, asked me if he was not,” Mary wrote. “Truth required me to say that I knew no more what Mr. C thought or felt on any subject now than I did twenty years ago. Sometimes I feel that we understand each other a little—then up goes the Iron Wall once more.”

  She took a moment that day to reflect on her own diary keeping. “I think this journal will be disadvantageous for me,” she wrote, “for I spend the time now like a spider spinning my own entrails instead of reading as my habit was at all spare moments.” She was paraphrasing a passage from a seventeenth-century play, Marriage à la Mode, by John Dryden, who wrote, “Our souls sit close and silently within,/And their own webs from their own entrails spin.”

  Fort Sumter

  Practice Makes Perfect

  March 12–21

  Each day the quiet at Sumter was punctuated by the booming of cannon from Confederate batteries as their inexperienced crews practiced firing and sought to determine optimal angles for hitting the fort and ships in the main channel.

  Firing a heavy gun was an art, and a dangerous one; practice was necessary. A mistake at the wrong moment could be fatal. A typical gunnery crew, as specified by the Army’s Heavy Ordnance Manual of 1861, had seven men—a gunner and six cannoneers. The gunner directed the action. In casual usage, however, the term gunner could be used to describe all members of the crew.

  Among artillery men, a cannon was known as a “piece.” Three cannoneers stood on each side of the barrel about three yards apart; the gunner, also known as the “chief of piece,” stood behind and to the left. Various “accoutrements” lay nearby to be used in loading the gun and adjusting its position and for the all-important step of sponging the barrel between each shot. The gunner’s pouch, which contained various tools for sighting the gun, was hung from the “cascabel,” the knob at the rear of the barrel, as was the “tube-pouch,” which contained the firing lanyard and ignition devices, called friction tubes. The ammunition was piled to the left of the cannon’s muzzle.

  On the gunner’s command From Battery! the men used long, heavy poles of wood, or handspikes, to back the gun away from the embrasure. The gunner guided the process by repeating the command Heave! The cannoneers positioned their spikes at various points under the gun carriage and levered the gun far enough away from the wall to allow access to its muzzle.

  Next the gunner shouted Load! If the gun had just been fired, the first step was to shove a sponge on a long pole into the barrel. At the command Sponge! two men forced the sponge against the bottom of the barrel and gave it three turns, left to right, and then three more, right to left. This was to ensure that no spark or flame remained in the barrel from the previous discharge. Either could cause a premature detonation of the next round as the gun was being loaded, with a lethal result.

  Now the round and its powder-filled cartridge were shoved into the barrel and rammed to the bottom. A small opening at the exterior base of the barrel, called a vent, allowed the gunner to insert a sharp pick to tear a tiny hole in the cartridge bag jammed within. The gunner then commanded In Battery! and the six cannoneers muscled the piece back into firing position.

  Next the gunner ordered Point! and directed the cannoneers through a series of adjustments in the gun’s position to “lay,” or aim, the weapon. Once it was properly laid the cannoneers stepped aside. One man attached the lanyard to a friction tube and then pushed the tube through the vent into the cartridge bag within. He stretched the lanyard taut. At the gunner’s command Fire! this cannoneer gave it a final yank. If all went well—if the charge detonated, if the barrel did not explode—the round within would rocket off toward whatever destiny awaited, and the firing process would begin anew. Typically a heavy gun could be fired a dozen times per hour.

  A misstep could be lethal. U.S. Navy records, for example, show more than thirty fatal artillery accidents during the Civil War, including one that would occur on Christmas Eve 1864 during the Union navy’s bombardment of a Confederate fort in North Carolina, when a very large cannon exploded aboard the U.S.S. Ticonderoga, killing eight men and wounding half a dozen others. Other ordnance accidents during the same bombardment killed or injured dozens of men on four other ships. A Navy surgeon listed the dead and wounded and described their injuries. One sailor was Theodore Abos, a second-class fireman: “left leg, thigh, hip, arm, and forearm fractured; soft parts extensively lacerated; killed by hemorrhage and shock.” Another was Henry Payne, an officer: “both thighs broken, cavity of the pelvis, and part of the abdomen opened; death by shock.” And then there was young James D. Ennels, first-class boy: “left leg and thigh shattered and lacerated; died shortly after amputation.”

  David Dixon Porter (the Navy officer who encountered an elated Varina Davis leaving her house on the night South Carolina seceded) was by this point a rear admiral and wrote the official report on the Ticonderoga incident. The gun in question was a “Parrott rifle” that fired one-hundred-pound shot and had by this time gained a reputation for bursting despite the innovative barrel reinforcement developed by its designer, Robert Parker Parrott. The guns, Porter concluded, were “calculated to kill more of our men than those of the enemy.”

  * * *

  —

  On Tuesday, March 12, the guns at Fort Moultrie alone fired off one hundred blank cartridges. Sumter’s Captain Foster monitored their progress, and saw great improvement. During one practice session Confederate gunners using live shot fired repeatedly and accurately toward a buoy five-eighths of a mile from Sumter. “The practice was excellent, all the shot striking the water nearly in the same spot,” Foster reported, “so it will be seen that the ranges are well understood now, and any vessel coming in must not expect to fare as well as the Star of the West.”

  The Confederates also began practicing with heavy mortars installed on Morris Island, these capable of launching shells high into the air so that they would drop within Sumter’s walls and then explode. Beauregard’s forces continued to add additional firepower. A new battery appeared on Sullivan’s Island, near Moultrie House, the resort hotel up the beach that was now occupied by Confederate officers and soldiers who watched the gunnery practice from the piazzas that encircled the building.

  Sumter’s guns remained silent. Its supply of cartridges was so limited that Major Anderson ordered Quartermaster Hall to retrieve a supply of flannel shirts from storage to be cut up and turned into cartridge bags. The men sewed five hundred of them. Anderson lamented the fact that he could not engage in the same window-rattling display as the Confederates, who seemed to have an unending reserve of shot, shell, and powder. “I have no ammunition to spare,” he told his superiors in Washington, “and, therefore, do not show them our proficiency in artillery practice.”

  His supplies of provisions were running low as well. After Anderson rejected Governor Pickens’s offer of free beef and vegetables, he secured from Pickens permission to acquire such foods on his own from city suppliers using the fort’s existing contracts. But delivery was erratic. Attempts to acquire even minor supplies, such as condiments, required permits from Pickens himself. It was a small humiliation but it prompted Anderson to write a long letter of complaint to the governor, in which he sulked that it might be better to have no supplies at all.

  Anderson complained, too, that South Carolina authorities had detained the fort’s only hired servant, a free Black named Thomas Moore Lynch, after he had ventured into Charleston bearing a permit signed by the U.S. secretary of war. The boy’s return, Anderson told Pickens, “was undoubtedly called for in this case by common civility and courtesy, as the officers have no opportunity of replacing him.”

  Civility and courtesy thus invoked, the incident now became a matter of honor. David Jamison, South Carolina’s secretary of war, replied on the governor’s behalf and told Anderson that in fact Thomas Lynch was a slave, and that it was “the unquestionable privilege of a slave owner to permit or not, at his own pleasure, the return of his slave to a hostile fort.”

  But there was more to the story, Jamison wrote. Charleston police had discovered that Lynch was carrying on “a very improper correspondence” with his mother. They found a letter in his possession in which the boy told her that if a battle broke out in Charleston between Sumter’s men and the state, “the negroes would rise” and assist the federal forces. This of course raised the specter of the kind of insurrection slaveholders had always feared. Moreover, Jamison wrote, the police investigation had turned up letters written by Lynch’s mother in which she described “operations in this city which were not proper to be communicated to anyone in your garrison.”

  But now Jamison managed, perhaps unknowingly, to impugn Anderson’s honor by recounting how the Black servant’s behavior “clearly showed that his temper and principles had not been improved by a residence in Fort Sumter.”

  This drew a testy reply from Anderson in which he first took to task “the professed owner of the boy, who, neglecting his duty as owner or master for months, had permitted the boy to hire himself out, every one supposing him to be free.” But Anderson, former slaveowner, understood the rules and told Jamison that if indeed the boy was someone’s property “of course, that ends the matter.”

  What really irritated Anderson, however, was Jamison’s remark about the boy’s experience at Sumter. “I regret exceedingly,” he wrote, “that your letter contains the remark it does in reference to the effect of a residence at Fort Sumter on the boy’s ‘temper and principles,’ and am satisfied that, upon further consideration, you will regret it.”

  He heard nothing back.

  Washington

  The Commissioners

  March 15–21

  On Friday, March 15, two singularly august men paid a call on Secretary of State Seward on behalf of the Confederate commissioners. These were Samuel Nelson of New York and John A. Campbell of Alabama, both associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, both committed to finding a peaceful resolution to the national crisis. They believed the best way to avoid war was for Seward to offer the commissioners a formal interview to allow them to state their case and to assure them that the administration wanted peace.