* * *

  —

  Seward’s secret March 15 memorandum explaining why the U.S. government could not recognize the Confederate commissioners still lay unread in the State Department’s archive. Gustavus Fox, Stephen Hurlbut, and Ward Lamon all returned to Washington. Lincoln continued to struggle with the ever-mounting crush of patronage seekers.

  He also prepared for the first official state dinner of his administration, to take place on Thursday, March 28. Mary Lincoln anticipated a glorious night of conversation and dancing. Lincoln invited the Times’ William Russell.

  Shortly before the dinner began, Lincoln received a disturbing recommendation from Gen. Winfield Scott that infuriated him and led indirectly to the final extinguishment of all hesitation and doubt as to what to do about the crisis in Charleston Harbor.

  Fort Sumter

  Firewood

  March 26

  At Fort Sumter, the days and nights remained cold. A storm was coming. “The sixth and last temporary building on the parade is being demolished for fuel,” chief engineer Foster reported on March 26. “Some lumber and one condemned gun carriage have already been burned.”

  Outsiders tended to overlook these details. They saw only the heroism and gallantry of Anderson and his men, a classic David and Goliath story: the major and his little garrison—it was invariably described in the press as “little”—standing up to a far larger force that outnumbered them by at least twenty-five to one.

  Anderson’s men saw it in starker terms. Details mattered. In a memorandum to Anderson about how to protect the fort against attack by infantry, Captain Doubleday identified the various points on the structure that would need a sentry, and recommended that one of the fort’s drums (it had five) be placed at the center of each flank of the fort to be beaten at the first sign of an attack. Captain Seymour closed his list of recommendations with this: “It would be well to arrange a privy, in a place of security.”

  To Anderson’s nephew, R. C. Anderson, it was all very thrilling. His children felt likewise; his son proudly steered visitors to Anderson’s photograph, calling him “Uncle Robert Major.” (R.C. lived in Frankfort, Kentucky, home also to Mildred Ruffin, beloved daughter of fire-eater Edmund.) “Had I not a family to provide for and protect in these unsettled times,” nephew Anderson wrote, “I would long before this have been at your side or died in the attempt.” Never mind that the major had a family as well.

  In another letter, this nephew revealed a heartfelt fear:

  “I believe that if there is a calamity which, of all conceivable misfortunes would forever crush my spirits and overwhelm my hopes, it would be the news that ‘Fort Sumpter’ had been surrendered and that the miserable ensign of S.C. floated in the place of your glorious Stars and Stripes.”

  Encouragingly, he added: “The announcement of your death—much as I love you—would not make me half so unhappy.”

  Charleston

  The Handsomest Man

  March 25

  Across the bay in Charleston, life among the chivalry followed its usual rhythms, with little regard for the prospect of civil war. Carriages and fine horses moved at an easy pace along the Battery as wealthy men and women strolled upon its paved frontage and greeted one another and made arrangements for tea and dinner, and for midday visits having no purpose at all. Now and then a cannon blast punctuated the conversation, but these became so frequent as Beauregard adjusted and tested his many guns that they drew no notice.

  By March, Mary Chesnut had become one of the most interesting topics of the day. She had attracted the attention of former-governor Manning, who in addition to being one of the richest men in the South—he owned six hundred enslaved Blacks at several plantations in South Carolina and Louisiana—was one of the most handsome. He was also married. He had decided to engage in a “flirtation” with Mary. He did not, apparently, contemplate a true love affair with all the social opprobrium, and likely bloodshed, that could bring. A flirtation was a bona fide noun deployed in Southern culture to describe something society found much more palatable, even welcomed, for the distraction it provided.

  It seems to have begun, as these things do, on a train, on Monday, March 25, when Mary and her husband traveled to Charleston from their Mulberry plantation in Camden, South Carolina. “Came down on the cars yesterday with an immense crowd,” she wrote in her diary. The train was full of men, planters mostly, attending the state’s secession convention, which continued to deliberate all manner of things, even though the main act was long over. Among the travelers was Manning, who, Mary wrote, “flew in to beg me to reserve the seat by me for a young lady under his charge.” Mary’s husband was seated on the same bench. He stood in courtly fashion to make room, she wrote. “ ‘Place aux dames,’ said my husband politely and went off to seek a seat somewhere else.”

  As it happened, Manning’s request was a ruse. “As soon as we were fairly under way,” Mary wrote, “Governor Manning came back and threw himself cheerfully down in the vacant place. After arranging his umbrella, overcoat, &c to his satisfaction, he coolly remarked, ‘I am the young lady.’ ”

  Mary did not mind the attention. “He is always the handsomest man alive (now that poor William Taber has been killed in a Rhett duel),” she wrote, “and he can be very agreeable. That is, when he pleases. He does not always please.” She was flattered, but she also saw value in the fact that Manning’s attention would irk her own husband, something Mary appeared to enjoy doing not out of spite, but rather to get his attention.

  The Chesnuts and others of their crowd stayed at the Gidiere boarding house, where they shared a table in the dining room with other prominent souls, among them Mary’s irascible uncle, Judge Withers, and William Henry Trescot, Buchanan’s former assistant secretary of state and Confederate court spy. On Tuesday morning, March 26, the Judge was in an exceptionally acerbic mood.

  Turning toward Mary, he said, “Your conversation reminds me of a flashy second-rate novel.”

  “How?”

  “By the quantity of French you sprinkle over it. Do you wish to prevent us from understanding you?”

  Trescot, conspiratorial as always, cut in. “No,” he said in French. “We are using French against Africa.” Trescot gestured toward the enslaved staff. “We know the black waiters are all ears now, and we want to keep what we have to say dark. We can’t afford to take them in our confidence, you know.”

  The Judge glared and “in unabated rage” turned away to talk with another member of the breakfast party.

  On Thursday, well after James Chesnut and the other men had left the breakfast table, Manning slid over and sat in one of the empty chairs beside Mary.

  “I looked at him in amazement,” Mary wrote, “as he was in full dress, ready for a ball. Swallowtail and all, at that hour!”

  “What is the matter with you?” she said.

  “Nothing. I am not mad, most noble Madame, I am only going to the photographer. My wife wants me taken thus.”

  He needed the photograph for a “carte de visite,” a photographic calling card, then de rigueur among the chivalry. He insisted Mary join him, and she in turn retrieved her husband, ordered him to dress in formal attire, and took him along. “Mr. M,” she noted, referring to Manning, “promised me his likeness.”

  Later, the day took a somber turn. Mary joined two other women for a carriage ride to the city’s Magnolia Cemetery to visit the tomb of the VanderHorst family, one of Charleston’s oldest families, “there to see the VanderHorst way of burying their dead,” she wrote. “One at least, is embalmed or kept lifelike by some process, dressed as usual—can be seen through a glass case. I did not look. How can anyone?”

  She returned home “with the worst attack of the blues.”

  That night, her husband chastised her for all the time she was spending with other men, especially Manning. “After dinner, Mr. Chesnut made himself eminently absurd by accusing me of flirting with John Manning, &c. I could only laugh—too funny!”

  Washington

  Change of Heart

  March 27

  On Thursday, March 28, shortly before Lincoln’s first state dinner, the president received a memorandum from Gen. Winfield Scott, whose prior appraisal of what would be required to save Fort Sumter had been so discouraging. This new assessment was doubly so.

  First, Scott addressed Sumter. With the passage of time, he argued, Anderson’s position had become more and more untenable due to Beauregard’s installation of so many new artillery batteries. To relieve the fort now, Scott wrote, would require a full-on invasion with enough ships and troops to seize control of those batteries. He estimated that organizing such an offensive would take ten months, during which Anderson undoubtedly would be starved out or forced to surrender by a Confederate assault. An expedition like the one proposed by Gustavus Fox would at best provide only temporary relief. “An abandonment of the fort in a few weeks, sooner or later, would appear, therefore, to be a sure necessity,” Scott wrote, and he added it was best to do it soon, gracefully, as a gesture of the government’s sincere interest in peace.

  But now he went further. He argued that Sumter’s evacuation alone was no longer enough to persuade the upper South and border states to stay in the Union. Citing “recent information from the South,” he wrote that the situation had degraded to the point where only the evacuation of both Sumter and Fort Pickens would be persuasive. “Our Southern friends,” he wrote, were clear that this “would instantly soothe and give confidence to the eight remaining slaveholding States, and render their cordial adherence to this Union perpetual.”

  Lincoln was stunned. Until now, no one had suggested a voluntary evacuation of Fort Pickens. Moreover, Scott seemed to be basing his judgment on political, rather than military, considerations. Who were these “Southern friends,” and what was this “recent information”? The memo, Lincoln said later, gave him “a cold shock,” but with his state dinner about to begin, he could not immediately address it. At seven p.m., Lincoln and Mary led a procession of guests into the state dining room, accompanied by the Marine band. William Russell, an invited guest, noted that “a babel of small talk” filled the room, interrupted now and then by sudden silence as Lincoln told one of his homespun stories. Mrs. Lincoln in particular captured Russell’s attention. She was, he wrote, strikingly plain, “her nose and mouth of an ordinary type, and her manners and appearance homely, stiffened, however, by the consciousness that her position requires her to be something more than plain Mrs. Lincoln, the wife of the Illinois lawyer; she is profuse in the introduction of the word ‘sir’ in every sentence.” She used a hand fan “with much energy.”

  Lincoln seemed utterly at ease and clearly enjoyed the gleam and energy of the evening. Russell had no idea that inwardly Lincoln was deeply troubled owing to General Scott’s memorandum.

  Now the correspondent got his first direct experience of Lincoln’s penchant for telling jokes and stories and saw immediately that it had a tactical element, allowing him to extricate himself from awkward conversations. “Mr. Lincoln raises a laugh by some bold west-country anecdote and moves off in the cloud of merriment produced by his joke,” Russell wrote. At one point during the dinner, Lincoln, with Russell present, heard his new attorney general, Edward Bates, express opposition to the appointment of a certain lawyer to a federal judgeship. “Come now, Bates,” Lincoln said, “he’s not half as bad as you think.” Lincoln explained that the lawyer in question had once done him a favor: Lincoln was walking to a courthouse about a dozen miles away when the lawyer overtook him in his coach and offered a ride. The driver of the coach drove erratically; Lincoln looked outside and watched a moment. The driver appeared intoxicated. Lincoln told this to the lawyer, who then shouted at the driver, “Why, you infernal scoundrel, you are drunk!” The driver halted the horses and gravely turned to the lawyer. “By gorra!” the driver said, “that’s the first rightful decision you have given for the last twelvemonth.”

  At which point, under cover of laughter, Lincoln “beat a quiet retreat from the neighborhood of the Attorney-General.”

  Russell had hoped to learn something substantive that night about how Lincoln planned to address the secession crisis but found himself disappointed. He wrote to a friend: “I dined with the Presdt. on Thursday and with his Cabinet, and am not a bit the wiser.”

  * * *

  —

  As Lincoln’s state dinner wound down, he discreetly asked the members of his cabinet who were present to join him in an adjacent room. Making no attempt to hide his irritation, Lincoln read General Scott’s message aloud.

  “A long pause of blank amazement followed,” according to John Hay and John Nicolay. Postmaster Blair recalled a “very oppressive silence.” Blair broke it, growling that Scott was “playing politician and not General.”

  Lincoln asked the members to convene for a formal cabinet meeting at noon the next day, Friday, March 29. “That night,” his secretaries recalled, “Lincoln’s eyes did not close in sleep.”

  At the next day’s meeting, Lincoln summarized the information he had accumulated thus far, including the report from his friend, Stephen Hurlbut, on the absence of pro-Union sentiment in South Carolina. Lincoln asked for another vote on whether to send an armed resupply mission to Fort Sumter, and each man wrote a brief statement of his views. Now, just fourteen days after their initial vote, the cabinet largely reversed itself, with Blair, Welles, and Treasury Secretary Chase all voting to resupply Sumter. Seward remained opposed; Interior Sec. Caleb Smith also voted no. Attorney General Bates offered a conclusion so noncommittal as to be almost funny: “As to Fort Sumter,” he wrote, “I think the time is come either to evacuate or relieve it.”

  Blair urged action now to spare more bloodshed later. “South Carolina is the head and front of this rebellion,” he wrote, “and when that State is safely delivered from the authority of the United States it will strike a blow against our authority from which it will take us years of bloody strife to recover.”

  All of the six members present, including Seward, endorsed directly or implicitly the reinforcement of Fort Pickens.

  * * *

  —

  Lincoln authorized both expeditions. This was a bold decision for a fledgling administration facing the imminent disintegration of the Union. But what would soon prove calamitous was that the commanders of both expeditions hinged their success on the use of the same powerful warship, a side-wheel steam frigate called the Powhatan.

  Lincoln inadvertently assigned this one ship to both.

  Part six

  COLLISION

  (March 29–April 9, 1861)

  If the insult be of a serious character, it will be the duty of the second of the challenger, to say, in reply to the second of the challengee: “We have been deeply wronged, and if you are not disposed to repair the injury, the contest must continue.” And if the challengee offers nothing by way of reparation, the fight continues until one or the other of the principals is hit.

  —The Code Duello

  Charleston

  The Flirtation

  March 30

  On Saturday, March 30, James Chesnut joined a group of other men on an excursion to visit the forts in Charleston Harbor. Mary declined to go, deeming the wind too strong and likely to raise too much dust on the harbor islands. “Mr. C gave me his cheek for farewell,” she noted. “I hope Anderson will not pay them the compliment of a salute with shotted guns as they pass Fort Sumter, as pass they must.”

  When she returned to her rooms after breakfast, she found a bouquet of roses from some friends and settled into the prospect of a peaceful Saturday.

  It was not to be, however.

  “Now, a loud banging at my door,” she wrote. “I get up in a pet and throw it wide open.”

  She found John Manning “smiling radiantly.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Pray excuse the noise I made. I mistook the number. I thought it was Rice’s room. That is my excuse. Now that I am here, come go with us to Quinby’s.” (Another photographer’s shop, a favorite of the chivalry, for a second round of carte de visite photos.) “Everybody will be there—who are not on the island. To be photographed is the rage just now.”

  Afterward, Mary and Manning toured the city in an open carriage and paid calls on a number of homes, “the handsome ex-governor doing the honors gallantly.” When she first made this reference in her diary, she wrote “my” handsome ex-governor, then later changed it to “the.”

  Her husband returned from the day’s excursion in a foul mood, “enraged,” she wrote, accusing her of having declined to accompany him so that she could stay home and flirt with John Manning. “I went to bed in disgust.”

  She tried to erase this passage, too.

  That night, while Mary was in her room, General Beauregard stopped by the house. Mary did not come out of her room to greet him. “He is the hero of the hour,” she wrote. “That is, he is believed to be capable of great things. A hero-worshiper was struck dumb because I said, ‘So far he has only been a captain of artillery or engineers or something.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Sunday, March 31, likely did not improve Mr. C’s mood. Friends came for tea. Many friends.