John Witherspoon (a cousin of Mary’s; his mother, Betsey, would soon be murdered by her enslaved servants).

  Dr. Smith.

  Theo Stark.

  Dr. Morrow (medical officer on Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853–54 voyage to Japan).

  Dr. Gibbes.

  Mr. Miles.

  Sam Shannon.

  And the indefatigable and resolutely handsome John Manning.

  Who, much to James Chesnut’s disgust, insisted on speaking to Mary alone, in a whisper.

  * * *

  —

  Nearby, at the Charleston Hotel, Governor Pickens grew impatient. Lincoln’s emissary, Ward Lamon, had promised that Sumter would be evacuated within days. Nothing had happened. On Saturday, March 30, Pickens telegraphed the Confederate commissioners, still in Washington, to tell them details of Lamon’s visit, namely his explicit statement that the surrender of the fort was imminent. The commissioners in turn showed this telegram to their intermediary, Justice Campbell, who then brought it to the State Department and asked for another interview with Secretary Seward to learn whether Sumter really would be evacuated.

  Seward found himself in a profoundly awkward position. He had assured the Confederate commissioners that Sumter would soon be surrendered, but now the cabinet had endorsed the opposite path.

  He promised to respond to the commissioners’ latest query on Monday, April 1; in the meantime, he showed Governor Pickens’s telegram to Lincoln.

  Washington

  Seward’s Play

  April 1

  When Justice Campbell returned to the State Department on Monday, April 1—All Fools’ Day, as it was known then—to discuss Governor Pickens’s telegram about the promised evacuation of Fort Sumter, Secretary Seward wrote out a brief statement for Campbell to bring to the commissioners. “The President,” he wrote, “may desire to supply Fort Sumter, but will not undertake to do so without first giving notice to Governor Pickens.”

  The note startled Campbell. “What does this mean?” he asked. “Does the President design to supply Sumter?”

  “No, I think not,” Seward replied, despite knowing that concrete plans for a Sumter rescue were underway. “It is a very irksome thing to him to evacuate it. His ears are open to everyone, and they fill his head with schemes for its supply. I do not think that he will adopt any of them. There is no design to reinforce it.”

  Campbell relayed the message to the commissioners and told them, mainly on the strength of Seward’s verbal assurances, that he remained confident Fort Sumter would be evacuated.

  Commissioner Crawford was skeptical. That same day, he telegraphed General Beauregard in Charleston: “My opinion is that the President has not the courage to execute the order agreed upon in Cabinet for the evacuation of the fort, but that he intends to shift the responsibility upon Major Anderson, by suffering him to be starved out. Would it not be well to aid in this by cutting off all supplies?”

  Beauregard promptly relayed this to Confederate War Secretary Walker in Montgomery, with one line appended: “Batteries here ready to open Wednesday or Thursday”—two to three days hence. “What instructions?”

  * * *

  —

  Seward, too, was growing frustrated. He still hoped to evacuate Sumter to buy time for the realization of his dream of Union restoration despite the Cabinet’s decision to resupply the fortress. He remained convinced that a deep reservoir of pro-Union sentiment existed in the South and that a period of calm would bring it to the surface. Lincoln, meanwhile, seemed overwhelmed and distracted by the petty responsibilities of establishing his government. In a March 26 letter to Charles Francis Adams, Seward complained that Lincoln had “no conception of his situation.”

  But here Seward sensed opportunity. The administration’s disarray seemed to create an avenue for him to step forward and exercise the power he all along presumed himself to wield.

  On April 1, he sent Lincoln a memorandum entitled “Some thoughts for the President’s consideration” that he had written after consultation with two allies, Thurlow Weed, editor of the Albany Evening Journal, and Henry J. Raymond of the New-York Times. Seward’s handwriting was so abysmal that he had his son Frederick copy the memorandum in his own hand. To avoid the prying eyes of intermediaries, Frederick carried it directly to Lincoln.

  The text was critical of Lincoln in an insinuative manner. “We are at the end of a month’s administration and yet without a policy either domestic or foreign,” Seward began. “This, however, is not culpable, and it has been unavoidable.” He understood that the need to fill patronage positions and secure Senate confirmations had distracted the president from other more serious matters. “But,” Seward wrote, “further delay to adopt and prosecute our policies for both domestic and foreign affairs would not only bring scandal on the Administration, but danger upon the country.”

  He again urged that Fort Sumter should be surrendered and Fort Pickens retained, and, further, proposed that Lincoln consider engineering a war with France or Spain to distract the nation from the secession crisis.

  “But whatever policy we adopt,” he told Lincoln, “there must be an energetic prosecution of it.” He hinted that he, Seward, was the man for the task. “Either the President must do it himself, and be all the while active in it,” he wrote, “or Devolve it on some member of his Cabinet.” As if to ensure that Lincoln did not miss the point, Seward then added, “It is not in my especial province. But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.”

  Seward fully expected Lincoln to endorse his proposals, according to a witness, New-York Times correspondent James B. Swain—so certain, in fact, that he had arranged in advance for Weed’s Journal and Raymond’s Times to publish the memorandum along with Lincoln’s expected response. The two editors would then launch an aggressive editorial campaign to support Seward’s twin goals of evacuating Sumter and conjuring a pro-Union resurgence in the South, while also emphasizing that he alone could achieve them.

  The Times was ready. The paper held open a portion of its front page ordinarily devoted to national news; correspondent Swain waited in Washington to receive Seward’s memorandum and Lincoln’s reply and then telegraph them to New York.

  Blinded perhaps by his own sense of self-importance, Seward had misread his employer. What he did not recognize yet was that there was steel in this Illinois lawyer and that it glinted most keenly when adversaries challenged his resolve. “It is a little difficult to imagine what must have been the feelings of a President…on receiving from his principal councilor and anticipated mainstay of his Administration such a series of proposals,” Nicolay and Hay would later write in their biography of Lincoln. Another president might have fired Seward on the spot, but Lincoln certainly understood that Seward was a talented statesman and shrewd politician, and that his sudden departure at this moment would add more confusion to an already chaotic situation.

  Lincoln wrote his answer in the form of a letter; what he did with it then is unclear. The letter and its envelope would be found years later among Lincoln’s papers, suggesting that he had never actually sent it to Seward; no copy exists in Seward’s papers. Lincoln may have asked Seward to return it, or decided simply to read it to him in person. That Seward did receive it in some form, however, is beyond question.

  The letter revealed with clarity what Lincoln thought of Seward’s memorandum and of his temerity. It was direct and polite, which astonished John Nicolay, who observed later that “had Mr. Lincoln been an envious or a resentful man, he could not have wished for a better occasion to put a rival under his feet.”

  Lincoln reiterated his inaugural pledge to hold and possess property belonging to the government and reminded Seward that he, too, had endorsed that policy. Nothing had changed, Lincoln wrote, with the exception that now Seward proposed to abandon Fort Sumter. Lincoln ignored Seward’s idea of starting a war.

  The only hint of annoyance in the letter came when he addressed Seward’s comment that someone needed to take America’s helm firmly and energetically in hand.

  “I remark that if this must be done,” Lincoln wrote, “I must do it.”

  The incident remained private, according to Nicolay and Hay. “So far as is known, the affair never reached the knowledge of any other member of the Cabinet, or even the most intimate of the President’s friends.” The Times and Albany Evening Journal never printed Seward’s memorandum, which would reside among Lincoln’s papers until 1888, when the two secretaries discovered it and published it in the Century Magazine.

  On that momentous Monday, April 1, Seward wrote to his wife, who was at their home in Auburn, New York, “Dangers and breakers are before us. I wish you were near enough to share some of my thoughts and feelings, and fears, and trials.”

  * * *

  —

  Two days after meeting with Seward, Justice Campbell, a sitting member of the United States Supreme Court, took the extraordinary step of writing directly to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, chief of the rebellion aimed at destroying the Union. Campbell specified that his letter was to be kept “strictly confidential and private.”

  “I do not doubt that Sumter will be evacuated shortly, without any effort to supply it,” Campbell told Davis; he noted that no “settled plan” seemed to exist regarding Fort Pickens in Pensacola. With a touching degree of naïveté, he added, “I have no expectation that there will be bad faith in the dealings with me.”

  Campbell addressed the lingering question of whether the commissioners should press for a final answer to their demand for a formal meeting with Lincoln. The administration, he wrote, would readily provide an answer but would prefer, he believed, to withhold it. “So far as I can judge, the present desire is to let things remain as they are, without action of any kind.”

  This in fact dovetailed perfectly with Confederate President Davis’s own belief that for the time being delay would be beneficial. Even as Campbell wrote this, a letter from Montgomery was en route to the commissioners conveying Davis’s view that the current stalemate enabled the seceded states “to make all the necessary arrangements for the public defense, and the solidifying of their Government, more safely, cheaply, and expeditiously than they could were the attitude of the United States more definite and decided.”

  * * *

  —

  All this sotto voce communication between Seward, Justice Campbell, and the Southern commissioners eventually caught the attention of Seward’s fellow cabinet members and prompted Navy Sec. Gideon Welles to remark, “A strange state of things, when the first officer of the cabinet and one of the judges of the highest court were in communication with rebels discussing measures having in view a disruption of the union.”

  Lincoln’s secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, were more direct: They described the justice as giving “ ‘aid and comfort’ to the enemies of his Government.” It came as no surprise when the Confederacy eventually named Campbell its assistant secretary of war.

  Fort Sumter

  Any Minute Now

  April 1–3

  At Fort Sumter, every day brought the expectation that a messenger from Washington would arrive with the order to vacate the fort, or that Ward Lamon himself would return and tell the garrison to get ready for departure. Anderson was prepared to fight if necessary but had come to believe that abandoning the fort was the only way to avoid bloodshed. This was not, however, something he felt authorized to do on his own. Capitulate under fire, yes; walk away, no. Doing so, moreover, would confirm the suspicions of those who wondered about his loyalty, and might make him appear to be another General Twiggs, the U.S. Army commander in Texas who had surrendered all federal outposts in the state. Once again Anderson was left without clear direction from Washington.

  Tempers at the fort flared. Anderson took to calling the garrison’s tenure at Sumter “imprisonment.” On Monday, April 1, he sent a report to the Army’s new adjutant general, Col. Lorenzo Thomas, who had assumed the post after his predecessor, Samuel Cooper, fled Washington to join the Confederacy. Thomas and Anderson were friends.

  “I have the honor to report that everything is still and quiet, as far as we can see, around us,” Anderson told Thomas. Which at that moment was not all that far. A dense fog had turned Sumter into a fortress of ghosts. Sentries stood watch, but with visibility reduced to a few yards, they saw only a wall of gray.

  Anderson told Thomas some startling news: The fort’s supply of food would be expended a lot sooner than he had previously indicated. His prior estimate was based on discharging the civilian laborers from the fort, thereby reducing consumption of food, but orders authorizing him to do so had never arrived from Washington, and now Governor Pickens wouldn’t allow the workers to leave. Pickens understood that the longer they stayed and consumed the fort’s provisions, the sooner Anderson would have to surrender. Pickens had also sharply reduced the flow of beef and vegetables from Charleston markets; he halted entirely the delivery of butter. This tightening convinced Anderson that Pickens would soon cut off all access to supplies.

  As a consequence, Anderson told Thomas, he was compelled to revise his estimate. He now expected his provisions to last just one more week, or until about April 8, and even then only if the governor allowed the laborers to leave. Pickens seemed unlikely to do so.

  Thomas received the letter four days later and passed it on to Lincoln.

  * * *

  —

  On the afternoon of Wednesday, April 3, a 180-ton schooner, the Rhoda H. Shannon, en route from Boston to Savannah with a load of ice, arrived at what its captain, Joseph Marts, believed to be the entrance to the Savannah River off Tybee Island. Powerful winds scoured the sea and raised a spume that impaired his ability to locate navigational waypoints. Hoping to draw the attention of a distant pilot vessel, he ordered one of his crew to display an American flag in the schooner’s fore-rigging. No pilot approached.

  Captain Marts decided to proceed anyway, despite the rough surf. He ordered the flag taken down and continued onward, until he realized that this was not, after all, the Savannah River. In fact, he had entered Charleston Harbor seventy-five miles to the north.

  A cannon boomed and a shot passed in front of his boat. Marts thought this was a signal that he should display his ship’s colors, so he again raised the American flag.

  Two more shots hissed past.

  Unsure of what the authorities on shore wanted him to do, he kept to his course and sailed deeper into the harbor until he was abreast of Morris Island and its new channel-facing batteries. Fort Sumter was still roughly a mile ahead. Captain Marts was aware of the unrest in Charleston but had heard reliable reports that Sumter was soon to be turned over to the Confederacy. He continued onward.

  Now the guns started firing at his ship. One shot passed through his mainsail two feet above the boom. He turned the schooner about and ran back toward the harbor mouth with hardshot falling around him. Instead of continuing on into the Atlantic, however, he anchored just inside the bar in a zone of rough water. The Morris Island guns continued to fire but at too great a distance to have any effect.

  At Sumter soldiers manned and loaded their guns. These could not have reached the battery that fired on the schooner but could easily have struck Fort Moultrie and batteries elsewhere on Morris Island. Captain Doubleday advocated action. Anderson, however, merely sent two officers over to Charleston “in a boat with a white flag to ask for an explanation, with the usual result,” Doubleday groused. The officers—Artillery Capt. Truman Seymour and Engineering Lt. G. W. Snyder—met with Confederate officers and then rowed out to visit the schooner and interview Captain Marts. They returned to Sumter.

  As it happened, the incident had another audience. Governor Pickens and General Beauregard watched the whole thing unfold while standing on the piazza at Moultrie House, the hotel near Fort Moultrie. They, too, were perplexed by what they saw and conducted an investigation of their own.

  The next day, Thursday, April 4, Sumter’s Lieutenant Snyder met with Governor Pickens and Beauregard and learned that a Confederate guard boat that should have been on patrol outside the bar to warn unauthorized ships against entering had not been on duty. Its captain had claimed “that the weather was too boisterous and the sea too rough,” Snyder wrote in his report.

  Governor Pickens assured Snyder that the guard boat’s captain had been summoned to account for his actions and would be dismissed. The governor further stated that “peremptory orders had been sent to Morris Island to stop this random firing.”

  Once again, civility and courtesy ruled. But this time Anderson’s forbearance took a toll on the garrison’s morale. Captain Doubleday understood his motivation but found his inaction frustrating. “In amplifying his instructions not to provoke a collision into instructions not to fight at all, I have no doubt he thought he was rendering a real service to the country,” Doubleday wrote. “He knew the first shot fired by us would light the flames of a civil war that would convulse the world, and tried to put off the evil day as long as possible. Yet a better analysis of the situation might have taught him that the contest had already commenced, and could no longer be avoided.”

  Asst. Surgeon Crawford likewise believed Anderson should have fired back. He and Anderson had a long conversation during which the major invited him into his office and showed him the orders he had received thus far from Washington, all urging him to avoid collision unless the safety of his command was at stake. “I regard this as the qualifying clause which will cover him in not firing yesterday,” Crawford wrote in his journal. “—But I still think we should have fired as we would have been sustained by the whole world. Not one word has yet come to us from the new administration…The Major is very greatly depressed in Spirits, and today told me he thought of taking down our flag. Without supplies, without encouragement, we are left to ourselves, and the greatest depression prevails among us.”