* * *

  —

  In Charleston, the incident served to increase anxiety. A new wave of rumor came rolling through the harbor with contradictory news. Some reports posited with absolute certainty that a Northern fleet would soon arrive; others with equal certainty that Sumter would shortly be evacuated.

  On Thursday night, April 4, the fiery Louis Wigfall of Texas was summoned to give an impromptu speech to a crowd that had gathered in front of the city’s Mills House hotel. War with the North was beyond doubt, he declared; within the next year he would return to Washington “in the saddle.” When Mary Chesnut learned of the speech, she knew at once that his saddle remark was an allusion to Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, for she knew Wigfall well and knew his penchant for quoting romantic literature in his speeches. In Scott’s novel, the heroic knight, James Fitz-James, proclaims his intention to suppress the unruly Clan Alpine. “Like Fitz-James—when he visits Clan Alpine again—it is to be in the saddle, &c&c.,” Mary wrote, gently mocking the Texan. “So let Washington beware.”

  She was at dinner with friends during the speech itself and was sad to have missed it. “But the supper was a consolation,” she wrote: “—pâté de foie gras, salad, biscuit glacé, and champagne frappé.”

  Later that night, her mood more serious, she wrote: “A ship was fired into yesterday and went back to sea. Is that the first shot?

  “How can one settle down to anything? One’s heart is in one’s mouth all the time. Any minute this cannon may open on us, the fleet come in, &c&c.”

  Washington

  The Correspondent

  April 3

  On Wednesday, April 3, William Russell of the London Times met with two of the Southern commissioners, Martin Crawford and John Forsyth. They chatted for over an hour, during which Russell became convinced that if the opinions they expressed were indeed representative of Southern thinking, there was little hope that the Union could be restored. “They have the idea they are ministers of a foreign power treating with Yankeedom,” Russell wrote in his diary, “and their indignation is moved by the refusal of [the] Government to negotiate with them, armed as they are with full authority to arrange all questions arising out of an amicable separation—such as the adjustment of Federal claims for property, forts, stores, public works, debts, land purchases, and the like.”

  Two days later he met with the commissioners again, this time all three, the third being André Roman of Louisiana. A number of other secession-minded men were present as well, including Col. George E. Pickett, destined one day to lead an ill-fated charge at Gettysburg. They dined at Gautier’s, a French restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue run by Charles Gautier, a prominent restaurateur and confectioner who had catered Lincoln’s inaugural party. Gautier was known at Christmas to build a display of sweet concoctions that included a twelve-hundred-pound cake.

  The commissioners and their Southern friends disparaged Lincoln and Seward and all Northerners, especially New Englanders, with a savagery that seemed out of alignment with what Russell believed to be the actual state of affairs in America. “Whether it be in consequence of some secret influence which slavery has upon the minds of men,” he wrote, “or that the aggression of the North upon their institutions had been of a nature to excite the deepest animosity and most vindictive hate, certain it is there is a degree of something like ferocity in the Southern mind toward New England which exceeds belief.”

  In the course of the evening’s conversation, Russell heard much about the South’s obsession with honor, including a vehement defense of dueling. “The man who dares tamper with the honor of a white woman knows what he has to expect,” one guest said. “We shoot him down like a dog, and no jury in the South will ever find any man guilty of murder for punishing such a scoundrel.” The commissioners revealed an intractable belief that Northern men were cowards. As evidence, they cited the 1856 caning of Republican senator Charles Sumner, a fervent critic of slavery, in the Senate chamber and his refusal to challenge his attacker to a manly duel. Here their argument abandoned logical constraint: As they saw it the violence of the assault was Sumner’s fault, never mind that his assailant, Rep. Preston Brooks, struck first and from behind while Sumner was seated at his Senate desk, as Russell reminded them. The commissioners brushed this aside; Brooks, they said, struck “a slight blow at first and only inflicted the heavier strokes when irritated by the Senator’s cowardly demeanor.”

  When the conversation turned to slavery, it seemed to Russell to slip all tethers to reality. “The gentlemen at table asserted that the white men in the slave States are physically superior to the men in the free States; and indulged in curious theories in morals and physics to which I was a stranger.”

  * * *

  —

  The evening reinforced Russell’s growing conviction that Northerners had little understanding of their brethren below the Mason-Dixon Line. Southerners, he noted, routinely traveled North, but Northerners were far less likely to go South, in part out of a concern, he realized, for safety.

  William Seward’s ignorance was particularly striking to Russell. The secretary dismissed Southerners as being “in every respect behind the age, with fashions, habits, level of thought, and modes of life, belonging to the worst part of the last century. But still he never has been there himself!”

  Seward persisted in his belief that secession was a short-lived thing. Later, over dinner and whist, Seward told Russell, “When the Southern States see that we mean them no wrong—that we intend no violence to persons, rights, or things—that the Federal Government seeks only to fulfill obligations imposed on it in respect to the national property, they will see their mistake and one after another they will come back into the union.” This would happen soon, Seward forecast; he expected “that Secession will all be done and over in three months.”

  Seward’s vision conflicted starkly with what Russell had learned from his contacts with Southern men in Washington. He decided it was time that he himself visit the South, and he began making arrangements to travel to the heart of the crisis, Charleston. “As matters look very threatening,” he wrote in his diary on April 6, “I must go South and see with my own eyes how affairs stand there before the two sections come to open rupture.”

  To his imminent regret, he did not set off right away but rather lingered in Washington for another six days.

  Washington

  Conflict

  April 4–5

  By the first week in April, Major Anderson, usually the model of stoicism and forbearance, seemed at last to become fed up with the lack of attention from Washington. The immediate trigger was his learning for the first time about the telegram sent by Confederate Commissioner Crawford to General Beauregard in which the commissioner warned that Lincoln lacked the courage to evacuate Fort Sumter and planned instead to leave the decision to Anderson, “by suffering him to be starved out.” Crawford had sent that telegram to Beauregard on April 1; three days later news of its contents filtered to Anderson.

  “I cannot but think that Mr. Crawford has misunderstood what he has heard in Washington,” Anderson wrote to Adjutant General Thomas the next day, with evident irritation, “as I cannot think that the Government would abandon, without instructions and without advice, a command which has tried to do all its duty to our country.”

  He worried about public perception if he alone were to decide to abandon the fort. He found it inconceivable that at so sensitive a moment, with war in the wind, the government would leave such a fateful decision to him.

  “I am sure that I shall not be left without instructions, even though they may be confidential,” he told Thomas. “After thirty odd years of service I do not wish it to be said that I have treasonably abandoned a post and turned over to unauthorized persons public property entrusted to my charge. I am entitled to this act of justice at the hands of my Government, and I feel confident that I shall not be disappointed. What to do with the public property, and where to take my command, are questions to which answers will, I hope, be at once returned.”

  * * *

  —

  As it happened, a letter was on its way from Washington that would provide Anderson some guidance, but not the kind he was hoping for. By now he had become convinced that evacuation was the prudent course.

  Anderson’s message warning that he would run out of food much sooner than expected had startled Lincoln. Based on information provided by Captain Fox after his March reconnaissance visit to the fort, Lincoln had come to believe that the Sumter garrison could hold out until April 15 “without any real inconvenience.” Now it appeared Anderson might run out of food a week earlier.

  Lincoln personally drafted a set of instructions for the major, which he gave to War Secretary Cameron, who then sent a copy to Anderson under his own signature. The instructions, which referred to the president in the third person, contained no hint that they were actually composed by Lincoln himself.

  Lincoln (via Cameron) first informed Anderson that his letter had caused “some anxiety.” He told the major that he had authorized a seaborne expedition to relieve Sumter, and indirectly affirmed that Captain Fox would be its commander. “Hoping still that you will be able to sustain yourself till the 11th. or 12th. inst[ant], the expedition will go forward; and, finding your flag flying, will attempt to provision you, and, in case the effort is resisted, will endeavor also to reinforce you. You will therefore hold out if possible till the arrival of the expedition.”

  Lest this sound unduly draconian, Lincoln added that he didn’t expect Anderson to subject his command to any danger beyond what “would be usual in military life.” Further, he said he was confident that Anderson would “act as becomes a patriot and soldier, under all circumstances.”

  He ended with, “Whenever, if at all, in your judgment, to save yourself and command, a capitulation becomes a necessity, you are authorized to make it.”

  Cameron posted one copy of the letter on Thursday, April 4, by mail; two days later, he dispatched another copy by messenger, Sumter’s own Lieutenant Talbot, still in Washington.

  Montgomery and Richmond

  Suspense

  April 5

  In Montgomery, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet grew increasingly uneasy; so too did their commissioners in Washington, their trust sutured in place solely by the assurances of their intermediary, Justice Campbell.

  This was hard for the commissioners. They were accustomed to mastery and command and proficient in the art of taking offense; they needed the unalloyed respect of all around them. Alexis de Tocqueville had observed this aspect of the planter class two decades earlier in his Democracy in America and attributed it to slavery. “The citizen of the Southern states becomes a sort of domestic dictator from infancy,” he wrote. “The first notion he acquires in life is, that he was born to command, and the first habit he contracts is that of ruling without resistance. His education tends, then, to give him the character of a haughty and hasty man,—irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles but easily discouraged if he cannot succeed upon his first attempt.”

  The Confederate commissioners had come north expecting to be treated as the envoys of a grand new republic, the Confederate States of America, and here was Secretary of State Seward, via Campbell, treating them as if they were house servants demanding a day off. Seward’s continued refusal to meet with them was a blow to their self-esteem, to their honor; in another context it might have required the dispatch of “a friend” to deliver a note of offense, in accord with the Code Duello.

  Campbell’s assurances seemed increasingly at odds with what the great waxing tide of rumor was telling the commissioners: that ships were on the way with guns and legions of armed men aboard. During that first week of April their alarm grew daily. “The war wing presses on the President,” they warned in a telegram to Montgomery; “he vibrates to that side.” They reported, too, that Lincoln had met with a number of naval officers. They presumed the subject was Fort Sumter.

  Confederate Secretary of War L. P. Walker wrote to General Beauregard to urge him to maintain a state of “watchful vigilance” and warned that he should comport himself “precisely as if you were in the presence of an enemy contemplating to surprise you.”

  * * *

  —

  In Charleston, former governor John Manning, now an aide-de-camp to General Beauregard, nonetheless found time to keep up his flirtation with Mary Chesnut.

  Mary’s diary:

  Tuesday, April 2: “Breakfasted today with John Manning. Mr C restive because I said I did not tell him every thing. Then John Manning brought me a bunch of violets.”

  Wednesday, April 3: “Breakfasted with John Manning who made better jokes than usual.”

  Then on Sunday morning, something unexpected: Manning revealed that he had told his own wife about the flirtation. “And now,” Mary wrote, “Mrs. M writes for Mr C’s likeness as she wants to begin a flirtation with him.”

  * * *

  —

  On Thursday, April 4, in Richmond, the still-seated Virginia Convention held a vote on a proposed ordinance of secession. The delegates rejected it 88 to 45.

  Edmund Ruffin, in Charleston, was outraged and embarrassed by the vote. He had hoped for better. But the next day the convention again rejected secession by an even wider margin.

  “This is worse than I supposed possible even of that submissive and mean body,” Ruffin wrote in his diary on April 5. He added the next day that he hoped—“with all my heart”—that Lincoln would indeed send a powerful naval squadron to attack Charleston. Such an attack, Ruffin believed, would at last force Virginia from its lethargy, with the corollary personal benefit of Ruffin’s being freed from continually having to explain the state’s reluctance.

  Washington

  Fatal Error

  April 5

  Lincoln’s error in assigning the same warship, the Powhatan, to the two relief expeditions came to light on April 5, a dreary night in Washington. He received a surprise visit from Secretary of State Seward and Navy Secretary Gideon Welles. The two men had set off for the White House after receiving a panicked telegram from New York, and arrived about midnight to find Lincoln still up and about.

  “He looked first at one and then at the other,” Welles recalled. Lincoln read and reread the telegram and asked if there wasn’t some mistake. “He took upon himself the whole blame,” Welles wrote—“said it was carelessness—heedlessness on his part—he ought to have been more careful and attentive.”

  Lincoln turned to Seward. His tone peremptory, he told him it was imperative that the Powhatan accompany the Sumter expedition, “that on no consideration should it be defeated or rendered abortive,” Welles recalled.

  Even at this juncture Seward continued to believe that he needed to take the reins of government and could still engineer a peaceful evacuation of Fort Sumter. He tried to make the case that the Florida expedition was more important.

  Lincoln emphatically disagreed. The relief of Sumter was to him far more pressing. He ordered Seward to telegraph the navy yard in New York immediately and hold the ship for the Sumter expedition.

  Seward stalled again, arguing that it was too late to send a telegram.

  Lincoln insisted.

  Seward capitulated—but may have dragged his feet in getting the message onto the wires. The telegram did not reach New York until the next afternoon, after the Powhatan had been secured by the expedition to Fort Pickens and had begun its voyage to Florida. Undeterred, the commander of the navy yard dispatched a fast steamer to overtake the ship and call it back to port.

  The steamer did catch up, but the Powhatan’s newly assigned captain, Lt. David Dixon Porter, ignored the order. He argued that his own instructions, signed by Lincoln himself, trumped the recall command, which was signed only by Seward, a mere cabinet secretary.

  Lieutenant Porter proceeded South to Fort Pickens with the Powhatan, where he would meet no resistance and would successfully deposit four hundred troops and six months of supplies. To Porter’s everlasting sorrow, however, he would not get to fire a shot. “The great disappointment of my life,” he wrote in his journal, “was not having had the pleasure of firing the first broadside into the rebels.”

  * * *

  —

  In New York, Capt. Gustavus Fox, in charge of the expedition to Fort Sumter but unaware of the Powhatan confusion, speedily gathered troops, supplies, and ships. He would lead a small but mighty fleet of steam-powered vessels: three oceangoing tugs, the Thomas Freeborn, Yankee, and Uncle Ben; a large transport, the Baltic, carrying troops and supplies; a secondary transport, the Illinois, to carry whatever the Baltic could not; and most critical, four large warships: the Pawnee, Harriet Lane, Pocahontas—and, he presumed, the Powhatan, the most powerful of all.

  For reasons never made clear, Fox had no idea that the all-important Powhatan was now on its way to Florida.