At the forty-seventh shot, a private named Daniel Hough—“an excellent soldier,” Doubleday said—loaded a cartridge into one of the guns. Apparently the barrel had not been thoroughly sponged after the preceding shot. The cartridge exploded and tore the private’s arm off; the blast killed him in an instant. Sparks then detonated other cartridges hidden under nearby debris and caused a second blast that blew the adjacent gunners into the air. One of these, Pvt. Edward Galloway, would later die in a Charleston hospital. Four others were injured but survived. The salute was suspended to give the garrison time to dig a grave in the parade for Private Hough.

  The private was placed in a coffin. Confederate and Union soldiers stood at attention on opposite sides of the grave. As the coffin was lowered, they solemnly presented arms. Confederate and Union soldiers alike removed their caps and stood at attention. “A unique and most impressive sight,” wrote Beauregard aide Captain Ferguson, “considering the fact that only a few hours before they were actively engaged in trying by every known means to destroy each other.”

  The salute resumed, but Anderson directed that it be shortened to fifty discharges, half of his original demand. At four o’clock, with the salute completed, Anderson ordered the long roll beaten. The men lined up in parade formation. As Sumter’s band played “Yankee Doodle,” the garrison marched out through the fort’s shattered gate and onto the waiting steamer. Shortly afterward they transferred to the Isabel.

  During the day’s delays the tide had receded and the light had faded, making it risky for the Isabel to cross the bar. The men remained in the harbor overnight, where they were compelled to stand witness to Charleston’s jubilant celebration. Rockets tore through the sky and bonfires flared, mimicking the battle just concluded. In Charleston, Mary Chesnut and several friends drove along the Battery promenade in an open carriage. “What a changed scene,” she wrote. “The very liveliest crowd I think I ever saw. Everybody talking at once. All glasses still turned on the grim old fort.”

  For Sumter’s men on the Isabel, the indignity was eased somewhat the next morning by a gesture of gallantry from the Confederate forces. As the steamer passed Morris Island on its way toward the bar, Confederate gunners and infantry lined the shore and in silence removed their hats.

  * * *

  —

  Something had begun, though exactly what was not yet clear. Was this the start of a war, or the beginning of a new relationship between the Confederacy and the Union?

  As far as Governor Pickens, General Beauregard, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis were concerned, it was the moment when at last the Union took the South seriously. The Confederacy had reduced and seized one of the most powerful forts in the land, the symbol of Northern tyranny, as three of the Union’s warships stood by.

  That no one had been killed in the bombardment itself was remarkable given that the Confederate batteries had fired 3,341 shells and balls, and Fort Sumter about a thousand. To the religiously inclined, it was a miracle and seemed a harbinger of peace ahead. Few among South Carolina’s chivalry expected that a real war would result; and even if war did come, they believed it would be short and unremarkable. A common expression often attributed to Col. James Chesnut forecast that the total amount of blood likely to be shed in a war over secession would fill “a lady’s thimble.” Chesnut also made the vivid pledge to drink whatever blood actually did get shed.

  Here lay the greatest of ironies: In thirty-four hours of some of the fiercest bombardment the world had ever seen, no one was killed or even seriously injured, yet this bloodless attack would trigger a war that killed more Americans than any other conflict in the country’s history.

  Charleston

  Acclaim

  April 14–15

  It was only on Sunday, April 14, that the Times’ Russell at last realized that Fort Sumter had indeed been bombarded, and had fallen, and that something larger and more tragic had begun to unfold.

  He had spent the previous night aboard the steamer Georgiana, which took him from Baltimore to Norfolk. It was a hard night, during which he was kept awake by noise and the predations of mosquitoes, which made their way into his room despite the rough gauze curtains that were supposed to protect against them. Unable to sleep, with little blood left to give and breakfast not yet available, he dressed and walked the ship. He found its barroom full despite the early hour, with passengers having cocktails, especially mint juleps. “In the matter of drinks, how hospitable the Americans are!” Russell wrote. “I was asked to take as many as would have rendered me incapable of drinking again; my excuse on the plea of inability to grapple with cocktails and the like before breakfast was heard with surprise, and I was urgently entreated to abandon so bad a habit.”

  The ship reached the wharf at Norfolk before seven o’clock that morning and was greeted by men calling out the news. “The Yankees out of Sumter! Isn’t it fine!” Russell spotted a few men who did not share this sentiment, whose expressions were “black as night,” but the overall atmosphere was one of great celebration. After disembarking, Russell boarded a steam ferry that took passengers across a creek to Norfolk proper.

  The city had a decayed air. “An execrable, tooth-cracking drive ended at last in front of the Atlantic Hotel, where I was doomed to take up my quarters,” Russell wrote. Mosquitoes clouded its hallways. “It is a dilapidated, uncleanly place, with tobacco-stained floor, full of flies and strong odors. The waiters were all slaves: untidy, slip-shod, and careless creatures.”

  A passerby dragged Russell to the office of a local newspaper, where a fresh telegraphic bulletin had just arrived. “The Yankees are whipped!” the man told him. Russell found a dirty sheet of yellow paper posted on a wall that carried an account of the shelling. He heard “joy and gratification” all around him. “Now I confess I could not share in the excitement at all,” he wrote. “The act seemed to me the prelude to certain war.” Convinced at last that the fort really had fallen, and dismayed at his own poor timing, Russell wrote to a colleague, “I hear today that I am late for the fair.” He resolved to continue south anyway.

  The closer he got to Charleston, the wilder the celebrations became, the more visceral the declamations of hatred for the North and of the willingness to kill to sustain some inchoate standard of Southern life, foremost of which was the right to enslave Blacks.

  Everywhere he saw the new Confederate flag—the first iteration, called the “Stars and Bars”: three broad horizontal bands of red and white, and a blue square in the upper-left corner with seven white stars, one for each seceded state. This flag would prove dangerously problematic, mistaken in battle for the American Stars and Stripes. A new flag would soon take its place, designed by General Beauregard, to prevent confusion: a perfect square, with a diagonal blue cross on a red background, and stars on the blue shafts of the cross—the flag that would grace Southern picnics and fly over Southern courthouses well into the twenty-first century.

  At every stop Russell found “flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths.” Bands of musicians played “Dixie’s Land” with varying success. The countryside through which his train traveled seemed wholly engulfed by revolutionary passion. “It was a saturnalia,” Russell wrote. “What would the President do? How would the people of the North assert themselves? Was Fort Sumter a Bastille? Had the federal government gone down before a revolution like a Bourbon or an Orleans dynasty?”

  At Portsmouth, Virginia, he boarded a train for the last and most revelatory leg of his journey.

  Washington and Charleston

  Hot Oxygen

  Monday, April 15

  On Monday, April 15, Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for “the several States of the Union” to muster their militias and contribute a total of seventy-five thousand troops for the suppression of rebellious “combinations” in the seceded states and to reassert the authority of U.S. law.

  “I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government,” the proclamation read. Here Lincoln, in his own handwriting, added this phrase: “and to redress wrongs already long enough endured,” a clear expression of his own frustration and lost patience.

  He forecast that the first mission of this sudden new army “will probably be to repossess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union,” though he added that “utmost care” would be taken “to avoid any devastation, any destruction of, or interference with, property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country.” With that second reference to property, Lincoln sought to signal his continued commitment to protect slavery where it already existed, in the persistent hope that the border states and the upper South might still remain in the Union. Virginia was still undecided about whether to secede; delegates to its ongoing convention continued to debate the matter.

  Lincoln’s proclamation ordered both houses of Congress to come back into session on July 4 “to consider and determine, such measures, as, in their wisdom, the public safety, and interest may seem to demand.” His choice of date, Independence Day, was hardly an accident; it was meant to call forth those mystic chords of memory to which he had alluded in his inaugural speech. His secretary of war set quotas for the number of troops each state should provide, the largest—seventeen regiments—for New York.

  The effect of the proclamation was explosive. If there had been any hope that after Sumter passions would subside and everyone would get back to their lives, that hope was now obliterated. Northern states reacted with jubilation. “Great rejoicing here over your proclamation,” wrote Ohio governor William Dennison. In the South, however, even moderate governors professed to be enraged. “I can be no party to this wicked violation of the laws of the country, and to this war upon the liberties of a free people,” wrote Gov. John Ellis of North Carolina, one of the four upper South states that Lincoln had hoped to retain in the Union. Tennessee’s governor vowed that the state “will not furnish a single man for coercion, but fifty thousand, if necessary, for the defense of our rights, and those of our brethren.” In Virginia, the sword at last fell: On April 17 the state’s long-seated convention voted to secede. Even staunch pro-unionist William Rives voted in favor, stating, “The Government being already overthrown by revolution, I vote ‘aye.’ ”

  As shattering as Virginia’s act was for the North, it was heartening for the South. And it prompted celebration by fire-eater Ruffin. When the news reached Charleston on Thursday, April 18, the Courier newspaper summoned him to its offices and invited him to fire the “secession cannon,” which the newspaper had fired for every state that thus far had seceded, “one discharge for each act of secession.” That day at a dinner party Ruffin broke his lifelong policy of abstinence and had a drink. Two drinks actually: “a glass of ale, and another of wine.”

  * * *

  —

  Arkansas followed, approving secession 65 to 5; a public vote ratified it on May 6. North Carolina and Tennessee acted next. One delegate to North Carolina’s convention wrote, “This furor, this moral epidemic, swept over the country like a tempest, before which the entire populations seemed to succumb.” The border states—Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, and Delaware—did not leave the Union, but they balked at Lincoln’s demand for volunteers. “Kentucky will furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister Southern States,” wrote Gov. Beriah Magoffin. Missouri’s governor called the request “inhuman and diabolical.” Missouri would remain in the Union, but be claimed also by the Confederacy as a member state.

  It was the crucible hour—the time for all to declare their loyalty, whether to nation or section. Caught up in the crisis was Virginia resident Robert E. Lee, a colonel in the United States Army, whom General Scott considered to be the Army’s finest field officer. Lee was fifty-four, a storied veteran of the Mexican War, former superintendent of West Point, and the man who had quashed John Brown’s insurrection. Acting through an intermediary—Francis Blair, father of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair—Lincoln offered Lee command of all Union land forces. That same day Lee learned that Virginia had seceded.

  For Lee this was a wrenching moment. He considered slavery “a moral and political evil” and looked upon secession “as anarchy.” Writing to Blair, he said, “If I owned the four million slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?” He needed time. He spent two days in personal torment considering the offer before formally notifying General Scott in a letter on April 20 that he had decided to resign from the Army. He would have done it “at once,” he told Scott, “but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted all the best years of my life and all the ability I possessed.”

  To which Scott replied, “You have made the greatest mistake of your life, but I feared it would be so.”

  Lee felt he had no choice. “Wherever the blame may be, the fact is, that we are in the midst of a fratricidal war,” Lee wrote in a letter to a Northern girl who had asked for his photograph. “I must side either with or against my section of country. I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children.” He still held out hope for peace, he told her, but added: “Whatever may be the result of the contest, I foresee that the country will have to pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation, perhaps, of our national sins.”

  In a letter to his sister telling her of his resignation, he wrote, “Save in defense of my native State (with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed) I hope I may never be called upon to draw my sword.”

  But now his state, too, had seceded. Far from sheathing his sword, Lee within days proffered his services to the Confederacy.

  * * *

  —

  On the day Lincoln called for troops, London Times correspondent William Russell was midway through his journey south. He was struck by the primitive appearance of the kingdom through which his train passed. The tracks skirted the “Dismal Swamp” and plunged through what Russell called a primordial forest. At first he entertained himself by looking for alligators and large turtles, but this became monotonous. Soon he saw crude farms populated with worn-looking cattle and pigs and worn-looking people. “The women, palefaced, were tawdry and ragged; the men, yellow, seedy looking. For the first time in the States, I noticed barefooted people.”

  Nonetheless, much to Russell’s amazement, at stations along the way these bleak forests yielded sophisticated travelers waiting for the train. “It really was most astonishing to see well-dressed, respectable looking men and women emerge out of the ‘dismal swamp’ and out of the depths of the forest, with silk parasols and crinoline, bandboxes and portmanteaus, in the most civilized style.” They were tended by enslaved men and women “handling the baggage or the babies, and looking comfortable enough, but not happy.”

  What struck him most during the journey was the warlike character of the South’s jubilation, amplified by Lincoln’s militia proclamation. “At every station the crowds were all cheering—men, women, and children, black and white,” Russell wrote. “Some were drunk, all noisy and jubilant. Many carried shotguns, old rifles, and revolvers.” The jubilation reached the level of spectacle when the train passed through Goldsboro, North Carolina, the first significant town Russell had come to since leaving Portsmouth that morning. “The station, the hotels, the street through which the rail ran was filled with an excited mob all carrying arms, with signs here and there of a desire to get up some kind of uniform—flushed faces, wild eyes, screaming mouths, hurrahing for ‘Jeff Davis’ and ‘the Southern Confederacy,’ so that the yells overpowered the discordant bands which were busy with ‘Dixie’s Land.’ ”

  Russell believed that these expressions of passion and determination could lead to only one outcome. “The utter contempt and loathing for the venerated Stars and Stripes, the abhorrence of the very words United States, the intense hatred of the Yankee on the part of these people, cannot be conceived by anyone who has not seen them,” Russell wrote. “I am more satisfied than ever that the Union can never be restored as it was and that it has gone to pieces, never to be put together again in the old shape, at all events, by any power of earth.”

  * * *

  —

  Toward evening on Tuesday, April 16, Russell’s train reached the outskirts of Charleston, where he got his first look at the source of all the turmoil and celebration. “Cavalry horses were picketed in the fields, tents were visible in the woods, and troops were marching as if at drill on the meadows,” he wrote in a report to his newspaper. “A block-like building shimmered through the haze, rising island-like from the sea. Smoke curled upwards from an angle of the wall.” The Confederate “Stars and Bars” flew above. When someone shouted “There’s Sumter!” the passengers cheered with joy. Russell found the city enraptured. “Charleston was in high revelry—triumph on every face, and an immense clinking of sabers and clatter of spurs and steel.

  “In the middle of these excited gatherings,” Russell wrote, “I felt like a man in the full possession of his senses coming in late to a wine party.”