He checked into the Mills House, then set out to introduce himself to the local powers. At the Charleston Club on Meeting Street he talked with a number of the city’s chivalry, including James Chesnut and John Manning. The conversation grew heated. Russell found the men full of confident menace not just toward Yankees, but also any potential British interference. They were convinced that Britain, once confronted with the loss of Southern cotton, would ally itself with the Confederacy—the “cotton is king” thesis famously articulated in the U.S. Senate by James Henry Hammond. Russell tried to persuade them otherwise, with no success. “I found this was the fixed idea everywhere. The doctrine of ‘cotton is king,’ to them is a lively all powerful faith without distracting heresies or schisms.”

  The next day, Wednesday, April 17, Russell at last got to visit Sumter itself during a special excursion arranged by Beauregard’s staff, men who in their past lives had been senators and governors. Russell wondered at the flamboyance of their uniforms: blue caps embroidered with palmetto trees; blue coats; shoulder straps trimmed with lace; gilt buttons; blue trousers adorned with gold cord; brass spurs—all this despite sweltering heat.

  The massive brick-sheathed walls of the fort were pocked and gouged by shot, the edges of the parapets torn and jagged, but otherwise the structure seemed to Russell to have sustained little serious damage, “no injury of a kind to render the work untenable.” The worst damage seemed to be the destruction by fire of the barracks within the walls.

  Overall he found himself unimpressed. Having witnessed the last charge of the Light Brigade and the siege of Sevastopol, he was perplexed by Sumter’s outsized importance. He wrote later, “A very small affair, indeed, that shelling of Sumter.”

  * * *

  —

  As darkness fell, the steamer arrived back at Charleston’s wharf. The city was ablaze with lights and war fervor. Drums rumbled, bands played; cheers and shouting rose everywhere. “The streets of Charleston present some such aspect of those of Paris in the last revolution,” Russell wrote. “Crowds of armed men singing and promenading the streets. The battle-blood running through their veins—that hot oxygen which is called ‘the flush of victory’ on the cheek; restaurants full, reveling in barrooms, club-rooms crowded, orgies and carousing in tavern or private house, in taproom, from cabaret—down narrow alleys, in the broad highway.”

  For Charleston’s enslaved and free Blacks the celebrations of their white overmen seemed to have little meaning. As Russell walked back to his hotel, a heavy bell began to ring, and he was passed by a swiftly moving mass of humanity, “the evening drove of Negroes, male and female, shuffling through the streets in all haste, in order to escape the patrol and the last peal of the curfew bell.”

  Aboard the Baltic

  Ovation

  Thursday, April 18

  By Thursday morning, April 18, the Baltic, carrying Capt. Gustavus Fox, Major Anderson, and the Sumter garrison, lay off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, a prominent waypoint for ships bound for New York Harbor. While still aboard, Anderson dictated a 109-word summary of the whole Sumter ordeal that for its rueful simplicity spoke worlds about the futility of the affair. He addressed it to Lincoln’s then secretary of war, Simon Cameron, and sent it by telegraph at ten-thirty a.m. after arriving in New York:

  “Having defended Fort Sumter for thirty-four hours, until the quarters were entirely burned, the main gates destroyed by fire, the gorge walls seriously injured, the magazine surrounded by flames, and its door closed from the effects of heat, four barrels and three cartridges of power only being available, and no provisions remaining but pork, I accepted terms of evacuation offered by General Beauregard, being the same offered by him on the 11th instant, prior to the commencement of hostilities, and marched out of the fort Sunday afternoon, the 14th instant, with colors flying and drums beating, bringing away company and private property, and saluting my flag with fifty guns.”

  As the Baltic entered New York Harbor it was greeted with the same kind of exultation that had erupted in Charleston after the surrender of Sumter. “All the passing steamers saluted us with their steam-whistles and bells, and cheer after cheer went up from the ferry-boats and vessels in the harbor,” Captain Doubleday wrote.

  Lincoln issued a formal note of gratitude to Anderson and his men through the War Department, then followed it on May 1 with a personal acknowledgment to Anderson alone. “I now write this, as a purely private and social letter, to say I shall be much gratified to see you here at your earliest convenience, when and where I can personally testify my appreciation of your services and fidelity; and, perhaps, explain some things on my part, which you may not have understood.”

  Two months later, in Washington, Lincoln would tell an aide, “Of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumter. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”

  * * *

  —

  General Beauregard was pleased with how things turned out and was proud of how his soldiers had performed, and in a letter on Wednesday, April 17, he made sure that Confederate War Secretary Walker knew it. “With such material for an army, if properly disciplined,” Beauregard proclaimed, “I would consider myself almost invincible against any forces not too greatly superior.”

  Mary Chesnut wrote in her red leather diary, “Must try and remember every thing about that wonderful siege and write it as soon as I have leisure.”

  * * *

  —

  With Virginia now seceded, Edmund Ruffin decided to rescind his self-banishment, as he noted in a simple declaration in his diary on Friday, April 19: “The formal act of secession, and withdrawal from Lincoln’s government, terminates my voluntary exile.” He watched with satisfaction as the nation began tilting toward war. “Strange events, or reports of, press on us fast,” he wrote.

  Citizens crowded the bulletin boards at the Charleston Courier and other city newspapers to read the latest telegraphic reports. Northern troops marching toward Washington were attacked in Baltimore, leaving four soldiers and a dozen civilians dead. Virginia forces seized the Norfolk Navy Yard and the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Maryland stayed in the Union, but secessionists in the state burned railway bridges and shut down all telegraphic communication between Washington and the North, leaving the city isolated. Confederate War Secretary Leroy Walker declared that the “Confederate flag would float over the Capitol at Washington before the 1st of May.” Virginia’s governor asked Confederate President Jefferson Davis to authorize sending two thousand Carolina troops to the state to prepare for an attack on Washington. Ruffin resolved to go with them.

  He reached Richmond on April 23 at six in the morning after a thirty-one-hour journey. He exulted in the change in atmosphere and the warmth with which he was received. Troops were everywhere; some three thousand volunteers were said to be in the city, and many more coming, including the Palmetto Guard. President Jefferson Davis was in town. A new general, a former U.S. Army colonel named Robert E. Lee, had taken charge of Virginia forces.

  War seemed inevitable. Ruffin’s sons Edmund, Jr., and Thomas set off to join their regiments, each for a twelve-month stint. Ruffin doubted the war would last even six months and expected a quick Southern victory.

  He was especially pleased when a third son, Charles, asked his approval to join the Palmetto Guard, which Ruffin gladly gave. This son had long been a disappointment. “God grant that this step may be a new direction and turning point in his progress, leading to usefulness and honor,” Ruffin wrote in his diary. “So far, he has lived for no good purpose, and has thrown away his time and opportunities. May he now deserve and achieve success, and acquire justly an honorable reputation, if not distinction and glory. But if not—an early and honorable death in fighting for his county’s rights and defense is preferable to a useless and inglorious life extended to old age.”

  Like most of the volunteers gathering in Virginia, Charles had no military experience; by the end of May, he was encamped with the Guard at a point eighty miles north of Richmond, thirty west of Washington, called Manassas Junction, at the intersection of two major rail lines. A nearby stream was called Bull Run.

  EPILOGUE

  Can every insult be compromised? is a mooted and vexed question. On this subject, no rules can be given that will be satisfactory.

  —The Code Duello

  A Toast

  April 14, 1865

  Justice came in circles. Sumter had fallen on April 14, 1861; now, four years later, President Lincoln wanted the American flag to again fly over the fort and wanted its former commander, Robert Anderson, to raise it. He left the choreography to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who had replaced Simon Cameron. Stanton directed that the flag-raising take place during a public ceremony at Sumter—or what was left of it—at noon on April 14, 1865, exactly four years to the day after Anderson and his men had evacuated the fort. They would use the same flag.

  Between the day Lincoln issued his order and the date of the planned ceremony, the Civil War had all but come to an end, with Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9 at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. The “expiation” Lee had feared, what Mary Lincoln called “this hideous nightmare,” had come to pass, killing 750,000 Americans. South Carolina alone lost 21,000 men, more than a third of the 60,000 state citizens who fought. Its planters grieved a more venal loss: The end of slavery cost them three hundred million dollars in human capital overnight.

  Anderson, now fifty-nine years old and a retired general, still possessed the Sumter flag that Confederate guns had shot down on that April afternoon four years earlier. He agreed to take part in the ceremony, though he had hoped for something different than what Stanton had in mind. His religious nature unchanged by the war, Anderson envisioned a quiet commemoration, perhaps a prayer or a moment of silence, to acknowledge the magnitude of the losses endured by both sides in the war. Stanton, however, wanted a ceremony attended by thousands, marked by great speeches, culminating with Anderson’s hauling the flag up a 150-foot flagpole newly installed on Sumter’s parade ground. Stanton’s wishes prevailed.

  Workmen erected bleachers for four thousand attendees. Ships brought participants and spectators alike to Charleston for the event; two hundred came aboard the Oceanus, a steamship from New York chartered for the occasion. Among its passengers was Henry Ward Beecher, the famed abolitionist firebrand, who brought with him many members of his Brooklyn congregation. Another abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, arrived aboard the steamship Arago along with eighty other New Yorkers. John Nicolay also came to Sumter that day.

  The fort now looked nothing like it had when Anderson and his garrison had occupied it. Four years of shelling by Union guns, including near constant bombardment over the previous year and a half, had reduced it to a rounded hillock of earth and shattered masonry. One discernible wall remained, dented and scaled by the impacts of hardshot and explosive shells. Two months earlier, Charleston’s mayor, Charles Macbeth, had surrendered the city to a force of Black soldiers, the 21st Regiment U.S. Colored Infantry.

  The flag-raising ceremony began with a benediction by Matthias Harris, the fort’s former chaplain, the same officiant who had said a prayer for the troops after their successful move to Sumter in December 1860. Three complete Psalms followed, and part of the twentieth: “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses; but we will remember the Name of the Lord our God.” Next, a senior Army official read aloud the one-paragraph report about the Sumter bombardment that Anderson had dictated while aboard the Baltic off Sandy Hook.

  In the audience were members of Sumter’s original garrison, including Abner Doubleday, now a major general and a Union hero, honored for the bravery he had demonstrated at Gettysburg two years earlier. Here, too, was Peter Hart, the New York City police officer who had become an honorary member of the garrison and had rescued the fort’s flag after its staff was shot away. With the reading of Psalms concluded, Hart stepped forward carrying a mailbag that contained the original flag, nail holes and all. At this the crowd broke into a tumult of cheers. Three Navy sailors attached the flag to a halyard; they added roses, mock orange blossoms, and an evergreen wreath.

  Anderson stood and stepped forward. His son, now six years old, sat nearby on the dignitaries’ platform. For a time Anderson did not speak. A brisk wind eddied his hair. One witness noted that he seemed to be “wrestling with intense emotion.”

  * * *

  —

  These had been a hard four years for Anderson, hard years for everyone. In the weeks after the fall of Fort Sumter, North and South began massing vast numbers of troops, especially in Virginia. At first only small military engagements occurred. The “real war,” as Walt Whitman put it, did not begin until July 21, 1861, a lovely but hot Sunday when Union and Confederate forces clashed at Bull Run. Edmund Ruffin joined the fray, solemnly riding into battle on the barrel of a cannon. At one point he was invited to fire that cannon into the backs of retreating Union troops as they struggled in full panic to cross a small bridge dammed by an overturned wagon. He was delighted to do so. In the midst of the fighting, Capt. Samuel Ferguson, the Beauregard aide from Charleston, spotted Ruffin astride his cannon. He recognized him instantly. Ruffin was in the thick of it, “enveloped in smoke, seated with the cannoneers, on a caisson of a battery,” rushing full speed into action “grasping a long, old musket resting across his knees, his long, snow white hair and beard flowing in the wind—a picture never to be erased from memory.”

  The next morning, Monday, in a cold mist, Ruffin and fellow soldiers rode out to scavenge the battlefield. He took great satisfaction in examining the Union dead and savored the details. “Clotted blood, in what had been pools, were under or by almost every corpse,” he wrote. “From bullet holes in the heads of some, the brains had partly oozed out. The white froth covering the mouths of others was scarcely less shocking in appearance.”

  Next he rode down to the bridge to examine his own handiwork. He found only three bodies. “This was a disappointment to me,” he wrote. “I should have liked not only to have killed the greatest possible number—but also to know, if possible, which I had killed, and to see and count the bodies.”

  He was gratified afterward to hear from witnesses that he may have killed as many as eight Union soldiers with that first cannon shot but that their bodies had been moved by Confederate troops assigned to collect abandoned guns and wagons. He would eventually raise this tally to fifteen, an exaggeration that he came to believe was true.

  Later that Monday, Russell of the London Times, who had covered the battle, mailed his first report to London; a second would follow four days later. It took time for these “letters,” as he called them, to reach the Times’ office and for copies of the editions in which they were published to make their way back to America. By the evening of August 20, thirty days later, newspapers in New York began publishing extracts.

  The battle had been a humiliating defeat for the Union. Though American newspapers had been just as damning in the immediate aftermath of the battle, by the time Russell’s detailed and vivid account appeared, the North had placed the disaster behind it. His criticism not only exhumed the hurt and humiliation, but coming as it did from a foreign observer, it seemed almost spiteful. The response was quick and harsh, the mails “swollen today by anonymous letters threatening me with bowie knife and revolver, or simply abusive, frantic with hate, and full of obscure warnings.”

  Russell found himself shunned on the street, his presence met by scowls and open snubs, “women turning up their pretty little noses.” He was dubbed “Bull-Run Russell,” and this was not meant kindly. Such name-calling perplexed him: “Oddly enough, the Americans seem to think that a disgrace to their arms becomes diminished by fixing the name of the scene as a sobriquet on one who described it.”

  The most cutting response came from the Lincolns. One evening Russell encountered them in their carriage. “The President was not so good-humored, nor Mrs. Lincoln so affable, in their return to my salutation as usual,” he wrote. “My unpopularity is certainly spreading upwards and downwards at the same time, and all because I could not turn the battle of Bull’s Run into a Federal victory, because I would not pander to the vanity of the people, and, least of all, because I will not bow my knee to the degraded creatures who have made the very name of a free press odious to honorable men.”

  Russell was banned from military posts and forbidden to join units in action, his métier. Only one course remained. Without first conferring with his editor, Russell arranged passage back to England. He left New York on April 9, 1862, “with the head of our good ship pointing, thank Heaven, towards Europe.”

  Although a clear Confederate victory, the battle at Manassas Junction, soon to be known variously as the First Manassas or the First Bull Run, came at great cost to the victors as well as the Union. On the Confederate side, the battle killed 387 men, wounded 1,582, and left thirteen missing. (Ruffin’s son Charles survived the battle but later deserted, much to his father’s shame.) The Union suffered 481 killed, 1,011 wounded, and over 1,200 missing, most presumably taken prisoner. One victim was the naïveté that had marked the attitudes of both sides in the months after Lincoln’s election, with both convinced that any war between North and South would be brief and tidy, spilling only enough blood “to fill a lady’s thimble.” They knew only what limited war looked like and lacked the visual memory and lexical tools to imagine a conflagration that would deposit corpses in their gardens, on their streets, and among the cotton bolls of their plantations.