1861 Read online

  This Is a Borzoi Book

  Published by Alfred A. Knopf

  Copyright © 2011 by Adam Goodheart

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by

  Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goodheart, Adam.

  1861 : the Civil War awakening / Adam Goodheart.— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59666-6

  1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865 —Causes.

  2 . United States—Politics and government— 1861–1865. 3. United States—

  Intellectual life— 19 th century. I. Title. II. Title: Civil War awakening.

  E 459 .G 66 2011

  973.7′11 —dc 22 2010051326

  Jacket image: Cumberland Landing, Virginia. Federal Encampment

  on the Pamunkey River by James F. Gibson, May 1862 (detail).

  Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  Jacket design by Joe Montgomery

  v3.1_r1

  For my family

  and in memory of

  Rose Sudman Goodheart

  (Teleneshty, Russian Empire, 1905–Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1997),

  who made America’s history ours, too.

  Union rally, San Francisco, 1861 (photo credit fm.1)

  ARM’D year! year of the struggle!

  No dainty rhymes or sentimental love verses for you, terrible year!

  Not you as some pale poetling, seated at a desk, lisping cadenzas piano;

  But as a strong man, erect, clothed in blue clothes, advancing, carrying a rifle on your shoulder,

  With well-gristled body and sunburnt face and hands—with a knife in the belt at your side,

  As I heard you shouting loud—your sonorous voice ringing across the continent;

  Your masculine voice, O year, as rising amid the great cities,

  Amid the men of Manhattan I saw you, as one of the workmen, the dwellers in Manhattan;

  Or with large steps crossing the prairies out of Illinois and Indiana,

  Rapidly crossing the West with springy gait, and descending the Alleghanies;

  Or down from the great lakes, or in Pennsylvania, or on deck along the Ohio river;

  Or southward along the Tennessee or Cumberland rivers, or at Chattanooga on the mountain top,

  Saw I your gait and saw I your sinewy limbs, clothed in blue, bearing weapons, robust year;

  Heard your determin’d voice, launch’d forth again and again;

  Year that suddenly sang by the mouths of the round-lipp’d cannon,

  I repeat you, hurrying, crashing, sad, distracted year.

  —WALT WHITMAN, “1861”

  It seems as if we were never alive till now; never had a country till now.

  —A YOUNG WOMAN IN NEW YORK WRITING

  TO A FRIEND, MAY 1861

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  A Banner at Daybreak

  Charleston Harbor, December 1860

  CHAPTER ONE

  Wide Awake

  Boston, October 1860

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Old Gentlemen

  Washington, January 1861

  CHAPTER THREE

  Forces of Nature

  Central Ohio, February 1861

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Shot in the Dark

  Charleston Harbor, April 1861

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Volunteer

  Lower Manhattan, April 1861

  CHAPTER SIX

  Gateways to the West

  Lower Carson River, Nevada Territory, May 1861

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Crossing

  Washington, May 1861

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Freedom’s Fortress

  Hampton Roads, Virginia, May 1861

  CHAPTER NINE

  Independence Day

  Washington, July 1861

  Postscripts

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Storm flag of the United States garrison at Forts Moultrie and Sumter, 1860–61 (photo credit fm.2)

  PROLOGUE

  A Banner at Daybreak

  Then over all, (aye! aye!) my little and lengthen’d pennant shaped like a sword,

  Runs swiftly up indicating war and defiance—and now the halyards have rais’d it,

  Side of my banner broad and blue, side of my starry banner,

  Discarding peace over all the sea and land.

  —WALT WHITMAN,

  “Song of the Banner at Day-Break” (1860–61)

  Charleston Harbor, December 1860

  NIGHT FELL AT LAST. Boats slipped off the beach, swift and almost silent, drawn by skilled oarsmen across the water. The rowers labored hatless and in shirtsleeves, breath visible in the chilly air, blue uniform coats draped over their muskets, concealing the glint of bayonets. Somehow all three of their vessels eluded the patrolling steamers, crossing the broad belt of reflected moonlight at barely a hundred yards from the nearest one, then vanishing, undetected, into the gloom on the far side of the channel.

  Only a few of their comrades had remained behind at the old fort, working hour after hour in the darkness, attending to the final tasks. Last of all, they had been told, the towering flagstaff must come down. No easy task: it was well over a hundred feet tall and rooted deep in the earth, constructed to withstand shot and shell. As midnight passed and daybreak drew nearer, men toiled with saws at the rock-hard pitch pine, like woodsmen at the base of a great tree. They fastened ropes to guide its fall. The soldiers carefully arranged bags of gunpowder, placed the fuse, lit a match. With a splintering crack the staff snapped perfectly at the cut, toppled forward, and split again upon the parapet. It lay at the foot of the wall, irreparably broken.

  The work was done. That morning, for the first time in half a century, the flag of the United States would not fly above the citadel.1

  THE MAN WHO LED that dangerous transit had arrived in Charleston just five weeks earlier.

  Major Robert Anderson had been sent to command the federal garrison at Fort Moultrie, a stronghold at the tip of Sullivan’s Island, just across the harbor from the city wharves. His official orders were to strengthen the harbor’s defenses against the far-fetched possibility of an attack by Great Britain or France, but everybody knew this was a sham.2 The real reason for his appointment had to do with the looming crisis threatening to split the country in half. Abraham Lincoln had been elected president just weeks earlier, and in response, the Southern states were moving quickly toward secession. It seemed certain that South Carolina would take the lead.

  The three forts commanding Charleston Harbor—Fort Moultrie, Fort Sumter, and Castle Pinckney—not only dominated the very hotbed of disloyalty but could also, if properly manned, instantly shut down the largest Southern port on the Atlantic seaboard. Most important, holding on to them would be a crucial symbolic statement to the nation and the world: the United States would not relinquish its grip on any federal property, nor on any of the states, without a fight. It would deal with secession as treason. If, however, it let the forts go peacefully, the national government would be sending quite a different message: that it was ready to negotiate with the aggrieved leaders of the slaveholding South, and perhaps even let t
he seceding states go peacefully as well. The new commander in Charleston Harbor had to be a dependable messenger—faithful and prompt—of either message, as circumstances might warrant.

  The junior officers waiting to salute his arrival could have been forgiven if their first sight of Anderson, as he stepped gingerly from a small launch onto Moultrie’s wharf, failed to inspire great confidence. Everything about their new commander seemed middling: he was a man in his fifties, of midlevel rank, medium height, and moderate demeanor; mild-mannered, nondescriptly handsome—the sort who left few vivid impressions even on those who had known him well. (None, surely, could have guessed that women would soon beg for locks of that meticulously combed gray hair; that woodcuts of that bland, impassive face would appear on the front pages of magazines on both sides of the Atlantic.) A scrupulous, methodical man, he was known in the service mainly for having translated certain French artillery textbooks into English. And yet here was the person to whom the United States government had just entrusted one of the most delicate military and political assignments in American history.3

  Anderson was, moreover, a Southerner who had grown up with slavery, and whose family included strong partisans for the South. Nearly all of the staff officers at Moultrie happened to be from the North. They included men like Captain Abner Doubleday, a New Yorker and a radical by army standards. The mustachioed, barrel-chested Doubleday considered himself a thoroughly modern man, unencumbered by the cheap affectations of honor and chivalry with which so many officers still bedecked themselves. Not one to keep his opinions to himself, he unabashedly opposed slavery and had voted for Lincoln. (He was probably the only man within two hundred miles of the Charleston Battery who would admit aloud to having done so.) He relished being hissed in the streets as a “Black Republican” when his official duties took him over the water to downtown Charleston. The fort’s other company captain was a lean, introspective Yankee named Truman Seymour, son of a Methodist minister from Vermont.

  Anderson had no reputation as a fire-breathing secessionist. Nor were Doubleday and Seymour the kind of men to question the honor of a superior officer—at least openly. But would a man of his background and temperament be ready to wrestle the Southerners into submission, if it came to that?

  Not that the federal force at Charleston appeared capable, as yet, of much coercion. Luckily for the founding fathers of the nascent Republic of South Carolina, Anderson’s three federal citadels “guarded” the harbor in only the most figurative sense. Waiting on Moultrie’s parade ground to welcome Anderson was a tiny detachment of soldiers that could scarcely be termed even a garrison: just two companies of barely thirty men each, not counting a small brass band. Sumter, in the harbor’s mouth, lay unfinished after decades of start-and-stop construction, and housed just a few military engineers supervising some civilian workmen. Castle Pinckney, whose guns overlooked the town itself, was manned by a single ordnance sergeant.4

  And even if Moultrie, the Charleston post’s official headquarters, had been garrisoned with hundreds of men rather than a few dozen, it wouldn’t have been much of a stronghold.

  During the Revolution, the fort had been the site of a famous American victory. In the summer of 1776, just a few days before the passage of the Declaration of Independence, a single regiment of South Carolina troops held it against an entire fleet; British cannonballs sank harmlessly into its fibrous palmetto-log ramparts while the American artillerymen exacted a terrible toll on enemy officers and sailors. (South Carolinians adopted the palmetto tree as their state symbol shortly after the battered enemy turned tail.) That victory at Moultrie—a thousand miles south of the previous American triumphs at Boston—was celebrated throughout the newborn United States, and was seen by many Americans as a sign, perhaps even a heaven-sent portent, that the loose concatenation of former colonies could stand together as one nation.5

  But by 1860, no foreign power had sent its fleets against America’s coastline in almost two generations. Moultrie’s defenses, built early in the century atop the old palmetto fort, were antiquated, its brick walls cracked and eroding. Sand drifts nearly buried its outer fortifications; stray cows from nearby farms could—and occasionally did—wander across the ramparts.6 Moreover, the southern end of Sullivan’s Island had become a fashionable beach resort in recent decades. Wealthy Charlestonians had built summer cottages among the sand dunes overlooking the fort, and on pleasant evenings would saunter through its open gates to promenade on the parade ground with wives and sweethearts. It was clear to everyone, from Anderson down to his last private, that the place was about as defensible as a public park.7

  Nonetheless, as November turned into December, it also became clearer and clearer that Moultrie might soon need to be defended—and from attackers based not in the mouth of Charleston Harbor, toward which the fort’s gun platforms faced, but onshore. When the new commander arrived, South Carolina’s legislature had just unanimously passed a resolution calling for a statewide convention to discuss secession, and local militia had placed the U.S. military arsenal in town under guard, ostensibly to defend it in case of a slave revolt.8 On November 29, the Charleston Mercury published a draft ordinance of secession.9 Visiting the city daily to procure fresh provisions, the men of the Moultrie garrison heard bands playing “La Marseillaise,” and saw the streets draped with banners bearing slogans like “Good-bye, Yankee Doodle” and “Let Us Bury the Union’s Dead Carcass.”10 The state’s governor was whipping up excitement with talk of the glorious future that awaited an independent South Carolina—promising laws that would reopen the African slave trade, officially declare white men the ruling race, and punish “summarily and severely, if not with death” any person caught espousing abolitionist views.

  Charleston was filling up with militiamen who drilled under the state flag—a white banner with a palmetto tree and single red star—and spoke openly of hauling down the Stars and Stripes, which flew above the harbor fortifications.11 On December 1, a rumor reached the garrison that South Carolina was about to place artillery just across Sullivan’s Island, pointing directly at Moultrie.12

  In letters and telegrams to their superiors back at the War Department, Anderson and his staff described their increasingly desperate situation in the tones of cool appraisal befitting seasoned officers. If they were to hold on to Charleston Harbor, additional troops, ammunition, and supplies were needed immediately. Fort Moultrie must be reinforced, and the two other federal strongholds in the harbor—Fort Sumter and Castle Pinckney—garrisoned with soldiers loyal to the United States. The sand hills looming just yards from Moultrie’s walls must be leveled, or they could quickly become nests of sharpshooters who could pick off the men inside, one by one, in a matter of hours.13

  Replies from Washington were dilatory, vague, and ambivalent. More troops would be sent—at some point. The garrison’s officers must prepare to defend Moultrie as best they could—but not touch the sand hills, which were believed to be private property. (They weren’t, in fact.) Above all, they must not do anything that the hot-tempered South Carolinians might find provocative—a category that seemed to include almost any action whatsoever that the little band of men might take.14

  The U.S. forts in Charleston Harbor were ground zero in the exploding secession crisis, yet no one at the War Department seemed to be taking their defense seriously. In fact, the garrison’s only direct communication from the secretary of war lately had been a one-sentence telegram ordering them to return a few dozen muskets that Seymour had managed to extract from the federal arsenal in Charleston.15

  Curiously enough, the only measure that the War Department fully supported was an all-out effort to buttress the fortifications themselves. Nearly a quarter of a million dollars was allocated to the building project, and throughout the autumn more than a hundred laborers, many of them Irish and German immigrants brought down from Baltimore, toiled busily at Sumter, rapidly completing the officers’ quarters, raising the height of the walls, and readying the u
pper tiers of the fort to support cannons. Back at Moultrie, an even larger group dug ditches, built makeshift gun platforms, and cleared sand from the outer walls—discovering, in the process, quite a few cannonballs that had been casually mislaid over the years. Anderson sent a third detachment of the civilian workers over to Castle Pinckney to commence repairs, on the assumption that Washington would soon send enough troops to man all three forts.16 This construction further infuriated many Charlestonians, who assumed that the Yankees were preparing to bombard their city. Bands of secessionists now patrolled day and night outside Moultrie, itching for any pretext to commence hostilities. The little garrison was stretched so thin that officers’ wives were taking shifts on guard duty.17 And still no reinforcements came.

  What Anderson and his men didn’t realize is that the secretary of war was playing a double game—or at least would shed no tears if their citadel fell to the rebels. John B. Floyd was a former governor of Virginia firmly aligned with states’ rights and the South—within a few months, he would wear the uniform of a Confederate brigadier general. Since his appointment by President James Buchanan, the War Department had become a den of graft and peculation, his staff entangled in an under-the-table scheme funneling government money held in trust for Indians into the pocket of a crooked military contractor.18 Afterward, it would remain unclear if Floyd had been involved in the scheme himself, or if he had simply allowed it to happen out of innocent laziness and incompetence.

  So, too, his response—or lack of response—to the Sumter crisis may have been rooted in treasonous tendencies, or may have been due to simple indifference. In the Charleston predicament, Secretary Floyd may have seen an opportunity: if no troops were sent to man the three harbor forts, no amount of sprucing up would prevent their tumbling into the laps of the South Carolinians. That way, the three citadels would be in tiptop shape, at the expense of the U.S. government, just in time to protect Charleston from any federal fleet that might come steaming down to crush the rebellion. (This was what Doubleday would later come to believe.)19 Or he may simply have wished to passively let the situation drift along, sparing himself the mess, unpleasantness, and extra work that might come from more decisive action. Either way, the result would be the same.