Coming Fury, Volume 1 (45 page)

Early in February, while the unpleasant taste of the
Star of the West
fiasco was still fresh, Fox had been called to Washington by Winfield Scott, at Montgomery Blair’s suggestion, to devise some means for getting reinforcements to Major Anderson. As an old navy man, Fox distrusted the idea that the warships could simply hammer their way into the harbor whenever the administration nerved itself to make the attempt, and he had worked out a scheme which he believed would make a stand-up fight unnecessary. Send down your men and supplies (he said) by transports, with men of war for escort. In the thickness of a dark night, put men and goods into whale boats, landing craft, small barges, or whatnot, have shallow-draft tugboats to take them in tow, and get them up to the Fort Sumter wharf before South Carolina knows what is going on. If guard boats or soldiers in rowboats try to interfere, the warships can drive them off. By daylight the fort will have everything it needs, and the secessionist gunners can do as they please: Fort Sumter will be secure.
¹

In its essentials this plan had been accepted, and at Buchanan’s direction the War and Navy departments had set aside men and ships for a Fort Sumter relief expedition. But the expedition had never been sent, because—as Lincoln was learning on his first full day in office—Major Anderson himself had concluded that it was not needed.

The major had been most explicit. After the
Star of the West
had been driven away, he told the War Department that he hoped it would make no effort to put supplies into the fort, because it “would do more harm than good.” Early in February he wrote that although it was always possible for a small party to slip in by stealth—precisely the point around which Fox was building his own plan—the harbor defenses had been improved so that an entrance
could be forced only by a substantial fleet.
²
The War Department, in turn, instructed the major to send word if he needed anything, and in the absence of any further word assumed that everything was all right. Anderson had sent many reports since then, but none of them had indicated any especial change in his situation (except that a steady, ominous tightening of pressure was perceptible, as Beauregard gave South Carolina’s effort professional direction), and as far as Washington knew, Fort Sumter contained all the soldiers and rations it would need for a long time to come. Now, out of a clear sky, had come this startling report, which in effect said, or at least appeared to say, that it was impossible for Major Anderson to stay at Sumter and equally impossible for the government to help him.

Any ideas Gustavus Fox had, accordingly, would be considered. Yet before he could pass on these, Lincoln had to reflect that Sumter was not the only fort to be held, occupied, and possessed. Most Federal installations along the coast, from Charleston to the Rio Grande, had passed into Confederate hands, but Lincoln’s government still held four. There was Sumter, to begin with. There were also Fort Taylor, at Key West, Florida, and Fort Jefferson, a gloomy rock of a place far offshore in the Dry Tortugas—places which it was important for the government to keep, but so remote that the Confederacy was not likely to raise a fuss about them. And there was, finally, Fort Pickens, at the entrance to Pensacola harbor in Florida.

Potentially, Fort Pickens offered a case that was fully as explosive as that of Fort Sumter. It also offered the Federal government one advantage that was absent at Fort Sumter; it was permanently reinforceable. A United States warship, as a matter of fact, with a company of regulars aboard, was even now anchored within musket shot of Fort Pickens, and the regulars could be sent ashore in a matter of minutes. Furthermore, whereas Fort Sumter lay well inside of Charleston harbor, and so could be isolated as soon as enough Confederate batteries were in place—a matter to which General Beauregard had been systematically attending for weeks—Fort Pickens lay on the seacoast, out at the harbor’s entrance. Confederate guns might conceivably pound it into submission, or it might be stormed if enough assault troops were
put on Santa Rosa Island, the forty-mile expanse of sand and underbrush on which the fort had been sited; but the place could never be isolated as long as the United States had a navy.

Fort Pickens’s history during the last three months had been a good deal like Fort Sumter’s, the difference lying chiefly in the fact that the people of Florida were milder than the people of South Carolina, and that Fort Pickens was more remote than Fort Sumter. When 1861 began, Pickens, like Sumter, was empty. United States troops present in the vicinity included no more than forty-odd artillerists, commanded by middle-aged Lieutenant Adam J. Slemmer, quartered on the mainland in barracks that were clustered about ancient Fort Barrancas, part of which had been built by the Spaniards in the long ago. When Florida seceded and prepared to seize all available government property, Slemmer took a leaf from Major Anderson’s book and got his men over to Fort Pickens—just in time, too, for the state troops seized Fort Barrancas, occupied the United States Navy Yard near by, moved into Fort McRee at the harbor mouth facing Fort Pickens, and began to build new batteries. Slemmer knew his case was hopeless if the Southerners made an all-out attack. His little company had been reinforced, after a fashion, by thirty sailors who got away when the navy yard was taken, bringing his total manpower to eighty-one, and he had plenty of supplies; but in its present condition Fort Pickens was vulnerable to an infantry assault and its tiny garrison would be overwhelmed if the Southerners used their available manpower in an all-out attack.

On January 12 the Florida authorities first demanded the surrender of the fort. Slemmer had rejected this demand, but it was common knowledge that an attack was being planned, and in consequence it was much to Slemmer’s advantage when Florida’s Stephen R. Mallory—a United States Senator, in January: in March, Jefferson Davis’s Secretary of the Navy—worked out a deal with President Buchanan. Under this deal the North would not reinforce Pickens and the South would not attack it. Both sides were fortifying, but neither side did any shooting. In many ways the case of Pickens and Pensacola was like the case of Sumter and Charleston, except that nobody worked up a great head of steam about it. Potentially, the cases were exactly parallel, with the Federal government
occupying a fort in a seaport that (as secessionists saw it, at any rate) belonged to a foreign power. One fort would make just as good a test case as the other. So far Fort Sumter had drawn all of the emotion, but there was plenty to spare for Fort Pickens if anyone made an issue of it.

At the end of the first week in March the Fort Pickens situation was endurable but complicated, the chief complication being that no one in Washington was entirely clear about the deal Buchanan had made back in January. The Navy Department of course knew that U.S.S.
Brooklyn
, swinging to her anchor chain half a mile from the Fort Pickens sally port, still contained a company of soldiers who belonged in the fort but had not been put there because the administration, two months earlier, had felt that it was advisable to keep them afloat for a while yet. In an absent-minded sort of way the department probably realized that the commanding officer of the U.S.S.
Sabine
, Captain H. A. Adams, who also commanded the squadron, had been instructed on January 30 not to put the soldiers ashore “unless said fort shall be attacked or preparations shall be made for its attack.” But nobody in Washington quite realized (and this was typical of the confusion and general fogginess which lay upon the capital as the new administration took over) that as far as Captain Adams knew, these orders of January 30 were still binding unless the Navy Department specifically canceled them.
³

Since January the situation at Pensacola had changed. The Confederacy had taken over. The thousands of Southern troops at Pensacola were now under the command of Brigadier General Braxton Bragg, a dour martinet who was an exceedingly capable trainer and organizer of troops but who, in action, was to show a bewildering knack for following moments of genuine achievement with moments of inexplicable incompetence; a baffling character, who would retain Davis’s confidence long after he had lost that of practically everyone else in the South. Like Beauregard, Bragg had been busy, and he had many guns in position along the water front. He was darkly pessimistic, writing to his wife that “our troops are raw volunteers, without officers, and without discipline, each man with an idea that he can whip the world,” and he did not see how the fort could be taken without a regular siege. But he was whipping his men into shape, and by mid-March the only thing around Pensacola
that had not changed was the January 30 order in Captain Adams’s desk.
⁴

However that might be, Fort Pickens had a powerful claim on the new President’s attention. Lincoln apparently was about to lose so much more than he could afford to lose at Fort Sumter; at Fort Pickens, quite possibly, he could get all of it back.

The Fort Sumter problem had always been loaded. If the Lincoln administration gave up the fort without a fight, the Confederacy was virtually independent; no one thereafter—in the North, in the South, or anywhere else—would see much reason to think that this government would or could maintain the Union. On the other hand, if the administration mobilized army and navy and fought its way into Charleston harbor, it immediately became the aggressor, validating all of the anguished complaints about coercion of the South; and it would certainly lose the border states en bloc. Its only possible course was the one that had been set forth in the inaugural—to stay in Fort Sumter peaceably, leaving only after the other side had brought on a fight. And this only possible course was, according to Major Anderson’s dispatch, about to be lost.

But Fort Pickens was different. This fort could be reinforced to the limit of capacity, without the need for firing a shot. Furthermore, the reinforcements—or enough of them, at any rate, to show what the policy was going to be—were immediately available and could be put into the fort in short order. The test of the administration’s determination to “hold, occupy and possess” its remaining forts could be made at Fort Pickens just about as well as at Fort Sumter. If the place were immediately reinforced, the government’s will would be unmistakable. The Fort Sumter problem could be disposed of at leisure. If Captain Fox’s plans looked good, Major Anderson could be reinforced and supplied; if not, Major Anderson could be withdrawn and no great harm would have been done.

Accordingly, on March 12, U.S.S.
Mohawk
was sent off to make a quick run to Pensacola. It bore a dispatch from General Scott, signed by E. D. Townsend, assistant adjutant general of the army, addressed to Captain Israel Vogdes, captain of the company of regulars which had been resting aboard U.S.S.
Brooklyn
for so many weeks, and the dispatch read as follows:

“At the first favorable moment you will land with your company,
re-enforce Fort Pickens, and hold the same till further orders. Report frequently, if opportunities present themselves, on the condition of the fort and the circumstances around you.”

On the same day, General Scott wrote that “as a practical military question the time for succoring Fort Sumter with any means at hand had passed away nearly a month ago.” In the general’s opinion it would take four months to collect the needed warships, and from six to eight months to raise and discipline the troops—5000 regulars and 20,000 volunteers. The fort’s surrender, from starvation or under assault, was, he felt, merely a question of time. On this day, too, Fox’s detailed plan was brought before the President, who liked it and found that most of the cabinet also liked it; and on March 15 Lincoln sent to each cabinet member a note:

“Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort Sumter, under all the circumstances is it wise to attempt it? Please give me your opinion in writing on this subject.”
⁵

The assumption that it was possible to put provisions into the fort doubtless owed much to Fox, who seemed to be the only optimist in town. With the new administration less than a fortnight old, most of Washington was already taking it for granted that Fort Sumter would be given up. For two days, newspaper correspondents had been telling their papers that the cabinet had agreed to evacuate the fort. The Baltimore
American
’s story was explicit: “The battle of the cabinet has been fought and Mr. Seward has triumphed. The cabinet has ordered the withdrawal of Major Anderson from Fort Sumter.” Edwin M. Stanton, who had lent so much vigor to the closing weeks of Buchanan’s administration, wrote to Buchanan that Lincoln had not yet come to any decision on the matter—Seward, Bates, and Cameron, he said, were pulling him one way, and Chase, Welles, and Blair were pulling in the opposite direction—but he felt that what was coming was clear enough: “It is certain that Anderson will be withdrawn.” Rumors of surrender were printed in Charleston, and were believed inside Fort Sumter; hospital supplies and other movables were packed, by way of preparation for the move. Some of Anderson’s people thought that they could see the besieging Confederates beginning to relax—obviously because they expected to get Fort Sumter without further effort.
(The relaxation was only temporary, if indeed it existed at all. Beauregard was profoundly skeptical about Yankee intentions.)
⁶

The Washington correspondent who spoke of the anticipated withdrawal as a victory for Seward had put his finger on one of the real oddities of the situation. Seward, who had tried at the last minute to avoid entering the cabinet at all, was doing his best to run things now that he was in it. The papers had a way of referring to him as “Lincoln’s Premier,” and it was widely believed—by Seward himself, most of all—that Seward would be the real boss of the administration. And Seward, who had won Southern hatred years earlier by talking glibly of an irrepressible conflict, believed now that everything could be settled if the government let go of Fort Sumter in the right way. The stories that Anderson would be withdrawn were almost certainly being planted by Seward. At the very time when Lincoln was asking the ministers to say whether or not Fort Sumter should be provisioned, Seward was quietly passing the word to the Confederate commissioners that the fort was going to be surrendered. Captain Fox was not going to get any support from the Secretary of State; neither, for that matter, was Major Anderson … nor the dedicated Union men of the North, who had put this administration in office in the first place, who in the Northwest had seen secession as no better than rebellion and treason, and who if a fight at last came would be the men on whom the government would have to rely the most. Ben Wade, the ruthless anti-slavery extremist from Ohio, was furiously declaring that withdrawal would wreck the Republican party and the administration throughout the Northwest, and he was said to have told Lincoln bluntly: “Give up fortress after fortress and Jeff Davis will have you a prisoner of war in less than thirty days.” In New England many Republicans felt the way prominent editor Joseph Hawley, of Connecticut, felt. Hawley had just written to Gideon Welles that he could see why Fort Sumter must be given up, but that the idea brought tears to his eyes, and he had then burst out: “I will gladly be one of the volunteers to sail into that harbor past all the guns of hell rather than see the flag dishonored and the government demoralized.”
⁷
A tension was rising in the North, and the longer the business of the forts hung in the balance, the higher
it would be, matching the merciless tension that already was tormenting the South.