The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (13 page)

By 1861, Missouri had long been involved in North-South controversy. From the congressional debates over statehood in 1819 and 1820 and participation as some of the bloodletters in the controversy over slavery in “Bleeding Kansas” in the late 1850s, Missourians should have been accustomed to sectional crises. Yet, in spite of this experience, the secession crisis was traumatic in Missouri. Led by Governor Claiborne F. Jackson and former Senator David R. Atchison, the secessionists persuaded the legislature to call a state convention and then launched a vigorous campaign to elect pro-Confederate delegates. Unionists, however, countered with success, and on February 18, Missouri voters selected a convention slate in which not one delegate publicly favored immediate secession. When the convention assembled ten days later, the delegates made moderate member Sterling Price their presiding officer and then proceeded to examine Missouri’s relations with the United States. The result was a seven-point program defining the state’s position as peaceable. Missouri would remain in the Union but asked for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the sanctity of slave property and expressed its opposition to coercion of the seceded states. Then the convention adjourned. Missouri, like other states on the border, remained in the Union but reserved the right to change its mind.
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With the possible exception of Virginia, no state displayed more agony of indecision about its ultimate loyalty than Kentucky. Birthplace of presidents, both of the United and Confederate States, Kentucky also claimed the compromise tradition of Henry Clay. Governor Boriah Magoffin was a Southern rights man, but Senator John J. Crittenden was the author of a major compromise proposal, an unamendable amendment to the Constitution sanctifying property in slaves south of latitude 36° 30'. Vice-President John C. Breckinridge, Kentucky’s Democratic presidential candidate in 1860, backed Crittenden’s scheme (presumably to rid himself of the secessionist label, which had lost him the state’s electoral votes to John Bell). The deep South’s looming independence and the lukewarm national reception of Crittenden’s compromise led Governor Magoffin in late December to call the legislature into special session to call a state convention—the first step toward secession. But even though Breckinridge endorsed the proposed convention, Kentucky’s legislature turned down the Governor’s request and adjourned until late March. Although the sectional crisis had deepened by the time the legislature again convened, indecision and hope for compromise still dominated that body. Kentucky continued to be divided but in the Union, committed only to the vain hope of sectional compromise.
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Maryland in the spring of 1861 was a border state with sharply divided loyalties. The southern and eastern shore sections of the state were extensions of eastern Virginia, while in northern and western Maryland people identified with western Virginia unionism. During the secession crisis the actions of Maryland Governor Thomas Hicks and of the Washington government were crucial. Hicks refused to call the legislature into session and thus prevented corporate action on secession; however much the Maryland secessionists fumed and threatened; they could do little without some legislative sanction. Lincoln realized that if Maryland and Virginia seceded, the Union would have to abandon Washington and lose an enormous amount of prestige and property to the Southern rebels. He played a decisive role in Maryland’s fate by moving troops into the state to prevent any untoward move by disunionists. The Confederates believed, probably correctly, that large numbers of Marylanders desired to join the new nation. But the presence of an equal or greater degree of unionist sentiment, supported by the energy of Hicks and Lincoln, made Maryland a doubtful ally of the Confederacy.
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The last and least of the slave states was Delaware, with only 1,800 slaves. When the legislature gathered for its regular session in January, 1861, Delaware lawmakers heard speeches from Southern commissioners and received a formal invitation from Georgia to join it in secession. Never, however, did the Delaware legislature seriously consider disunion; indeed on two occassions it passed statements strongly condemning secession.
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On the eve of confrontation at Fort Sumter, then, the slave states that had remained in the Union were in great flux. It was clear, or at least should have been clear, to the Montgomery and Washington governments that nothing decisive would happen in the upper South and border states until the Confederate and United States had had some kind of showdown. As long as the two “nations” existed in undefined relation to each other, border Southerners could live suspended between them. Only when the relationship between the Union and the Confederacy crystallized as peaceful coexistence or war would a choice be necessary. Until the showdown, the slave states could watch and wait, and they did.

However much the border South wished to avoid a confrontation between the Washington and Montgomery governments, by April of 1861 both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln had good reason to seek one. Neither president wanted war, but both had to have an end to the ambiguity surrounding the secession crisis. During his first month in office Lincoln could afford to stall. He needed to form his administration, he hoped that the great mass of Southern whites would “come to their senses,” and he sought support for the Union among the border states.
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Davis, too, required time to construct his government and to proselytize among the slave states still in the Union. By April, though, both governments had done what they could about the border South; people and governments on both sides had begun to clamor for decisive action.

In addition the crises at Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens required resolution. At Fort Pickens, Braxton Bragg’s Confederates were about as numerous and as well trained as they were ever going to be, and it was apparent that the United States intended to reinforce its forces. Bragg wrote Davis that he could storm the fort but that chances of success or failure were about even, and in either event the attack would be costly. Davis hoped for better odds than that.
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At Sumter the situation had become critical. Major Anderson and his garrison were running out of food. Women and children, dependents of the troops, left the fort in early February; but even without the extra mouths to feed, Anderson calculated that he would be starved out before mid-April. To retain Sumter the United States would have to send in supplies. To be rid of the Union presence in Charleston Harbor the Confederacy would then be compelled to open fire on the resupply ship or the fort or both. Both sides accepted the confrontation then and there.

On April 7 a federal fleet sailed for Charleston to resupply Anderson’s garrison. A day later the Confederate commissioners in Washington received a letter, dated March 15 but held back by Seward, stating that the United States had no intention of abandoning Sumter. The same day, April 8, Robert Chew of the United States State Department arrived in Charleston and personally read a message from his President to Governor Pickens, which explained that Lincoln planned to send provisions to Fort Sumter but would not send more troops or arms. After Pickens had heard his tidings, Chew left in some haste.
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Pickens promptly relayed Lincoln’s message to the Confederate military commander at Charleston, General P. G. T. Beauregard, who passed the news on to his commander-in-chief in Montgomery. Then it was Davis’ turn to act. All along he had believed that war was inevitable, and although he did not wish to fire the first shot, he perceived no alternative. Accordingly, on the tenth, Secretary of War Walker sent orders by telegraph to Beauregard to demand evacuation and to reduce the fort should the demand be refused.
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At two o’clock on the afternoon of April 11, Beauregard sent a written demand to Anderson. Two of the General’s aides, Colonel James Chesnut and Captain Stephen D. Lee, presented the note to Anderson with appropriate formality. No one involved in the Sumter confrontation missed the drama and import of what was happening. Beneath the courtesy and fastidious propriety of the proceedings, however, were the hard facts that Anderson refused to move and Beauregard meant to move him.
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After informing Chesnut and Lee of his determination to remain at his post, Anderson said, almost as an afterthought, that he would be starved out within a few days whether the Confederates fired on him or not. Chesnut reported these words to Beauregard, and the General decided to make one last effort to avoid a fight. Consequently Chesnut and Lee again rowed out to Sumter, around one o’clock on the morning of the twelfth. This time Beauregard’s note requested the day and hour when Anderson could consider himself starved out and would evacuate. The Union Major conferred with his officers for almost two hours and then agreed to leave Sumter at noon on April 15, providing the circumstances regarding resupply did not change. Chesnut, the senior Confederate officer present, took only a few minutes to read Anderson’s proposal and reject it. Lincoln’s resupply fleet was overdue already; the Confederacy must have Sumter by the time it arrived. At 3:20
a.m
., Chesnut informed Anderson that the shore batteries would open fire on Fort Sumter in one hour. The Southerners then bade somewhat emotional farewells and left Anderson to his fate.
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During these last few hours of peace, Edmund Ruffin was on Morris Island sleeping in his clothes among the sand fleas. The old man was determined to have a part in the fight for Fort Sumter, and so he had joined the Palmetto Guard, South Carolina Infantry. At four o’clock in the morning the Palmetto Guard rolled out of their makeshift beds and hurried to their guns. Ruffin stood by Columbiad number one, the first of the heaviest class of seacoast weapons, in the Iron Battery.

At four-thirty a thin, red arc appeared in the sky over Sumter. It was the burning fuse of a ten-inch mortar shell from Fort Johnson on the southern shore of Charleston Harbor. The shell burst about a hundred feet above the center of the fort. This was the signal, ordered by Chesnut after he left Anderson, to begin the bombardment. Mortar batteries opened soon after, and at dawn Ruffin jerked the lanyard of his Columbiad. Afterward the zealous old man claimed that his was the first shot of the war. Perhaps because of Ruffin’s age and fame, no one then seriously disputed his claim. As time passed and the war became a disaster, few but Ruffin would have admitted starting it.
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Fort Sumter and Anderson’s garrison did not resist long. The Federals answered the Confederate fire, but they were short not only of food but also of gunpowder. At 2:30
P.M.
on April 13, Anderson sent word that he was prepared to surrender, and on the afternoon of the fourteenth the stars and stripes came down from the makeshift flagstaff over Sumter. Ironically, the only casualties of the first battle in the new war occurred during the flag-striking ceremony. Some gunpowder exploded, killing one Union soldier outright and wounding five others, one mortally. When the Palmetto Guard occupied the fort later that day, the first man ashore was “Private” Edmund Ruffin. He immediately set to work gathering souvenirs to send to his “slowpoke,” sometime-Southern friends in Virginia.
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In Washington, Lincoln responded to the attack on Sumter by calling for 75,000 volunteer troops to suppress “combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by law.” By so doing he accepted the challenge of armed conflict without accepting the legality of secession or the reality of the Confederacy. The flood of volunteers in the North and the enthusiastic cooperation of state governments there supported Lincoln’s determination and his logic. In the border South, however, the President’s call for volunteers pushed the slave states off the fence. When United States Secretary of War Simon Cameron presented the appropriate troop requisitions to state governors, middle ground between North and South disappeared. At that point the states of upper South had to answer their President’s call to arms or find a new president.

Now things moved quickly. On April 17 the Virginia state convention became a secession convention by adopting 88 to 55 an ordinance dissolving the state’s bonds with the Union. Delegates from the far western counties, however, strongly dissented from the majority stance, and on the evening of the seventeenth, as secessionists were celebrating in the streets, the western unionists met in a Richmond hotel to take the first step toward their own secession—from Virginia.
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In the wake of Lincoln’s call to arms, North Carolina’s Governor Ellis called a special session of his legislature and urged that body to call a secession convention. Circumstances and minds had changed since the last time North Carolinians had considered secession. This time the legislature was nearly unanimous in passing the convention bill, and when the body assembled on May 20, the principal debate concerned whether to base North Carolina’s secession on the right of revolution or on the traditional state-sovereignty compact theory. By the end of the day’s session the convention had removed North Carolina from the Union.
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Governor Isham Harris of Tennessee also called his legislature back into session after receiving requests for troops from Washington. Harris, however, believed that the secession convention process would be too slow. Therefore he urged the legislature to declare Tennessee’s independence and refer the
fait accompli
to the voters. The solons complied and on May 7 approved a military alliance with the Confederacy. When the voters finally made their voice heard, they endorsed secession from the United States and union with the Confederacy by more than a two-to-one majority, although eastern Tennesseeans, even after the fact of secession, voted against the proceeding by 32,923 to 14,780.
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In Arkansas the slim majority of unionist votes in the convention before Sumter melted away. The state convention which reassembled on May 6 took only one day to pass an ordinance of secession, 65 to 5.
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