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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Erik Larson
Slavery with us is no abstraction—but a great and vital fact. Without it our every comfort would be taken from us. Our wives, our children, made unhappy—education, the light of knowledge—all all lost and our people ruined for ever. Nothing short of separation from the Union can save us. —Arthur Peronneau Hayne to President James Buchanan, December 22, 1860
The boat reached its wharf at twelve forty-five a.m., Friday, April 12, 1861, destined to be the single-most consequential day in American history.
“No, sir, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King.”
“ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ ” “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”
Just as Lincoln’s speech lodged the phrase “a house divided” into the American psyche, and Hammond’s speech the “cotton is king” thesis, so Seward’s speech deposited a phrase that would color political discourse for the next three climactic years: “an irrepressible conflict.”
Nonetheless, Petigru voted for secession. He agreed with a friend’s assessment that the state was “going to the devil,” but in accord with honor and loyalty to home, two of the most powerful forces in the South, he felt compelled to go with it.
The convention’s declaration also cited the 1778 Articles of Confederation, which asserted that each “State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence,” the base upon which Southern polemicists had built their case for secession—never mind that in asserting such rights the declaration also indirectly provided justification for the personal-liberty laws that Northern states had passed to prevent the seizure of escaped slaves from within their boundaries.
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” they wrote in their official declaration. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”
The pace at which the Union began to disintegrate was breathtaking, and Lincoln had yet to set foot in Washington.
“I will suffer death before I will consent or will advise my friends to consent to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right; because, whatever I might think of the merit of the various propositions before Congress, I should regard any concession in the face of menace the destruction of the government itself.”
“Compromises based on the idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the Liberty of nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right—The alteration of the Constitution to perpetuate slavery—the enforcement of a Law to recapture a poor, suffering fugitive—giving half of the Frontier of a free Country to the curse of Slavery—these compromises cannot be approved by God or supported by good men.”
What Seward had not addressed in his speech, and perhaps did not truly understand, was that at this point in the crisis, the thing that the South most resented was the inalterable fact that the North, like the rest of the modern world, condemned slavery as a fundamental evil. In so doing, abolitionists and their allies impugned the honor of the entire Southern white race, for if slavery was indeed evil, then the South itself was evil, and its echelons of gentlemen, the chivalry, were nothing more than moral felons.
Meanwhile newly elected Confederate President Jefferson Davis strode into Montgomery for his own inauguration ablaze with war lust, proclaiming that the North must be ready to “smell southern gunpowder and feel southern steel.”
The seven clauses underscored the fact that for all of the South’s efforts to blame the crisis on Northern tyranny in imposing tariffs, collecting revenue, and ordaining “internal improvements,” the crux of the crisis was in fact slavery. This was obvious to all at the time, if not to members of a certain school of twentieth-century historiography who sought to cast the conflict in the bloodless terms of states’ rights.
married couple “who quarreled on a bridge and the man said, blubbering, ‘Nancy, take the baby; I will drown myself.’ But she said, ‘No, take the baby with you. I want none of your breed left!’ What a tale.”
“Everywhere the Southern leaders are forcing on a solution with decision and energy,” Russell wrote, “whilst the Government appears to be helplessly drifting with the current of events, having neither bow nor stern, neither keel nor deck, neither rudder, compass, sails, or steam.”
“I am much obliged to his excellency the governor and yourself for the assurances you give me,” Anderson wrote, “but you must pardon me for saying that I feel deeply hurt at the intimation in your letter about the conditions which will be exacted of me, and I must state most distinctly that if I can only be permitted to leave on the pledge you mention I shall never, so help me God, leave this fort alive.”
Seward would only say, “with a pleasant twinkle of the eye,” that the government’s policy had been set out in Lincoln’s inaugural and would not be altered. Upon reading the inaugural, however, Russell found no particular guidance. To him, it seemed as if they were waiting for events to unfold rather than acting upon “any definite principle designed to control or direct the future.”
Even as Campbell wrote this, a letter from Montgomery was en route to the commissioners conveying Davis’s view that the current stalemate enabled the seceded states “to make all the necessary arrangements for the public defense, and the solidifying of their Government, more safely, cheaply, and expeditiously than they could were the attitude of the United States more definite and decided.”
The evening reinforced Russell’s growing conviction that Northerners had little understanding of their brethren below the Mason-Dixon Line. Southerners, he noted, routinely traveled North, but Northerners were far less likely to go South, in part out of a concern, he realized, for safety.
Despite the rain and cold, the atmosphere on Morris Island was festive and lighthearted. The men at the Confederate batteries cheered each time Fort Sumter fired a shot, to honor the gallant Major Anderson, whose performance thus far was deemed very much in accord with the chivalry’s code of honor. For the moment, at least, this was not war but rather an elaborate if perilous form of sport.
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.
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.
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.
