The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

by Erik Larson

Charleston was a central hub in the domestic slave trade, which in the wake of a fifty-year-old federal ban on international trading now thrived and accounted for much of the city’s wealth. The “Slave Schedule” of the 1860 U.S. Census listed 440 South Carolina planters who each held one hundred or more enslaved Blacks within a single district, this when the average number owned per slaveholding household nationwide was 10.2. In 1860, the South as a whole had 3.95 million slaves. One South Carolina family, the descendants of Nathaniel Heyward, owned over three thousand, of whom 2,590 resided within the state. Together these planters constituted a kind of aristocracy and saw themselves as such. They called themselves “the chivalry.”

The 1860 census found that the state had 111,000 more enslaved people than it did whites;

Not only did the state’s planters call themselves “the chivalry”; they devoured chivalric novels, like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. They held jousting competitions, called “heads and rings,” where a rider bearing the name of one of Scott’s or Tennyson’s knights, wearing knightly garb and holding a long lance, would ride at full gallop and attempt to spear a series of dangling metal rings as small as half an inch in diameter, then draw his saber to take an exuberant swipe at the head of an inanimate figure at the end of the course. The chivalry gave themselves military titles and favored elaborate uniforms.

For one thing, Lincoln’s election and the apprehension leading up to it inflicted a direct cost on the financial well-being of the South’s leading citizens, its planters. Cotton prices fell, as did the market value of slaves, and this in turn limited the planters’ ability to use them as security for mortgages and other investments. An “Extra No. 1” male who sold for $1,625 in Richmond over the preceding summer now sold for only $1,000, or 38.5 percent less. South Carolina reacted with particular fury. The day after the election, the state’s most senior federal officials resigned their posts, among them federal judge Andrew Gordon Magrath.

To Lincoln all this rancor was a mystery. He could not fathom South Carolina’s reaction. An election had taken place; he had won; America’s greatest democratic tradition had been upheld. At no time had he threatened to abolish slavery or emancipate the millions of enslaved men and women who populated the plantations of the South. But fire-eaters and secessionist editors had portrayed him as seeking exactly that.

More importantly, it gave them the connections to help them on their way toward success in the two realms that mattered most to the white aristocracy—politics and planting, with achievement in the latter counted in the number of enslaved people you owned and the array of fine possessions displayed in your home. If a student had any qualms about slavery, he found them eased at every turn, particularly in his senior year, when graduating students attended lectures in “moral philosophy” that taught them “to delight in the possession and exercise of power,” affirmed the rightness of the existing social hierarchy, and reinforced that it was “absolutely necessary to keep the blacks in the present condition.”

Hammond was selected by the state legislature to be a candidate for the House of Representatives in the 1834 U.S. congressional election. The public did the ultimate electing, but given the mechanics of Carolina politics, being thus anointed pretty much assured that Hammond would become his district’s next congressman. So ritualized was this process that candidates were counseled to avoid campaigning altogether. The chivalry did not go door to door begging for votes. As expected, Hammond won.

What most troubled Hammond and his fellow Southerners was the rapid intensification of antislavery sentiment in the North, epitomized in 1831 by William Lloyd Garrison’s founding in Boston of his abolitionist newspaper the Liberator. Antislavery societies soon proliferated and began bombarding the South with pamphlets and broadsides that depicted slavery as an unalloyed evil. Many Virginians blamed Garrison’s rhetoric for igniting the Nat Turner Rebellion of August 21–22, 1831, in which Turner and coconspirators killed fifty-five whites.

He explained why the antislavery petitions that filled Southern post offices so inflamed him and his constituents. “Sir,” he said, “I do firmly believe that domestic slavery regulated as ours is produces the highest toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth.” If slavery was good, so too were the slaveholders: To attack slavery as an evil was to soil the honor of the owners themselves, the chivalry. If this abolitionist assault on Southern honor did not subside, he warned, the consequences would be grave.

By 1846 Hammond was widely considered a contender for the Senate. To stop him, Wade Hampton took the scandal public; he circulated to state legislators a document full of details. In Carolina’s honor-bound culture this was a risky thing to do. Hampton himself came in for significant criticism for airing so private a matter in the legislature and thereby publicly tarnishing the reputations of his own daughters, but he succeeded in hobbling Hammond’s candidacy. Hammond lost by a vote of 97 to 46. “My career as a public man is over, I am crushed,” Hammond wrote on December 21, 1850, after the final results were recorded; “—annihilated forever. God’s will be done.”

Hammond likely acquired Sally because of her overall appearance, for he promptly made her his mistress. In this case there was no question of his sexual interest: He slept with her repeatedly. Their relationship lasted years, and when Sally’s daughter turned twelve in 1850, Hammond made her his mistress as well. Hammond did not address any of this in his diary but eventually disclosed it in a letter to his son Harry in which he revealed that in his will he bequeathed both Sally and Louisa to him, “and all the children of both.” The letter alludes to children sired by both him and Harry and cautioned Harry never to sell Louisa or her offspring. “Do not let Louisa or any of my children or possible children be slaves of Strangers. Slavery in the family will be their happiest earthly condition.”

What no one appreciated at the time was the extent to which Hammond’s “cotton is king” thesis would blind Southern radicals to the risk that if the South seceded, real war could result, prolonged and ugly. The North would not dare make war, the reasoning went: It could not afford to lose its supply of cotton. And if a war did begin, it would be short—all the South needed to do was shut down cotton production, and the North’s economy would collapse. Nor could the North risk the corollary wrath of Britain, which also depended on Southern cotton and would surely throw its might into the fray on behalf of the seceded states.

Underlying these fears was the deeper dread that newly emancipated Blacks would take their place beside whites at all social levels, or even supplant them, perhaps even marry their daughters, the maximally feared “amalgamation.” That Lincoln himself never actually envisioned or encouraged racial equality, let alone intermarriage, became irrelevant. The South had reached a point where its suspicions alone confirmed these as his foremost goals and the primary objectives of the Republican Party.

At one point, Lincoln told him that when he was a clerk in a country store, his greatest ambition had been to become a state legislator. “I did not consider myself qualified for the United States Senate,” he told Villard, “and it took me a long time to persuade myself that I was. Now, to be sure, I am convinced that I am good enough for it; but in spite of it all, I am saying to myself every day: ‘It is too big a thing for you; you will never get it.’ ” But his wife, he said, insisted that he would become not only a senator, but president as well. At this, according to Villard, Lincoln laughed his oddly high-pitched laugh, “with his arms around his knees, and shaking all over with mirth at his wife’s ambition.” Lincoln then exclaimed, “Just think of such a sucker as me as President!”

Love this guy

During the 1856 presidential election the Democratic Party wrestled with the problem of his bachelorhood and came up with a solution. Introducing him at the party’s 1856 national convention, a fellow Pennsylvania Democrat announced, “Ever since James Buchanan was a marrying man, he has been wedded to THE CONSTITUTION, and in Pennsylvania we do not allow bigamy.”

Four of Buchanan’s cabinet members were wealthy Southern planters. A fifth, Navy Secretary Isaac Toucey, was from Connecticut, but he, too, was a doughface, a Northerner who embraced the Southern states’ rights doctrine. For Buchanan the cabinet served as more than an advisory body. Without a wife and children he was lonely, as he himself acknowledged; his cabinet members, especially Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb, a Georgian who once owned a thousand enslaved Blacks, were his personal companions, his friends, his family.

Buchanan’s address opened with a question that captured the perplexity many felt about Southern unrest. After observing that the country had experienced a greater surge in prosperity than any nation before it, Buchanan asked: “Why is it, then, that discontent now so extensively prevails, and the Union of the States, which is the source of all these blessings, is threatened with destruction?” He promptly answered: It was all the North’s fault. What caused the current crisis, he said, was Northern antislavery agitation that had inspired “vague notions of freedom” among enslaved people.

Having thus indeed dared, the delegates choreographed a signing ceremony meant to rival the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The convention adjourned at three forty-five, then reassembled at six-thirty that evening at St. Andrews Hall in order to march in procession back to Institute Hall—now “Secession Hall”—for the ceremony, set to begin at seven o’clock. The delegates were met at the base of the steps by the state’s leading legislators, wearing ceremonial robes, who then led the delegates up the steps and into the hall. President Jamison carried the sacred ordinance, which by now had been printed on a piece of linen parchment measuring roughly two feet by two feet, and embossed with the Great Seal of South Carolina (designed tellingly in 1776). As they entered the hall, a roar rose from the three thousand spectators who had crammed themselves within, a level of riotous cheer that in fact had been absent those eighty-four years earlier when the founding fathers signed the Declaration of Independence. According to Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Rush, they did so then amid a “pensive and awful silence,” convinced they were signing “what was believed by many at the time to be our own death warrants.” There was no such dread evident at Secession Hall. This was now strictly a legal matter, a contract broken, a compact dissolved; no hard feelings; even that lofty oracle of public sentiment, Horace Greeley, had said, “Go in peace.”

Inwardly, Lincoln’s frustration was mounting, occasionally bursting forth in remarks both stark and direct. In an offhand comment to private-secretary Nicolay, Lincoln said that if it was true that Buchanan planned to surrender the Charleston forts, “they ought to hang him.”

Adding to the pressure Lincoln felt was the looming matter of his inaugural speech, which seemed certain from the perspective of the day to be the most important speech of his life, and, owing to his public silence thus far, certain to command the nation’s attention. Yet two months remained until he could deliver it and at last take office. “I would willingly take out of my life a period in years equal to the two months which intervene between now and my inauguration to take the oath of office now,” he told a friend in a moment of unusual despond. In those two months, anything could happen. “Because every hour adds to the difficulties I am called upon to meet, and the present Administration does nothing to check the tendency toward dissolution, I, who have been called to meet this awful responsibility, am compelled to remain here, doing nothing to avert it or lessen its force when it comes to me.” Citing scripture, he told his friend, “My cup of bitterness is full and overflowing.”

“When men come under the influence of fanaticism, there is no telling where their impulses or passions may drive them.”

Maryland was a slave state, part of what was considered the border South, and Baltimore, its principal city, seethed with secessionist zeal. Pinkerton and Felton agreed that it was during that transfer between trains, in a slaveholding city sympathetic to disunion, that Lincoln would be most vulnerable. Moreover, the city’s chief of police, George P. Kane, was an avowed secessionist who made it clear that he had no intention of deploying officers to help protect Lincoln as he traversed the city.

On Wednesday, January 9, Mississippi’s secession convention voted 84 to 15 in favor of immediate exit from the Union and became the second state after South Carolina to do so. The delegates were very clear about their motivation. “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.”

Buchanan did nothing. On that Wednesday, he delivered an address that by its title, “Message on Threats to the Peace and Existence of the Union,” seemed to signal some form of decisive action. Instead, he offered what sounded very much like a capitulation. After describing the damage the crisis had done to American prosperity and reiterating his belief that no state had a right to secession, Buchanan essentially threw up his hands and announced that the conflict between the states “has assumed such vast and alarming proportions as to place the subject entirely above and beyond Executive control.” It was up to Congress to save the day, he said. He did, however, assert a federal right to use force against “those who assail the property of the Federal Government,” calling that right “clear and undeniable.” When he referred to Major Anderson’s move from Fort Moultrie to Sumter, he called him “that gallant officer,” drawing both hisses and applause from the spectator gallery.

With crisis came suspicion. In Washington the House established a new “Select Committee” comprised of five members given more or less unlimited power to investigate potential acts of treason within the government. The “Committee of Five,” also called the “Treason Committee,” included two Republicans, two pro-Union Democrats from the North, and one Southerner, a Democrat from North Carolina. The committee soon found itself the recipient of confidential intelligence from an unusual source in the highest echelons of Buchanan’s government: his newly appointed attorney general, Edwin M. Stanton. Once the committee convened, Stanton began providing clandestine information on a daily basis to its two Republican members. He left unsigned messages in secret places, including hollow cavities in trees. The members would retrieve these late at night, read them, then put the messages back where they found them. “There is a Northern traitor in the cabinet,” read one such message. “Arrest him tonight. Pensacola has been given up. Stop him before it is too late.” The “traitor” in question was Buchanan’s secretary of the Navy, Isaac Toucey, whom the Treason Committee called to appear at two closed-door hearings.

The Treason Committee then turned to matters more grave. Under a resolution proposed by Senator Seward of New York (Lincoln’s pick for secretary of state), the committee was directed to investigate a widely rumored threat to the city of Washington by Southern forces hoping to seize the government. The fear of such a coup became pervasive, stoked by wildly inflammatory reports and rumors. A Richmond newspaper came right out and demanded that Maryland and Virginia take steps to block Lincoln’s inauguration. The South-leaning New York Day Book, breathing fire, called upon the South to “save the republic of Washington from the taint of n—rism;—they must expel Lincoln and his free-n—r horde from the federal district.”

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. Yet the chivalry, thanks to Edmund Ruffin, James Hammond, and others, had persuaded themselves of a different reality: Slavery was a positive good; it was endorsed by the Bible and by anthropological observation; even two famed Northern anthropologists, Louis Agassiz and Charles Morton, both of Harvard, no less, had proclaimed on the basis of purportedly scientific research that the Black race was not only inferior, but a different species altogether. If slavery was good, then slaveowners were good, and anyone who said otherwise abraded their honor, something no Southerner could forgive.

All in all, the beef incident was imbued with the South’s peculiar sense of chivalry: The state would be civil, generous, courteous, while also planning to exterminate the garrison with a bombardment on a scale the nation had never seen—akin to serving a man his favorite meal before slipping a noose around his neck. As a Southerner, Anderson understood the rules of honor. He knew that these kindnesses from Pickens meant nothing in terms of the ultimate fate of Anderson’s garrison and the fort. On that score he and his men had no illusions.

As a display of defiance against unrest, authorities had ordered an American flag flown from the Washington Monument, which at 156 feet was only about 30 percent complete, a stub of blue gneiss granite faced with white marble, surrounded by tumble-down work sheds and scattered pieces of stone. Seward called the flag-raising “more effective than the most eloquent speech,” although skeptics might have been inclined to see the structure below it more as a symbol of failure. Construction of the monument had begun in 1848 with enslaved labor but ceased ten years later, just as America’s sectional crisis neared its peak, and would not resume until 1880. Owing to the use of a different marble upon resumption, the tower’s face would forever after have two tones, inadvertently immortalizing in stone America’s antebellum division.

Even as he said this, however, concern in Washington mounted that the electoral count might be disrupted. That day crowds of irate Southerners had gathered in Washington and converged on the Capitol clamoring to get inside. General Scott, however, was well prepared. Soldiers manned the entrances and demanded to see passes before letting anyone in. Scott had positioned caches of arms throughout the building. A regiment of troops in plainclothes circulated among the crowd to stop any trouble before it started. The throng outside grew annoyed at being barred from entry and began firing off obscenities like grapeshot. If words could kill, one observer wrote, “the amount of profanity launched forth against the guards would have completely annihilated them.”

Concern about the count was real and had intensified as the day approached. The fact was, the electoral votes were vulnerable. These were paper certificates that had to be transported from the Senate to the House, where Vice President Breckinridge would certify the count and announce the result. “This was the critical day for the peace of the capital,” wrote New York diarist George Templeton Strong. “A foray of Virginia gents…could have done infinite mischief by destroying the legal evidence of Lincoln’s election.”

Lincoln veered east to Albany, where a certain well-respected actor was onstage performing in a play called The Apostate. The actor, John Wilkes Booth, threw himself so energetically into his role that at one point he fell on his character’s dagger and carved open a three-inch wound. So well known was Booth as a “tragedian” that the incident made news as far away as Montgomery, Alabama.

When Pinkerton urged Lincoln to leave immediately for Washington on a train scheduled to depart Philadelphia in one hour, he rejected the idea. “I didn’t like that,” Lincoln would later tell an early biographer. “I had made engagements to visit Harrisburg and go from there to Baltimore and I resolved to do so. I could not believe there was a plot to murder me.” Lincoln considered the next morning to be particularly important. He had timed his Philadelphia stop to coincide with Washington’s birthday itself. He was scheduled to climb atop a stage in front of Independence Hall and raise the new thirty-four-star American flag. The symbolism was powerful. The flag represented the entire Union, seceded states and all. Only his actual arrival in Washington would have more importance. Meanwhile, in Lincoln’s bedroom at the Continental, Frederick Seward waited, savoring the quiet “that was in such contrast to the bustle outside.”

He was deeply moved, he said, to find himself standing in the place where the nation was founded. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” A loud cheer rose from his audience. He explained that the struggle for independence and the enduring nature of the resulting confederation of states had often led him to ponder what guiding principle had made it so durable. “It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land,” he said, “but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.” Great applause, here. “It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” Another round of cheering. “This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence. “Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it can’t be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle”—he slapped a hand against his knee—“I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”

Under the new plan, Lincoln would then leave Harrisburg in secret on a special train bound for Philadelphia to catch Samuel Felton’s regularly scheduled midnight express to Baltimore, which would arrive at the city’s Calvert Street station at three-thirty in the morning. There, before dawn, he would change trains for the final run to Washington. Lincoln understood there was a political risk in seeming to sneak into the capital, especially when the rest of the journey had been so public. This did not daunt him. “Unless there are some other reasons besides fear of ridicule,” he said, “I am disposed to carry out Judd’s plan.”

Lincoln put on a worn overcoat and carried a hat of a kind he had never worn before, but which by now had become fashionable in America: a “kossuth” hat made of soft felt, with a low crown, named after Hungarian politician Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva, or Louis Kossuth for short, who had been exiled to America in 1851 after Russia invaded Hungary. His ardent support for democracy made him a popular figure in the 1850s; his hat, plumed with an ostrich feather, had become popular too. A variation of it became standard issue for the U.S. Army in 1858, but without the plume. Lincoln also carried a shawl, and walked with his shoulders slumped forward to disguise his height. The plan worked well. Incredibly, no one appeared to recognize Lincoln despite his great height, craggy features, and overall distinctive look. As a precaution the American Telegraph Co. agreed to temporarily sever all telegraph lines from Harrisburg “in all directions,” according to one planner’s account; the company’s superintendent was to dispatch “a professional Climber to do the needful thing in the right place and at the right time. I think we may safely rely that Harrisburg will be isolated completely.”

Lincoln, to further disguise his presence and act the part of an ailing friend, leaned on Pinkerton’s arm and walked with an exaggerated stoop.

The train left Baltimore at four-fifteen a.m. Two hours later, bodyguard Ward Lamon caught a first glimpse of the incomplete dome of the U.S. Capitol. This was Lincoln’s triumphant arrival: an empty railroad station, before dawn, in disguise, at just about the same time that his originally planned train would be leaving Harrisburg with his wife and sons aboard. The depot wasn’t entirely empty, however. As Pinkerton told it, the three men—Lincoln, Lamon, and he—had just stepped off the train when a shadowy male figure emerged from behind a pillar and looked sharply at Lincoln. “Abe,” the man said, “you can’t play that on me.” He rushed forward. Pinkerton, alarmed, blocked him. “I hit the gentleman a punch with my elbow as he was close to me, staggering him back, but he recovered himself, and again took hold of Mr. Lincoln remarking that he knew him. I was beginning to think that we were discovered, and that we might have to fight, and drew back clenching my fist, and raising it to take the gentleman a blow, when Mr. Lincoln took hold of my arm saying, ‘Don’t strike him Allan, don’t strike him—that is my friend Washburne—don’t you know him?’ ” This was Rep. Elihu Washburne, one of only two men in Washington who had been alerted to Lincoln’s new arrival time. The other was Senator Seward, who was not present in the station.

All this underscored an inescapable truth, that at a time when Lincoln needed to appear as commanding as possible, he had slipped quietly into the capital of the country he was now expected to lead. Thoughtful observers found little to laugh at. A diarist identified only as “Public Man” wrote that “when we have reached a point at which an elected President of the United States consents to be smuggled through by night to the capital of the country, lest he should be murdered in one of the chief cities of the Union, who can blame the rest of the world for believing that we are a failure?” Another diarist, George Templeton Strong, warned that much rested on whether the assassination plot was real. “It’s to be hoped that the conspiracy can be proved beyond cavil,” he wrote. “If it cannot be made manifest and indisputable, this surreptitious nocturnal dodging or sneaking of the President-elect into his capital city, under cloud of night, will be used to damage his moral position and throw ridicule on his administration.”

It was also the case that the original train, still commonly believed to be carrying Lincoln and still hewing to its published itinerary, and therefore still a likely target for any conspiracy, was unmolested when it entered Baltimore, according to private secretary Nicolay. Lincoln’s family, he wrote, “witnessed great crowds in the streets of Baltimore, but encountered neither turbulence nor incivility of any kind.” 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.”

Senate received the amendment proposed by the Peace Convention and promptly voted it into oblivion, 28 to 7. It never went to the House. But a vestige survived in the form of a parallel constitutional amendment proposed in the House by Rep. Thomas Corwin of Ohio and in the Senate by William Seward that guaranteed that Congress would not interfere with slavery where it currently existed. This vestigial stub fared better. The House approved it by a vote of 133 to 65; the Senate did likewise, 24 to 12. Lincoln later forwarded the proposed amendment, the original thirteenth, to all state governors, including those in the Confederacy, for ratification by their legislatures. He neither endorsed it nor denounced it. As he saw it, the amendment merely made explicit—“express and irrevocable”—a principle already embodied in the Constitution and one he himself had espoused many times. Only a few states would ultimately ratify the amendment before events made it irrelevant. Known to future centuries as the Shadow or Ghost Amendment, it remained an active congressionally approved but unratified amendment into the twenty-first century, theoretically still open to a final vote by the states.

She had come across a slave auction in progress. A mulatto woman stood on a raised platform high enough to be seen above the crowd. “Mulatto women in silk dresses—one girl was on the stand. Nice looking—like my Nancy”—this a reference to her own enslaved maid. In a later much-modified version of her journal meant for publication, she added detail: “She was magnificently got up in silks and satins. She seemed delighted with it all—sometimes ogling the bidders, sometimes looking quite coy and modest, but her mouth never relaxed from its expanded grin of excitement.” Something about the moment caved Mary’s spirits. “South Carolina slave holder as I am my very soul sickened,” she wrote. “It is too dreadful. I tried to reason—this is not worse than the willing sale most women make of themselves in marriage—nor can the consequences be worse. The Bible authorizes marriage and slavery—poor women! poor slaves!”

At a breakfast gathering of New York editors he encountered such influential men as Charles A. Dana of the Republican-leaning New York Tribune and Henry Raymond of the New-York Times; Frederick Law Olmsted was present as well. At these sessions, conversation inevitably veered toward the secession crisis, but often with an unexpected inflection: Despite being far north of the Mason-Dixon Line, the city was an island of pro-South sentiment. Its banks, merchants, and shipping companies maintained close commercial ties with Southern planters and routinely issued credit secured by the planters’ holdings of enslaved Blacks. At a dinner hosted by a city banker, Russell heard the persistent view that the federal government had no authority to suppress secession; a former New York governor, Horatio Seymour, unabashedly declared that secession was a right. The proslavery New York Herald openly mocked Lincoln, Russell noted in his diary. “The Herald keeps up the courage and spirit of its Southern friends by giving the most florid accounts of their prospects and making continual attacks on Mr. Lincoln and his Government.”

He was struck by the Lincoln administration’s inability to influence events. “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.”

Seward seemed remarkably detached from what Russell even in his short time in America had come to see as the true gravity of the crisis. The two federal forts on everyone’s mind, Pickens and Sumter, somehow had become flint points capable of igniting a civil war. Russell understood, however, that the true cause of the conflict, no matter how hard anyone tried to disguise it, was slavery. He called it a “curse” and likened it to a cancer whose inner damage was masked by the victim’s outward appearance of health. He marveled that the South seemed intent on staking its destiny on ground that the rest of the world had abandoned. “Never,” he wrote, “did a people enter a war so utterly destitute of any reason for waging it.”

Anderson was troubled by Fox’s conclusion that a reinforcement mission could succeed. Fox had gone so far as to point out a location outside the rear wall of the fort that seemed well suited for the landing of troops and supplies. Anderson disagreed. The next day, March 22, he reported Fox’s assessment to the War Department and sought to refute his conclusion. “I have examined the point alluded to by Mr. Fox last night,” he wrote. “A vessel lying there will be under the fire of thirteen guns from Fort Moultrie.” He added that Sumter’s chief engineer, Captain Foster, had told him that even at high tide a vessel with a ten-foot draft seeking to land at the optimal point adjacent to the fort would have to anchor forty feet out in the passage. “The Department can decide what the chances will be of a safe debarkation and unloading at that point under these circumstances.” On arrival in Washington, perhaps to increase the likelihood that his plan would be adopted, Captain Fox hinted that Anderson’s loyalty might be compromised, that his opposition to a reinforcement mission was motivated by his sympathy for the South. Fox later wrote, “I did intend” to provide Anderson with “a complete history of the conditions of things at Washington, and the dilemma Mr. Lincoln was in on account of contrary counsels, but as I found him to be on the other side, politically as well as in military point of view, I refrained.” Captain Fox proved to be a compelling salesman. His confidence was reas...

What Lincoln needed was a better sense of just how much pro-Union sentiment really did exist in South Carolina. Like Seward, Lincoln believed, on basically no evidence, that loyalty to the Union was pervasive, but unlike Seward, he now wanted proof. Soon after Captain Fox’s return from Sumter, Lincoln dispatched two more emissaries to Charleston, both friends of his, with instructions to talk with residents and gauge the local mood.

More confounding and problematic was the foray of the second emissary, Ward Lamon, Lincoln’s sometime bodyguard who had accompanied him on his inaugural journey. In Charleston he and Hurlbut parted company. Lamon checked into the Charleston Hotel and there met with Governor Pickens. Lamon was known to be a close associate of Lincoln’s, and thus his visit had a quasi-official aura. He also bore with him a letter of introduction from Postmaster General Montgomery Blair stating that he had been sent to Charleston as an agent of the post office, but no one seemed to take this letter seriously. The conversation quickly turned to the standoff in Charleston Harbor. The only way to prevent war, Pickens told him, was for Lincoln to accept secession and to pledge not to reinforce any Southern forts. With absolutely no authority to do so, Lamon assured the governor that Lincoln planned to evacuate Fort Sumter.

But now Beauregard addressed a second matter, one based on erroneous information conveyed to him by Lamon. While showing Lamon the fort, Anderson had told him about the various mines, thunder barrels, and other defensive devices put in place by Sumter’s engineers. Lamon, who had little expertise in military matters, concluded that their purpose was to blow up the fort after the garrison departed. For some reason he felt compelled to convey this to Beauregard and Governor Pickens. Now, in allusive, oblique prose, Beauregard wrote: “All that will be required of you on account of the public rumors that have reached us will be your word of honor as an officer and a gentleman, that the fort, all public property therein, its armament, &c., shall remain in their current condition, without any arrangements or preparation for their destruction or injury after you shall have left the fort.”

At the next day’s meeting, Lincoln summarized the information he had accumulated thus far, including the report from his friend, Stephen Hurlbut, on the absence of pro-Union sentiment in South Carolina. Lincoln asked for another vote on whether to send an armed resupply mission to Fort Sumter, and each man wrote a brief statement of his views. Now, just fourteen days after their initial vote, the cabinet largely reversed itself, with Blair, Welles, and Treasury Secretary Chase all voting to resupply Sumter.