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Erik Larson
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January 17 - April 5, 2025
On January 19, the state’s quartermaster notified Anderson that he had been directed by the governor to send, by the next morning’s mail boat, “two hundred pounds of beef and a lot of vegetables” and thereafter supply whatever Anderson wished on a daily basis.
The “beef incident”.
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.
On January 19, the state’s quartermaster notified Anderson that he had been directed by the governor to send, by the next morning’s mail boat, “two hundred pounds of beef and a lot of vegetables” and thereafter supply whatever Anderson wished on a daily basis.
In his letter to War Secretary Holt, Anderson estimated that his little garrison of seventy-five men was now opposed by some two thousand Carolina soldiers.
Early 1861.
With neither a wife nor close family circle, he grew increasingly lonely amid the mounting turmoil. As the secession crisis deepened and talk of civil war became prevalent, Buchanan invited Dix to move into the White House. He needed the company. There, like some ghostly spirit, Buchanan would visit Dix in the night to talk about the national crisis.
On Monday, January 28, he received the “joyful news” about Louisiana’s secession, which brought the total of seceded states to six.
In chronological order:
The eleven states of the CSA, in order of their dates of secession (listed in parentheses), were:
South Carolina (December 20, 1860),
Mississippi (January 9, 1861),
Florida (January 10, 1861),
Alabama (January 11, 1861),
Georgia (January 19, 1861),
Louisiana (January 26, 1861),
Texas (February 1, 1861),
Virginia (April 17, 1861),
Arkansas (May 6, 1861),
North Carolina (May 20, 1861), and
Tennessee (June 8, 1861).
Rain was still falling as of eleven a.m. on Sunday morning, but the Marion at last departed. Barely visible in the murk and windblown spume, the ship sailed near Sumter and the families gathered on deck. “As they passed the fort outward-bound,” Captain Doubleday wrote, “the men gave them repeated cheers as a farewell, and displayed much feeling; for they thought it very probable they might not meet them again for a long period, if ever.” The men fired a gun in salute.
1861.02.03.
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.
Washington Monument.
Davis initially was uncertain as to whether to accept the appointment. It was an honor, of course, but he was not at all sure that he was the right man for the post. “I have no confidence in my ability to meet its requirement,” he said. He could serve as a general, yes. He was, after all, a West Point graduate (though he graduated twentieth out of thirty-three students in his class) and a celebrated hero of the Mexican War, and had been Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce.
Jefferson Davis, appointed provisional president at the 1861 secession convention in Mobile, AL. He wasn’t there, he was home in Vicksburg, receiving a telegraph with the news.
South Carolina Attorney General Hayne and U.S. War Secretary Holt both seemed to have little grasp of how important Fort Sumter was to the other. Hayne marched into the White House with the idea that he could simply demand the surrender of the fort, negotiate some kind of payment, and then go home.
It was views like Allen’s, he charged, that lay at the root of the conflict. “You think our system an evil—a sin, and one that, therefore, cannot last,” Hammond wrote. “We think the same precisely of yours, but while we don’t trouble ourselves about yours, you make all sorts of war on us about ours in which we see no evil, no sin, and nothing but good. We think it far better than yours—at least for us—in all respects. “Can you not let us alone?”
A. B. Allen, the former editor and cofounder of the American Agriculturist lived in New York and opposed slavery. James Hammond, former editor of the pro-slavery pro-secession newspaper the Southern Times. Also a planter, slave owner, and SC U.S. Representative.
White planters relied on slaves to maximize the value of their horses and in the process burnish their own social cachet.
As the South Carolina Jockey Club’s biographer put it in 1857, horses were “the impersonation of Carolina chivalry—the embodied spirit of Carolina blood and Carolina honor.” The planters were knights engaged in chivalric contests. Winning mattered. Observing the effect of a loss on the backers of one racehorse, a Carolina writer noted in 1859 how it made these “manly men” feel restless and dissatisfied. “Their cavalier blood is stirred—they cannot brook such defeat—they cannot go home thus shorn, stripped of their trophies, bankrupt of applause—not a green leaf of all their laurels, now only a
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Race Week brought together the most powerful men in the state, typically planters, affirming their lofty stature while also building connections among them and shoring the mutual convic...
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Jockey Club Ball, the most glamorous social gathering of the entire year, held in Charleston’s St. Andrews Hall, the same venue where delegates to South Carolina’s secession convention had voted the state out of the Union. The ball began at eleven p.m. and ended at six the next morning with dancing and an elaborate banquet; it drew only the “very select,” according to one attendee, “none but the higher classes.”
After the race, Hercules recommended champagne and offered to buy it. Cantey paid for it instead. The stable was soon crowded with tippling celebrants. No one knew it yet, of course, but this would be Charleston’s last Race Week for nearly two decades.
The day’s journey ended in Indianapolis at the Bates Hotel, where he was to spend the night. First, however, he delivered a speech from the hotel balcony to a throng estimated to number forty-five thousand.
On his way from Springfield, IL to his inauguration.
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.
Much of this tirade was aimed at General Scott. It had no effect. He vowed that anyone who obstructed the count would be “lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder and fired out of the window of the Capitol.” Scott would then “manure the hills of Arlington with the fragments of his body.”
1860 presidential election electoral account in Congress in early-1861.
the count went smoothly. “The proceeding occupied two hours, but it was conducted in profound tranquility, which relieves us all of a great weight.” This tranquility abruptly disappeared, however, when Vice President Breckinridge issued the long-awaited announcement: “Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, having received a majority of the whole number of the electoral votes, is elected president of the United States, for four years, commencing on the fourth of March.”
“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”
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.”
Crawford expressed a degree of bitterness, leavened with pride, and made it clear that he had no illusions about the subtext of what was occurring. “We are to be left to ourselves and our own exertions as a sacrifice to turn public opinion against those who attack us,
Fort Sumter’s Asst. Surgeon Samuel Wylie Crawford.
Lincoln’s triumphant arrival: an empty railroad station, before dawn, in disguise, at
In all, Lincoln had traveled nearly two thousand miles and given over one hundred speeches, all without incident, a remarkable thing given the accumulating rumors of impending violence and the fact that he had traveled with only minimal security—all that way, only to arrive at his new hometown in secret and disguise.
Texas voters overwhelmingly approved secession, by a vote of 46,129 to 14,697, thereby bringing the total of seceded states to seven, or roughly one-fifth of the country.
the general in charge of U.S. Army forces in Texas, Georgia-born David E. Twiggs, seventy-one years old, had surrendered all federal outposts in the state to the Confederacy, including the fabled Alamo, along with their stockpiles of weapons, in the process cutting adrift twenty-four hundred federal soldiers, or about 15 percent of the existing United States Army. Buchanan fired him for “treachery to the flag of his country.” But Twiggs quickly found another employer: the Confederate States Army, which made him a brigadier general.
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.”
Same time Lincoln entered Washington D.C. to be inaugurated.
the Peace Convention approved a proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to be submitted to Congress for a vote. All seven of its clauses dealt with slavery, including one nicknamed the “Never-Never” clause, which would bar Congress from ever interfering with slavery as it existed in any state or territory in the country.
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.
Jefferson Davis seemed to like it, or at least hoped to persuade his wife, Varina, of its virtues. “This is a gay and handsome town of some eight thousand inhabitants, and will not be an unpleasant residence,” he wrote to her two days after his inauguration; he failed to note that half the population was enslaved.
Montgomery, AL - capital of the Confederacy.
Davis was not an ardent secessionist. He had little patience for insouciant visitors to his home who talked so blithely of civil war.
The final ending, though heavily influenced by Seward’s changes, was very much Lincoln’s own, laden with reverence and barely suppressed emotion. “I am loth to close,” he wrote. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels in our nature.”
To Colonel Garnett, slavery was anything but evil. “Divine institution”—the colonel declared—“an Abolitionist opposes the laws of God himself!”
U.S. Army colonel, Robert S. Garnett of Virginia.
The Union was literally falling apart. Virginia tottered, its convention waiting to hear what Lincoln had to say before taking a final vote on whether to secede. The man next to him, the ineffectual James Buchanan, had let all this come to pass without making any substantive effort to stop it. All Buchanan wanted to do now was go home to Wheatland. He could not wait to leave the White House.
Lincoln’s speech carved a line between conciliation and provocation and seemed to make no one happy, though his closing paragraph, with its mystic chords and better angels, moved many in the audience to tears and would be largely responsible for lodging his address in the pantheon of the greatest speeches ever delivered.
Inauguration speech on 1861.03.04.
Frederick Douglass found the speech disheartening. “Some thought we had in Mr. Lincoln the nerve and decision of an Oliver Cromwell,” he said, “but the result shows that we have merely a continuation of the Pierces and Buchanans, and that the Republican President bends his knee to slavery as readily as any of his infamous predecessors.”
Confederate officials reached the immediate conclusion that it signaled hostility toward the South. Just after hearing Lincoln speak, Texas senator Louis Wigfall, never much inclined toward equanimity, telegraphed from Washington: “Inaugural means war.”
The Lincolns took possession of the White House. As Buchanan exited, he told Lincoln, “If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering the house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.”
Stephen A. Douglas, who had graciously held Lincoln’s hat earlier in the day, danced a quadrille with Mrs. Lincoln.
“ugly as sin.”
The phrase dates back to 1801. It supplanted, “ugly as the devil”.
That morning when Lincoln arrived at his office, as his friend Orville Browning would later recall, “the very first thing placed in his hands” was a letter from Major Anderson at Fort Sumter, accompanied by a note from outgoing war secretary Joseph Holt. This was Anderson’s report summarizing the estimates made by his officers as to the number of troops and the quantity of supplies that would be necessary to sustain the fort against Confederate attack.
On Lincoln’s first full day as President, March 5 1861.
For months, Inauguration Day had stood in the temporal distance as a day to be dreaded, girded for, and survived. It seemed an endpoint in itself, like an assignation for a duel: one dared not look beyond. First the inauguration had to take place; only then could the nation get back to constructing its future, with the helm of state securely in new hands. Now that March 4 had come and gone and no secret force had seized the Capitol and no assassin had leapt onto the East Portico, relief supplanted disquiet.
Ruffin once again wondered at the lack of violence thus far. He found it strange, and demoralizing. He was dismayed to learn that Major Anderson was still able to send and receive mail. It was said that Anderson and General Beauregard were actually friends.
Marjor Anderson is the commander of Fort Sumter.
An actual cannonball came tearing through the air and struck the water about thirty yards from Sumter. The ball ricocheted twice, then slammed into the rubble foundation of Sumter’s wharf. Bits of masonry rocketed into the sky. The ball penetrated four inches.
March 8, 1861 - the first shot of the Civil War.
The shot was so clearly an accident that Anderson withheld fire. “The Major laughed, the officers laughed, everybody laughed,” wrote Crawford, “and instead of taking to bombs we took to breakfast.”
hotel, the Willard, now more than ever the center of city life. Its corridors were crowded with men seeking patronage jobs from the new administration; its writing room was packed, so much so that “the rustle of pens rose to a little breeze,” Russell wrote. The hotel restaurant served twenty-five hundred guests a day; its waiters “never cease shoving the chairs to and fro with a harsh screeching noise over the floor.” Tobacco stains marred this floor as well. The hotel, Russell wrote, “probably contains at the moment more scheming, plotting, planning heads, more aching and joyful hearts, than
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Seward declared himself to be skeptical that the movement would endure. “All through this conversation his tone was that of a man very sanguine and with a supreme contempt for those who thought there was anything serious in secession,” Russell wrote in his diary.
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.”
William Howard Russell, on assignment to the U.S. for The [London] Times.
Hurlbut wrote, “I have no hesitation in reporting as unquestionable—that Separate Nationality is a fixed fact, that there is an unanimity of sentiment which is to my mind astonishing—that there is no attachment to the Union.” He added, “The Sentiment of National Patriotism always feeble in Carolina, has been Extinguished and overridden by the acknowledged doctrine of the paramount allegiance to the State.”
his conclusion “that this whole matter of Secession could have been stopped in the bud, by prompt and gallant action on the part of the late administration.” But now, he warned, any action by Lincoln to enforce federal law in the seceded states would result in war.
Stephen A. Hurlbut.
