Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (27 page)

On the day following, their newspaper was “stolen from the door step again.”

Fifteen miles away, in rural Chester County, the news of the fall of Fort Sumter came over the telegraph wire to West Chester, the county seat, on Sunday evening, April 14. The next morning, the national flag was flying everywhere through the town. Across Chester County, in Upper Uwchlan Township, an immense Stars and Stripes was hoisted up an eighty-foot pole in front of the local tavern, and in the evening the county courthouse was thrown open for a mass Union rally.
²
Far to the north, at Maine’s Bowdoin College, a professor and former pupil of Calvin Stowe who had once sat in the Stowe parlor listening to Harriet Beecher Stowe read drafts of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was seized with anger that “the flag of the Nation had been insulted” and “the integrity and the existence of the People of the United States had been assailed in open and bitter war.” His name was Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and an “irresistible impulse” came over him to abandon the teaching of rhetoric at Bowdoin and join the army to become God’s minister “in a higher sense than the word.”
³

To the west, the news of the first shot fell on the Ohio legislature when “a senator came in from the lobby in an excited way” and cried out, “‘The telegraph announces that the secessionists are bombarding Fort Sumter!’” There was a sick moment of
silence, and then “a woman’s shrill voice” called out from the gallery, “Glory to God!” It was the voice of Abby Kelley, the veteran abolitionist for whose sake William Lloyd Garrison had broken up the American Anti-Slavery Society two decades before. Kelley had come to believe, with John Brown, that “only through blood” could the freedom of the slaves be won, and now the redeeming blood of the abolition martyrs could begin to flow. The next day, the news of Anderson’s surrender came over the wires, and “the flag—
The Flag
—flew out to the wind from every housetop in our great cities.” Ohio judge Thomas Key stopped State Senator Jacob Dolson Cox in the Ohio Senate hall: “Mr. Cox, the people have gone stark mad!” Cox, a staunch anti-slavery Whig turned Republican, replied, “I knew they would if a blow were struck against the flag.”
⁴

Six hundred miles to the South, the English newspaperman and war correspondent William Howard Russell had gone to church on Sunday morning, April 14, in a small Episcopal parish in Norfolk, Virginia. “The clergyman or minister had got to the Psalms” when a man slipped into the back of the church and began whispering excitedly to the first people he could speak to. The whispering rose in volume, while some of the people at the back “were stealing on tiptoe out of the church.” The minister doggedly plunged on through the liturgy, and the people gradually began to heave themselves up and walk out, until at length Russell “followed the example” and left the minister to finish the service on his own. Outside in the street, Russell found a crowd running through the street. “Come along, the telegraph’s in at the Day Book. The Yankees are whipped!” Russell was told. “At all the street corners men were discussing the news with every symptom of joy and gratification.” That night, in Richmond, “bonfires and fireworks of every description were illuminating in every direction—the whole city was a scene of joy owing to [the] surrender of Fort Sumter”—and Virginia wasn’t even then part of the Confederacy.
⁵

Further south, in what was now the Confederate States of America, the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, received a telegram from P. G. T. Beauregard at 2:00
PM
on April 13, informing Davis, “Quarters in Sumter all burned down. White flag up. Have sent a boat to receive surrender.” Davis wired back his congratulations, and added, “If occasion offers, tender my friendly remembrance to Major Anderson.”
⁶
He went to bed, gloomy with the foreboding that Lincoln and the North would soon retaliate. Davis had never been able to make his fellow Southerners understand that secession would mean war with the Northern states, and a long war at that. “You
overrate the risk of war,” the governor of Mississippi had assured Davis. “I only wish I did,” Davis replied.

Outside, in the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, the crowds cheered and cheered.
⁷

The bombardment and seizure of Fort Sumter was an act of aggression that no one, least of all President Lincoln, could afford to ignore. What the Confederate forces had done in Charleston harbor was, technically speaking, nothing different from John Brown’s assault on the Harpers Ferry arsenal, a deliberate and hostile act of war, with the added flavor of treason. It destroyed at one stroke all real hope for negotiation or compromise and left it up to Lincoln to demonstrate whether or not the federal government was prepared to back up its denial of the right to secession with force. Long ago, in 1856, Lincoln had warned the Democrats that a Republican administration would not allow the Union to be dissolved, and “if you attempt it,
we won’t let you
.” At the same time he dismissed all serious talk of secession as “humbug—nothing but folly.”
⁸
Now the talk had to be turned into iron reality.

But what means did Lincoln have at his disposal to suppress the Confederate rebellion? The United States Army consisted of only ten regiments of infantry, four of artillery, and five of cavalry (including dragoons and mounted riflemen)—in all, that worked out to 1,105 commissioned officers, a number of whom were Southerners from the seceded states, and 15,259 enlisted men.
⁹
Furthermore, few of the regiments were together in one place, almost all of them having been broken up piecemeal to garrison forts in the West or along the borders. It was, in truth, little more than a police force. There was no general staff to coordinate the army’s various functions—recruitment, planning, training, mapmaking. The cavalry contained no heavy cavalry units, only light cavalry useful for skirmishing and scouting. Three-quarters of the army’s artillery had been scrapped at the close of the Mexican War, and artillery units had been “made to serve either as infantry or cavalry, thus destroying almost completely their efficiency as artillery.” No force of such tiny proportions was likely to bring the secessionists easily to heel.

What was worse, Congress was at that moment out of session, and without congressional sanction, Lincoln lacked constitutional authority to raise a national army. Nor could Congress be assembled at the drop of a hat for the emergency. Unlike
the Senate, the representatives in the House were still elected in 1860 on a staggered schedule that varied from state to state, and the new Congress did not usually expect to fully assemble itself after an election year until December of the following year—which, in this case, meant December 1861. At the very best, even with speeding up some state elections, there was little hope of getting the new Congress together before July, when a number of crucial border-state elections would finally be complete. Maryland, in fact, would not hold its congressional elections until June 13, and Kentucky not until a week after that.
¹⁰

Lincoln did have one other recourse for recruiting soldiers, and that was the 1795 federal militia statute that had originally delegated to President Washington the authority to call up the militia of the various states in the event of insurrection. So on April 15, two days after the fall of Fort Sumter, Lincoln issued a proclamation that declared the Confederate states in rebellion and called for the states of the Union to provide the federal government with 75,000 militia for three months (the statutory maximum), with the numbers to be apportioned among the states. Two weeks later, he issued a second call, this time for the recruitment of forty regiments of state volunteers (a little over 42,000 men) and the expansion of the regular army by eight regiments of infantry and one each of artillery and cavalry. Although Congress approved both acts retroactively—in fact, greatly expanded the numbers of volunteer recruitments, up to a million men—nothing in the 1795 statute had authorized either of these follow-up calls, and Lincoln would later have to justify his actions largely on the admittedly vague basis of the “war power of the government.”
¹¹

The calls for militia, volunteers, and an expanded regular army created a parallel system in the Union armed forces, which would be composed of three kinds of military organizations. First, at the core of the army would be the old regular U.S. Army regiments, which enlisted men directly into service as long-serving professional soldiers, and which were known simply by their regimental numbers (i.e., 1st U.S. Infantry, 5th U.S. Cavalry). Second, rising into existence at the call of the various state governments would be the volunteer regiments, which were recruited by the states, marched under state-appointed officers carrying their state flag as well as the Stars and Stripes, and were identified by their state regimental number (i.e., 83rd
Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, 1st Minnesota Volunteers, 20th Maine Volunteers, 19th Massachusetts Volunteers). These volunteers were a makeshift category, to save Congress the expense of permanently commissioning officers and mustering men into a dramatically expanded Federal service, which might prove legally difficult to disband once the wartime emergency was over.

Unlike regulars, the volunteers remained state-based, and they signed up for two- or three-year periods, after which they returned to civilian life and their units evaporated without any further fiscal obligations. The British had invented the volunteer system during the Napoleonic Wars, also to save themselves the expense of permanent expansions of their army, and the United States had taken over the example in the Mexican War, where the bulk of the U.S. forces were volunteers. In a pinch, the president was always able to call upon the supposedly vast reservoir of state militia. However, only a few states actually had a reasonably organized militia system to start with (New York’s was the best, with about 45,000 men on its rolls, followed by those of Ohio and Indiana), so in practice militia units were usually employed only on emergency rear-echelon duties, to free up the volunteers and regulars.
¹²

This system might have been more confusing had it not been for the fact that the regular army regiments never numbered more than a handful compared to the vast outpouring of volunteer recruits (Pennsylvania alone raised 215 volunteer infantry regiments during the course of the war), and for the fact that the volunteer regiments were frequently commanded by regular officers who were commissioned into state volunteer service. At the beginning of the war, though, it caused no end of chaos. State volunteer regiments often chose their own uniforms and weapons, elected their own noncommissioned and company officers with minimal regard for their competence, and generally behaved little better than a mob of hunters at a turkey shoot. Regiments such as the 79th New York arrived in Washington garbed in Highland kilts; the 72nd Pennsylvania copied from the daring French-Algerian colonial troops known as Zouaves the dashing Zouave uniform, complete with baggy red trousers, a cutaway monkey jacket, and a red fez and turban; the 3rd Maine reported for duty in uniforms of gray. Regimental drill often had to wait until the newly elected officers could learn, from a variety of popular handbooks or from the presence of a few old regulars, how to give the necessary orders.

Nevertheless, the volunteers were all that Lincoln at first thought he might need, for the president was sure that a show of resolute determination on the part of the federal government in raising an army would be all that was necessary to force the secessionists to back down. Still confident that Southern Unionism would reassert itself, Lincoln “questioned whether there is, to-day, a majority of the legally qualified voters of any State, except perhaps South Carolina, in favor of disunion.” At least, he
added weakly, “the contrary has not been demonstrated in any one of them.” Only let the federal government show its resolve, and the rebellion would collapse before a rebirth of Union loyalty.

In fact, almost the exact opposite happened. Virginia had called a state convention soon after Lincoln’s election to consider secession. The convention met on February 13, 1861, but debate on a secession ordinance dragged on for a month and a half before it was finally put to a vote on April 11, when secession lost, 88 to 45. The upper South, and especially Virginia, was not willing to go following the will-o’-the-wisp of secession, especially when it was led by the hotheads of South Carolina. Lincoln’s call for the states to put their militia at the disposal of the federal government laid an entirely different complexion over affairs, however. Virginia would not fight the Union for South Carolina, but it would not join with the rest of the Union in suppressing its fellow Southerners and denying the principle of secession. “The militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view,” Virginia governor John Letcher replied to Lincoln’s summons.
¹³
Forced by Lincoln’s proclamation to choose which master it would serve, the Virginia convention reversed itself and voted to secede on April 17; the state then proceeded to seize the undefended federal navy yard at Norfolk.

Similar reactions set in across the upper South. In Maryland, pro-secession riots broke out in the streets of Baltimore a day after Lincoln issued his call for the militia, and a secessionist mob stoned the men of the 6th Massachusetts on April 19 as they changed trains in Baltimore en route to Washington. The panicky militiamen responded by opening fire, killing four civilians and wounding thirty-one. Maryland secessionists had been haranguing Maryland governor Thomas Hicks for a special session of the state legislature, which was strongly Democratic, but Hicks had so far stubbornly refused to yield to them. The Baltimore shootings momentarily unsettled Hicks and forced him to call a special session on April 26.