Fort Sumter

Fort Sumter

It does not, surely, require such torrents of blood to satisfy any reasonable man that nothing can be a more impious presumption than for either side to think themselves entitled to count the Almighty as an ally in such a pitiful display of human passion. James L. Petigru

Questions for the Little Round Table Thursday night.

How did a tub of ice in Charleston harbor almost preempt Fort Sumter as the flashpoint that set off the American Civil War?

Five weeks before the Fort Sumter surrender Lincoln selected Republican William Seward, his still bitter rival for the Republican Presidential nomination, as his Secretary of State. Although a brilliant and an experienced politician, during that five week period Seward made two of the greatest miscalculations of the 19th century. What were they?

During the initial weeks of the Lincoln administration Alabama Democrat John Archibald Campbell, a still serving U.S. Supreme Court Justice, made his greatest miscalculation since his participation in the Eggnog Riot while a West Point cadet. What was his miscalculation?

South Carolina was first to secession because unlike the other states they had a vision and a long-range plan for themselves that went well beyond the simple slavery / tariff issues. What was it?

During the months leading up to the firing on Fort Sumter, fire-eaters and southern newspapers were calling for the fort to be attacked. Aside from tactical and commerce reasons, what two things did they expect to gain from such action?

How did David Dixon Porter, not yet an admiral, insure that there would be no attempt to forcibly enter Charleston Harbor with supplies and reinforcements for Fort Sumter?

Who appeared in Charleston ten days before the attack on Fort Sumter openly claiming to be the envoy of President Lincoln, and what was his actual mission?

Although wishful thinking made both sides a bit delusional, why was pretty much everyone in authority so incredibly patient about the slow progress toward a resolution (peaceful or otherwise) of the Fort Sumter question?

Lincoln pretty much left the handling of the Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens questions to Seward. What was occupying almost all of Lincoln's time and attention during his first five weeks in office?

Why does the Lost Cause Movement consider Fort Sumter the most significant act of Yankee aggression?

What does Lincoln represent to the world that has caused him to be the primary target of the Lost Cause and its related nativist movements in trying to place the blame for Fort Sumter and for the war itself?

Miscalculations

"Why did that green goose Anderson go into Fort Sumter? Then everything began to go wrong."

"And so we fool on, into the black cloud ahead of us"

Define green goose: a young goose; especially : a well-fattened young goose ready for market when 10 to 12 weeks old.

What is so compelling about Mary Chesnut's diary of this period is not just that she was quite literally "there", but that she confessed to allowing herself to get quite caught up in the euphoria - soon followed by moments of objective clarity in response to which she would make these almost embarrassed assessments of the dangerous indulgences and simplistic thinking in which she and everyone around her were engaging.

Chesnut's reputation rests on the fact that she created literature while keeping the sense of events unfolding; she described people in penetrating and enlivening terms and conveyed a novelistic sense of events through a "mixture of reportage, memoir and social criticism"

"War is the continuation of contract law by other means."

Clausewitz had many aphorisms, of which the most famous is "War is the continuation of politics by other means." America in 1861 would see war became the continuation of contract law (and torts) by other means. This little trip into the legal world provides a useful model for objective study of the basic nature of the conflict.

From the beginning of the nation both an explicit and an implied contract existed between the states and between the nation and its "citizens", the implications of that contractual relationship grew more intertwined and unseverable with each passing year it remained in place. Every social and commercial decision had been made under the presumption of an on-going union of the existing states.

A tort is a wrongful act or an infringement of a right (other than under contract) leading to civil legal liability. Tort law seeks to provide reimbursement to members of society who suffer losses because of the dangerous or unreasonable conduct of others.

The unilateral severance of the contract by one party pretty much guarantees a response by the other party(s), legally or extra-legally if a realistic legal remedy is not available. Staying with legal terms, each seceding state presented the country with a fait accompli, a thing that has already happened or been decided before those affected can protect their interests, leaving them with no option but to accept the unilateral action or pursue a retroactive remedy. Only South Carolina had made a serious effort to convert their fait accompli into a bilateral agreement and this had been effectively derailed when Governor Pickens seized Castle Pinckney. Once appointed President, Jefferson Davis would send peace commissioners to Washington in a effort to negotiate a peaceful settlement on behalf of the group of states that had unilaterally seceded, although only Alexander Stephens appeared to have had serious concerns with tort issues like the negative impact of secession on national citizenship.

So the question up for discussion is to characterize Lincoln’s actions as a responding party in the Fort Sumter crisis. His response being basically to continue Buchanan's refusal to evacuate the fort, as neither of them would order the garrison to withdraw. And neither would "require" that it be reinforced, only that it be given enough supplies to remain in place indefinitely.

Probably no aspect of the American Civil War is as interesting as the events leading up to Fort Sumter. Yet as fascinating as they are, their actual importance is grossly over-stated. If a shooting war had not broken out at Sumter in April 1861 it would have broken out in the coming months at any number of budding flashpoints; Fort Pickens, western Virginia, Jefferson City, Louisville, etc. There was little to no chance that the region as two nations could have peacefully co-existed.

What tends to be grossly understated about developments in the months after the election of 1860, is the incredible capacity of leaders and citizens on both sides for miscalculation and wishful thinking.

Thursday night we will try to focus on both what has led to casual overstatement regarding Sumter, especially after the war; and the astonishing miscalculations that went into creating the conditions necessary for insuring that the war’s first flashpoint was in the middle of Charleston harbor.

Early in the 20^th century a movement came into the mainstream, its goal was to rewrite civil war history through three main precepts: that slavery was not the cause of the conflict; that it was a struggle for Southern independence over Northern aggression; and that slaves never sought their freedom but were only too glad to be civilized under the hand of a superior race. All of this was romanticized under the rubric of “The Lost Cause,” in which a martyred South was defeated by a rapacious North solely due to the weight of numbers. The Yankees had the bigger battalions, not the better reasons.

At the time the cause of Southern revisionism was a political movement that manipulated the past to justify a present that deprived blacks of civil and political rights through terror and intimidation.

Confederate apologists and Southern historians, abetted by kindred academic spirits in the North, controlled a racialist narrative that perpetuated the Lost Cause myth in revisionist histories.

The process of forgetting, and obscuring, was long and layered. Some of it was benign, but not all. It began with self-justifying memoirs by defeated Confederate leaders and was picked up by war-weary veterans on both sides who wanted to move on. In the devastated South, writers and historians kindled comforting stories of noble cavaliers, brilliant generals and happy slaves, all faithful to a glorious lost cause. In the prosperous North, where cities and factories began filling with freed slaves and their descendants, large audiences were happy to embrace this idea of a time when racial issues were both simple and distant.

Interestingly generals such as Longstreet, Mosby, and Hampton were relegated to historical obscurity in the Lost Cause version of the war; because they had prospered through progressive cooperation with the north in the years after the war.

Also interesting is that southern attitudes were less objective about the responsibility for the war in 1966 than in 1866. Immediately following the war southern leaders were held accountable for the miscalculations leading to war and defeat. One hundred years later these miscalculations were largely forgotten in favor of blaming the north.

Fort Sumter became the #1 revisionist focus of the Lost Cause Movement. It was critical to the promotion of the three Lost Cause precepts that Lincoln be recast as an unprincipled aggressor. And to do this it became absolutely essential to excuse the south for technically firing the first shots of the war. Accordingly they began to promote the idea that Lincoln had tricked the south into firing the first shots of war and that Lincoln was entirely to blame for the conflict.

They contend that the President-elect conspired with Winfield Scott to order Major Anderson to move his men to Fort Sumter. And that Lincoln fabricated a ruse to justify invading the south, much as Hitler would do almost 80 years later to justify invading Poland.

So in these two Little Round Table sessions David and I have tried to present an objective review of the personalities and events leading up to the attack on Fort Sumter.

The real first shots of the war

In early April 1861, by regular mail, Major Anderson got his first ever communication and instructions from the Lincoln administration. It was from Secretary of War Simon Cameron and was in reply to Anderson’s latest letter (also by regular mail ) advising Washington of his approaching supply crisis.

Cameron wrote:

Your letter of the 1st instant occasions some anxiety to the President.

On the information of Captain Fox he had supposed you could hold out until the 15th instant without any great inconvenience; and had prepared an expedition to relieve you before that period.

Hoping still that you will be able to sustain yourself till the 11th or 12th instant, the expedition will go forward; and, finding your flag flying, will attempt to provision you, and, in case the effort is resisted, will endeavor also to reinforce you.

You will therefore hold out, if possible, till the arrival of the expedition.

It is not, however, the intention of the President to subject your command to any danger or hardship beyond what, in your judgment, would be usual in military life; and he has entire confidence that you will act as becomes a patriot and soldier, under all circumstances.

Whenever, if at all, in your judgment, to save yourself and command, a capitulation becomes a necessity, you are authorized to make it.

This represented a considerable change as up till then Anderson had been operating according to Buchanan's last instructions on January 10th and February 23rd. To act strictly on the defensive and avoid any collision if consistent with his safety. The news was a horrible blow to Anderson who felt he had been humiliating himself for the past few months in order to prevent a war and that now it appeared that his personal sacrifice had been in vain. But it was greeted enthusiastically by almost everyone in his command.

As Governor Pickens had been given a similar letter the night of the 8th, both Anderson’s and Engineer Captain Foster’s replies to Washington were intercepted at the post office by Beauregard, opened, and sent on to Montgomery. Together they nicely detailed what those in the fort knew of their situation at that point. Foster’s included details of his efforts to modify the Fort’s defenses in response to the batteries that had been constructed in the harbor.

Although following his orders, Anderson still felt extreme guilt for failing to return fire during two incidents in which before his eyes ships flying the United States flag were fired upon as they attempted to entry the harbor. This is called failing to resent an affront to the flag and some of his officers condemned him for it.

The first had been the “Star of the West” incursion on January 9th, that ship had been fired at by batteries on Morris Island and at Fort Moultrie, actually suffering incidental hits after turning around and fleeing Charleston harbor.

The second had been only the week before, on April 3rd the batteries on Morris Island had fired at and caused minor damage to the “Rhoda Shannan”, a schooner bearing the United States flag. Governor Pickens quickly issued an apology and dismissed the captain of the patrol boat that had failed to intercept the schooner. The incident was overlooked because "anybody could see the folly of starting civil war over the likes of slow-witted Captain Marts and his tub of ice". Can anyone explain that statement?

As the first salvo in the Sumter discussion I include below a book review I wrote about 20 years ago. At the meeting be prepared to discuss why it became critically important to “Lost Cause” adherents that the south not be blamed for starting the war by firing on Fort Sumter. And why they attempted to shift all of the responsibility for this to Lincoln.

And bear in mind that when ex-president Tyler from Virginia was appointed to head the Peace Commission during Buchanan’s last two months in office, he urged Buchanan (not Lincoln) to snuff out the threat of war by removing that noble boy (fifty-five year old Anderson) and his garrison from Sumter.

But Tyler found that Buchanan had become remarkably stubborn on this point. He refused to withdraw the garrison and refused to make any pledge that Anderson would not be reinforced. Buchanan wished Tyler well and hoped he could create a truce between the administration and South Carolina. But Anderson would stay because the garrison in Sumter had become Buchanan’s visible protest against the illegality of unilateral secession and the continuing seizures of federal property in the South; Sumter was his symbol that he still considered the Union intact.

John Shipley Tilley, was a lawyer in Montgomery, Alabama who got inspired in the 1940's to make a case for the south having being a victim of clever Yankee manipulation in the months just before the Civil War and of a distorted image by northern sympathizing historians after the war. His 1941 book "Lincoln Takes Command" was his first of several attempts at recasting the South's position before, during, and after the war.

The central thesis of this book being that Lincoln tricked the South into firing the first shots of the war (if one ignores the shots that were fired at the "Star of the West" expedition in relief of Fort Sumter two months before Lincoln took office). Tilley laments that the South has traditionally been blamed for the war; attempts to show that war was Lincoln's real agenda, and asserts that this possibility has not been adequately examined because the less than impartial victors wrote the traditional history of the conflict.

Nothing much is made of the three months of northern inactivity after Fort Sumter, where Mr. Lincoln's only significant military action was the repulse of the South's invasion of still loyal western Virginia. From which one can reasonably conclude that even if Lincoln wanted war he did not want it starting in April 1861.

Indeed, Tilley's entire focus is to blame Lincoln for the war. And to do so he must totally ignore that it was in fact Buchanan (a southern sympathizing Democrat) who drew the line in the sand that would lead to war. In his last annual message Buchanan stated that secession was unequivocally unconstitutional and that exclusive control over forts and other federal properties in any given state belonged to the national government. Weak and vacillating as Buchanan was, he found a line from which at his weakest and most timid he would not retreat. Thus bequeathing to Lincoln (who given the circumstances of his election could hardly retreat further) the firm policy that would ultimately force the South to abandon unilateral secession or make war.

Tilley's case is that had Lincoln made sufficient conciliatory gestures toward the south immediately following his election (Tilley neglects to mention that Lincoln publicly supported a Constitutional Amendment protecting slavery in the states where it still existed), the war could have been averted.

It is certainly reasonable to believe that had the south been guaranteed everything they wanted and all their concerns about future threats to the Southern institution of slavery properly addressed (they wanted slave codes-legal slavery on some scale in all states and territories - Dred Scott - and guarantees that abolishing slavery would no longer be open to discussion), the southern states (except perhaps South Carolina) would have opted to remain in the union. And that Sumter would not have been fired on had a union garrison not been present in the fort on the day it was attacked. And had the North simply rolled over and permitted states wishing to unilaterally withdraw from the union to do so, there would have been no war. There is nothing new here, what is new is that Tilley takes it a bit further by arguing that Lincoln had a long-range master plan to goad the South into starting a shooting war. Tilley believes that Lincoln's refusal to withdraw from Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens can only be explained as a means to implement his master plan. Thereby insuring that the northern public would be united behind the war effort and tipping the balance in the essential border states (Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland) toward remaining in the Union.

Of course, if one wants to keep playing the conspiracy theory game, the same logic can be extended to a claim that Lincoln was cleverly duped by the fire-eater Southerners, who fired on Ft. Sumter to trick him into responding with a call for volunteers to invade the South; thereby swaying reluctant Southerners to enthusiastically support a fight for independence and tipping neutral Virginia and North Carolina into secession. In fact, at the time the newspapers in Charleston were advocating this action for exactly that purpose.

Bruce Catton concisely summed it all up in "Two Roads to Sumter", stating that neither Davis nor Lincoln could possibly grant what the other asked. "American society's tragic, compounded, centuries-old debt to the Negro bondsman was coming due at last, and the hardened, resolute attitudes expressed by American's foremost leaders in 1860 were ample guarantee that it would be paid in full, every drop of blood drawn with the lash paid for by another drawn with the sword".

Unfortunately, in his eagerness to state his case in the most convincing manner, Tilley undermines his credibility with the same lack of impartiality that he complains about when discussing traditional historical interpretations of the period. It was not Lincoln "the man" that pro-slavery forces objected to, but the insult and humiliation of being governed by the repellent Black Republicans who had put Lincoln in office. And in practical terms the end of decades of pro-slavery control over presidential patronage and judicial appointments. The South had seen the handwriting on the wall four years earlier when Buchanan won only because he had barely carried his own home state (Pennsylvania) and four other northern states. The changing demographics of the country did not favor the Southern cause, Lincoln had won the election without a single electoral vote from a slave state.

Tilley's most deliberate omissions are the decades of bias "toward" the south by popular historians "throughout" the country. At the time of his writings they had carefully crafted a revisionist theme, the "Gone With The Wind" romanticized "Lost Cause" myth, which had obtained a firm grip on popular imagination in both the North and the South. Southerners liked to think that the Civil War South had been united and Northerners liked to think that they had beaten a united South. Historians obliged and the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" theme was removed from the table; a far greater distortion of reality than anything cited in Tilley's discussions.

Also off-the-table with most everyone was the crusade against slavery, as those of Tilley's world view cited northern aggression and southern victimization while ignoring the cause of what was essentially a second American Revolution. As the revolutionary anti-slavery movement pressed for social change and the pro-slavery faction reacted with a series of increasingly counterproductive measures and simplistic miscalculations.

During these months there was so much completely unnecessary treason by southerners in federal positions (and still under their original oaths of office) that even the southern sympathizing Buchanan was ready to inflict reprisals.

Also curious is Tilley's failure to examine the case for and against secession being made in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri during the initial months of the Lincoln presidency; given that the central point of his conspiracy theory is that these border states remained in the union because Lincoln tricked the south into firing the first shots of the war. These states had far more to lose from a repeal or lax enforcement of Federal fugitive slave measures (the only remotely radical action Lincoln contemplated at the time he took office) than states deeper in the South, as the border states accounted for a hugely disproportionate share of the fugitive slaves. But because of their location, they had been less successful (than other southern states) suppressing anti-slavery literature and opinion. There was no Fourteenth Amendment until 1868, so the "Bill of Rights" was not yet applicable to the states and the Buchanan administration could not protect freedom of speech and press. But the geographical location of these three states (and to a lesser extent Virginia and Tennessee) made it more difficult to end these freedoms entirely as had been done in the other southern states.

The book's simplistic analysis dodges the simple fact that each Southern state was full of United States citizens who suddenly found themselves at the mercy of the powerful planter class. Whether a reluctant majority or a small minority of each state's population, they had not waived their United States citizenship; and the federal authorities were duty bound to protect them. Particularly since they now found themselves subject to a new Constitution that was the antithesis of the one they had been living under; in a new nation conceived in slavery and “specifically” dedicated to the proposition that all “men” were not created equal.

Tilley's complete glossing over of critical details like these relegates his book to curiosity status; mainly of interest for its insights about the victimization mentality during the Jim Crow days.