Charleston Harbor, S.C., April 10, 1861

Maj. Robert Anderson sat at his desk in Fort Sumter, composing a letter that might never be read. Two days earlier, the enemy commander, Gen. G.T. Beauregard, acting on orders from the Confederate government had finally cut off mail to and from the Union-held fort. Yet the scrupulous major nonetheless sat down to compose his daily report to the War Department in Washington, awaiting a time when the fort might again regain contact with the outside world – a time that seemed less and less likely ever to arrive.

Library of Congress Maj. Robert Anderson

Any hour now, a boat from the Confederate headquarters across the harbor might bring a demand for Sumter’s immediate surrender. Anderson – so accustomed to obediently following the dictates of his superiors – would have no further orders to rely upon, beyond the terse missive that had arrived several days earlier from the War Department. This had urged Anderson to hold the fort until a relief expedition arrived from the North, but added: “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.” Read more…

Charleston Harbor, S.C., April 9, 1861

After months of anxiety and expectation, there came at last a day of terrible clarity. For months, a single question had preoccupied the men of Fort Sumter’s beleaguered Union garrison, from their commander down to the lowliest private: what would the Lincoln administration do? Would it yield to Southern coercion and evacuate the fort, sending a signal to the world that it was ready to negotiate with the secessionists, and perhaps even let the slave states go in peace? Or would it send reinforcements and supplies to Charleston Harbor — and in so doing, quite possibly touch off civil war?

Almost every morning throughout the four-month siege, a mail boat from Charleston hadbrought a bundle of newspapers out to the fort. These usually included the latest edition of the Charleston Mercury, with its banner headlines screaming blood and secession, as well as a grab-bag of recent Northern papers forwarded by the men’s families back home. Every day, the fort’s officers pored over these papers, seeking clues to their own fate. Read more…

Lucretia Mott, the Philadelphia Quaker famous for her work in the abolition and women’s rights movements, never met Abraham Lincoln. But Mott and many of her faith thought they knew him well enough to be wary: though the South was up in arms over his antislavery statements, he was nowhere near radical enough for Mott’s small but influential religious community. Indeed, by March 1861, the views of Mott and other Quakers provide a trustworthy indicator of how Northern radicals saw the possibility of sectional conflict on the eve of the Civil War.

Library of Congress Lucretia Mott

Lincoln, though hardly a religious man himself, was no stranger to the Quakers, a pacifist Protestant sect. As a Springfield legislator and lawyer, Lincoln knew a Quaker mill owner, John Huy Addams, whom he wrote with a droll salutation: “My dear Double-D’ed Addams.” Jane, Addams’ daughter, grew up cherishing “Mr. Lincoln’s Letters,” and the Hull-House founder told tales of her father’s friend to generations of Chicago immigrants.

And yet there was a wide gap between the sect and the new president. Like other radical abolitionists, the Quakers — officially the Religious Society of Friends — weren’t afraid of war so much as the possibility that Lincoln would give in and compromise to prevent it from happening. “Lincoln and [Secretary of State William] Seward & very many of the Republicans promise, or express a willingness to strengthen the pro-Slavery parts of the Constitution,” Mott wrote in a March 19 letter. “Indeed all the Slave States might go — without fighting about it.” Read more…

Library of CongressWashington, D.C., as seen from Georgetown. The incomplete Washington Monument can been seen in the distance on the left side of the photograph.

On April 8, 1861, the same day that President Lincoln notified South Carolina’s governor that he intended to resupply Fort Sumter, ratcheting up the possibility of an armed Southern response, he also met with the governor of Pennsylvania, Andrew G. Curtin, at the White House. The president had more than Sumter on his mind: according to Curtin’s account, reported in the Times, Lincoln stated he had “information of a design to attack the city of Washington,” and urged the governor — a close Republican Party ally — to ready his state’s militia for a quick deployment to the Union capital.

Library of Congress Charles Stone and his Daughter, Hettie

The information had come via the inspector general of the District of Columbia Militia, Charles P. Stone, who had written to Secretary of State William H. Seward on April 5 describing recent reports of Confederate threats within the capital. An informant had warned him Stone that “thousands of men in Washington, Virginia and Baltimore” were “ready to rise up armed” at Jefferson Davis’s order — and that the “attack on Fort Sumpter [sic] would be the Signal for action here, and plenty of men would rise to seize and hold the Capital until the Southern Army could reach here.” Read more…

Charleston Harbor, S.C., April 7, 1861

It had been the most gentlemanly of sieges. Arriving at the beginning of March, Gen. G.T. Beauregard, commander of the Confederate forces at Charleston, had sent several cases of cigars and fine brandy over to Fort Sumter. The gifts were intended as tokens of undiminished esteem for his former West Point professor — now military adversary — Maj. Robert Anderson, commander of the tiny, beleaguered Union garrison. Anderson, mindful of military etiquette, promptly returned them untouched.

Library of Congress A Boston admirer of Maj. Robert Anderson named a special brand of cigars after the Union commander. It is unknown whether he sent any to the besieged Union garrison at Fort Sumter, also depicted on the label. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Still, when the two commanders had occasion to exchange messages, their notes were addressed “My dear General” and “My dear Major.” A sympathetic lady of Charleston sent over a bouquet of early-blooming Carolina jasmine whose scent delighted the men, reminding them of “the woods and freedom,” the Union garrison’s surgeon, Samuel Wylie Crawford, wrote.

South Carolina’s governor, Francis Pickens, was not quite so courtly and obliging, but he did allow the garrison at Sumter to communicate with the outside world, with almost no interference. Visitors came and went, including one of Mathew Brady’s photographers, who assembled Anderson and his officers for a group portrait. Read more…

It was two days after the presidential inauguration, and the Virginia secession convention was in an uproar. The pro-secession minority insisted that Abraham Lincoln’s Inaugural Address was a declaration of war against the South. But the delegate from rural Franklin County, Jubal Early, nicknamed the “Bad Old Man” for his stubborn attitude and imposing figure, would have none of it.

Library of Congress Jubal Early

The new president’s promise that “he would execute the laws in all the states,” Early tartly observed, would normally have been “hailed throughout the country as a guarantee that he would perform his duty.” Virginia’s perilous situation was not Lincoln’s fault, Early asserted; rather, it resulted instead “solely from the action of these states that have seceded from the Union without having consulted our views.”

Viewed in retrospect, Early was the most improbable member of the anti-secession coalition that dominated the convention and that believed disaster would befall the Old Dominion if it left the Union. He worked tirelessly to promote a Union-saving compromise that would halt secession in the Upper South and oblige the Lower South to reconsider its reckless course. But once the war started, he committed to the Confederate States of America and never let go, becoming one of Robert E. Lee’s corps commanders by the last year of the war. Then, during the postwar era, he became the quintessential promoter of “Lost Cause” mythology, which airbrushed slavery as a cause of the conflict and instead celebrated the heroic fight by outnumbered white Southerners, who sought only to vindicate their honor and maintain their rights. Read more…

Most historians now argue — and contemporary documents bear them out — that the leaders of the Confederacy were, above all, motivated by a desire to protect their system of slavery. Leaving the Union, they believed, was the surest way to preserve an institution that was now threatened by the newly-elected, and self-proclaimed anti-slavery, president, Abraham Lincoln.

But if slavery motivated the leaders — almost all of them slave-owners — where did that leave the vast majority of Southerners, the men who owned no slaves but filled the ranks of the Confederate army? For them, the answer was less about the slave economy or states’ rights than the perceived threat that abolition posed to their very identity as white men. Read more…

March 30 – April 5, 1861

It was Take Your Pick Week in Washington. Do you want your army run by a general or a captain? Do you want your Navy run by the secretary of the Navy, or a naval lieutenant, or an army captain, or a private businessman? Do you want your government’s policies to be set by the president, or by a rival he defeated?

Do not trouble yourself excessively to divine any answers, for these are trick questions: at one time or another this week, you had them all.

At the week’s beginning, President Lincoln had ordered the implementation of the plan for a relief expedition to Fort Sumter that had been devised by Gustavus Fox, a politically connected mill owner from Massachusetts who had once been a naval officer and who had recently impressed the president with his intellect and demeanor.

For all its virtues, confusion was woven into the fabric of the plan from the start. The mission called for a convoy of civilian vessels that would carry supplies and 1,000 troops, and armed military vessels that would protect them. The civilian Fox could not command the military vessels, but Commodore Stringham, who as the Navy’s senior officer was the logical choice to take over the expedition, declined the job because Fox had scouted the harbor and authored the plan. Another officer would have to be named, but because time was fleeting, Fox left for the Brooklyn Navy Yard to begin assembling civilian ships and provisions. Meanwhile, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles ordered the revenue cutter Harriet Lane in Brooklyn and the steamers Pawnee in Washington and Pocahontas in Norfolk to prepare to join the expedition not later than April 6. The next day Welles telegraphed Brooklyn and ordered the steamer Powhatan to be readied as well. Read more…

Both professional historians and the general public have long explained America’s descent into civil war as the result of the economic divergence between an industrial North and an agrarian South.

Southern planters accumulated untold riches from the labor of their slaves, declared cotton king and boldly embraced aggressive policies culminating in secession. Northerners had wisely abolished slavery, so the story runs, and found prosperity by allowing free farmers and laborers to compete in the marketplace. Nearly four decades of debate over national tariff policy — with Northerners pushing for higher tariffs to protect domestic industry, and Southerners for lower tariffs to promote cotton exports — attested to the fundamental antagonism of these two sectional economies. Only after the forces of industrial modernity had destroyed the archaic system of human bondage could the United States achieve its true economic potential.

Told this way, the Civil War seems a fait accompli, the inevitable outcome of the economic incompatibility of slavery and capitalism. Moreover, such an account has allowed Northerners to hold themselves blameless for the crime of American slavery: the South was, in this telling, practically a different country.

Yet historians increasingly understand that slavery was not just important to one region of the United States, but to the economic development of the United States as a whole. This realization changes everything: by recognizing the economic interdependence of North and South and slavery’s centrality to American capitalism itself, it becomes possible to see the outbreak of the Civil War as more surprising than predictable. Read more…