Upon the Altar of the Nation Read online

  Lincoln by this time was ready for war, and saw in Sumter and the Baltimore riots the perfect opportunity to move beyond his inaugural declaration of “possessing” Federal property to “repossessing” it. When a disconsolate Massachusetts businessman named Gustavus Vasa Fox complained bitterly of the loss of Sumter and the timidity of ranking Republicans, Lincoln wrote him on May I: “You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort-Sumpter [sic], even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.”27 In the midst of these events, Lincoln called for a blockade of the Confederate states.

  CHAPTER 3

  “OUR FLAG CARRIES . . . AMERICAN HISTORY”

  In response to armed mobilization, four of the remaining slaveholding states joined the Confederacy: Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina, and, most significantly, Virginia. In Richmond, the post-Sumter embrace of secession was electric, and the scene following news of secession bedazzling. Streets were “brilliantly illuminated” by torches and bonfires, signaling with “triumphal acclaim” the birthday of a new nation. Confederate war clerk J. B. Jones, stationed throughout the war in Richmond, described universal enthusiasm: “Ladies everywhere seem embued [sic] with the spirit of patriotism.” Former president John Tyler delivered a stirring oration invoking “benign providence” to bless the Confederacy’s “holy effort,” all in the spirit of the “Revolution of 1776.”1

  Certainly in 1860 no one could have predicted that Richmond would become such a vital center for the Confederacy. In contrast to the fire-eaters to the South, Richmond’s citizens had not been eager for secession. In 1860 business was booming, and that meant business with the North. With many Northerners living in the city, attitudes toward secession were cautious or opposed. Unlike Charleston or New Orleans, Richmond had much to lose from a Northern invasion and very little to gain. As late as April 4, Virginia’s convention voted 2—1 against secession, with Virginia’s governor voting with the majority.

  Then came Sumter and secession, and Lincoln’s summons to the state militias to suppress the rebellion. From the first days of the Confederacy to the last, cannons would sound within Richmond’s hearing. The population would increase threefold to more than one hundred thousand. An army was raised so that at any given time ten to fifteen thousand soldiers were stationed in Richmond for training or passing through on battle maneuvers. Soon they would be joined by thousands of the wounded being treated as hospital patients and, a little later, thousands more prisoners of war.

  John Moncure Daniel, editor of the Richmond Examiner and destined to be Davis’s greatest critic, initially urged action and praised the new president. The even larger Richmond Daily Dispatch, with a subscription of eighteen thousand and a reading audience probably double that, also supported the new administration. In 1861 Richmond’s secular press represented, in J. Cutler Andrews’s words, “the hub of the Confederate news enterprise.”2 The city boasted four major daily newspapers: the Richmond Daily Whig, the Daily Richmond Enquirer, the Richmond Examiner, and the Richmond Daily Dispatch. In July 1863 it added another, when the Alexandria Sentinel began publishing from Richmond.3 In addition, Richmond published six denominational religious weeklies with a reading public as great as that of the secular press. Secular and religious leaders, no less than ordinary men and women, participated in the common world of print and would depend on it to shape and disseminate their understanding and interpretation of the war’s events.

  Virtually no one imagined a war of unprecedented escalation that would soon consume soldier-civilians by the thousands and ravage civilian properties and even lives. Without that “total war” scenario, no one felt the need to launch a moral inquiry into just conduct on either side. All assumed the looming conflict would be brief, clean, decisive, and, above all, defensive.

  As presses and politicians fumed, former West Point superintendent and Mexican War hero Robert E. Lee declined Lincoln’s offer to take command of the Federal armies. Instead, on April 22, he arrived in Richmond to take command of Virginia troops. On May 20, a grateful Provisional Congress of the Confederacy voted to move the capital of the Confederate nation from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia—a move calculated to solidify the support of Virginians in all but the pro-North western counties.

  From this point on, Richmond, not Charleston, dominated the Southern landscape and represented the single most determined target of the North. No single Northern city occupied the special place that Richmond occupied in the Confederacy as simultaneously sacred site, moral voice, media source, and nerve center of Confederate government and command. If Charleston invented the politics of secession and the ideology of states’ rights, the Confederate capital at Richmond invented the ideology and morality of separate nationhood that made those states’ rights worth defending to the death. From May 1861, Richmond’s destiny as the “Jerusalem of the Confederacy” remained forever fixed in the Confederate imagination. What Charleston had conceived, Richmond delivered.

  Northern and Southern states rushed to fill their quotas with volunteers brimming for a fight. Hardly anyone now wanted to change the collision course or doubted the righteousness of their respective nation’s cause. With the virtue of a just war simply assumed, all that now mattered was the fight.

  White Southerners had discovered the awe-inspiring power of patriotism in secession; Northerners would discover it at Sumter. Whatever caution existed before Sumter disappeared after the artillery assault. In both sections, regional patriotism displaced political partisanship. Southern Unionists were effectively silenced, as were Northern peace advocates. There was no room for equivocation.

  After a private meeting with President Lincoln, an ailing Stephen Douglas renounced party differences between Republicans and Democrats and threw his support behind Lincoln and the looming war. In words reprinted throughout the nation, Douglas declared: “Every man must be for the United States or against it; there can be no neutrals in this war—only patriots and traitors.”4 Lincoln’s secretary John Hay later recalled:The day before, we had appeared hopelessly divided. But before the smell of powder disappeared from Charleston Harbor, the flag floated from every newspaper office in the country. From the opposite poles of opinion men thronged to the call of their country. Long-estranged enemies stood shoulder to shoulder.... The coldest conservatives sprang forward to the front and the wildest radicals kept time with the new music. Douglas and Lincoln joined hands. Millard Fillmore put on the uniform of a militiaman, and Wendell Phillips stood for the first time in his life under the Stars and Stripes, and “welcomed the tread of Massachusetts men marshaled for war.”5

  Patriotism triumphed with the Civil War. Before then, there were few symbols of national unification. Rather, state and local associations governed American life. In the early Republic, the American flag, the clearest and most literal emblem of patriotism, was barely visible. Flags were limited largely to merchant and naval ships. None flew from homes or churches.6

  All this changed in 1861. The clearest and most literal emblem of patriotism and resolve was the national flag. Churches, storefronts, homes, and government buildings all waved flags as a sign of loyalty and support. A nation festooned with flags is a nation at war.

  On both sides, flags assumed a transcendent significance as symbols of their respective nation’s sacred importance. In the North, Henry Ward Beecher, the nation’s most famous minister, pointed out the significance of flags: Our flag means, then, all that our fathers meant in the Revolutionary War; it means all that the Declaration of Independence meant; it means all that the Constitution of our people, organizing for justice, for liberty, and for happiness, meant. Our flag carries American ideas, American history and American feelings.7

  In the South, ordinary Confederates were the most committed to unfurling banners, first the Stars and Bars, and soon thereafter the aptly named Southern Cross, which became the readily identified i
con of the Confederacy and, later, the Lost Cause. On both sides, verse would soon fuse with symbol and produce hundreds of songs directed primarily to the national flags. If West Point became the seminary of America’s national religion, then flags would serve as its religion’s totem.8

  To modern readers accustomed to instantaneous news, the most interesting thing to note in the immediate aftermath of Sumter is the absence of extensive news coverage. Soon the press would be transformed no less than the military. But in the beginning, the press had to gear up for an unprecedented war no less than the army. Artists, lithographers, and writers in the field would have to be enlisted for immediate and extensive coverage. The steam-driven press and telegraph would be coordinated for intelligence gathering and dissemination with no clear rules of censure or propaganda.9

  Soon a syndicate to feed stories nationally—the Associated Press—would be invented in New York City, and Richmond would assume the same dissemination service in the South. Though short on details, the Northern press would not hesitate to bang the drum for war. In fact, the looming war would be a dream come true for Northern newspapers looking for advertising revenue and expanded circulations. For over a generation, the technology of steam-driven presses and the culture of a newspaper-reading public had been moving toward full-blown maturity. Sectional strife and rumors of war would provide the occasion for transforming the penny press into the premier shaper of public information and public opinion.10

  The New York Herald, founded in 1835, boasted the largest circulation of penny papers in the country, with more than seventy-seven thousand daily subscribers in 1860. The paper’s publisher, James Gordon Bennett, was no friend of President Lincoln or the abolitionists and initially resisted the drumbeat of patriotism. In the weeks preceding Sumter, Bennett seemed almost more sympathetic with the South than with the Lincoln administration when he praised a speech by Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States of America, as “a statesmanlike exposition of the views of the moderate Southern leaders.” Of Lincoln’s administration, he complained, “Through lukewarmness, greed of place, and an overweening desire to retain popularity with the ultraists of New England and the Northwest, they also have concluded to take no efficient step towards peacefully solving the difficulties that embarrass the country.”11

  When Sumter fell, Bennett turned, as usual, to the business community for direction. Good money managers that they were, their initial response was caution:The leading merchants, traders and professional men of the city of New York intend to hold a private preliminary meeting to-morrow, preparatory to a grand mass meeting, to be held in the park some day during this week, to declare in favor of peace and against civil war and coercion. This will probably be one of the greatest meetings ever held in this city, and its effect on the government at Washington and the government at Montgomery is expected to be very decided.

  Still wishing to paint Lincoln into the abolitionist camp of Garrison and other radical abolitionists like Boston’s Wendell Phillips, he asserted that “[a]s for Wendell Phillips, he must be fairly exulting over the terrible business. Every boom of the guns from Sumter or Moultrie is sweet music to the ears of the fanatics who have toiled and prayed for years for the destruction of the Union.” 12

  The mass meeting in the park never took place. Bennett soon changed his tune as well. Local emotions turned him into a patriot. The symbol of that support was the flag. Those who refused to fly it did so at their own risk. On April 17, after a mob had forced him to fly the American flag over his offices, Bennett went on to show his stripes with provocative rhetoric:The people of the North are compelled to accept the dread arbitrament of the sword. They did not seek it. There is no course left for them but an earnest, vigorous, determined support of the government. We have no longer parties, or factions, or cliques. Feeble effort may be made to organize new parties or restore old political attachments, but they will be fruitless. From the Aroostook to the Potomac, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Rocky Mountains, the war slogan has been sounded and responded to with alacrity!”

  The Herald’s greatest rival and sparring partner, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, proved quicker on the patriotic draw. The first headline ran: “War Begun. The Jeff. Davis Rebellion, claiming to be the Confederate government of the seven States which profess to have seceded from the Federal Union, commenced formal war upon the United States by opening fire on Fort Sumter at 4 o’clock yesterday moming.”13

  Clearly this was not a time for sober moral reflection but for immediate, visceral exclamation. While unable to include an account of the attack for the morning edition of April 12, the paper issued a sensational evening “extra”—the first of many more to come in a society starved for news. Although extras had been issued ever since Bennett first introduced them at the Herald in the 1830s, their reach was limited and their appearance rare. The Civil War would transform the extra into a more frequent, electric event beginning with the attack on Sumter.

  In an early instance of “making” news, Greeley reported as “news” the great success of his extra in the next morning’s edition:The “extras” issued at 9 o’clock last night, with news from the seat of war at Charleston occasioned the most intense excitement about town. Boys scampered through every part of the city loaded with papers and crying, “Extra!”—“Bombardment of Charleston.” From one end of Broadway to the other groups of men were gathered about the most brilliantly lighted windows, reading aloud and discussing the dispatches contained in the extra.14

  Throughout the following days, the Tribune focused on the war effort. On April 15 it read: “South Carolina has thus formally and willfully inaugurated war, and upon no other pretext than that the President desired to save Major Anderson’s command from starvation.” Four days later, Tribune writers called for a massive escalation of forces: “The defection of Virginia shows that little can be hoped for from the loyalty of the dominant party in the Border slave states, and the Government should prepare for a great war. At least 200,000 men should be called out in addition to the regular army”15 To nineteenth-century readers those numbers would have appeared shocking. Little could they imagine how terribly right Greeley would turn out to be.

  There were some hesitant exceptions, to be sure. The Democratic congressman from Ohio, Samuel S. Cox, did not accept secession, asserting, “I call this secession, revolution.” But he also stood against Lincoln and the war response, pleading for compromise instead. 16

  An even stronger response appeared on May 4, 1861, when the radical reformer and freethinker Thomas Nichols launched a newspaper in New York entitled The Age. The paper would publish only one issue before Nichols fled to England. The religious and political tone of the paper was unusually irenic. Nichols would not be overcome by patriotism; he realized that wars were more easily declared than won.17 To Northern Republicans filled with unalloyed confidence in their superiority of arms and technology, he issued a sober—and prescient—warning:It is easy to clamor for war—but it is wise to count the cost before entering upon such a war as this. Those who think the South is powerless do not understand her. In the Mexican war the Southern States contributed twice as many men as the Northern.... In case of civil war, with the North as the aggressor, the whole South would be united to a man, while the North would be divided.

  A unified South, Nichols continued, would encompass 560,000 square miles, a territory larger than France, Spain, Portugal, England, Ireland, and Scotland combined. All of this raised ominous questions about the future of America in Nichols’s mind. Who was to conquer such a territory? And what would “victory” mean?

  Suppose we were to conquer—burn their cities, waste their fields, introduce all the horrors of servile insurrection, and finally overcome and subdue them. What then? Can one portion of the Union hold the other conquered provinces? Can we hold the South as Austria holds Venetia, or as England holds Ireland? To do this, our Government must become a military despotism. It cannot be done under the Constitutio
n. And if it were, there are four millions of negroes to dispose of. The North, the conquering section, must either govern them in slavery, or take the responsibility of setting them free, and providing for them. Frankly, we see no course for the Government to pursue but to acknowledge the independence of the Southern Confederacy, make equitable treaties, conciliate the Border States, and wait for the developments of the future.18

  The Charleston press, which had done so much to arouse a war spirit in both the North and the South, was temporarily uncertain how to respond to Fort Sumter. Despite enthusiasm and self-righteous vindication, journalists did not really see the next step. Both the Charleston Daily Courier and the tri-weekly Charleston Mercury carried extensive coverage of the attack and surrender. They openly doubted Lincoln’s willingness to engage in an offensive war on Southern territory. Yet if war came, they assured their readers, the Confederacy would prevail. The Mercury, which for years had served as a clipping service for incendiary editorials against the North, continued the onslaught: But will not Fort Pickens be held like Fort Sumter? And will we not be compelled to shell them out? Yes! But this will not be war. Will not our coast be blockaded? Very probably. But this will be war on sea, where we cannot reach them. But a campaign war—a war of invasion for conquest, by the North against the South, we do not expect to see. It will be most fatal to the interest of the North, whilst it may be most beneficial to the South in uniting them together in one exclusive destiny. 19

  The next week the Mercury restated the Confederate case for independence. To the question “For What Are We Contending?” the answer was unequivocal:The matter is now plain. State after State in the South sees the deadly development, and are moving to take their part in the grand effort to redeem their liberties. It is not a contest for righteous taxation. It is not a contest for the security of slave property. It is a contest for freedom and free government, in which everything dear to man is involved.20