1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [106]
The news, Whitman would later remember, “ran through the Land, as if by electric nerves.” Many people didn’t believe it at first: surely, they said, this was rebel propaganda. Perhaps someone had tampered with the telegraph lines. Contradictory reports began coming in: Major Anderson had shelled downtown Charleston, incinerating the city and sending thousands of civilians fleeing for their lives. No, he had gone over to the Confederate side, was blowing up his fort piece by piece, and planned to escape by sea in a small boat. Captain Doubleday, resisting surrender, had been clapped in irons by Anderson and then promptly went insane. And perhaps most prevalent: Sumter had been reinforced by Fox’s fleet. (Saturday night’s performance at the Academy of Music was interrupted during Act 4, when the house manager stepped onstage to announce this last piece of splendid news, inspiring the soprano to launch immediately into “The Star-Spangled Banner.”)
In any event, wrote the skeptical George Templeton Strong, no man of sense could believe that the rebels “have been so foolish and thoughtless as to take the initiative in civil war.”112
But when later reports confirmed the initial headlines, disbelief gave way to shock. Throughout the country—even in the heart of busy Manhattan, even on Wall Street—business came to a halt as men and women left their shops and offices to crowd into barrooms, hotel lobbies, and public squares, anywhere that they might hear the very latest facts and rumors. Crowds formed around newsstands, too, pushing and shoving to press pennies upon the beleaguered vendors. From Fort Kearny in the Nebraska Territory—the westernmost point of the telegraph lines—a Pony Express rider galloped off toward California with the news. In Washington, when a man in the lobby of the Willard ventured to express his sympathy with the rebels, police had to come break up the ensuing fracas.113
Perhaps the calmest place in the country was, oddly enough, just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Willard.
“There was little variation in the business of the Executive Mansion on that eventful Saturday,” Hay and Nicolay would remember. The president signed official papers, read his mail, and met patiently with the usual parade of dubiously qualified patronage seekers, who insisted on a hearing even at this moment of historic crisis. When a delegation of congressmen came bustling into Lincoln’s office, pressing him for his reaction to the momentous news, he replied dryly, “I do not like it,” and changed the subject. The only visitors who left the White House with something more substantial were three Virginians, members of the statewide convention considering secession. He reassured them that he would hold fast to the policy of nonaggression promised in his inaugural address. But, he now added almost matter-of-factly, “in every event, I shall, to the extent of my ability, repel force by force.” This was, as the Virginians would soon learn, an all-important clarification.114
Although there is no record of exactly when or how Lincoln got the news of Sumter’s surrender, initial reports probably reached him Saturday evening, not many hours after the event itself. Incredibly, the White House and War Department had no official intelligence or communications system of any kind, but at least two citizens in the South—one of them a prominent Charleston secessionist, the other an obscure Savannah accountant—were considerate enough to send Lincoln telegrams that night.115
Just six months earlier, very few Americans had ever even heard of Fort Sumter. But now the loss of this two-acre island—the lowering of one flag and the raising of another over a useless piece of federal real estate—was suddenly a national calamity. For many, it was also a summons to vengeance.