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By Root 1705 0

of individualism, found himself beholding with astonished admiration the “whirlwind of patriotism, not believed to exist, but now magnetizing all discordant masses under its terrific unity.” He was then in the midst of a lecture series in Boston on the relationship between “Life” and “Literature.” Amid his abstract ruminations, he had taken note of the national crisis; a few days before Sumter he had spoken of “the facility with which a great political fabric can be broken.” But the following week, he threw aside his prepared text and spoke instead from a sheaf of hastily scribbled notes. The sage went so far as to admit he had been wrong:

It is an affair of instincts; we did not know we had them; we valued ourselves as cool calculators; we were very fine with our learning and culture, with our science that was of no country, and our religion of peace;—and now a sentiment mightier than logic, wide as light, strong as gravity, reaches into the college, the bank, the farm-house, and the church. It is the day of the populace; they are wiser than their teachers.… The interlocutions from quiet-looking citizens are of an energy of which I had no knowledge. How long men can keep a secret! I will never again speak lightly of a crowd. We are wafted into a revolution which, though at first sight a calamity of the human race, finds all men in good heart, in courage, in a generosity of mutual and patriotic support. We have been very homeless, some of us, for some years past,—say since 1850; but now we have a country again.… This affronting of the common sense of mankind, this defiance and cursing of friends as well as foes, has hurled us, willing or unwilling, into opposition; and the nation which the Secessionists hoped to shatter has to thank them for a more sudden and hearty union than the history of parties ever showed.122

Ironically, the Confederates’ attack on, and swift victory at, Fort Sumter turned out to be their worst strategic blunder of the war, a blunder, indeed, that may have cost the South its independence. It is difficult to see what the rebels would have lost if they had allowed Major Anderson and his tiny force to be provisioned and remain indefinitely. Indeed, they could have couched their forbearance as a humanitarian gesture, a token of their peaceful intentions, that might have won them allies not just in the North but also—all-importantly—among the nations of Europe. Certainly leaving Sumter alone would have bought them more time: time to more fully organize and equip the South’s armies; time to establish all the ordinary apparatus—a postal service, a stable national currency, a judicial system—that serve to make government a stable fact rather than a speculative figment. Both to its own citizens and to the rest of the world, the Confederate States of America might have come to seem like a fait accompli.123 Instead, Davis, his cabinet, and his generals had only a perfunctory discussion before deciding to shell the fort.

As Lincoln told a confidant: “They attacked Sumter—it fell, and thus, did more service than it otherwise could.”

To be sure, some Americans in the North continued decrying what they saw as a misbegotten war against slavery. “A servile insurrection and the wholesale slaughter of the whites will alone satisfy the murderous designs of the Abolitionists,” wrote the editor of one New York paper in mid-April. “The Administration, egged on by the halloo of the Black Republican journals of this city, has sent on its mercenary forces to pick a quarrel and initiate the work of devastation and ruin.”124

A few still held out hope for a bloodless reunion. One pro-Union meeting in New York began with extravagant toasts, not to Anderson or Lincoln but to John J. Crittenden. When the venerable senator had announced his retirement when Congress adjourned in March, he made clear to his friends that he wished never to see Washington again. He then hurried home, exhausted and demoralized, to his Kentucky farm. Just after the fall of Sumter, however, with his state teetering on the brink of secession, the old