1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [222]
In April of the following year, an astronomer at the Imperial Russian Observatory near St. Petersburg glimpsed it one last time through the lens of his telescope. And then it was gone, continuing on its own mysterious errand toward some incalculable future rendezvous, beyond human sight.
Fort Sumter, April 14, 1865 (photo credit 9.1)
POSTSCRIPTS
Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again,
and ever again, this soil’d world …
—WALT WHITMAN,
“Reconciliation” (1865)
DESPITE HEAVY NAVAL BOMBARDMENTS of the citadel throughout 1863 and 1864, Fort Sumter did not fall into Union hands again until the surrender of Charleston at the end of the Civil War.
On April 14, 1865—the fourth anniversary of the original Union garrison’s evacuation—a ceremony was held at Sumter to celebrate the war’s end. Some three thousand people attended, both civilians and soldiers, black and white. The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, the famous “Glory” regiment, served as a color guard; Abner Doubleday, Charles Sumner, and William Lloyd Garrison were among the guests of honor. Charleston Harbor was full of flag-bedecked gunboats, steamers, and ironclads, firing salutes throughout the morning.
Just before the ceremony, according to The New York Times, a large steamship arrived “loaded down with between 2,000 and 3,000 of the emancipated race, of all ages and sizes. Their appearance was warmly welcomed.”
After a brief prayer, Major—now General—Robert Anderson stepped to the fort’s flagpole and slowly raised the same tattered banner that he had lowered there four years before.
Memories of the ceremony were overshadowed by the assassination that night of President Abraham Lincoln.1
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James Buchanan never returned to Washington, D.C. He spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name, and supported the Lincoln administration throughout the war as a pro-Union Democrat. He died in 1868.2
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Eight months after the close of his Peace Conference, John Tyler was elected a congressman of the Confederate States of America. He died of a stroke in January 1862, before he was able to take his seat. His villa just outside Hampton, Virginia, remained a Freedmen’s Bureau school for black children until his widow finally regained possession in 1869. Hampton University is currently building a new dining hall on the site where it once stood.3
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Notwithstanding John J. Crittenden’s intention to retire from public life at the beginning of the Civil War, his friends pressured him to return to Washington as a congressman and continue striving to peacefully reconcile North and South. This he did until his death in July 1863, three weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg.4
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Abby Kelley Foster remained an outspoken critic of Lincoln throughout the war, maintaining that he was not aggressive enough in his policies on slavery and race. After emancipation, she joined Frederick Douglass in arguing that the American Anti-Slavery Society should not disband but should continue fighting for black civil rights. The society held its last meeting in April 1870. Foster gave one of the final speeches, in which she rejoiced at all the changes that she had seen over the course of her life: “Have we not moral as well as physical rail-roads and telegraphs? I feel as if I had lived a thousand years.”5
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Lucy Bagby liberated herself a second time from slavery in June 1861, becoming a contraband when Union forces entered Wheeling, Virginia. Her master, a leading secessionist, was imprisoned by federal troops in the same jail where he had once placed her.
On her return to Cleveland as a free woman in 1863, she was greeted with an enthusiastic welcome;