1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [86]
There was a brittleness to Anderson, Doubleday noticed—almost, it sometimes seemed, a kind of fragility. The strain and uncertainty were clearly taking a mental and physical toll on the major: soon there were a pallor to the man’s skin and a dullness to his eyes and, abandoning his long-accustomed reticence, he began sharing his private opinions almost recklessly. In conversations around the officers’ mess table, he blamed secession on the North, and confessed that if he were in charge in Washington, he would promptly surrender all the Southern forts. He could never take up arms against the Stars and Stripes, he said, but if his native state of Kentucky left the Union, he would be sorely tempted to do likewise—that is, resign his commission and move to some quiet corner of Europe.27
Was this a man to be trusted with the most delicate military assignment in American history? Certainly not, Doubleday had thought at first. In an act of plain insubordination, he had even managed to convey his misgivings directly to the new commander-in-chief. The previous autumn, Doubleday had begun sending frank letters about the situation at Charleston, written in a private code, to his brother Ulysses. Ulysses, a Republican campaign operative in New York City, then decoded them and sent them on to the candidate Lincoln and other “leaders of public opinion” across the North. Some of the early dispatches went so far as to hint that Anderson might soon show his true colors as a secessionist traitor.28
Yet there were facets to the new commander that Doubleday did not immediately appreciate. One of these was Anderson’s deeply felt sense of honor and duty—a quality apparent in the move from Moultrie to Sumter.
Another, which revealed itself more slowly, was Anderson’s hatred of war itself. Carnage sickened him, and he had already witnessed far too much in the course of his career. As a young officer in the struggle against Chief Black Hawk in Illinois, he had watched helplessly as the local settler militia, berserk for Indian blood, massacred unarmed civilians; had seen and smelled the emaciated bodies of women and children left rotting by the road under an August sun. He had rescued a four-year-old Indian girl, maimed by a musket ball, from beneath the corpse of her dead mother. He had beheld senseless misery, he wrote then to his brother, “exceeding any I ever expected to see in our happy land.”29 He had prayed God to spare his country from enduring the like ever again.
It was to peace that Anderson was most loyal, Doubleday began to realize. The major’s experiences of war, his piety, and his staunch conservatism all committed him to preserving the Union—and not in name alone, but the Union as only a politically innocent man could conceive it: a Union without sectional strife, without secessionists, without abolitionists. Without even North and South, perhaps. Civil war, disunion, radicalism: these were anathema to every fiber of Anderson’s being. Eventually Doubleday began to feel sympathy, verging on admiration, for his commander. “I feel deeply for him,” he wrote in February. “I consider him an honorable and brave man [and] as much as we differ in the propriety of some of his acts,