1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [87]
All those in the fort had come to detest what they called the secessionist “madmen.” But most had little more love, if any, for the incoming Republican administration. On March 4, a few hours after Lincoln had taken the oath of office, Dr. Crawford wrote to his brother back home in Pennsylvania: “A vulgar, third rate politician, a man without anything to entitle him to the position he holds, an uncouth Western Hoosier is now our President.… How any party could have … elected [such] a character as the present rail splitter is more than a mystery to me. He is however under the control of Mr. Seward almost entirely and from that single circumstance I permit myself to hope for the best.”31
From the Northern newspapers that came on the daily mail boat, the men at Sumter knew that they had become famous. On distant Broadway, P. T. Barnum’s “Museum” was staging “Union Drama, Anderson and Patriots at Sumter in ’61,” which spectacle filled the house twice daily at twenty-five cents a ticket. (A tall, handsome actor named J. H. Clark played Doubleday, who was portrayed—not without some justice—as the most warlike among the “Patriots,” itching to unleash the fury of Sumter’s cannons upon the rebels.) During the long hours of standing watch or supervising work on the fortifications, the junior officers whiled away their time in idle speculation about how their grateful country would eventually reward their heroism—heroism that, of course, had not yet included firing or withstanding a single shot. Crawford thought that the War Department should confer on each of them a brevet promotion in rank and pay grade. Doubleday actually designed a medal for Congress to bestow upon the garrison’s members, depicting the evacuation of Fort Moultrie on one side and the word Fidelity on the other.32
Fidelity was a virtue all too rare in America that winter. Newspapers from the North also brought reports of a steady exodus of career military men resigning from the army to join the Confederate forces. These defections came as personal blows to the men at Sumter. “We cannot repress the sadness that comes over us when we see one by one of our old comrades dropping away, men with whom we have [shared] many a bivouac in the far distant frontier,” Crawford wrote in his diary. “How are we to regard them as our enemies now?”33
On that same day, March 6, came word of Lincoln’s inaugural speech, with its pledge to “hold, occupy, and possess” the Southern forts. Across Charleston Harbor, a new flag unfurled above the city, alongside the familiar palmetto banner. From Sumter’s ramparts, it looked at first, confusingly, like the defenders’ own flag, “the one flag we longed to see,” as Doubleday called it. But as they took turns with the spyglass, they got their first good look: three broad red and white stripes and a circle of seven stars—the banner of the new Confederate nation.34 From that moment on, the garrison’s position felt even less tenable than before.
The officers and men at Sumter put little stock in Lincoln’s rhetoric—let alone in the bluster of Republicans across the North who said the fort must be defended. Its ultimate fate could hardly be in doubt. Anderson had shared with the War Department the estimates of how many troops would be required to hold or resupply his post, and neither the major nor his subordinates could believe that elder statesmen like Secretary Seward and General Scott would approve a doomed mission that would lead inexorably to internecine war. Fort Sumter, Crawford wrote to his brother, “must be given up and the sooner the administration appreciate this the better. All this talk of ‘occupying, holding, and possessing’ the forts is nonsense. There is neither Army enough to do it, nor is it likely there soon will be.” If it were up to him, he said bitterly, he would simply blow up the fort and leave the accursed harbor forever—and then, like Anderson, depart for Europe rather than remain in the “rump” of his former country. Yet even at the same time Crawford pined