1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [92]
Since the very beginning of the secession crisis, the only glimmer of national pride had come with the surprise occupation of Fort Sumter back in December, the moment greeted with cheers and cannon salutes throughout the North. Whatever Major Anderson’s true feelings and motives, he and his small band of men were as yet the Union’s only heroes: the “Patriots at Sumter in ’61,” as P. T. Barnum had dubbed them. Could it be that Barnum had his finger on the North’s pulse, more than Secretary Seward and all the wise heads in Washington?
The move to Sumter had been a declaration that the nation would fight rather than surrender its integrity; the fort had become the Unionists’ sole emblem of defiance and steadfastness rather than compromise and withdrawal. Surrendering now would mean more than just giving up two acres of militarily worthless federal property, more than just throwing an easy sop to the South. To many people, it would mean nothing less than abrogating American history, abandoning the heroic struggle that—within living memory—had transformed thirteen small colonies into a vast and mighty empire. As one elderly citizen of Illinois, remembering his father’s service under General Washington in the Revolution, asked plaintively, “Shall all this be thrown away to please a few villains and Traitors[?]”51
Lincoln had in any case come to doubt that the South could be appeased. Moreover, as he suggested to Scott, he had come to doubt that the military situation in Charleston Harbor was as hopeless as Anderson claimed. Two weeks earlier, Lincoln had met with an obscure former navy captain named Gustavus V. Fox. Since January, Fox had been peddling a complicated scheme he had devised to get troops, food, and supplies to Sumter. Balding, diminutive, and pear-shaped, Captain Fox had never commanded a vessel larger than a mail steamer, and since his retirement five years earlier had occupied himself chiefly in the woolens industry. The main reason his plan even got a hearing is that he happened to be married to Postmaster General Blair’s sister-in-law. Instead of trying to get a heavily armed naval squadron into Charleston Harbor, Fox proposed keeping the warships out in deep water and sending in two shallow-draft tugboats that could slip over the sandbars and sunken hulks under cover of darkness. They would have to be civilian vessels, but their steam engines could be protected from incoming fire with bales of cotton or hay. Anyhow, Fox doubted that the rebels’ heavy cannons would be able to hit small, speedy craft half a mile away, and enemy boats could be kept at bay with barrages from Sumter’s own guns.
The president was intrigued by this improbable proposal—so much so that he ordered Fox to set out for Charleston and, taking advantage of the Confederates’ lax visitation policies, inspect Sumter for himself to ascertain whether the plan was practicable. Fox would spend barely an hour talking with Major Anderson, who found the scheme—or as much of it as Fox hazarded to reveal—utterly harebrained. By that point, however, the ex-captain was so besotted with his own idea that probably nothing could have dissuaded him. Returning directly to Washington, Fox assured the president that his tugboat-and-hay-bale strategy was foolproof. Anderson, meanwhile, dashed off a quick but pointed memo to the War Department, neatly demolishing the plan in three sentences—or so he thought.52
On Friday, March 29, the day after Lincoln’s sleepless night, he convened his cabinet again at the White House. They met in his upstairs office, around a scuffed walnut table stacked high with papers.
For the past three weeks, the president had largely deferred to these men on matters of policy. Before his arrival in Washington, he had met almost