1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [96]
Perhaps Lincoln was remembering Hill’s letter the following month when—just after the Sumter attack—leaders of the Young Men’s Christian Association visited the White House to make one last plea for compromise. “You gentlemen, come here to me and ask for peace on any terms,” Lincoln told them. “You would have me break my oath and surrender the government without a blow. There is no Washington in that—no Jackson in that—there is no honor or manhood in that.”68
On April 6, Lincoln met at the White House with the governors of Indiana, Maine, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, whom the ardently Republican editor Horace Greeley had marshaled to deliver a hard-line message to the president. All were ready to proffer troops. From Pennsylvania came news that the state legislature had appropriated half a million dollars to arm its militia, readying it to march southward at a moment’s notice in defense of the nation’s capital.69
That same evening, Lincoln also made a decision that perhaps no career military officer would have made: he gave the enemy advance notice of Captain Fox’s arrival. In a message to Governor Pickens of South Carolina, Lincoln announced that vessels were on their way with provisions—but not arms or reinforcements—for Anderson’s men. Furthermore, barring an attack by the Confederates, Lincoln pledged no future military reinforcement of Sumter. He had, in fact, completely changed the purpose of the mission. It was now not merely destined to fail—as perhaps Lincoln had known all along it would be—but designed to do so. He would force the Confederates’ hands: either they would bow to federal authority, or they would unleash their artillery on tugboats that had come to relieve starving men, becoming aggressors in the eyes of the entire world.70
Three days later, on the gray morning of April 9, the little flotilla under Fox’s command steamed past Sandy Hook and out into the open Atlantic amid heavy seas.71
ON THE LAST DAY OF PEACE, Abner Doubleday found a potato. It had been kicked into a corner and stepped on but was not too badly squashed, so he dusted it off as best he could and stowed it away for safekeeping. In a few days’ time, he knew, he might be glad he’d done so. The officers were down to half-rancid pork and a bit of the rice; the privates were issued one hardtack biscuit each as rations for the entire day.72
The morning was clear and bright; full southern spring had come at long last. All around the fort, Charleston Harbor stirred with activity. Small steamers ferrying men and supplies among the various Confederate outposts passed insolently right beneath the guns of Sumter. Sometime before dawn, an odd boxlike structure, like a large floating coffin, had been towed out to the point of Sullivan’s Island and left inside the breakwater, its four square gun ports staring across the water like the eye sockets of a skull. This odd contraption clad in iron boilerplate—presaging later inventions that this war would inspire—the federal troops recognized as the Floating Battery, which the rebels had designed to be moved wherever they needed extra firepower. The now familiar Confederate flag flew from its gabled end. As Crawford noted, its new position, reinforcing the battery that the enemy had unmasked a few days earlier, made it utterly impossible for Fox’s tugboats to reach Sumter without being blown to splinters. (Across the harbor, on Cummings Point—just over half a mile from Sumter’s vulnerable gorge wall—the Carolinians had built a similar structure on land, the Iron