Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [224]
Thirty-four hours after the fighting began, Major Anderson surrendered. In a gesture that forever endeared him to the North, he brought his men together and fired a dignified fifty-round salute to the shredded American flag before hauling it down and leaving the fort. Incredibly, only one Union soldier died, the result of an accidental explosion of gunpowder during the salute to the flag. Beauregard, who had been taught by Anderson at West Point and had great respect for him, waited until Anderson had departed before entering the fort, as “it would be an unhonorable thing…to be present at the humiliation of his friend.”
Captain Fox was inconsolable. Convinced that his mission would have been successful with the missing Powhatan, he believed that for a failure that was not his fault, he had lost his “reputation with the general public.” Lincoln, once more, assumed the blame, assuring him that “by an accident, for which you were in no wise responsible, and possibly I, to some extent was, you were deprived of a war vessel with her men, which you deemed of great importance to the enterprize. I most cheerfully and truly declare that the failure of the undertaking has not lowered you a particle, while the qualities you developed in the effort, have greatly heightened you, in my estimation.
“You and I,” he continued, “both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort-Sumpter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.”
Critics later claimed that Lincoln had maneuvered the South into beginning the war. In fact, he had simply followed his inaugural pledge that he would “hold” the properties belonging to the government, “but beyond what may be necessary” to accomplish this, “there will be no invasion—no using of force.” Fort Sumter could not be held without food and supplies. Had Lincoln chosen to abandon the fort, he would have violated his pledge to the North. Had he used force in any way other than to “hold” government properties, he would have breached his promise to the South.
The Confederates had fired the first shot. A war had begun that no one imagined would last four years and cost greater than six hundred thousand lives—more than the cumulative total of all our other wars, from the Revolution to Iraq. The devastation and sacrifice would reach into every community, into almost every family, in a nation of 31.5 million. In proportion to today’s population, the number of deaths would exceed five million.
CHAPTER 13
“THE BALL HAS OPENED”
NEWS OF THE CONFEDERATE ATTACK on Fort Sumter spread throughout the North that weekend. Walt Whitman recalled hearing the shouts of newsboys after he emerged from an opera on 14th Street and was strolling down Broadway late Saturday night. At the Metropolitan Hotel, “where the great lamps were still brightly blazing,” the news was read to a crowd of thirty or forty suddenly gathered round. More than twenty years later, he could “almost see them there now, under the lamps at midnight again.”
The “firing on the flag” produced a “volcanic upheaval” in the North, Whitman observed, “which at once substantially settled the question of disunion.” The National Intelligencer spoke for many Northerners: “Our people now, one and all, are determined to sustain the Government and demand a vigorous prosecution of the war inaugurated by the disunionists. All sympathy with them is dead.”
The fevered excitement in the North was mirrored in the South. “The ball has opened,” a dispatch from Charleston, South Carolina, began.