This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [10]
For the bitterly divided men who, unable to phrase a nobler appeal, had asked fear and anger to judge between them were being compelled to cope with an issue greater than any of them. They had not chosen to cope with it; they had been willing to go to almost any length to avoid coping with it; but it was there, and now it had to be faced. At the very bottom of American life, under its highest ideals and its most dazzling hopes, lay the deep intolerable wrong of slavery, the common possession not of a class or a section but of the nation as a whole. It was the one fatally limiting factor in a nation of wholly unlimited possibilities; whatever America would finally stand for, in a world painfully learning that its most sacred possession was the infinite individual human spirit, would depend on what was done about this evil relic of the past. Abraham Lincoln had once called it “the great Behemoth of danger,”1 and now it was forcing men into war.
Yet for a long time men would refuse to admit that this was the dreadful inevitable beneath all of their differences. They would look instead at symbols; at swaggering Border Ruffians, at gaunt John Brown, or at something else. And in April 1861, Fort Sumter itself had suddenly become the most compelling of these symbols.
When southern men looked at the fort they saw a squat, ugly obstacle standing in the path of romantic destiny, the visible sign that there were cold and designing folk who would not let the lovely, white-pillared, half-imaginary past perpetuate itself; they lined the mud flats and the sand dunes around Charleston Harbor with batteries, and eager young men in gray uniforms tossed palmetto flags into the wind, until Major Anderson at last calculated that if his government ever tried to force its way in to rescue him it would need all of its navy and an army of twenty thousand men besides.
Most Northerners, so far, were hardly looking at the fort at all. Secession had been threatened for years and now it was here, but there was something unreal about the situation. Sumter was no more than an unpleasant reminder of a distasteful possibility. Yet there it was, a solid block of a thing, holding the national flag in the light between Charleston and the sunrise, and the indifference of the North was only apparent. For beneath everything else, North and West, there ran a profound, unvoiced, almost subconscious conviction that the nation was going to go on growing — in size, in power, in everything a man could think of — and in that belief there was a might and a fury that would take form instantly at the moment of shock. If just one of these encircling guns should be fired an immeasurable emotional flood would be released.
But for the time there was an uneasy equilibrium. The regulars did their best to go on as usual. Some months earlier they had noticed that the people of Charleston were courting them — were courting even the enlisted men, who in ordinary times had a dog’s berth and expected nothing better and so were not courted by anybody. There is a record of a banquet in Charleston (held in the autumn of 1860, before things had quite come to a head) with high privates seated with their betters at a great table, and one mercenary in uniform, full of good food and southern whiskey, got up on the table and stalked at full stride from one end to the other, scattering meat and drink and broken china, scandalizing the elect; yet pride was swallowed and nothing was done to him, because hired soldiers might change flags if they were treated softly. In the end the hired soldiers changed no flags; instead they moved their own flag from obsolete Fort Moultrie, which could never be defended, into Fort Sumter, which perhaps could be; and now they waited in their stronghold,