This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [12]
Major Anderson replied that he would obey no such demand. He added, however, that if the Confederates cared to be a little patient his men would be out of food in a very few days and would have to give up anyway. Trim officers in swords and sashes went back and forth between the fort and the encircling batteries that evening. There was grave, courtly politeness between besieged and besiegers, with solemn handshakes and farewells on the fort’s wharf by torchlight, and word came back at last that what the major had said was not good enough: he must surrender now, and do it under the gun. This, said the major, he could not do; and so, after midnight, the final word came out from the mainland: Our batteries will open on the fort in one hour precisely.7
War: the word had been said, and the business could go just one way. In the black hours of early morning the United States officers stood at the parapet atop Fort Sumter and looked off in the darkness toward the place where, they knew, the nearest guns had been planted. The candle flame was guttering out fast and it was very close to the socket, but as long as it continued to flicker the America of the old days still lived, the America that was cemented to a heritage from the past with a dream born of pride and careless waste, of lazy beauty and cruelty, its face turned away from the future — a dream that would begin to die the moment its impassioned defenders pulled on the lanyard of one of the surrounding cannon.
And at last there was a quick flash, like heat lightning, off beyond the unseen marshland, and a sullen red spark climbed up the black sky, seemed to hang motionless for a final instant directly overhead, and then came plunging down, to explode in great light and rocking sound that would reverberate across the land and mark an end and a beginning.
Chapter Two
NOT TO BE ENDED QUICKLY
1. Men Who Could Be Led
IN THE state capitol at Columbus, Ohio, senators were talking their way through a desultory session when one of their number came hurrying in from the lobby. There was some note of urgency in his manner, and the debate died down. Catching the eye of the presiding officer, he called out: “Mr. President, the telegraph announces that the secessionists are bombarding Fort Sumter!” There was a stunned silence in the chamber for a moment. Then, far up in the gallery, a woman sprang to her feet and screamed ecstatically: “Glory to God!”1
The woman was a devout abolitionist, convinced that nothing mattered but to set the Negro free and that only war could do it, and most people in the North did not see it that way. Yet her terrible cry, ringing out without premeditation, somehow spoke for men and women all across the land, and they surged out into bannered streets to cheer and laugh and exult. There had been all of these years of doubt, of argument, of bewilderment and half-stifled anger; the moment of disaster brought wild rejoicing, as if an unendurable emotional tension had at last been broken.
For Abraham Lincoln, to be sure, the news from Fort Sumter brought no release.
He had said that his policy was to have no policy; that he did not control events but was controlled by them; that his task was heavier than the one Washington had carried; and now he had to act firmly and swiftly in a contingency not provided for by the founding fathers. What he could do, he did without delay. On April 15 he announced that “combinations too powerful to be suppressed” by any U.S. marshal or posse comitatus had taken possession of various southern states, and he called on the states to send seventy-five thousand militia into Federal service for three months to restore order. He summoned Congress to meet in special