Upon the Altar of the Nation (8 page)

John Moncure Daniel, editor of the
Richmond Examiner
and destined to be Davis’s greatest critic, initially urged action and praised the new president. The even larger
Richmond Daily Dispatch,
with a subscription of eighteen thousand and a reading audience probably double that, also supported the new administration. In 1861 Richmond’s secular press represented, in J. Cutler Andrews’s words, “the hub of the Confederate news enterprise.”
²
The city boasted four major daily newspapers: the
Richmond Daily Whig,
the
Daily Richmond Enquirer,
the
Richmond Examiner,
and the
Richmond Daily
Dispatch. In July 1863 it added another, when the
Alexandria Sentinel
began publishing from Richmond.
³
In addition, Richmond published six denominational religious weeklies with a reading public as great as that of the secular press. Secular and religious leaders, no less than ordinary men and women, participated in the common world of print and would depend on it to shape and disseminate their understanding and interpretation of the war’s events.

Virtually no one imagined a war of unprecedented escalation that would soon consume soldier-civilians by the thousands and ravage civilian properties and even lives. Without that “total war” scenario, no one felt the need to launch a moral inquiry into just conduct on either side. All assumed the looming conflict would be brief, clean, decisive, and, above all, defensive.

As presses and politicians fumed, former West Point superintendent and Mexican War hero Robert E. Lee declined Lincoln’s offer to take command of the Federal armies. Instead, on April 22, he arrived in Richmond to take command of Virginia troops. On May 20, a grateful Provisional Congress of the Confederacy voted to move the capital of the Confederate nation from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia—a move calculated to solidify the support of Virginians in all but the pro-North western counties.

From this point on, Richmond, not Charleston, dominated the Southern landscape and represented the single most determined target of the North. No single Northern city occupied the special place that Richmond occupied in the Confederacy as simultaneously sacred site, moral voice, media source, and nerve center of Confederate government and command. If Charleston invented the politics of secession and the ideology of states’ rights, the Confederate capital at Richmond invented the ideology and morality of separate nationhood that made those states’ rights worth defending to the death. From May 1861, Richmond’s destiny as the “Jerusalem of the Confederacy” remained forever fixed in the Confederate imagination. What Charleston had conceived, Richmond delivered.

Northern and Southern states rushed to fill their quotas with volunteers brimming for a fight. Hardly anyone now wanted to change the collision course or doubted the righteousness of their respective nation’s cause. With the virtue of a just war simply assumed, all that now mattered was the fight.

White Southerners had discovered the awe-inspiring power of patriotism in secession; Northerners would discover it at Sumter. Whatever caution existed before Sumter disappeared after the artillery assault. In both sections, regional patriotism displaced political partisanship. Southern Unionists were effectively silenced, as were Northern peace advocates. There was no room for equivocation.

After a private meeting with President Lincoln, an ailing Stephen Douglas renounced party differences between Republicans and Democrats and threw his support behind Lincoln and the looming war. In words reprinted throughout the nation, Douglas declared: “Every man must be for the United States or against it; there can be no neutrals in this war—only patriots and traitors.”
⁴
Lincoln’s secretary John Hay later recalled:

Patriotism triumphed with the Civil War. Before then, there were few symbols of national unification. Rather, state and local associations governed American life. In the early Republic, the American flag, the clearest and most literal emblem of patriotism, was barely visible. Flags were limited largely to merchant and naval ships. None flew from homes or churches.
⁶

All this changed in 1861. The clearest and most literal emblem of patriotism and resolve was the national flag. Churches, storefronts, homes, and government buildings all waved flags as a sign of loyalty and support. A nation festooned with flags is a nation at war.

On both sides, flags assumed a transcendent significance as symbols of their respective nation’s sacred importance. In the North, Henry Ward Beecher, the nation’s most famous minister, pointed out the significance of flags:

In the South, ordinary Confederates were the most committed to unfurling banners, first the Stars and Bars, and soon thereafter the aptly named Southern Cross, which became the readily identified icon of the Confederacy and, later, the Lost Cause. On both sides, verse would soon fuse with symbol and produce hundreds of songs directed primarily to the national flags. If West Point became the seminary of America’s national religion, then flags would serve as its religion’s totem.
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To modern readers accustomed to instantaneous news, the most interesting thing to note in the immediate aftermath of Sumter is the absence of extensive news coverage. Soon the press would be transformed no less than the military. But in the beginning, the press had to gear up for an unprecedented war no less than the army. Artists, lithographers, and writers in the field would have to be enlisted for immediate and extensive coverage. The steam-driven press and telegraph would be coordinated for intelligence gathering and dissemination with no clear rules of censure or propaganda.
⁹

Soon a syndicate to feed stories nationally—the Associated Press—would be invented in New York City, and Richmond would assume the same dissemination service in the South. Though short on details, the Northern press would not hesitate to bang the drum for war. In fact, the looming war would be a dream come true for Northern newspapers looking for advertising revenue and expanded circulations. For over a generation, the technology of steam-driven presses and the culture of a newspaper-reading public had been moving toward full-blown maturity. Sectional strife and rumors of war would provide the occasion for transforming the penny press into the premier shaper of public information and public opinion.
¹⁰

The
New York Herald,
founded in 1835, boasted the largest circulation of penny papers in the country, with more than seventy-seven thousand daily subscribers in 1860. The paper’s publisher, James Gordon Bennett, was no friend of President Lincoln or the abolitionists and initially resisted the drumbeat of patriotism. In the weeks preceding Sumter, Bennett seemed almost more sympathetic with the South than with the Lincoln administration when he praised a speech by Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States of America, as “a statesmanlike exposition of the views of the moderate Southern leaders.” Of Lincoln’s administration, he complained, “Through lukewarmness, greed of place, and an overweening desire to retain popularity with the ultraists of New England and the Northwest, they also have concluded to take no efficient step towards peacefully solving the difficulties that embarrass the country.”
¹¹

When Sumter fell, Bennett turned, as usual, to the business community for direction. Good money managers that they were, their initial response was caution:

Still wishing to paint Lincoln into the abolitionist camp of Garrison and other radical abolitionists like Boston’s Wendell Phillips, he asserted that “[a]s for Wendell Phillips, he must be fairly exulting over the terrible business. Every boom of the guns from Sumter or Moultrie is sweet music to the ears of the fanatics who have toiled and prayed for years for the destruction of the Union.”
¹²

The mass meeting in the park never took place. Bennett soon changed his tune as well. Local emotions turned him into a patriot. The symbol of that support was the flag. Those who refused to fly it did so at their own risk. On April 17, after a mob had forced him to fly the American flag over his offices, Bennett went on to show his stripes with provocative rhetoric:

The
Herald’s
greatest rival and sparring partner, Horace Greeley’s
New York Tribune,
proved quicker on the patriotic draw. The first headline ran: “War Begun. The Jeff. Davis Rebellion, claiming to be the Confederate government of the seven States which profess to have seceded from the Federal Union, commenced formal war upon the United States by opening fire on Fort Sumter at 4 o’clock yesterday moming.”
¹³

Clearly this was not a time for sober moral reflection but for immediate, visceral exclamation. While unable to include an account of the attack for the morning edition of April 12, the paper issued a sensational evening “extra”—the first of many more to come in a society starved for news. Although extras had been issued ever since Bennett first introduced them at the Herald in the 1830s, their reach was limited and their appearance rare. The Civil War would transform the extra into a more frequent, electric event beginning with the attack on Sumter.

In an early instance of “making” news, Greeley reported as “news” the great success of his extra in the next morning’s edition:

Throughout the following days, the
Tribune
focused on the war effort. On April 15 it read: “South Carolina has thus formally and willfully inaugurated war, and upon no other pretext than that the President desired to save Major Anderson’s command from starvation.” Four days later,
Tribune
writers called for a massive escalation of forces: “The defection of Virginia shows that little can be hoped for from the loyalty of the dominant party in the Border slave states, and the Government should prepare for a great war. At least 200,000 men should be called out in addition to the regular army”
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To nineteenth-century readers those numbers would have appeared shocking. Little could they imagine how terribly right Greeley would turn out to be.

There were some hesitant exceptions, to be sure. The Democratic congressman from Ohio, Samuel S. Cox, did not accept secession, asserting, “I call this secession, revolution.” But he also stood against Lincoln and the war response, pleading for compromise instead.
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An even stronger response appeared on May 4, 1861, when the radical reformer and freethinker Thomas Nichols launched a newspaper in New York entitled
The Age.
The paper would publish only one issue before Nichols fled to England. The religious and political tone of the paper was unusually irenic. Nichols would not be overcome by patriotism; he realized that wars were more easily declared than won.
¹⁷
To Northern Republicans filled with unalloyed confidence in their superiority of arms and technology, he issued a sober—and prescient—warning: