The Confederate Nation: 1861 to 1865 (10 page)

A
map of Charleston Harbor is perhaps as close as cartographers can come to sensual expression. The city of Charleston occupies a V shaped peninsula formed by the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers. Because the south Atlantic coastline is geologically advancing into the ocean, a torso-shaped body of water separates the city from the sea. Charleston Harbor is enclosed by lowlying mainland, marsh-covered islands, and sandy spits. At the “neck” of the harbor, Charleston’s channel to the Atlantic, Sullivan Island to the north and Morris Island to the south arch toward each other like collar bones and define irregular curves in the harbor shoreline behind them. Rising from the water, between the tips of Sullivan and Morris Islands lies a manmade blemish on the harbor body. At roughly the position of a geographical sternum is Fort Sumter.

When South Carolina left the Union, Sumter was unfinished; when completed the fort would dominate the entrance of Charleston Harbor and effectively control access to the port city from the sea. Supporting Sumter were other fortifications clustered about the harbor entrance. These works, too, were in various stages of construction and occupied by a small garrison of sixty troops from the United States Army whose headquarters was at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan Island. On December 19, 1860, the presence of American troops in Charleston presented no official complications. On December 20, however, the soldiers were a “foreign army” in possession of some Palmetto Republic real estate. South Carolina could hardly defend its pretensions to being an independent republic while the United States manned its military strongpoints. On the other hand, the troops were servants of the United States government entrusted with the care of government property. They could not simply abandon their posts and their duty just because some hot-headed Carolinians asked them to leave.
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South Carolina’s secession convention anticipated the problem, and on December 24 three commissioners from the convention set out for Washington to open diplomatic relations with the United States and to arrange for the transfer of public property from one government to another. Meanwhile South Carolina’s recently inaugurated Governor Francis W. Pickens and Major Robert Anderson, commander of the garrison at Moultrie, maintained the status quo. Based upon informal communications through intermediaries, Pickens believed he had an understanding with Washington that nothing would happen in Charleston Harbor until the commissioners had dealt with President James Buchanan. Anderson had orders to do nothing hostile, to protect himself and his post, but not to make martyrs of himself and his men. The Major was a Kentuckian with some sympathy toward the South. Nevertheless he was also an army officer with a strong sense of duty, and in the crisis he consistently chose duty over sympathy.
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For six days the situation remained static but tense. Advisors, official and otherwise, exhorted Pickens to seize the forts and send Anderson’s troops packing. Anderson all but pleaded with his government to give him precise instructions. His position at Fort Moultrie was indefensible; South Carolina militia could storm the place any time they wished, and from sand hills only a hundred yards outside the walls of the fort they could shoot down anyone attempting to serve Moultrie’s guns.
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By an odd coincidence, Edmund Ruffin was one of the first Confederates to notice any change in the delicate situation in Charleston Harbor. The old man had come to Charleston to witness the secession process, and another interested observer, Governor Madison S. Perry of Florida, invited Ruffin to Tallahassee to attend the Florida secession convention. On the evening of December 26, Ruffin was gazing out at the ocean from the upper deck of a steamboat bound for Fernandina when he heard two cannon shots from Fort Moultrie, about four miles astern. He wondered at the noise and assumed that the shots “must have been a signal for something….” when he heard no more firing, he dismissed the incident.
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In fact the two shots were a signal; they announced the arrival of Major Anderson’s command at Fort Sumter. At dusk on the twenty-sixth the “foreigners” moved quickly and quietly across the mile or so of water, and when the main body of troops reached the island fort, a rear guard at Moultrie fired two cannon to signal two boats loaded with the garrison’s dependents and provisions to pull for Sumter. Later the dozen men at Moultrie spiked its cannon, burned the gun carriages, and joined the rest of the command at Sumter. So carefully did Anderson plan and execute his move that Charlestonians did not discover it until the morning of the twenty-seventh.
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Reaction in the city to the concentration at Fort Sumter was immediate and ominous. Volunteer troops and local militia units filled the streets of the town while the more curious residents crowded into steeples and cupolas to view the spectacle of Yankees at Sumter. The Charleston
Mercury,
edited by Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., termed Anderson’s action an “outrageous breach of faith” and advised patriotic women to begin rolling bandages.
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Governor Pickens, who in the face of considerable criticism had pursued what he believed to be a moderate and generous policy toward the United States, was more than a little embarrassed; Anderson had responded to forebearance with trickery and had committed what many of the Governor’s constituents would view as an act of war! Pickens sent his military aide, Colonel J. Johnston Pettigrew, to Fort Sumter to demand an explanation from Anderson and “courteously but peremptorily” to order the Federals to return to Moultrie. Anderson listened to the Governor’s message, protested his ignorance of any agreement to maintain the status quo in Charleston’s forts, and firmly refused to leave Sumter. Later in the day Pettigrew, with a rifle battalion, took partial revenge on behalf of Pickens by storming Castle Pinckney, a small, weak fortification located on a shoal at the mouth of the Cooper River. In the days that followed, Carolinians seized and manned the land fortifications which surrounded Sumter. Pickens permitted mail, wives, and officers to pass between Fort Sumter and Charleston but forbade resupply of the garrison and thus added the tactic of siege to the war of nerves between himself and Anderson.
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“Anderson has opened the ball,” remarked one Charlestonian who was perhaps more perceptive than he knew.
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When the dutiful Major concentrated at Fort Sumter, he created an impasse from which there was no graceful exit. The presence of United States troops at Fort Moultrie was a diplomatic incident; a besieged garrison at Sumter transformed incident into crisis. Once Anderson made his move from an untenable position on what in essence was the mainland to a defensible island, he could hardly afford to back down.

The concentration at Sumter and Sumter’s location also limited the options of South Carolina. An attack on Fort Sumter promised success, but the cost of such victory might well be war between the United States and South Carolina, and secessionists realized that war, at this stage, was a bad idea.
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Thus the impasse remained and the crisis grew. Anderson, with four months’ supply of provisions, could afford to wait, and President James Buchanan, with only three months left in his term of office, was determined to wait. On January 5 the President did dispatch two hundred soldiers and additional arms and supplies to Fort Sumter aboard an unarmed merchant ship,
Star of the West.
When the ship reached Charleston Harbor, South Carolina batteries on Morris Island and at Fort Moultrie opened fire, and in accord with her orders the
Star of the West
turned about and steamed away. Buchanan’s gesture was essentially symbolic; the
Star of the West
incident heated tempers without solving anything, and the lameduck President did not repeat the effort to resupply or reinforce Anderson.
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As the weeks passed, however, the focus of the Sumter crisis narrowed; because Anderson’s provisions were dwindling, the issue became resupply. Mercifully for Anderson and Pickens, as the crisis deepened, responsibility for its resolution broadened. Anderson had the full attention of his ultimate commander-in-chief. And when the South Carolina delegates at Montgomery signed the provisional Constitution of Confederacy, Pickens became one among several state governors instead of the head of a sovereign republic, and Fort Sumter became the problem of Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government.
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As spring came to the new capital at Montgomery, the world looked rosy enough to inspire confidence. Relations with the United States were not yet established, but every day the Confederacy existed the Southern nation became more a fact of life in the world. True, the United States had made an issue of maintaining troops at Fort Sumter and at Fort Pickens near Pensacola, but there seemed a chance the stalemate over government property might be resolved peacefully, and if not, any armed conflict would last only long enough for the Southerners to demonstrate their determination to be a separate nation. Even if a war should drag on a bit, the Confederates were steadfast in their commitment and in the belief that they could confirm their national existence in blood. If necessary the Southern cause and Southern cotton could make their claims in Europe and secure aid or intervention on behalf of the Confederacy from a wider world. For the present, Jefferson Davis’ first priority was the creation of a working government; then that government could act for the Southern people and negotiate the Confederacy’s rites of passage into the family of nations.

After George Washington, Davis was in a position unique among American presidents, in that he had the opportunity to construct an entire executive branch of government by himself. Davis had few political debts associated with his election. Nor did he lead a political party into power—indeed, the Confederacy never developed political parties. The Confederate President was thus unencumbered as he began to fill the new nation’s patronage vacuum.

Davis did not lack helpers in his task. The lure of office made a magnet of Montgomery, and the already overfilled town bulged with would-be cabinet members, clerks, generals, bureau chiefs, and colonels. The mails carried petitions to the President or to men who might have his ear from many more potential public servants, and the numbers tended to grow geometrically as Davis chose his cabinet members and as they in turn selected their staffs. However free the President should have been to select his cabinet on the basis of merit and public virtue, in fact his choices reflected the demands of politics and geography.
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Obviously the cabinet required a “South Carolina seat.” Davis wanted Robert Barnwell to be secretary of state because he was a South Carolinian and because he had led the state’s delegation to vote for Davis as president instead of Rhett. Barnwell declined the offer but proposed Memminger as secretary of the treasury, and Davis acceded to the request. Memminger had a reputation, acquired while he was chairman of the ways and means committee of the South Carolina House of Representatives, for a conservative but quick financial mind, and indeed the frugal Charleston lawyer organized his department using the structure created by Alexander Hamilton as a model.

Fortunately, Memminger did not begin his tenure with an empty treasury. On February 8, 1861, the provisional Congress began its session with the happy duty of accepting a loan from Louisiana of $500,000 in specie seized as state property from the New Orleans mint and United States Customs Office. This action set what became an unhappy precedent; gifts, loans, and the printing press became the chief sources of support for the Confederate government. On the last day of February, Congress authorized a $ 150-million loan in the form of 8-percent bonds and provided for repayment by levying an export duty on Confederate cotton. While this loan drained patriotic Southern banks of much of their specie, Congress tapped a more available Southern resource, agricultural produce. The idea was to get Southern planters to lend their crops; then the government could convert the goods into other forms of wealth or barter for its needs with the pledged staples. Under the act of May 16, Memminger’s department could issue $50 million worth of 8- percent bonds and immediately print $20 million worth of treasury notes to circulate in lieu of specie.
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As a basis of fiscal policy, loans and paper money backed by loans were not very sound. Memminger well knew that in the long run the Confederacy would have to establish a more stable source of revenue and meet its financial needs by some system of taxation. But in 1861 he believed that the government’s needs were both extraordinary and temporary; there would be time enough for fiscal restraint when the Southern government was firmly established and the situation became normal. Moreover, like Hamilton, Memminger allowed himself to hope that the government’s instant debt would be creative in that it would stimulate Southern patriotism by making the Confederacy’s citizens its creditors. The initial success of these loans and faith accorded the treasury notes cheered Memminger and confirmed his hopes.
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Memminger’s wishful thinking presupposed peace to be the normal Confederate condition, and he was not alone in this presupposition. The Southern leaders at Montgomery had intoned the official liturgy of “peaceful secession” so often that many of them had come to believe it.
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The President, though, could not afford to be so sanguine; and therefore the needs of the War Department had high priority. There is evidence that Davis preferred Braxton Bragg, a professional soldier, for war secretary; but he realized that governments are political constructions and thus felt obliged to choose a civilian politician to run the War Office. The cabinet required an Alabamian in a prominent place, and Leroy Pope Walker wanted the War Office. Initially the choice appeared fortuitous. Walker had been a lawyer and active Democratic politician; he was also a hardworking administrator. Davis hoped that his own talents, which he believed were more military than political, would meld well with those of Walker, and for a brief time they did.
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