Charleston, City of Mourners: Anticipations of Civil War in the Cradle of Secession

On Saturday morning, January 19, 1861, a Northern journalist steamed into Charleston Harbor aboard the Columbia. Skirting the “massive, commanding, and formidable” hulk of Fort Sumter, the ship docked at the nascent republic of South Carolina. The unnamed correspondent stayed ten days, taking the pulse of a citizenry energized, and yet divided, by the prospect of war. Everywhere, Charlestonians discussed “those two eternal subjects, Secession and Fort Sumter.” Secession was electrifying; Sumter was vexing. Perched on an island three miles from downtown, the fortress defied armchair strategists, whose schemes for seizing it ranged from frontal attacks to stink bombs that would drive the garrison back to Yankeedom. “Young and thoughtless” hotspurs craved war, but many of their elders gagged at the idea of risking their genteel lives against the “gang of Irishmen, Germans, British deserters, and New York roughs” manning the fort. Excruciating anxiety united white Charlestonians: how long would they teeter on the verge of combat? Locals postponed clothing purchases, lest Sumter’s guns rake the city and compel them to wear mourning black. They flinched when doors slammed and quivered when cannons fired, even to celebrate Louisiana’s secession on the twenty-sixth. And always, their conversations circled back to the awaited assault. One impatient soldier loudly berated a civilian friend: “‘Why, good Heaven, Jim! do you want that place to go peaceably into the hands of Lincoln?’” Jim emphatically denied the charge, but added a warning. “‘I tell you, Fred, when the fort is attacked, it will be the bloodiest day,—the bloodiest day!—the bloodiest—!!’” Suddenly speechless, Jim “flung his arms wildly about, ground his tobacco with excitement, spit on all sides, and walked away, shaking his head . . . in real grief of spirit.”¹

Three themes pervade the journalist’s account: Fort Sumter’s strength, dread of a costly assault, and anticipations of an even bloodier civil war. Since late December 1860, secessionists had coveted the fort, the last Federal stronghold in the Palmetto State. But white Charlestonians differed over the expediency of an assault. Many envisioned appalling short- and long-term consequences. Would Charleston Harbor run red with the blood of Carolina’s finest? Would the resulting war claim even more lives? Despite Charleston’s reputation for fire-eating politics and military ardor, these questions plagued the city’s diverse white population during the secession winter of 1860–61. Charlestonians did not rush blindly into a catastrophe, in part because Fort Sumter constantly reminded them of war’s grim costs. Yet, their candid forecasts of a bloody and protracted conflict did not foster an organized peace movement, largely because the meanings of “bloody war” talk varied widely. As Elizabeth R. Varon has shown, antebellum Americans used “disunion” discourse to predict the future, threaten rivals, and tar opponents as traitors.² After South Carolina seceded, anticipations of war played similarly diverse roles in Charlestonians’ public and private discussions of the future. Ardent secessionists, reluctant disunionists, and unionists appealed to the prospect of bloodshed for their own purposes. Forebodings of violence at Fort Sumter and beyond did not uniformly point toward moderation or compromise.

This emphasis on powerful but diverse anticipations of bloodshed cuts against the grain of Civil War historiography. Often, the bombardment of Fort Sumter serves as an ironic interlude between secessionist vitriol and Civil War carnage or as a milestone on Americans’ impulsive rush to war. That Sumter’s defenders capitulated after an artillery duel that killed no one is, in retrospect, ironic, given the slaughter soon to come. According to one oft-repeated phrase, the bombardment was “a bloodless opening to the bloodiest war in American history.”³ That Sumter was undermanned and unfinished after three decades of fitful construction enhances its symbolic significance. Like the incomplete US Capitol dome or the half-built Washington Monument, Sumter’s unmounted guns and empty embrasures readily represent the nation’s political and military immaturity. Dismissed by one historian as “unfit for service,” Fort Sumter provides an ideal setting for tales of naïfs plunging into the abyss.⁴

Embedded in these narratives...