A Place Called Appomattox

4. The Parting

4 THE PARTING One of the mail bags that arrived during the Clover Hill muster carried letters of appointment from Governor John Letcher, who tried to achieve political balance in selecting county commissioners for the presidential election. He chose a former Whig, Thomas H. Flood, a unionist Democrat in Flood’s cousin, Henry Bocock, and Crawford Jones, a fire-eating radical . Many in Appomattox evidently shared the moderation and tolerance displayed by Letcher (a Douglas Democrat who had carried a 207-vote majority in the county the year before), for when a John Bell congressional elector came through early in October that constitutional unionist drew a patient crowd at the courthouse.1 The three-way split in the Democratic Party, which otherwise might have attracted Southern Whigs, merely assured the election of the Republican , Abraham Lincoln. No sooner did that probability arise than the governor of South Carolina began advocating secession and mobilization if Lincoln did win. Some Virginians concurred, but even most of the hardline defenders of slavery adopted a softer tone when it came to dissolution of the union. Home to campaign for reelection early in November, Thomas Bocock tried to persuade a Danville audience that Virginia ought to remain in the union and act as mediator between the national government and any Deep South states that did secede. The ever-cautious Lynchburg Virginian applauded Bocock’s advice, but that sentiment failed to carry Appomattox County, and when the citizens cast their votes it was largely for Breckinridge, the slave Democrat. Of the 794 men who exercised the franchise that autumn, 563 chose Breckinridge and 221 voted for Bell, who carried Virginia by just 358 votes. Only Map 4. Appomattox Court House, 1860 ten Appomattox residents backed Douglas, and not a single Lincoln man could be found in the entire county.2 Lincoln nevertheless prevailed nationwide. South Carolina called its secession convention as threatened, but still Virginia hesitated. Trouble soon surfaced over the U.S. forts in Charleston Harbor, which South Carolina sought to acquire—the hard way, if necessary. In the North, fervent union men clamored for the reinforcement of those forts, but a lame-duck president declined to act at all. Clinging to the theory that his state’s rights could better be achieved in the union than out of it (and perhaps reflecting that his political ambitions could be more easily realized in the U.S. Congress than in any other), Thomas Bocock enlisted all the aid he could to persuade his constituents. He apparently even lobbied indirectly for restraint among South Carolinians after their state formally voted to secede. Three days before Christmas the congressman’s brother, Reverend John Bocock, sat at his desk in Georgetown and scratched off a letter to a fellow Presbyterian minister in Columbia. Remarking that he had just spoken with ‘‘a friend’’ who had spent part of the day advising President Buchanan on the forts (his brother Thomas, no doubt), Reverend Bocock { t h e p a r t i n g } 79 explained that Buchanan’s forbearance had cost the president dearly in the North. That, Bocock suggested, put South Carolina under ‘‘a Sort of obligation of honor’’ not to make an unprovoked attack against the federal bastions while Buchanan remained in office. ‘‘If a collision of arms can be avoided,’’ Bocock wrote, ‘‘all may yet be well. . . . The collision will drench the continent in blood, as well as deeply stain the honor of Carolina, as an ungenerous return for the great sacri- fices the President has made to show her kindness.’’3 Reverend Bocock’s letter had probably not even been delivered when the post commander at Charleston changed the complexion of the crisis by ferrying his garrison from the vulnerable quarters at Fort Moultrie to the more defensible Fort Sumter, in the middle of the harbor. South Carolinians raged over the movement, considering it an act of aggression rather than simple defense, and the Buchanan cabinet wrangled over it. While the president regretted the transfer, he refused to order the garrison back to Moultrie. His secretary of war, former Virginia governor John B. Floyd, resigned in nominal outrage over what he considered a breached promise to South Carolina, though Floyd’s departure may have been hastened by a growing controversy over his mishandling of federal funds. The days following Fort Sumter’s occupation saw secession conventions meet in the Gulf states, and...