Sumter falls—Sherman repairs to Washington—His Interview with
the Secretary of War and the President—His Prophetic Insight of
the Threatening Times—The state of the Country—Rebel
Expectations.
THE traitorous Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, had not lost sight of
the probable uprising of the South at no distant period, for a moment,
during all of his official career. Every fort on her soil was made an
easy prey to her rebellious hand by reducing their garrisons.
The magnificent Fortress Monroe, on which the United States had expended
nearly two and a half millions, could muster only eight companies of
artillery. The forts, Moultrie, Pinckney, and Sumter, of Charleston
harbor, had only eighty men, who were in Fort Moultrie.
And yet, had you been in the Halls of Congress when Mr. Clarke, of New
Hampshire, offered a resolution of inquiry into the condition of those
defences, you would have heard a storm of apparently virtuous
indignation from Jefferson Davis and his fellow-conspirators, as if the
intimation of treachery were an insult to Southern chivalry.
A week later General Anderson and his band, loyal to the national
banner, having become assured that their capture with Fort Moultrie was
designed, after destroying its equipment as far as possible, stole at
dead of night from its walls and floated over the waters to silent
Sumter, whose massive battlements promised a safer refuge from the
passions of infatuated men. The rebels immediately seized Forts Moultrie
and Pinckney; and ten days later the Star of the West, an unarmed
steamer conveying a reënforcement of two hundred and fifty soldiers and
supplies for the destitute garrison, was fired upon from newly-erected
earthworks.
The spring came with flowers and birds, but the angry storm of rebellion
beat around Sumter with increasing fury. Iron-clad batteries had risen
on every hand to cut off the approach of our ships, and grim ordnance
now pointed toward the old fortress.
April 12th a messenger approached it with a very brief message to Major
Anderson; it was, “Surrender!” The reply was nearly as short: “His sense
of honor and his obligations to the Government would prevent
compliance.”
A few hours after, and “boom! boom!” was the sound, followed with shot
and shell, against Sumter’s walls, which opened a bloody civil war. In
the iron hail the fort was scarred, and its ground covered with
exploding shells. At length the band, one-third the number of the famous
warriors at Thermopylæ, against ten thousand, saw the hopelessness of
resistance, and made honorable terms to themselves, of surrender. Every
telegraphic wire in the land, North and South, trembled to the tidings
of the battle hour.
The Hon. Thomas Ewing wrote Charles Taylor Sherman, of Washington, the
brother of William Tecumseh, to use his influence to get the latter
again into the army. He felt that he was, and _would be_ needed. The
intelligent, patriotic mind of the captain did not require _light_ for
action, but only _opportunity_.
Our railroad superintendent at St. Louis thought that all observant
people must see that a terrible conflict had begun, and like Grant in
Galena, left his office to offer his services to the Government, and his
life, if that should be the sacrifice, included in their acceptance. He
hastened to the nation’s capital. Soon after reaching Washington he
called on Secretary Cameron.
“Mr. Secretary, civil war is imminent, and we are unprepared for it. I
have come to offer my services to the country in the struggle before
us.”
“I think,” replies Mr. Cameron, “the ebullition of feeling will soon
subside, we shall not need many troops.”
Indeed the Secretary was quite surprised, if not annoyed, at the
earnestness of Captain Sherman. He next sought an interview with the
President, and made a similar statement and offer to him. The good
President was inclined to take the whole thing as a joke. After
listening to the serious enthusiasm expressed in the strong appeal, he
replied, pleasantly: “We shall not need many more like you; the whole
affair will soon blow over.”
He left the Chief Magistrate of a republic whose very existence he knew
was assailed, with a shadow of disappointment on his brave, loyal
spirit—not for himself, but for the cause near his heart. Friends then
advised him to go to Ohio and superintend the organization of three
months’ men there. He declared “it would be as wise to undertake to
extinguish the flames of a burning building with a squirt gun, as to put
down the rebellion with three months’ troops.”
To talk of any thing less than a gigantic war was to him absurd. But he
was then nearly alone in his just estimate of the struggle.