The first shot of the Civil War is said to have been fired by a newspaper editor. In the early-morning dark of April 12, 1861, Edmund Ruffin, a self-declared hater of the "Yankee race," volunteered for the symbolic task; the round he fired, wrote historian Shelby Foote, "drew a red parabola against the sky and burst with a glare, outlining the dark pentagon of Fort Sumter." Four thousand more rounds were needed to induce the Fort's surrender; 620,000 Americans would die in the war that was there begun.
Hence the first lesson of Fort Sumter: War is too important to be left to the journalists.
But that isn't the only lesson, and Fort Sumter is worth remembering for reasons other than today's sesquicentennial. The crisis over the Charleston harbor fort had been brewing since South Carolina's secession the previous December, which included the demand that federal forces leave the state. It came closer to a head with Abraham Lincoln's pledge, in his first inaugural on March 4, 1861, to "hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the government." Fort Sumter was one of four federal forts in what by then was Confederate territory.
The next day, Lincoln received a report from Maj. Robert Anderson, Fort Sumter's commander, that he had only six weeks of provisions left. Lincoln then asked his top general, Winfield Scott, what it would take to hold the fort. Scott answered that 25,000 soldiers would be required, and that it would take six to eight months to organize a relief flotilla. At the time, the entire U.S. army numbered 16,000 men.
That advice led straight to the conclusion that the garrison would have to be abandoned. But Lincoln was loath to agree, not least because he believed that the fort's surrender would be "utterly ruinous . . . that, at home, it would discourage the friends of the Union, embolden its adversaries, and go far to insure to the latter, a recognition abroad." So he looked for, and got, a second military opinion from former Navy Lt. Gustavus Vasa Fox, who had an ingenious (and ultimately untested) plan to relieve the fort by sea.
Hence the second lesson: The views of senior military officials are not dispositive. Presidents have a responsibility to scout around for options. And the question of the "objective" military situation always has to be weighed against broader political and psychological goals.
Yet Lincoln also faced vexing political and psychological questions. Just as his first inaugural had promised to hold fast to federal property, he had promised, too, that the first shot would not come from him. "The government will not assail you," he had told his "dissatisfied fellow countrymen" in the South. "You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors."
View Full Image
gloview0412
Corbis
Illustration of the Bombardment of Fort Sumter
gloview0412
gloview0412
As most of Lincoln's cabinet saw it, the resupply of the fort was bound to be viewed by Southerners as an act of aggression. Secretary of State William Seward, who thought of himself as the brains behind the throne, fretted that an expedition would "provoke combat, and probably initiate a war." He was particularly keen to shore up Unionist sentiment in slave states that hadn't yet seceded, particularly Virginia.
Seward's advice to Lincoln was to change the subject. He wanted to abandon Fort Sumter but save face by relieving Fort Pickens in Florida. He wanted to let the seven seceding states go without a fight so they could stew in their own juices. He wanted to pick quarrels with foreign powers to turn American energies toward a common cause.
Lincoln would have none of this. "Stand firm," he advised one congressman. "The tug has to come and better now, than any time hereafter." Hence the third lesson: Crises cannot be solved by deflecting the issue, or by postponing the reckoning, or by compromising on core principles. And conciliation has its limits.
Lincoln thus embarked on an attempt to relieve Fort Sumter. By then, most of his cabinet had come around to supporting the effort, demonstrating a fourth lesson: Determined leadership tends to beget devoted followership. But the expedition quickly devolved into a comedy of military errors, with Lincoln inadvertently signing contradictory orders as to just which fort, Sumter or Pickens, the Navy's most powerful ship should be sent to relieve.
The blame for the mix-up might fairly have been laid on Seward. Yet Lincoln, according to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, "took upon himself the whole blame—said it was carelessness, heedlessness on his part—he ought to have been more attentive." Hence lessons five and six: In war, execution is critical. But what is absolutely paramount is that the president assume ultimate responsibility for the failures of his administration.
Throughout the crisis, Lincoln remained determined to preserve the moral high ground in the contest for public opinion. Ruffin's shot gave him that. Maj. Anderson surrendered after a 34-hour bombardment. Lincoln called for 75,000 army volunteers and immediately got 92,000. Which offers a final lesson: Small and temporary reversals in battle can lay the foundations for eventual and lasting triumph in war.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label News. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Civil War's dirty secret about slavery
Editor's note: James DeWolf Perry and Katrina Browne work at the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery and appear in Browne's PBS documentary, "Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North." They are descendants of the DeWolf family of Rhode Island, which from 1769 to 1820 brought more enslaved Africans to the Americas than any other family.
(CNN) -- This week marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, a war that redefined national and regional identities and became an enduring tale of noble resistance in the South and, for the rest of the country, a mighty moral struggle to erase the stain of slavery.
On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on the beleaguered Union garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. By April 14, the fort had fallen and the war had begun in earnest.
By the time Fort Sumter was again in Union hands, following the evacuation of Charleston in the closing days of the war in 1865, the war had become the bloodiest in the nation's history -- and has not been surpassed. Yet the relationship of the North to the South, and to slavery before and during the war is not at all what we remember today. The reality is that both North and South were profoundly complicit in slavery and deeply reluctant to abolish our nation's "peculiar institution."
To see this, start by considering the response of New York City to secession. On January 7, 1861, after the secession of South Carolina but before any other state joined in rebellion, Mayor Fernando Wood delivered his annual message to the New York City Council. Would the mayor of the largest and wealthiest northern city denounce the southern cause? Rally his fellow citizens around the Union and its president-elect, Abraham Lincoln? Perhaps lament the necessity of a bloody moral struggle to abolish slavery?
Both North and South were profoundly complicit in slavery and deeply reluctant to abolish our nation's 'peculiar institution.'
--James Perry and Katrina Browne
Wood did none of these things. Instead, he announced that New York offered "friendly relations and a common sympathy" with the "aggrieved brethren of the slave states." He then offered the bold proposal that New York City secede, as well, forming an independent city-state. This move, he argued, "would have the whole and united support of the southern states" and would allow the city to avoid breaking off its existing relationships with the slave states.
Of course, New York did not secede from the Union. But why did this northern mayor, along with many of his fellow citizens, so dramatically embrace the southern cause?
The first answer is cotton. Cotton -- southern, slave-picked cotton -- was the mainstay of New York City's antebellum economy, and indeed, of the North's. In 1860, the South produced 2.3 billion pounds of cotton, accounting for two-thirds of world production and more than half the value of all U.S. exports. Most of this wealth, however, flowed north and west, as these regions provided the financing, insurance, marketing, transportation, foodstuffs and manufactured goods for southern slave plantations. Even the growing industrialization of the North took the form of cotton textile mills, which were dependent on southern cotton production.
The critical linkage of northern industrialization and southern slavery, while generally ignored or downplayed in the past, has been drawing increasing attention from historians, as brought out at a conference on slavery and the U.S. economy this past week, organized by Seth Rockman of Brown University and Sven Beckert of Harvard University.
No one profited more handsomely from the cotton trade and the textile industry than New York's financial and maritime interests. Yet Wood was not in the pocket of big business; he was a populist supported by the city's working-class immigrants. New York's laborers, bolstered by waves of Irish and other immigrants, were just as dependent for their modest wages on King Cotton, and like other ordinary northerners, they knew it.
This leads us to the second answer: Racism. The North had seen slave-owning slowly fade away, and had grudgingly passed emancipation laws to gradually eliminate slavery over generations. Yet even as northern slavery was dying out -- indeed, precisely because it was -- free blacks in the North were increasingly ill-treated.
Draconian laws tightly controlled the lives and employment of free blacks, and black families were being driven out of northern towns by being deemed poor or disorderly or simply through armed attack. Finally, as the North began to erase responsibility for two centuries of slave-owning from its collective memory, an ideology of black racial inferiority arose to justify the impoverished conditions and harsh treatment of a free black population.
In the same vein, wealthy northern business interests had little regard for enslaved people in the South on whose labor their profits depended. And the working class viewed southern slaves not with sympathy, but as economic competition whose working conditions -- they mistakenly thought -- were no worse than those of northern "wage slaves." This is why New York City's working class, rioting against the Union draft in 1863, would turn to lynching free black men, women and children in the streets.
Abolition was a radical cause embraced by only a minority in the North. Northerners would march to war in vast numbers not to end slavery, but to preserve the Union.
The sesquicentennial of the Civil War -- 2011 to 2015 -- could easily become an occasion to rehash tired old myths: righteous northerners fighting to abolish slavery and proud southerners defending states' rights and the southern way of life. These beliefs provide each side with the smug view that history vindicates its actions and absolves it of responsibility for slavery.
Instead, let's use this anniversary to face and learn from our shared history in all its complexity. In this way, we can take a fresh look not only at the legacy of the Civil War for race in our society, but at lingering tensions between North and South, as well.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writers.
(CNN) -- This week marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War, a war that redefined national and regional identities and became an enduring tale of noble resistance in the South and, for the rest of the country, a mighty moral struggle to erase the stain of slavery.
On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on the beleaguered Union garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. By April 14, the fort had fallen and the war had begun in earnest.
By the time Fort Sumter was again in Union hands, following the evacuation of Charleston in the closing days of the war in 1865, the war had become the bloodiest in the nation's history -- and has not been surpassed. Yet the relationship of the North to the South, and to slavery before and during the war is not at all what we remember today. The reality is that both North and South were profoundly complicit in slavery and deeply reluctant to abolish our nation's "peculiar institution."
To see this, start by considering the response of New York City to secession. On January 7, 1861, after the secession of South Carolina but before any other state joined in rebellion, Mayor Fernando Wood delivered his annual message to the New York City Council. Would the mayor of the largest and wealthiest northern city denounce the southern cause? Rally his fellow citizens around the Union and its president-elect, Abraham Lincoln? Perhaps lament the necessity of a bloody moral struggle to abolish slavery?
Both North and South were profoundly complicit in slavery and deeply reluctant to abolish our nation's 'peculiar institution.'
--James Perry and Katrina Browne
Wood did none of these things. Instead, he announced that New York offered "friendly relations and a common sympathy" with the "aggrieved brethren of the slave states." He then offered the bold proposal that New York City secede, as well, forming an independent city-state. This move, he argued, "would have the whole and united support of the southern states" and would allow the city to avoid breaking off its existing relationships with the slave states.
Of course, New York did not secede from the Union. But why did this northern mayor, along with many of his fellow citizens, so dramatically embrace the southern cause?
The first answer is cotton. Cotton -- southern, slave-picked cotton -- was the mainstay of New York City's antebellum economy, and indeed, of the North's. In 1860, the South produced 2.3 billion pounds of cotton, accounting for two-thirds of world production and more than half the value of all U.S. exports. Most of this wealth, however, flowed north and west, as these regions provided the financing, insurance, marketing, transportation, foodstuffs and manufactured goods for southern slave plantations. Even the growing industrialization of the North took the form of cotton textile mills, which were dependent on southern cotton production.
The critical linkage of northern industrialization and southern slavery, while generally ignored or downplayed in the past, has been drawing increasing attention from historians, as brought out at a conference on slavery and the U.S. economy this past week, organized by Seth Rockman of Brown University and Sven Beckert of Harvard University.
No one profited more handsomely from the cotton trade and the textile industry than New York's financial and maritime interests. Yet Wood was not in the pocket of big business; he was a populist supported by the city's working-class immigrants. New York's laborers, bolstered by waves of Irish and other immigrants, were just as dependent for their modest wages on King Cotton, and like other ordinary northerners, they knew it.
This leads us to the second answer: Racism. The North had seen slave-owning slowly fade away, and had grudgingly passed emancipation laws to gradually eliminate slavery over generations. Yet even as northern slavery was dying out -- indeed, precisely because it was -- free blacks in the North were increasingly ill-treated.
Draconian laws tightly controlled the lives and employment of free blacks, and black families were being driven out of northern towns by being deemed poor or disorderly or simply through armed attack. Finally, as the North began to erase responsibility for two centuries of slave-owning from its collective memory, an ideology of black racial inferiority arose to justify the impoverished conditions and harsh treatment of a free black population.
In the same vein, wealthy northern business interests had little regard for enslaved people in the South on whose labor their profits depended. And the working class viewed southern slaves not with sympathy, but as economic competition whose working conditions -- they mistakenly thought -- were no worse than those of northern "wage slaves." This is why New York City's working class, rioting against the Union draft in 1863, would turn to lynching free black men, women and children in the streets.
Abolition was a radical cause embraced by only a minority in the North. Northerners would march to war in vast numbers not to end slavery, but to preserve the Union.
The sesquicentennial of the Civil War -- 2011 to 2015 -- could easily become an occasion to rehash tired old myths: righteous northerners fighting to abolish slavery and proud southerners defending states' rights and the southern way of life. These beliefs provide each side with the smug view that history vindicates its actions and absolves it of responsibility for slavery.
Instead, let's use this anniversary to face and learn from our shared history in all its complexity. In this way, we can take a fresh look not only at the legacy of the Civil War for race in our society, but at lingering tensions between North and South, as well.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writers.
Lone mortar shell in Charleston opens 150th anniversary of Civil War
By Douglas Stanglin, USA TODAY
Update at 10:12 a.m. ET: Cannon roared today in Hartford, Conn., to mark the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the bloody four-year war, The Hartford Courant reports, noting that 5,354 Connecticut men died in the conflict.
On April 13, 1861, the then-Hartford Daily Courant declared in an editorial about the assault on Fort Sumter:
Let it be forever remembered that the greatest crime committed since the crucifixion of our Saviour was wantonly and willfully committed in behalf of American Slavery!
Earlier posting: The fiery blast from a lone mortar at 6:45 a.m. today near Fort Sumter marked the start of the Civil War 150 years ago and the beginning of a four-year commemoration of the conflict that cost 600,000 lives, The Post & Courier reports.
Civil War re-enactors fire a 21-gun salute at Fort Johnson near Fort Sumter today to commemorate the moment the first shots of the Civil War were fired 150 years ago.
CAPTION
By Alice Keeney, AP
The mortar round on a grassy point near Fort Johnson in South Carolina triggered a bombardment of cannons lining the harbor toward Fort Sumter, which Union troops held April 12, 1861. A "star shell" was also fired into the sky today, signaling re-enactors who have been encamped in the Charleston area to begin reliving the attack that started the conflict.
Cannon set up around the harbor will fire throughout the morning in recognition of the bombardment, the Charleston newspaper reports.
"This was history, again, in the making," state Sen. Glen McConnell of Charleston, the main speaker at Fort Johnson, said of today's ceremony.
The lights, representing a divided nation, shine at Fort Sumter early today to commemorate the moment the first shots of the Civil War were fired in Charleston, S.C., in 1861.
CAPTION
By Alice Keeney, AP
The stage was set for this morning's events at 4 a.m. when a single beam of light reached skyward from Fort Sumter. About a half-hour later, there was a second beam signifying a nation torn in two.
The Associated Press recalled a dispatch to the AP in 1861 by an unnamed correspondent who observed the bombardment of Fort Sumter. He wrote of gun emplacements being "shot away" and shells falling "thick and fast."
"The ball has opened. War is inaugurated ... Fort Sumter has returned the fire, and brisk cannonading has been kept up," the correspondent wrote.
Update at 10:12 a.m. ET: Cannon roared today in Hartford, Conn., to mark the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the bloody four-year war, The Hartford Courant reports, noting that 5,354 Connecticut men died in the conflict.
On April 13, 1861, the then-Hartford Daily Courant declared in an editorial about the assault on Fort Sumter:
Let it be forever remembered that the greatest crime committed since the crucifixion of our Saviour was wantonly and willfully committed in behalf of American Slavery!
Earlier posting: The fiery blast from a lone mortar at 6:45 a.m. today near Fort Sumter marked the start of the Civil War 150 years ago and the beginning of a four-year commemoration of the conflict that cost 600,000 lives, The Post & Courier reports.
Civil War re-enactors fire a 21-gun salute at Fort Johnson near Fort Sumter today to commemorate the moment the first shots of the Civil War were fired 150 years ago.
CAPTION
By Alice Keeney, AP
The mortar round on a grassy point near Fort Johnson in South Carolina triggered a bombardment of cannons lining the harbor toward Fort Sumter, which Union troops held April 12, 1861. A "star shell" was also fired into the sky today, signaling re-enactors who have been encamped in the Charleston area to begin reliving the attack that started the conflict.
Cannon set up around the harbor will fire throughout the morning in recognition of the bombardment, the Charleston newspaper reports.
"This was history, again, in the making," state Sen. Glen McConnell of Charleston, the main speaker at Fort Johnson, said of today's ceremony.
The lights, representing a divided nation, shine at Fort Sumter early today to commemorate the moment the first shots of the Civil War were fired in Charleston, S.C., in 1861.
CAPTION
By Alice Keeney, AP
The stage was set for this morning's events at 4 a.m. when a single beam of light reached skyward from Fort Sumter. About a half-hour later, there was a second beam signifying a nation torn in two.
The Associated Press recalled a dispatch to the AP in 1861 by an unnamed correspondent who observed the bombardment of Fort Sumter. He wrote of gun emplacements being "shot away" and shells falling "thick and fast."
"The ball has opened. War is inaugurated ... Fort Sumter has returned the fire, and brisk cannonading has been kept up," the correspondent wrote.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)