150 Years Ago

April 14 – 20, 1861

Fort Sumter has capitulated. Major Anderson’s gallant band of troops have arrived in New York, where a crowd counted in the tens of thousands jammed the never more determinedly named Union Square to salute his bullet-torn flag. Now the Stars and Bars, the newfangled flag of the Confederacy, ripples in the breezes over Charleston Harbor. But the battle that ended that crisis has resolved only a minor issue, clearing the stage for a conflict that promises to be ever so much more lethal.

The battle has galvanized both sides. Southerners, who are seldom reluctant to boast about their fighting skills or to invent occasions to demonstrate them, have been crowing like a rooster who has made a thousand suns arise. The Atlanta Confederacy wrote, “If the fanatical Nigger Republican North is resolved to force [war] upon us, we are ready to meet it.” Governor Francis Pickens of South Carolina — a man whose ridiculous wig and ham-handed leadership were much mocked by Charleston’s elites during the Sumter crisis, but who is now lauded as one of the many fathers of this glorious victory — thumped his chest and boasted, “Let it lead to what it might, even if it leads to blood and ruin. … We have defeated their twenty millions, we have met them and conquered them. We have humbled the flag of the United States before the Palmetto and the Confederate.”

But Major Anderson’s steely defense of Sumter and the insult inflicted on Old Glory have inspired the North as well. “All squeamish sentimentality should be discarded, and bloody vengeance wreaked upon the heads of the contemptible traitors,” said the Columbus (Ohio) Daily Capital City Fact. Said Senator Stephen Douglas, the president’s erstwhile electoral rival, “There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots or traitors.” Everywhere in the North, flags and bunting were hung from every window and porch rail; in Pittsburgh, lampposts sported nooses, sashed with the slogan “Death to Traitors!” The word seldom spoken as states seceded is now on every lip.

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