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Christmas 1860
Wishes for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year carried vastly different meanings in the North and the South in 1860.
By contemporary standards, mid-nineteenth century Christmas celebrations in the United States were low-keyed affairs. Even in the affluent and sophisticated cities of the East, only a relatively few families had adopted the European customs of having a decorated tree in the parlor or sending Christmas cards. Most people observed the holiday by attending church services and enjoying special meals with family and friends. Children looked forward to gifts, usually modest, brought by St. Nicholas.
Most families went about celebrating Christmas in their usual manner in December of 1860, but the actions of pro-secessionists made peace and goodwill increasingly rare commodities.
As soon as Abraham Lincoln became the Republican candidate for the presidency in May of 1860, many southern politicians began discussing secession, an old theme, in earnest. Lincoln had no interest in abolishing slavery where it then existed but intended to prevent its extension into future states carved from the western territories. This position would not interfere with their internal society, but it would put the southern states at a distinct political disadvantage: Outnumbered by free states, they would be outvoted on most issues.
Secession was the answer, a legal, peaceable, logical answer as far as the pro-slavery firebrands, who believed withdrawing from the Union would be as easy as pulling a horse from a race, were concerned. The southern states would simply resign from the Union, federal troops and employees would turn over all United States facilities to the states, and life would continue.
With Lincoln’s election on November 6, talk quickly turned into action. On November 9, South Carolina, which had been threatening to secede for three decades, called for a convention to discuss leaving the Union. Without waiting for the outcome of the convention, scheduled for December 17, South Carolina’s senators, James Chesnut and James H. Hammond, resigned their seats on November 10th and 11th, respectively; the state’s representatives followed suit on December 20. State militia units stepped up recruitment and training for taking over the operation of federal facilities.
In Georgia, Governor Joe Brown wrote an open letter to the people less than 24-hours after Lincoln’s election. Using inflammatory rhetoric and post hoc fallacies, he touted secession as a necessity. A few days later, Alexander Stephens, a former Georgia state legislator and United States congressman, responded with a thoughtful, cogent speech urging Georgians to remain in the Union. Unlike Brown, Stephens relied on logic to build his case. Most Georgians, unfortunately, were caught up in the emotional frenzy created by Brown, and on December 14, Georgia called for a convention of southern states to form an independent union. Only days earlier, Tennessee’s governor, Isham Harris, had called for a special session of his state’s legislature to consider secession.
The border state of Virginia did not immediately jump on the secession bandwagon. However, residents of western Virginia realized the state would join her southern neighbors if they exited the Union and decided, in effect, to seceed from the Old Dominion. On November 12, Preston County held an initial organizational meeting aimed at remaining in the Union. It was the first step in the creation of a new free state, West Virginia.
As the days wore on, South Carolina grew increasingly recalcitrant. Not only did she expect to be handed the federal facilities in the port city of Charleston upon secession, she made clear that any attempt by Buchanan to strengthn U. S. military facilities there in the interim would be construed as aggression and met with force from the state militia. Boats patrolled the harbor to challenge any suspicious vessels or activities.
In Washington, James Buchanan faced four miserable months as a lame duck president. With states threatening to secede and legislators resigning, he found himself facing an unprecedented crisis. In his State of the Union message delivered on December 4, he claimed the Constitution did not give states the right to withdraw from the Union. On the other hand, he also said it did not provide a method by which the federal government could prevent states from leaving.
Making matters worse for Buchanan, his cabinet, the men to whom he would normally turn for advice, was crumbling, largely along sectional lines. Treasury Secretary Howell Cobb, a pro-secessionist Georgian, resigned on December 8. Four days later, Northerner Lewis Cass resigned as Secretary of State when Buchanan refused to augment the small garrison at Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor. Finally, on December 23, Buchanan asked for the resignation of Secretary of War John Floyd, a Virginian.
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The South Carolina Secessionist Convention voted unanimously to secede and appointed a committee to draw up official documents for withdrawl from the United States. When the Ordinance of Secession was approved by the Convention on December 20, incoming governor Francis Pickens demanded that Buchanan hand control of the Charleston Harbor forts to South Carolina; three days later, the state selected three commissioners to facilitate the delivery of the federal lands to the state.
Buchanan was in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t situation. If he relinquished the Charleston forts and other federal facilities to South Carolina, Northerners would be enraged. If he attempted to retain control of them by sending additional troops to Charleston, Southerners would brand him as a viscious attacker. His best hope was to do as little as possible and wish for secession fever to run its course and allow cooler heads to prevail, at least until he could turn the whole mess over to Lincoln on March 4th.
Meanwhile, Lincoln was in Springfield dealing with hordes of well-wishers, job seekers, political advisors, and reporters, as well as mountains of correspondence, both congratulatory and critical. He was, of course, keeping an eye on the situation, and the demands of putting his cabinet together as Buchanan’s was falling apart left him little time for celebrating Mrs. Lincoln’s birthday on December 13 and Willie’s on December 21. Authors Thomas J. Dybaand George L. Painter report that on Christmas Eve “Lincoln purchased eleven handkerchiefs to be given as Christmas presents,” but they do not say for whom they were intended. Perhaps one went to Lincoln’s long-time friend Edward D. Baker, a newly-elected senator from Oregon, who had returned to Springfield to visit his step-daughter. Lincoln made an unannounced Christmas Eve visit to her home to visit with his old comrade.
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The names of Buchanan and Lincoln were on the lips of Americans as both halves of the country attempted to analyze the import of what the two leaders had said, done, and were likely to do. However, a third man, whose name was not yet a household word, was about to steal the spotlight.
He was Major Robert Anderson, the 55-year-old professional soldier assigned on November 15 to command the United States forces in Charleston Harbor. Those forces included eight officers, sixty-one men, a thirteen-member band, a surgeon, and an engineer garrisoned in Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island. Anderson found Moultrie, the only occupied fort in the harbor, surrounded by a village and completely indefensible. He sent numerous requests for assistance and advice to Washington, receiving none of the former and only small, ambiguous amounts of the latter. In effect, he was told to do nothing that South Carolina could perceive as threatening but to defend the forts vigorously.
Anderson quickly determined that unfinished Fort Sumter on a man-made island in the harbor was the most defensible site and stepped up work on it. In doing so, he took some risk as the work was being done by mostly local laborers who carried reports of its progess to South Carolina officials. The South Carolinians apparently felt that having the Union pay citizens wages to construct a harbor defense the state inteded to occupy shortly was a good deal, and construction on the fort was allowed to continue.
Once South Carolina seceded on December 20, Anderson knew his situation was critical. He would be asked to surrender the Union’s harbor forts and would refuse to do so. If he remained at Fort Moultrie, state militia forces would easily enter that weak establishment and destroy his small command. He determined to remove his garrison to the stronger Fort Sumter to prevent “the effusion of blood”.
Anderson wrote his wife a letter on Chritmas Day and apologized for not having sent her a Christmas gift. Although he did not say so, he had been too busy planning the evacuation of Fort Moultire to go shopping. Keeping his plans and preparations secret from his subordinates until the last possible moments, Anderson arranged the move for the night of December 26. His plans went off without a hitch. Even when a harbor patrol boat came within sight of one of the small barges carrying men and supplies to Sumter, it failed to issue a challenge, probably because of the quick thinking of the barge’s commander. Captain Abner Doubleday ordered his men to remove their brass-buttoned coats and throw them over their rifles, creating the impression that the barge contained civilian laborers headed for another day of work on Fort Sumter.
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The close of the Christmas season of 1860 found the North and the South facing off in a game of chicken across the waters of Charleston Harbor. The season had not been a pleasant one, but most Americans assumed that the contentious issues would somehow be resolved and looked forward to a merrier holiday in 1861.
Others, however, realized that war would follow southern secession and that it would be a horrific event. Among them were Robert E. Lee and William Tecumseh Sherman. December of 1860 found them both living in the South. Lieutenant Colonel Lee was in Texas thinking of his family enjoying what would be their final Christmas at Arlington House. In a letter to his wife, he wrote of his hope that Virginia would maintain the Constitution and save the Union.
Sherman was enjoying life as a civilian. A year earlier he had assumed the superintendency of the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy (later to become LSU). He found both the job and life in the South appealing but warned one of his faculty members of the what would follow secession:
. . . you people of the South don’t know what you are doing! You think you can tear to pieces this great Union without war! But, I tell you there will be bloodshed, and plenty of it!
Regrettably, Lee’s hope vanished and Sherman’s prophecy proved accurate.