From Election and Lincoln's Victory to the End of the Union

150 years ago Americans were not just welcoming a new year, but an uncertain future. The election in November 1860 of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency had left the country in limbo and the South on the doorstep of secession. The New York Times present a vivid picture of the mood of the country at the time and the road from Lincoln's victory to the grim picture and future of the country.

The trail painted by Ted Widmer:

NOV. 7, 1860 Immediately after Lincoln was elected, Americans from all walks of life wrote to their president-elect to express their feelings about where the country was headed. These letters present a remarkable documentary portrait of a nation at a crossroads.

— TED WIDMER, from “Lincoln’s Mailbag”

NOV. 9-15, 1860 The day after Lincoln’s election, revolutionary fever breaks out in South Carolina. Nearly all of the state’s federal officials resign, and the state legislature speedily passes a bill authorizing a state convention to meet on Dec. 20 to consider, and if it desires, to authorize, secession. In the Deep South, where the idea of disunion is taken most seriously, three main groups of secessionists can be identified. There are those who are talking about talking; those who are talking about walking; and those who have already stopped talking and started walking. South Carolina is the home of the ultras, men like William Yancey and Robert Barnwell Rhett, and they all belong to the third group. For two decades Yancey and Rhett have shouted secession whenever so much as an ominous rain cloud drifted down from the North. Lately, however, they have been joined by men of a different sort, prominent men of wealth and influence, grandees who heretofore have disdained agitation. This past week, these men succeeded in inflaming passions that might well have been safely jawed to death.

— JAMIE MALANOWSKI, from “A Superabundance of Velocity”

NOV. 16, 1860 On fine afternoons that week, throngs of strollers promenaded on Canal Street in New Orleans. The thoroughfare, one newspaper reported, “was crowded with an unusually large and brilliant array of the beauty of our city — the stately matrons and lovely damsels of the South. What gave peculiar interest to this grand display of beauty, grace and elegance, was the exhibition of blue [secessionist] cockades worn on the shoulders of nearly all the ladies who appeared in public. All our ladies are for the South, and for resistance to the aggressions, outrage and insult of an abolition dynasty. No man will merit their favor who is not ready to sacrifice everything for that cause.”

— ADAM GOODHEART, from “Female Partisans”

NOV. 23, 1860 Between his election and his inauguration, Lincoln withdrew into intractable official silence, even as the union crumbled. Lincoln’s approach was very much intentional. Saying nothing, he believed, did the least damage to his fragile winning coalition of moderate Westerners and abolitionist Easterners — a coalition that yet might be called upon to resist rebellion by force. He was “not unmindful of the uneasiness which may exist in many parts of the country,” he privately conceded. But “nothing is to be gained by fawning around the ‘respectable scoundrels’ who got it up.”

— HAROLD HOLZER, from “The Sound of Lincoln’s Silence”

NOV. 25, 1860 The story of how Lincoln decided to let his chin whiskers sprout has been retold so many times that it’s almost legendary: Grace Bedell, an 11-year-old in upstate New York, wrote him a letter a few weeks before the election. “I have got four brothers,” she told the Republican candidate, “and part of them will vote for you anyway and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you. You would look a great deal better, for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be president.” Lincoln replied: “As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affectation if I were to begin it now?” Just days after his election, though, he made up his mind. “Billy,” he supposedly told his barber, “let’s give them a chance to grow.”

— ADAM GOODHEART, from “Lincoln: A Beard Is Born”

NOV. 23-29, 1860 President James Buchanan this week changed his tune, after receiving a request for reinforcements from Maj. Robert Anderson, his newly appointed commander of the three federal installations — Fort Moultrie, Fort Sumter and Castle Pinckney — in Charleston. Assessing the situation — the general secession fever, the evidently vulnerable condition of the dilapidated Moultrie, the threatening presence of the harbor hoodlums and wharf rats who menace the soldiers as they go about their duties, the mysterious boats full of armed men that prowl the harbor at night — Anderson implored Washington for more men. “The storm may break upon us at any moment,” he told the administration. “The garrison is so weak as to invite an attack.” Buchanan ordered the secretary of war, John Floyd, to send more troops. Floyd, the former governor of Virginia who is, in turns, pro-union, pro-slavery and an appeaser of the secessionists, has ignored the order, for although he wishes to protect the troops, he feels sending reinforcements would provoke violence, which of course would be illegal, although secession is South Carolina’s right.

— JAMIE MALANOWSKI, from “Off the Record, Behind the Scenes”

NOV. 30, 1860 The knock came after dark. Hastening to answer it, the old Quaker found a familiar figure in the doorway: a dark-skinned woman, barely five feet tall, with a kerchief wrapped around her head. Five others followed her: a man and woman, two little girls and, cradled in a basket, the swaddled form of a tiny infant, uncannily silent and still. As politicians throughout the country debated secession and young men drilled for war, Harriet Tubman had been plotting a mission into the heart of slave territory. The group had come from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, but even here, in Wilmington, Del., it was not yet out of danger: Delaware was still officially a slave state. But at last, on the night of Nov. 30, she reached the house of the elderly Quaker, Thomas Garrett, a leading Underground Railroad “conductor” who would smuggle the Ennals family to relative safety in Philadelphia.

— ADAM GOODHEART, from “Moses’ Last Exodus”

DEC. 19, 1860 “Today it is hoped we shall get the old Lady South Carolina out of the crowd without damaging her hoops or tearing her dress,” wrote the planter John S. Palmer to his wife. The following afternoon, Palmer and other delegates who had assembled in the South Carolina city voted 169 to 0 for secession. That evening thousands flocked to Institute Hall in downtown Charleston to witness the formal signing of the “Ordinance of Secession.” Afterward “cannon were fired,” reported The Charleston Mercury, “and bright triumph was depicted on every countenance.” On this Dec. 20, exactly 150 years later, Confederate enthusiasts sought to relive the festivities with an elaborate Secession Gala. Three hundred celebrants — dozens decked out like cavalier planters and Lady South Carolina — packed Charleston’s Gaillard Auditorium to celebrate the fateful vote. One could almost be forgiven for thinking the whole town had gone back in time.

— BLAIN ROBERTS and ETHAN J. KYTLE, from “Dancing Around History”

DEC. 26, 1860 The rowers strained at their oars, gasping with exertion, their breath visible in the chill night air of Charleston Harbor. By good fortune, the water lay almost flat, with just the slightest rolling swell, and each pull drew them several lengths farther on. None of those men knew that their brief but perilous transit would end up changing American history. Their only thought was of swiftly and silently reaching their destination, barely a mile across the channel: Fort Sumter. From the ramparts of Sumter a signal gun rang out, its sharp crack echoing across the water. The detachment back at Fort Moultrie would know that their comrades had arrived at their destination. As for the secessionists over in Charleston, they would soon awaken to a very unpleasant surprise. “They must have looked upon us as a mouse to play with and eat up at leisure,” one of the Union officers gloated. “But we gave the cat the slip, however, and are now safe in our hole.” At the two forts, men labored through the night, bracing for the fast-approaching moment when that startled cat would unsheathe its claws. Midnight passed and dawn approached: one of the last days in a waning year.

— ADAM GOODHEART, from “The Night Escape”


It seemed that an attack on Fort Sumner would be almost certain.