TONGUES 23 страница

Back when John Brown’s attack began to make the possibility of a resort to arms seem less like a distant fantasy, Henry David Thoreau had written these prophetic words about the imminent execution of the martyr: “When you plant... a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up.” Still, the white South did not believe the North would fight. Lincoln’s caution seemed unheroic. Perhaps it fed the Confederate leaders’ confidence about war as a solution. But in the month after the inauguration, the new president demonstrated that he was canny enough to outmaneuver enslavers on the field of peace. Instead of forcing his way into Charleston’s harbor with blazing guns, he sent a resupply fleet sailing from New York with instructions to resupply the Fort Sumter garrison—but not to reinforce it with troops and weapons. The South’s decisionmakers decided to move the game onto a different board. They would assert their independence by eliminating the Union presence off the coast of the state where the cotton frontier had started. On April 10, the local Confederate commander heard from Montgomery: tell the Union troops to evacuate Fort Sumter immediately. If they refuse, begin the bombardment before supplies can arrive. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, the first cannon boomed. Fort Sumter surrendered at first light on the 14th, after thirty-three hours of shelling that produced not a single fatality.⁹⁵

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