The Fall of Fort Sumter and the Faulty Thinking That Started the Civil War

The Civil War may have been inevitable, but that it would start at Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbor was not.  Bombardment of the fort by Southern batteries in April 1861 launched a war in which both the North and South misjudged its length and slaughter. The confrontation over Sumter is richly described in Erik Larson’s new book, The Demon of Unrest. Flawed thinking on both sides highlights useful lessons for the dangers our democracy faces today.   

Two days after Lincoln’s victory on November 6, the Charleston Mercury announced that “[T]he tea has been thrown overboard, the revolution of 1860 has been initiated.”  President James Buchanan desperately wanted to avoid war in the waning days of his Administration and fell prey to what today we call the status quo bias.  He ignored such broadsides and did nothing to stop the brewing conflict. Though Major Robert Anderson had moved all his Charleston forces from land-based forts to Sumter, a more easily defensible island in Charleston’s harbor, Buchanan refused to reinforce him.  He told Congress that war could be prevented if the slave states were just left alone.  Besides, as he put it, “the power to make war against a State is at variance with the whole spirit and intent of the Constitution.”

By December 20, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union.  James Petigru, a South Carolina Unionist, remarked that “South Carolina is too small for a Republic, and too big for an insane asylum.”  Nevertheless, he still voted for secession.  The code of chivalry that infused the planter class required honor and loyalty and bred hubris, a sense of self-importance and self-esteem that could lead to violence when challenged - and sometimes did in duels. 

Alexander Stephens, a former member of Congress who would become Vice-President of the Confederacy, saw where emotional contagion could lead.  In a December 30th letter to Lincoln urging him to “save our common country,” he wrote that “[W]hen men come under the influence of fanaticism, there is no telling where their impulses or passions may drive them.”

One place it drove them was to overconfidence.  Three commissioners were sent to Washington, D.C. to negotiate the transfer of all federal property including Fort Sumter to the South. They assumed this would be done peacefully, an early sign of the misperceptions that flow from overconfidence.  Secessionists were also confident the North would not fight and that if it did war would be short.  As Larson relates, when speaking with William Russell, a London Times reporter then in Washington, the commissioners revealed their belief that Northern men were cowards and that white men in the slave states were physically superior.

When Sumter fell on April 14, Col James Chestnut, who helped draft the Confederate constitution is reported to have said that so little blood would be spilled in a war of secession that it would only fill “a lady’s thimble.”  Confederate Secretary of War, Alabama’s LeRoy Walker, predicted that “the Confederate flag would float over the Capitol in Washington before the first of May.”

The illusion of knowledge – that we know more about something than we do – is another example of the irrational reasoning that characterized the Fort Sumter story. Lincoln, in Springfield awaiting his March 4th inauguration, assumed Union sentiment in the South was much stronger than it was.  As a result he misread the impact of growing Southern state militias thinking  “It will enable the people more easily to suppress any uprisings there,” blind to what their real use would be.  His Secretary of State William Seward continued to believe throughout the Administration’s early weeks that southern states would come to their senses. The Times’s Russell speculated the Seward’s miscalculation may have resulted because he had never been to the South.

Confirmation bias – searching for and accepting only evidence confirming existing beliefs – pushed Southern miscalculations too. John Forsyth, one of the South’s commissioners in Washington, though never having met with Lincoln nevertheless wrote back home that “Lincoln inclines to peace.” In contrast, reading Lincoln’s Inaugural speech, Edmund Ruffin who had traveled throughout the South campaigning for secession concluded that [I]t settles the question that there must be war.”  This was despite Lincoln’s promise to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law and support ratification of a 13th Amendment that would prevent the federal government from interfering with slavery where it existed. 

The South also believed that taking Fort Sumter would not lead to war because “cotton is king.” The North, they concluded, would never go to war because it needed cotton and England would side with the Confederacy for the same reason. Today we call this motivated blindness. They failed to grasp that outside the South and in England opposition to slavery was intense.  It would become what Lincoln in his Second Inaugural would say was “the cause of the war.”

On April 14, 1865 four years to the day after Sumter’s fall, now-Major General Anderson was given the honor of raising the flag on the recaptured fort. Between those exact April days, over 620,000 Americans died.

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Photo Credit: Fort Sumter, 1861 - by Matthew Brady