A quick skim through the Charleston Mercury (available at Newspapers.com) from November 8 and the following several days yields multiple written statements and letters by various U.S. government officials—federal judges, attorneys, and so forth—resigning their offices. They had told their fellow citizens they would not work for an administration that sought to limit the spread of slavery, so they resigned the day after the election of Abraham Lincoln. Only the postmaster, at the request of local officials, remained in his position, to ensure that delivery of the mail would continue until alternate arrangements could be made.
[Civil War envelope showing Union soldier with flag and sword trampling the Confederate flag], Library of Congress
Unfortunately, I do not know that federal official’s name, and have not yet been able to find it. Nor have I been able to find a solid history of the takeover of U.S. military and government facilities south of the Mason-Dixon line before the secession conventions, never mind before the shelling of Fort Sumter. Allan Nevins briskly reviews this history in the first chapter of Ordeal of the Union, vol. 3, but gives no detail about rank-and-file soldiers or civil servants. Nevins’s research assistant on that project, E.B. Long, compiled an almanac, The Civil War Day by Day, that begins with the election of 1860 and focuses on events in South Carolina. Still, Long provides no details about the men involved in the incident.
A source that both Nevins and Long consulted in their research was—and remains—a very handy compilation of contemporary news coverage of the war as it happened: The Rebellion Record. Alas, this key primary source begins its coverage of war events in December of 1860. Between November 8 and December 1, 1860, there is no coverage of the seizure or surrender of federal facilities, nor of the officers and men involved on both sides of those actions.
Beyond an antiquarian interest, why is this information important? Because history is a moral inquiry, and my point in teaching history is to help my students understand how and why people made the choices they did in the circumstances they faced. Throughout the southern and western United States, there were federal officials and soldiers who suddenly found themselves in “enemy territory,” because of the enmity of local citizens and local officials against the Republican party platform and the Republican standard-bearer, Abraham Lincoln. The man had not yet been sworn in, and insurrectionists were already seizing federal facilities and federal resources. The men in charge of those facilities and resources had some choices: fight or surrender, join the rebellion or flee or escape towards safety, destroy the materiel under their command or allow it to fall into hostile hands. There were hundreds of uniformed Army and Navy officers and men, and hundreds and hundreds of civilians, who had to make these choices long before the first shots fired on Fort Sumter. I am deeply interested in their stories of capitulation or resistance.
I have not been able to find a definitive account—or, really, any account—of this crucial moment in military history or in American social history. When General Twiggs handed over his entire command, The Army of Texas, to the rebellion, what was the response of the rank and file? Were his men allowed to choose whether to remain with their units? How many of the commissioned officers under his command said, “To hell with this!” and struck for the nearest secure United States installation. Most importantly, what did these men have to say about these choices? How did federal appointees or civil servants throughout the south who disagreed with these steps toward war grapple with their own sudden danger?
This is the part of Civil War history I am most anxious to learn more about: what choices were available to the rank and file, to the local postmasters, to the federal revenue officers or customs officials. If they had wanted to resist, could they have survived? If they sought to resign and remove themselves to an area under firm United States control, were they allowed to do so? What happened at each and every U.S. military installation under Twiggs’s command? Many forts were abandoned, but what happened to the men? What did they have to say about it?
These moral dilemmas, these high-stakes individual choices, are of great interest to me and would be fascinating for students. But I lack sources to tell this story, and I hope that someone can point me to a work or works that tell the story better than I could anyhow. If there is no such work, I wish a military historian or social historian would write it. I would read the hell out that book.
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I’d be quite surprised if this hadn’t been written about, given the size of Civil War historiography, which is not to say that info at the granular level you’re looking for is necessarily available. There are likely specialized and more general guides to Civil War historiography, but I’m unfamiliar with them. One concrete suggestion would be to look at McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, the relevant chapter(s) and footnotes and the Bibliographical Note at the end. That book was published in 1988, so that’s one obvious limitation. Second suggestion: there are histories of Texas that probably cover the Army of Texas, though perhaps not at the level of detail you’re looking for. Third suggestion: Lib. of Congress subject headings and catalog, though that can prove, I think, somewhat time-consuming. You might luck out, and then again, not. In general, however, Lib. of Congress subject headings may be underused — they can get pretty detailed, and it’s a matter of finding the right one(s). (When I was working on my dissertation, a good while ago now (sigh/cough/etc.), I stumbled on a very useful book in a library as I was scanning a shelf, and I would have found that book earlier had I made more careful use of the Lib. Cong. subject headings.) Final suggestion: the ProQuest diss. database. There’s got to have been, I would think, a dissertation or two on this very subject, even if their authors never published them as books.
Now I hope that a Civil War historian, which I am, of course, absolutely not, will come along and give you a more useful answer.
P.s. My impression is that what ends up being recorded in newspaper accounts or archives or diaries or etc. is determined at least partly by chance. That said, if you can find published diaries by residents of the states in question that start early enough (i.e., with Lincoln’s election and immediate aftermath), that might turn up something relevant. There are some reasonably well-known published diaries, but I’m not sure when they start.
Well, I’ve asked Civil War historians, military historians, and members of a military history writers’ group to point me to any published work on this that they can, and so far everybody is drawing a blank. I wouldn’t doubt that someone has written about this; there’s probably some dusty old United States Army file or report on it. But it seems to me to be somewhat under-discussed. There’s a lot of passive voice narration — Fort such-and-such was abandoned, or Fort such-and-such was seized — but nothing beyond that in any accounts I’ve found.
I suppose if you were a soldier in the U.S. Army in 1860 you wouldn’t write a memoir about how your unit fled in the dark of night. But I’d very much like to read something from soldiers who faced this moral choice before the inauguration of the new president, and how they grappled with it.