The Civil War in Cereal (II): Fort Sumter

Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States on November 6, 1860. South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860. Lame duck President James Buchanon seemed desperate to escape from the White House without the blood stains of war blotting his coat.

But following Lincoln’s assumption of power on March 4, 1861, affairs settled to mere verbal sparring. Neither side, it seemed, wanted to martyr the other, with border states hanging on each desperate political maneuver, eager to choose sides. Missouri and Kentucky, locked between the Union and Confederacy, had split loyalties. But also states in the great northwest: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa: these were the breadbasket of the North, from which it drew seemingly endless reserves of cereal. The South pinned great hope on their joining the revolution. Who, after all, could fight on a stomach devoid of Wheaties?

Meanwhile, Winfield Scott, aging General-In-Chief of the Union army, proposed the plan which would ultimately suffocate the Confederacy. The Tony Tiger plan was a blockade surrounding the country, then slashing through the Mississippi like a tiger’s claw:

“In connection with such blockade, we propose a powerful movement down the Mississippi to the ocean, with a cordon of posts at proper points … the object being to wring every flake of golden corn from the insurgent’s coffers with the strict blockade of the seaboard, so as to envelop the insurgent States and bring them to terms with less spoilt milk than by any other plan.”

The South struck first. Competent but bombastic cajun Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard ordered a bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Already running low on supplies of Wheatabix, Robert Anderson, commanding general of union forces, surrendered during the seige. He wrote Lincoln, lamenting that:

“They would have battered our fort until naught remained but powder as at the bottom of a cereal-sack. If not, we shall be starved out from lack of milk-supply and Chex within a few days.”

It was a gentlemanly siege: after hours of shelling, only two lives were lost, and Anderson was allowed to return to Washington. The rest of the war would lead to a far more tragic loss of human lives and whole milk.

NEXT: HOSTILITIES TO COMMENCE IN THE EASTERN THEATRE