Civil War for the day

The New York Times has made available articles from the War years, and Adam Goodheart has a commentary on one little-known event from Montgomery, Alabama on 29 January 1861:

The Alabama telegraph operator must have been horrified as he sat at his post late that night, translating the dots and dashes into letters. The message that they formed— an official, secret missive from Washington, destined for New Orleans– was too awful to be relayed any further. Its final sentence read: If any one attempts to haul down the American flag, shoot him on the spot.
So the operator intercepted the telegram, sending it not to the federal government agent in New Orleans, but to Louisiana’s secessionist authorities, who promptly leaked it to the press. Within a few days, it was being read by thousands of people and, soon, millions throughout both North and South. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the message was where it had originated: in the heart of President James Buchanan’s vacillating, temporizing, divided cabinet.
Early on the evening of 29 January, John Adams Dix, the administration’s newly appointed Treasury secretary, had learned that an armed vessel belonging to the Revenue Cutter Service (a predecessor of the Coast Guard) was in danger of being seized by the secessionists in New Orleans. The captain of the cutter McClelland, known to be a rebel sympathizer, was refusing to bring his ship north, as Dix had ordered. And so the secretary dashed off his order, intended for delivery to the cutter’s still-loyal lieutenant.
Dix’s fierce command was an instant media sensation. The New York Herald, a proponent of compromise with the South, was appalled at the rash act of provocation. Shoot him on the spot it headlined its editorial, slightly mangling the quotation. “It is the first command to shed blood that has been issued in the present crisis. It is but a preparation for a coercion policy on the part of the incoming administration, as might have been expected from an abolitionist ringleader.”
Other Northerners cheered. At last, someone in Washington was prepared to crush secession and to treat the traitors as traitors! The news, in the words of Harper’s Weekly, “flew over the land like the Highland cross of fire, setting the hearts of the people everywhere ablaze.”
Dix’s telegram “has the ring of true metal”, said the Boston Daily Advertiser, adding: “If Mr. Buchanan had called such men about him at the beginning of his administration, it is safe to say that we should have escaped the crisis which is now threatening the country.” (Buchanan’s original Treasury secretary, Howell Cobb of Georgia, had cast his lot with secession the previous month.) A New York state legislator agreed: “If you want to crush rebellion, you must put it down in its incipient steps; shoot down the first man, and it will not be necessary to shoot down the second.” And the New York Tribune warned that, unless Dix’s decree became official federal policy, “we may expect some fine morning to see the Pelican flag of Louisiana, or the Palmetto flag of South Carolina, waving its rebel folds from the flag-staff at the Wallabout”; that is, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
President Buchanan’s own heart was decidedly not set ablaze by his Treasury secretary’s order, except perhaps in the sense that it gave him a severe case of agita. Dix later recalled informing him of the message; when he heard the crucial line, the president jumped as if just stung by a wasp in some particularly delicate portion of his anatomy. “Did you really write that?” he gasped.
“No, sir,” Dix replied, “I did not write it, but I telegraphed it.” This did not noticeably ease Buchanan’s distress.
The Treasury secretary, known as General Dix from his position in the New York State militia, had not previously been known as a dynamic wordsmith. According to one newspaper report, his telegraphic bon mot provoked “astonishment among the acquaintances of General Dix, who thought he had been sleeping for the last ten or fifteen years, and that he must have roused very suddenly from his long lethargic condition thus to produce a single sentence which should preserve him in lasting remembrance.” Nor did it prove immediately effective, at least not in the way its author had hoped: notwithstanding his threat, the revenue cutter McClelland’s American flag did come down, and the vessel soon fell into in Confederate hands.
Yet Dix’s famous command– eventually reprinted in newspapers as far afield as Honolulu, became one of the great Union rallying cries throughout the Civil War. Banners were emblazoned with his words; poems written about them; coins inscribed with them; badges printed with them. One man even wrote a Shoot Him on the Spot song, in which he attributed the words to the wrong politician, Edwin M. Stanton, an error for which he quickly apologized.
The 62-year-old Dix, previously known as a Democrat of the mildest stripe, found himself a lion of the radical Republicans. When war came in the spring of 1861, Abraham Lincoln appointed him one of the Union’s top generals, assigning him to Maryland, where he was charged with implementing the new administration’s most heavy-handed policies in suppressing the rebellion. The following year, Union forces occupying New Orleans recaptured the McClelland and sent both her flags, Union and Confederate, to Dix as trophies.
In 1872, when New York’s Republican Party chose the now-elderly General Dix to head its statewide ticket, newspaper headlines announced: Old 'Shoot Him On The Spot' Norminated for Governor. He won that election handily.

Rico says his friend John Robinson from New Orleans sends along a link to more on the story, this about William Bruce Mumford, who was hanged for tearing down a United States flag during the Civil War.