1861 (2 page)

Anderson had no reputation as a fire-breathing secessionist. Nor were Doubleday and Seymour the kind of men to question the honor of a superior officer—at least openly. But would a man of his background and temperament be ready to wrestle the Southerners into submission, if it came to that?

Not that the federal force at Charleston appeared capable, as yet, of much coercion. Luckily for the founding fathers of the nascent Republic of South Carolina, Anderson’s three federal citadels “guarded” the harbor in only the most figurative sense. Waiting on Moultrie’s parade ground to welcome Anderson was a tiny detachment of soldiers that could scarcely be termed even a garrison: just two companies of barely thirty men each, not counting
a small brass band. Sumter, in the harbor’s mouth, lay unfinished after decades of start-and-stop construction, and housed just a few military engineers supervising some civilian workmen. Castle Pinckney, whose guns overlooked the town itself, was manned by a single ordnance sergeant.
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And even if Moultrie, the Charleston post’s official headquarters, had been garrisoned with hundreds of men rather than a few dozen, it wouldn’t have been much of a stronghold.

During the Revolution, the fort had been the site of a famous American victory. In the summer of 1776, just a few days before the passage of the Declaration of Independence, a single regiment of South Carolina troops held it against an entire fleet; British cannonballs sank harmlessly into its fibrous palmetto-log ramparts while the American artillerymen exacted a terrible toll on enemy officers and sailors. (South Carolinians adopted the palmetto tree as their state
symbol shortly after the battered enemy turned tail.) That victory at Moultrie—a thousand miles south of the previous American triumphs at Boston—was celebrated throughout the newborn United States, and was seen by many Americans as a sign, perhaps even a heaven-sent portent, that the loose concatenation of former colonies could stand together as one nation.
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But by 1860, no foreign power had sent its fleets against America’s coastline in almost two generations. Moultrie’s defenses, built early in the century atop the old palmetto fort, were antiquated, its brick walls cracked and eroding. Sand drifts nearly buried its outer fortifications; stray cows from nearby farms could—and occasionally did—wander across the ramparts.
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Moreover, the southern end of Sullivan’s Island had become a fashionable beach resort in recent decades. Wealthy
Charlestonians had built summer cottages among the sand dunes overlooking the fort, and on pleasant evenings would saunter through its open gates to promenade on the parade ground with wives and sweethearts. It was clear to everyone, from Anderson down to his last
private, that the place was about as defensible as a public park.
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Nonetheless, as November turned into December, it also became clearer and clearer that Moultrie might soon need to be defended—and from attackers based not in the mouth of Charleston Harbor, toward which the fort’s gun platforms faced, but onshore. When the new commander arrived, South Carolina’s legislature had just unanimously passed a resolution calling for a statewide convention to discuss secession, and local militia had placed the U.S.
military arsenal in town under guard, ostensibly to defend it in case of a slave revolt.
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On November 29, the
Charleston Mercury
published a draft ordinance of secession.
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Visiting the city daily to procure fresh provisions, the men of the Moultrie garrison
heard bands playing “La Marseillaise,” and saw the streets draped with banners bearing slogans like “Good-bye, Yankee Doodle” and “Let Us Bury the Union’s Dead Carcass.”
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The state’s governor was whipping up excitement with talk of the glorious future that awaited an independent South Carolina—promising laws
that would reopen the African
slave trade, officially declare white men the ruling race, and punish “summarily and severely, if not with death” any person caught espousing abolitionist views.

Charleston was filling up with militiamen who drilled under the state flag—a white banner with a palmetto tree and single red star—and spoke openly of hauling down the Stars and Stripes, which flew above the harbor fortifications.
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On December 1, a rumor reached the garrison that South Carolina was about to place artillery just across
Sullivan’s Island, pointing directly at Moultrie.
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In letters and telegrams to their superiors back at the War Department, Anderson and his staff described their increasingly desperate situation in the tones of cool appraisal befitting seasoned officers. If they were to hold on to Charleston Harbor, additional troops, ammunition, and supplies were needed immediately. Fort Moultrie must be reinforced, and the two other federal strongholds in the harbor—Fort Sumter and Castle Pinckney—garrisoned with
soldiers loyal to the United States. The sand hills looming just yards from Moultrie’s walls must be leveled, or they could quickly become nests of sharpshooters who could pick off the men inside, one by one, in a matter of hours.
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Replies from Washington were dilatory, vague, and ambivalent. More troops would be sent—at some point. The garrison’s officers
must prepare to defend Moultrie as best they could—but not touch the sand hills, which were believed to be private property. (They weren’t, in fact.) Above all, they must not do anything that the hot-tempered South Carolinians might find provocative—a category that seemed to include almost any
action whatsoever that the little band of men might take.
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The U.S. forts in Charleston Harbor were ground zero in the exploding secession crisis, yet no one at the War Department seemed to be taking their defense seriously. In fact, the garrison’s only direct communication from the secretary of war lately had been a one-sentence telegram ordering them to return a few dozen muskets that Seymour had managed to extract from the federal arsenal in Charleston.
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Curiously enough, the only measure that the War Department fully supported was an all-out effort to buttress the fortifications themselves. Nearly a quarter of a million dollars was allocated to the building project, and throughout the autumn more than a hundred laborers, many of them Irish and
German
immigrants brought down from Baltimore, toiled busily
at
Sumter, rapidly completing the officers’ quarters, raising the height of the walls, and readying the upper tiers of the fort to support cannons. Back at Moultrie, an even larger group dug ditches, built makeshift gun platforms, and cleared sand from the outer walls—discovering, in the process, quite a few cannonballs that had been casually mislaid over the years. Anderson sent a third detachment of the civilian workers over to Castle Pinckney to commence repairs, on the
assumption that Washington would soon send enough troops to man all three forts.
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This construction further infuriated many Charlestonians, who assumed that the Yankees were preparing to bombard their city. Bands of secessionists now patrolled day and night outside Moultrie, itching for any pretext to commence hostilities. The little garrison was stretched so thin that
officers’ wives were taking shifts on guard duty.
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And still no reinforcements came.

What Anderson and his men didn’t realize is that the secretary of war was playing a double game—or at least would shed no tears if their citadel fell to the rebels. John B. Floyd was a former governor of Virginia firmly aligned with states’ rights and the South—within a few months, he would wear the uniform of a Confederate brigadier general. Since his appointment by President
James Buchanan, the War
Department had become a den of graft and peculation, his staff entangled in an under-the-table scheme funneling government money held in trust for Indians into the pocket of a crooked military contractor.
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Afterward, it would remain unclear if Floyd had been involved in the scheme himself, or if he had simply allowed it to happen out of innocent laziness and incompetence.

So, too, his response—or lack of response—to the Sumter crisis may have been rooted in treasonous tendencies, or may have been due to simple indifference. In the Charleston predicament, Secretary Floyd may have seen an opportunity: if no troops were sent to man the three harbor forts, no amount of sprucing up would prevent their tumbling into the laps of the South Carolinians. That way, the three citadels would be in tiptop shape, at the expense of the
U.S. government, just in time to protect Charleston from any federal fleet that might come steaming down to crush the rebellion. (This was what Doubleday would later come to believe.)
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Or he may simply have wished to passively let the situation drift along, sparing himself the mess, unpleasantness, and extra work that might come from more decisive action. Either way, the
result would be the same.

In fact, the reason Floyd had dispatched Anderson to Moultrie in the first place was his expectation that the major would not raise any sort of fuss. Anderson, a Virginian by ancestry and a Kentuckian by birth, was known to sympathize with the grievances of Southern slaveholders. His wife, a more ardent Southerner, was the daughter of one of
Georgia’s wealthiest rice planters; she and the major had recently sold off most or all
of her inherited slaves and their progeny, causing him once to quip that “the increase of her darkies” had made him rich.
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Nor did the major appear to be the sort to attempt an inconvenient act of heroism. When Floyd plucked Anderson out of the middle ranks of the officer corps for the Charleston appointment, he was serving on a commission to revise the
curriculum at West Point, where he had once been an instructor. Anderson’s rigid deference to military duty was, as everyone in the service knew, exceeded only by his Christian piety.
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Even the junior officers at Moultrie were at times beginning to suspect their new commander of disloyalty to the Union or simple lack of backbone—not that it was clear what even a loyal stalwart could have done without more arms and men. Their best tactical move, Doubleday and Seymour knew, would be to occupy Castle Pinckney, where they could easily bring Charleston to heel by lobbing artillery shells into the city at close range. But, as Doubleday put it
sardonically, “with only sixty-four soldiers and a brass band, we could not detach any force in that direction.”
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Pinckney lay more than three miles across the harbor from Moultrie, a stone’s throw from the downtown promenade known as the Battery, with its high row of fine mansions that housed
many of Charleston’s wealthiest
citizens—and its leading secessionists. Even under cover of darkness, there was no way that Anderson’s men could make it there without being intercepted.

Their other option was
Fort Sumter. Sumter sat on its own artificial island—a sturdy pedestal of granite boulders, hewn from the quarries of New England—just inside the narrowest part of the harbor’s mouth, alongside the main ship channel. Though still unfinished after decades of fitful progress, because no one had expected that Charleston Harbor would ever again become a key strategic point, its 360-degree view
of the surrounding water made it more or less impregnable to sneak attack, and its high brick walls, designed by the
Army Corps of Engineers to withstand modern artillery fire, were much more formidable than Moultrie’s. Its armaments included a fearsome array of heavy mortars and columbiads, the bulbous ten-ton cannons that could hurl a heavy projectile as far as three miles—though many of these guns still lay dismounted and
inoperable beneath the unfinished gun platforms. Sumter’s location in the port’s tight entrance, with land close by in three directions, might make it vulnerable to shot and shell fired from batteries onshore: the fort’s builders, like Moultrie’s, had never anticipated the need to defend against an attack from “friendly” territory. But that position, however vulnerable, did command the shipping lane. Most critical of all, Fort Sumter lay
barely a mile from Moultrie—just close enough that the garrison might, with a bit of luck, slip across under the secessionists’ noses.

The junior officers, Doubleday most of all, pleaded with their commander to make that move. Anderson dug his heels in and refused. The War Department had assigned him to Fort Moultrie, he said, and he would not budge without an official order to do so. The officers pointed out that if the Carolinians themselves occupied Sumter—which they might do at any moment without so much as firing a shot—its columbiads turned against Moultrie could pound the old
fort’s walls into rubble. Still the major blandly demurred. His resistance seemed incredible. Any captain or lieutenant in the army was used to dealing with the stubbornness or even stupidity of his superiors, but Anderson’s position defied common sense, as well as basic principles of military science that he had taught at West Point. Worse yet, in the event of forced surrender, the power and prestige of the entire army—perhaps even the entire national
government—might be sacrificed to a few thuggish traitors.

In bewilderment, the staff officers returned to overseeing the ceaseless—and, it seemed, pointless—work of digging sand away
from the walls, building picket fences, and moving cannons from one place to another.
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Occasionally Captain Doubleday would relieve his frustration by loading a howitzer with double rounds of canister
shot, pointing it out to sea, and blasting a furious volley against the insolent Southern waves. It was the only thing he could do.

Just before sundown on December 20, the rooftops and church steeples of Charleston lit up with flashes of red, as the reflected lights of bonfires and Roman candles flared amid the gathering darkness. From across the harbor, the soldiers at Moultrie could hear booming cannons and pealing bells. The city was celebrating. Delegates to the Convention of the People of South Carolina, meeting downtown in St. Andrew’s Hall, had voted unanimously that afternoon to
approve a resolution: “The Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of the ‘United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”