1861 (24 page)

Fort Sumter under the Confederate flag, April 14, 1861 (
photo credit 3.2
)

—W
ALT
W
HITMAN
,
“Rise, Lurid Stars” (manuscript fragment, 1861)

A
N HOUR BEFORE DAWN,
a single shell announced the war’s beginning.

Something flashed and boomed suddenly ashore. In the fort, men keeping watch saw the projectile coming toward them, arcing clean and high, like a small comet tracing its course among the scattered stars. The night was so still that they could hear—or so they would later tell—the hissing sound it made as it cut through the air. A spray of sparks trailed from the fuse, reflected on the rippled water below, so that not one but two streaks of orange fire
seemed to race across the harbor, converging and converging. The ball burst at last above them, right over the ring of parapets, a hundred pounds of metal blown apart from within. Perfectly aimed. An instant of sudden clarity illuminated the bricks, stones, and panes of quivering glass; the silent iron guns; and the flag that hung, barely stirring, on its tall staff.
¹

Darkness and stillness again. That first shot had been one gun’s signal to the others. Out across the water, all around the harbor, unseen cannons and mortars were being carefully adjusted and aimed. Then the enemy’s full barrage began.

A
FTER SO MANY MONTHS
of waiting, the standoff at Sumter had been broken finally by an ancient law of siege warfare: the fort’s defenders were being starved out. Major Anderson had been left with 128 mouths to feed—the officers and soldiers themselves, plus several dozen civilian laborers who had remained in the citadel—and precious little to give them. Over the past four weeks, the few remaining barrels of hardtack had
dwindled away to mere crumbs, as had the flour, sugar, and coffee. Back in February, a singular piece of bad luck had befallen the fort’s supply of rice: a cannon saluting
Washington’s Birthday smashed a window and sprayed the food store with splinters of glass. By early April, the men were sifting through that rice grain by grain. Each one represented another morsel of time.
²

Grain by grain, that precious commodity, too, had been running out for the Union, and for peace.

Almost every morning throughout the four-month siege, a
mail boat from Charleston had brought a bundle of newspapers out to the
fort. These usually included the latest edition of the
Charleston Mercury,
with its banner headlines screaming blood and
secession, as well as a grab bag of recent Northern papers forwarded by the men’s families back home. Every day,
Anderson and his officers pored over these papers, seeking clues to their own fate. For more than six weeks after their arrival
at Sumter they had waited out the protracted, ever-feebler death twitches of the Buchanan administration. Then in late February, papers had started coming with reports on the president-elect and his journey to the capital. They had read Lincoln’s speeches closely, noting how he seemed to change his mind at each new
stop. Their naïve, inexperienced new commander-in-chief was obviously no more resolute a leader than Buchanan, and perhaps even less so.

“The truth is
we are the government
at present,” lamented Dr. Crawford, the fort’s surgeon. “It rests upon the points of our swords. Shall we use our position to deluge the country in blood?”
³

The garrison was in a bizarre position of both power and powerlessness. On the one hand, as Crawford realized, they could at will, with a single cannon shot, change the course of American history. On the other hand, Fort Sumter, which had looked so commanding and impregnable from the sandy ramparts of Moultrie, was beginning to feel less and less so. On all sides of the harbor, they could see new artillery platforms under construction, cannons being wheeled into place,
and in the distance bayonets glinting as if in Morse code, as recruits marched and countermarched on the beach. Each day, Captain Doubleday looked across the harbor at the hundreds of tiny figures moving busily over the dunes of
Sullivan’s Island: slaves whose Confederate masters had brought them from their plantations to assist in constructing earthworks. Anderson expressed it for most in the garrison when he wrote that he felt like
“a sheep tied watching the butcher sharpening a knife to cut his throat.”
⁴

Worse even than the growing menace from Charleston was the uncanny silence from Washington.

Since its occupation of Sumter, the garrison had received no orders from the War Department except to stay firm, maintain a strictly defensive stance, and do nothing that might provoke bloodshed. As soon as President Lincoln was inaugurated, the men awaited a more decisive message. Would they be directed to abandon it, as many people, even old General Scott, were suggesting? Would reinforcements be sent to defend it, or at least provisions to sustain it as the still
bloodless secession crisis continued to unfold?
⁵

Days turned into weeks, and still no message came. Anderson
and his men speculated endlessly about which course of action Lin-coln would choose. There was something to be said for—and against—each one.

Republican hard-liners in the North, they knew, wanted Lincoln to send more troops to Charleston Harbor. With the entire world watching, many Americans thought it insane to entrust the nation’s military prestige, and perhaps even its destiny, to just a few dozen soldiers. Yet experienced tacticians like Anderson and his senior staff knew that with Southern troops massing by the thousands in Charleston, a foray by the North would likely end in bloody disaster.
Several days before the inauguration, Anderson asked each of his officers to estimate, independently, how large an expeditionary force it would take to seize the rebel batteries and break the siege. Doubleday said ten thousand men, backed by a naval attack. Captain Seymour simply replied that he thought a large-scale reinforcement was “virtually impossible.” The major himself concluded it would require at least twenty thousand soldiers—more than the number in the
entire United States Army, which was then scattered among the frontier outposts of the West. In any event, a large-scale collision at Charleston was certain to bring on full civil war.
⁶

An attempt to deliver fresh provisions to Anderson’s men might well end likewise in failure and humiliation. In the months since the garrison’s surprise move to Sumter, no ship under the U.S. flag had been permitted to approach, and the rebels had turned Charleston Harbor into a potentially deadly trap for any foolish enough to try. They had sunk hulks at the harbor’s mouth, turning the already narrow channel into a tortuous maze navigable only by
daylight with a local pilot’s aid—certainly no sizable naval squadron could get through. Even if a supply ship did manage to slip in and anchor
at Sumter, it would almost certainly be smashed to splinters by the enemy’s heavy land-based artillery, assuming it was not first intercepted by the rebel patrol vessels, camouflaged black against the night, now prowling the harbor round the clock.
⁷

The Southerners had made it clear that they would not hesitate to fire even at an unarmed vessel. Back in January, General Scott had chartered a private steamship,
Star of the West,
to bring a few fresh troops and supplies to the Sumter garrison, hoping that the enemy would take it for a harmless merchantman. Word of its true mission slipped out—in fact, it made headlines in Northern newspapers—and by the time it arrived at Charleston the rebels
were ready at their guns, sending the
Star
fleeing ignominiously amid a badly aimed but
still alarming barrage of iron balls. (Inside Sumter, an officer’s wife almost set off the war three months early when she seized the lanyard of a loaded cannon, intending to fire back at the rebel battery, but a quick-thinking Doubleday stayed her hand.) And at the beginning of April, the clueless captain of a New England merchant schooner—he
didn’t read newspapers much and had only a vague idea of some sort of trouble between the North and South—came bobbing innocently into the harbor with his cargo of ice, the Stars and Stripes flapping from his masthead. It was only after a cannonball tore through the
Rhoda B. Shannon
’s mainsail that he swung her round rather hard and ran for the open sea. Anderson and his men watched with gritted teeth. It took every inch of their self-restraint to see
their flag insulted with impunity, practically beneath the muzzles of their impotent guns. But they knew that if they responded to the rebels’ provocation, this, too, would likely end in
civil war.
⁸

As a last resort, the Lincoln administration could simply let the rebels have Sumter, along with
Fort Pickens, the only other significant stronghold in the South that remained in federal hands. Shameful as this might seem, it would be only the latest in a succession of bloodless
Union surrenders. Since the fall of Pinckney and Moultrie at the end of December, forts, arsenals, navy yards, and other
federal assets across the South had tumbled like pawns, one by one. In
Florida, state troops had seized an arsenal that held almost a million rifle and musket cartridges and fifty thousand pounds of gunpowder. In
Louisiana, U.S. officials meekly handed over the New Orleans mint and customs house, and with them $599,303 in gold and silver coin. In Texas, General
David Twiggs, a
native Georgian and stout veteran of both the 1812 and Mexican wars, made only a token demurral before bestowing all federal forts and armaments in the state upon a ragtag coterie of irregulars who had marched into San Antonio under the Lone Star flag. (Twiggs would be dismissed from the
U.S. Army for treason—in absentia, since by then he had already joined that of the Confederate States.) Next to these rich prizes, Fort Sumter was of
negligible value to the Confederacy—a small sacrifice, it would appear, in exchange for staving off “the horrors of a fratricidal war,” as Major Anderson put it in one of his dispatches. More time might still buy a peaceful compromise with the South. More time might permit the Union to prepare itself for war as the Confederacy was doing, assembling munitions and volunteers.
⁹

This last course of action, peaceful surrender, was the one that nearly all of Sumter’s officers and men—and its commander—expected Lincoln
ultimately to choose. Anderson felt that he had honorably held the fort throughout the worst of the secession mania. Now, he wrote to a friend, tempers in the seceding states would gradually cool, and, barring any rash federal action, “our errant sisters, thus leaving us as friends,
may at some future time be won back by conciliation and justice.” There would be no disgrace in lowering his flag to the forces of secession, now that the mob of local roughnecks shaking their fists at Moultrie in December had become a well-equipped army of seven thousand men, commanded by one of the ablest siege tacticians in America, General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard. In fact, the dapper little Louisianan had studied artillery technique at West Point under no less an
authority than Major Anderson himself, and the two men had remained warm friends.
¹⁰

It was the most gentlemanly of sieges. Arriving in Charleston at the beginning of March, Beauregard had sent several cases of cigars and fine brandy over to Anderson as tokens of his undiminished esteem. (Anderson, mindful as ever of military etiquette, promptly returned them untouched.) When the two commanders had occasion to exchange messages, their notes were addressed “My dear General” and “My dear Major.” A sympathetic lady of Charleston
sent over a bouquet of early-blooming Carolina jasmine whose scent delighted the men, reminding them of “the woods and freedom,” the surgeon Crawford wrote.
¹¹

South Carolina’s governor,
Francis Pickens, was not quite so courtly and obliging, but he did allow the garrison at Sumter to communicate with the outside world, with almost no interference. Visitors came and went, including one of
Mathew Brady’s photographers, who assembled Anderson and his officers for a group portrait. The daily
mail boat from town
brought confidential communiqués from the War Department inquiring about the military situation. It brought letters and small packages from home, and a large crate of prime-quality tobacco from an admiring merchant in New York. (Anderson did not send this back.) It brought requests from men and women all over the North for autographs, photos, and locks of hair, which the officers did their best to supply. It even brought emissaries from Washington: White House aides and War
Department adjutants, interviewing, inspecting, inquiring, but offering no instructions. Beauregard and the Carolinians allowed these envoys to pass, believing that their reports would only hasten Lincoln’s inevitable decision to surrender the fort peacefully.
¹²

One day, the boat brought Mrs. Anderson. Worried by the lack of mail from her husband, the major’s wife had traveled by train from
New York to see him, and received permission from the rebel authorities because, as Doubleday wryly put it, “she had many influential relatives among the Secessionists.” She stayed only two hours, barely long enough to assure herself that her husband was safe and to take a meal together, but with her
had come another visitor who would remain for three months.
Peter Hart, a tough former sergeant, had accompanied the major as his orderly all through the
Mexican War. Remembering her husband’s fondness for him, the resourceful Eba Anderson had decided to track him down. She found Hart serving as a New York City policeman in a remote district of Upper Manhattan—just above Twenty-sixth Street—and
somehow persuaded him to join the defenders
at Sumter. The rebels refused to let Hart stay, but Mrs. Anderson not being a lady to take no for an answer, they finally assented, on the condition of his word of honor not to fight as a soldier. This he gave, but he would still play an important role in the battle to come.
¹³