Coming Fury, Volume 1 (50 page)

The visit was very brief. There was no talk about home, children, or any other personal matters; Mrs. Anderson simply explained about Sergeant Hart, the sergeant was folded into the Sumter garrison, and Mrs. Anderson got into the guard boat, returned to Charleston, and went back to New York. With the help of the governor of South Carolina and a former sergeant of United States artillery, her mind had been made easier.
³

Late in March, Anderson and Beauregard had an odd exchange. It had been printed that the Yankees were going to withdraw the Sumter garrison and that Beauregard had said that he would not permit this unless Anderson first surrendered, and Anderson’s feelings were hurt. He wrote to Beauregard about it in protest, and both Beauregard and Governor Pickens replied politely that nothing of the sort had been said or contemplated. Anderson wrote back that he knew Beauregard could not have said such a thing, and the amenities were properly preserved.
⁴

A Northerner who visited Charleston that winter found that he was greeted without any particular hostility: the people he talked with all asked if the North really intended coercion and closed by saying that everyone in South Carolina hoped for a peaceful separation—peaceful, but of course a separation. He looked on with interest at the drill of the home guard, a modestly uniformed assortment of elderly men, some of them with white hair, and was told that this was a volunteer police force, raised to overawe the Negroes
during the absence on military service of most of the city’s young men. One Charlestonian explained that the illiterate Negro slaves, knowing nothing of anything that happened ten miles away from them, had somehow caught on to the fact that big things were stirring in the land.… “Our slaves have heard of Lincoln—that he is a black man, or black Republican, or black something—that he is to become ruler of this country on the fourth of March—that he is a friend of theirs and will help them.” Hence it was essential for the state to establish its independence, so that the black folk would know that this legendary Lincoln could do nothing for them; essential, as well, for the home guard to come out and drill, while the younger men manhandled the big guns out in the marshes.
⁵

So the winter wore away: guns firing harmlessly, officers exchanging dignified notes, elderly home guards drilling under the Carolina sun, Negroes mysteriously hearing something, amateur soldiers toiling to learn the cruel skills of a new profession—and nothing irrevocable was actually happening. But now the pace was quickening, and it would never go any more slowly. Lincoln had made up his mind and sent his message, Secretary Toombs had voiced his grim doubts, Davis had come to his own conclusion and sent a message of his own—and on the night of April 8 the steamer
Baltic
left her New York wharf, dropped down the bay, and anchored until dawn just inside of Sandy Hook. The warships and tugs had gone on ahead, separately.
Baltic
would sail in the morning, there would be a rendezvous off the Charleston bar, and it was conceivable that the Sumter garrison would get fresh provisions.

Gustavus Fox, aboard
Baltic
, had few doubts about his mission, several doubts about Major Anderson. When he visited Fort Sumter, he had supposed that he would find a straightforward soldier, thinking only of his soldierly duty and hoping his government would send him help in time. To such a man Fox would have told everything he knew—about the projected relief expedition, about the eddying cross-currents in Washington, about Lincoln himself. But he felt that he had found a man who was “on the other side, politically as well as in a military point of view”; as a Massachusetts-born Unionist, Fox could neither understand nor sympathize with the American of conflicting loyalties.
⁶

Anderson, whose loyalty to the Federal government never wavered
for a moment, had doubts of his own. He doubted that the relief expedition would work, and he wrote to the War Department: “I fear that its result cannot fail to be disastrous to all concerned.” He felt that Washington should have told him about it earlier; Fox had done no more than hint at it, and Lamon had convinced him that the thing would not be tried. “We shall strive to do our duty,” said the major, “though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is thus to be commenced.”
⁷

One man who had no doubts was Beauregard. He was a soldier whose loyalty lay with his duty. He had come to Charleston to form what he called “a circle of fire” around Fort Sumter; the circle was formed, and he would set it aflame whenever he was told to do so, content to follow the destiny of his state. To a Northern friend he wrote that his state had called on him for his services; he had given them, “not through a false ambition or a desire to see my name (badly spelt) in print, but because I consider it my solemn duty.” He hoped sooner or later to be able to retire to a farm near New Orleans, with his family, his books, and a few friends around him. Meanwhile, “whether this
revolution
results in peace or war—I will take as my only guide a clear conscience and a fearless heart.”
⁸
Now he had his orders from Secretary Walker, and he would carry them out.

Another man untroubled by doubts was Roger Pryor, the Virginia Congressman, who came down to Charleston, was serenaded on the evening of April 10, and spoke with unrestrained passion to the serenaders who stood in the street in the spring dusk under his hotel balcony.

“Gentlemen, I thank you, especially that you have at last annihilated this cursed Union, reeking with corruption and insolent with excess of tyranny,” cried Pryor. “Thank God, it is at last blasted and riven by the lightning wrath of an outraged and indignant people. Not only is it gone, but gone forever.” South Carolina had taken the lead, but Virginia would surely follow. A great storm of cheers arose when Pryor shouted his words of advice: “I will tell you, gentlemen, what will put her in the Southern Confederation in less than an hour by Shrewsbury clock—strike a blow! The very moment that blood is shed, old Virginia will make common cause with her sisters of the South.”

The news that Sumter was to be reinforced was out, and words like Pryor’s were what Charleston wanted to hear. At midnight alarm guns were fired from Citadel Square, signal for the reserves to assemble, and all night long there were the beating of drums and the tramping of feet as company after company formed up—in the open streets, armories being lacking—and moved off to their posts. It was reported that a United States fleet lay off the bar, in the windy dark, and signal lights were seen, or were believed to have been seen, atop Fort Sumter.
⁹

On the morning of April 11—cloudy, with a mild breeze, although a heavy swell out at sea kept Captain Fox’s steamer tossing most uncomfortably on its way down from New York—Beauregard set about the composition of the formal demand for Fort Sumter’s surrender. He had it finished by noon, and soon after that a boat with a white flag shoved off from a Charleston wharf and headed for the fort. It carried two of Beauregard’s aides—Colonel James Chesnut, until December a United States Senator from South Carolina, an aristocrat of aristocrats, whose wife was keeping a diary that would be famous; and Captain Stephen D. Lee, a West Point graduate recently resigned from the United States Army, a man who would win fame and high position as a Confederate officer. With them was Lieutenant Colonel James A. Chisholm, aide-decamp to Governor Pickens. In due course the boat reached the fort. The officers came on the wharf and were taken inside, and to Major Anderson they gave General Beauregard’s message.

During the war that was about to begin, various generals would write demands for surrender. This document, however, had a tone all of its own. It had the dignity and the odd, formal politeness of an age that was ending; it was, furthermore, pure Beauregard from start to finish, as if it had been written partly to make a demand on Major Anderson, partly to satisfy Beauregard’s own sense of what was correct, and partly for the appraisal of history. It might have been a restrained argument addressed to a wayward friend rather than a trumpet blast announcing violence. It read:

“Sir: the Government of the Confederate States has hitherto foreborne from any hostile demonstration against Fort Sumter, in the hope that the Government of the United States, with a view to the amicable adjustment of all questions between the two Governments,
and to avert the calamities of war, would voluntarily evacuate it.

“There was reason at one time to believe that such would be the course pursued by the Government of the United States, and under that impression my Government has refrained from making any demand for the surrender of the fort. But the Confederate States can no longer delay assuming actual possession of a fortification commanding the entrance of one of their harbors, and necessary to its defense and security.

“I am ordered by the Government of the Confederate States to demand the evacuation of Fort Sumter. My aides, Colonel Chesnut and Captain Lee, are authorized to make such demand of you. All proper facilities will be afforded for the removal of yourself and command, together with company arms and property, and all private property, to any post in the United States which you may select. The flag which you have upheld so long and with so much fortitude, under the most trying circumstances, may be saluted by you on taking it down.”
¹⁰

The three Southern officers waited alone for perhaps an hour, while Anderson called his officers together, read the message to them, and asked for their comments. The officers said about what they could have been expected to say, and no one bothered to make a record; they were professional soldiers in a fort which they had been ordered to keep, and to surrender on demand would have been unthinkable. Major Anderson composed a reply to General Beauregard. Like the letter he had just received, what the major wrote had dignity, courtesy, and firmness, and yet there was in his note a flavor faintly odd—as if his voice, had he been saying this instead of writing it, would have quavered just a little.

“General,” wrote Major Anderson, “I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication demanding the evacuation of this fort, and to say, in reply thereto, that it is a demand with which I regret that my sense of honor, and of my obligations to my Government, prevent my compliance. Thanking you for the fair, manly and courteous terms proposed, and for the high compliment paid me, I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant, Robert Anderson, Major, First Artillery, Commanding.”

This letter was given to the Confederate officers, and they started back to their boat, Major Anderson walking with them. At the edge of the wharf he asked whether Beauregard would open fire at once, without giving further notice. Colonel Chesnut hesitated, then replied: “No, I can say to you that he will not, without giving you further notice.” Anderson said he would take no action until he was fired upon; then, moved by the thought that had been preying on his mind for many days—the almost complete exhaustion of the fort’s supply of food—he burst out: “If you do not batter us to pieces we will be starved out in a few days.”

The remark seems not to have registered, right at first, and the Southern officers got into their boat. Then Colonel Chesnut did a double-take: if the major had said what the colonel thought he had said, there might be no need to open a bombardment. Quickly Colonel Chesnut asked Major Anderson to repeat his last remark. Major Anderson did so, and Colonel Chesnut asked if he might include this in his report to General Beauregard. The major was not enthusiastic about having that casual remark put in a formal report, but he said that he had stated a fact and the colonel could do as he liked.
¹¹

Like a good subordinate, Beauregard passed the whole business on to the Confederate Secretary of War, telegraphing the text of Anderson’s written response and adding the remark to Colonel Chesnut. To show that he wanted Montgomery to say whether the bombardment should be called off, Beauregard ended his telegram with the single word: “Answer.”

Jefferson Davis was perfectly willing to call off the shooting, but he wanted something better than Major Anderson’s offhand remark on the wharf. Beauregard was informed, in a telegram signed by Secretary Walker but undoubtedly composed by President Davis, that he had better get it in writing.

“Do not desire needlessly to bombard Fort Sumter,” said the telegram. “If Anderson will state the time at which, as indicated by him, he will evacuate, and agree that in the mean time he will not use his guns against us, unless ours should be employed against Fort Sumter, you are authorized thus to avoid the effusion of blood. If this or its equivalent be refused, reduce the fort as your judgment decides to be most practicable.”

Neither Davis nor Beauregard could overlook the chance that somebody might be trying to pull a fast one. Major Anderson was saying that he would be starved out very soon, but while the major seemed to be a truthful man, Washington of late had been a hotbed of deceit and falsehood. It was known that food was on its way to Fort Sumter. Some sort of Yankee ships—warships, transports, or whatnot—were known to be cruising to and fro off the Charleston bar, and Captain H. J. Hartstene, of the Confederate navy, had just said that in his opinion it was quite possible for these ships to send supplies to Major Anderson at night in small boats. All in all, this was no time for Southerners to be too confiding. To cancel the attack because Major Anderson was about to starve, and then to find that his larder had just been filled and that he could hold out indefinitely, would be a very poor way to begin the Confederacy’s struggle for independence.
¹²

Beauregard undertook to nail it down. He wrote another letter to Major Anderson, and at eleven o’clock on the night of April 11 the three aides got into their boat once more and started for Fort Sumter, reaching the wharf a little after midnight. Major Anderson took the letter they gave him and once more called his officers into council.