by Tony Horwitz
A man to my left stared at his tour book. “They fired three thousand rounds at that thing,” he said. His wife nodded with the trancelike glaze of a teenager in first-period history class. To my right stood a heavyset man about my own age. He had a shaved head, sunglasses and a camouflage jacket with safety pins where the buttons should have been.
“It’s heart-breaking, huh?” he said, staring out to sea. I wasn’t sure if he meant the Civil War or the scene on the Beauregard.
“Tony Horwitz,” I said, extending my hand.
“Joel Dorfman.” He paused. “Shalom.”
Dorfman was an unemployed truck driver from Long Island. I asked what brought him to Fort Sumter.
“This is the end,” he said.
“The end?”
“Yes, the end, my friend. I just got into town about an hour ago.”
“Me, too.”
“Took a look around to see which way the wind blows.”
I don’t know what I’d expected to find on the ferry to Fort Sumter, but it certainly wasn’t this: a shaved-headed Jewish truck-driver from Long Island, talking in Doors’ lyrics.
“I’ve been a rider on the storm for four months,” Dorfman went on. The journey began when he lost his trucking job. Ever since, Dorfman had traveled through the Civil War, as I now planned to do. Only Dorfman was doing it backwards: from Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, to Petersburg, to Gettysburg, Antietam, Manassas and now Fort Sumter. Later today, he’d begin the long retreat to New York.
“Why’d you do it in reverse?” I asked him.
Dorfman looked at me quizzically. “If we could travel back in time, wouldn’t we hit the end of the War first?”
THE Beauregard docked at Sumter. Up close, the “consecrated object,” as Henry James called it, looked even less impressive than it had from sea. The fort, a low pentagon of brick, squatted atop a bleak man-made atoll. Its walls were covered with an ugly, lavalike spill of black pitch. Seagulls screamed and shat around us as we clambered ashore for the hour until the boat returned.
A Park Service ranger stood atop a cannon barrel inside the fort’s walls. He explained that Fort Sumter wasn’t yet finished when the Confederate commander in Charleston, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, received orders to “proceed to reduce it.” Beauregard carried out this dietlike instruction at dawn on April 12, 1861, when the rebels unleashed an artillery barrage from batteries ringing the harbor.
The Union garrison inside Sumter fired back until the fort’s wood barracks caught fire, forcing the men to surrender. Incredibly, the only fatality during the thirty-four-hour artillery duel was a Confederate horse. But when Beauregard permitted his foes to fire a 100-gun salute before lowering the Stars and Stripes, one of the shots misfired and killed two Northern soldiers—the first of 620,000 men who would die in the four-year struggle that followed.
“No climbing, no crossing barriers and please don’t take Fort Sumter home with you,” the ranger said, as his audience dispersed across the rubbled fort. The ranger, a young black man named Joe McGill, said his warning against carting off chunks of the fort was only partly in jest. Many Southerners regarded Sumter as a Confederate shrine; marines often came here to reenlist and couples to exchange marriage vows. “Every once in a while someone gets carried away and tries to pry loose a sacred brick,” McGill said.
Mostly, though, the fort attracted ordinary tourists, many of whom possessed a muddled grasp of American history. Visitors often asked McGill why he didn’t mention the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He had to explain that the national anthem was composed during the shelling of a different fort in a different conflict: Baltimore’s Fort McHenry in the War of 1812. Others asked whether it was true that John Brown fired the first shot at the fort. They were thinking of the abolitionist’s raid on Harpers Ferry, eighteen months before the attack on Sumter. “One guy even asked me why so many Civil War battles were fought on national parks,” McGill said.
I was curious if McGill felt any awkwardness guiding tourists through a shrine to the slaveholding Confederacy. “I would if that was the whole story here,” he said. He pointed to a spit of land a short way across the water. It was near there, he said, that black Union troops launched a suicidal attack on a Confederate redoubt called Battery Wagner. The assault, which formed the climax of the movie Glory, changed white attitudes both North and South about the fighting ability of black soldiers.
McGill also told me about Robert Smalls, a Charleston slave and harbor pilot who hijacked a Confederate ship called the Planter, slipped past the guns at Sumter, and turned the ship over to the Union navy. Smalls later became the ship’s commander, as well as a five-term U.S. congressman from South Carolina. McGill smiled. “I see my role here a little the same way,” he said. “Maybe I can slip in a few things that will change how folks think about the War.”
McGill excused himself and went over to tell a school group about the fort’s crumbled bulwarks. The mortar was made from oyster shells and lime, and the ugly black coating I’d noticed from sea was the legacy of the fort’s renovation following the Spanish-American War. The army converted Sumter into a gun battery and sealed it with reinforced concrete, painted black to deaden glare.
I wandered outside and found Joel Dorfman lurking in the mudflats by Sumter’s original gate. A few artillery shells were still embedded in the wall. “These are the original stones and the original cannonballs,” Dorfman said. He pressed his palms against the sun-warmed bricks and closed his eyes. “Break on through to the other side,” he intoned.
A ship’s horn tootled, recalling us to the General Beauregard. Steaming back to Charleston, we gazed at the palmetto-lined seawall where women and children gathered in 1861 to watch the bombardment of Sumter. “All the death,” Dorfman said. “It starts to get to you. Shiloh. I was there. Bloody Pond. It was horrible. The Wilderness. I was there. During the battle the woods caught fire and burned hundreds of wounded men.” He paused. “I’ve been to a lot of cemeteries. Did you know three thousand Jews fought for the South? There’s some buried here in Charleston.”
Suddenly a cry went up and the other passengers started pointing at the sea. “Fin!” someone shouted. A pair of dolphins had broken water. “Quick, get the camcorder!”
Dorfman shook his head. “I’ve been to a lot of these places,” he said. “I couldn’t get much higher. But ninety percent of these people don’t know why they’re here. They’ll be standing on top of ten thousand graves and it might as well be Disneyland.”
We docked in Charleston at sunset. I walked Dorfman to his car. The backseat of the battered Dodge was piled with crumpled clothes, a stained pillow, Civil War books, crushed boxes of Ritz crackers, and a Styrofoam tray holding a gravy-stained biscuit. “The end, my friend,” Dorfman said, climbing inside. He rolled down the window and shouted “Shalom” as he puttered off in a cloud of exhaust. I waved and smiled, wondering if I would reach the end of my own journey in similar shape: death-obsessed, bloated on biscuits and gravy, sleeping in a car littered with dirty laundry and Ritz crackers.
AS A CIVIL WAR BORE, I’d arrived in Charleston naively expecting to confront the 1860s at every turn. But climbing off the Beauregard, I quickly saw that the Confederacy represented only a four-year blip in Charleston’s long history. The first clue to the city’s other lineage was the regal procession of street names—King, Queen, John, Mary—so reminiscent of colonial Williamsburg. In fact, Charleston predated Virginia’s first capital and was named for a monarch who ruled England two thrones before William of Orange.
Charleston even had its own creation story, a Southern version of the Mayflower. Hardy colonists sailed from England in 1669 aboard three ships; hurricanes wrecked two, forcing settlers to crowd onto the Carolina before alighting in Charleston the next year. When modern-day Charlestonians intimated that their ancestry went back to the “three ships,” they were letting you know, in genteel code, that their blood was of the bluest Charleston pedigree.
In the
eighteenth century, Charleston was the largest city south of Philadelphia and boasted the colonies’ best theaters, finest homes and first public library. Each summer, while slaves toiled in the rice and indigo fields, the gentry escaped the malarial torpor of their coastal plantations and took up residence in urban pleasure-domes that rivaled the Robber Baron “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island. “The gentleman planters are absolutely above every occupation but eating, drinking, lolling, smoking and sleeping, which five modes of action constitute the essence of their life and existence,” a colonial doctor in Charleston observed.
This sybaritic splendor had helped ignite the Civil War and was, in turn, destroyed by the conflict. On the eve of the Civil War, white Charlestonians had the highest per capita income in America. In much of the Lowcountry, as the swampy coastal lands around Charleston were known, slaves outnumbered whites by nine to one. It was mostly wealthy planters who gathered at a Charleston hall one December night in 1860 to unanimously pass the South’s first ordinance of secession.
By War’s end, Charleston had been ravaged by fire and by an eighteen-month blitz by Union naval guns. While post-War Atlanta and other cities remade themselves in the image of the North, Charleston abided in a sultry drowse: a poor, proud ghost of the defeated South. But destitution proved a blessing of sorts, sparing Charleston the wrecking ball. By the time prosperity crept back during World War II—fueled, ironically by the same federal navy that pummeled the city eighty years before—Charleston’s grand homes had been recognized as historic and architectural gems worth preserving, and the city was reborn as a playground for tourists. Having vanquished the Old South, Northerners could now partake of its luxuries by staying at planters’ city homes, touring their plantations, riding carriages along cobbled streets, and dining elegantly on the Lowcountry’s colorfully named dishes: hoppin’ John, frogmore stew, wild-cat shrimp and she-crab soup.
I opted for the low-rent tour, staying at a B and B and lolling about the peninsula tip on which the heart of historic Charleston rested. This square mile or so was the most agreeable piece of urban real estate I’d yet visited in America. The low skyline, hurricane-swept flora and well-spaced buildings gave Charleston’s streets the sun-flooded brilliance of a Van Gogh landscape, with architectural coloring to match. I gazed at the lollipop-colored facades lining “Rainbow Row” and peered through wrought-iron gates at secret gardens and grand side porches called piazzas, a Caribbean import designed to catch sea breezes and offer shade against the summer sun. Even in winter, it was easy to conjure a pair of Charleston aristocrats perched in wicker settees on one of these piazzas, idling away the day over rum, tobacco and whist.
I finally found the Civil War again at the Market, a former fish and produce mart that was now a tourist bazaar, including a stall devoted to Confederate paraphernalia: rebel flags, Dixie shot glasses, bumper stickers proclaiming, “If at First You Don’t Secede, Try Try Again.” Just beside the stall, a black woman sat weaving coiled baskets from palmetto fronds, pine needles and sweetgrass. She perched in a fold-out chair with a blanket over her legs and cardboard scraps as shields against the breeze. “Can’t bear the cold,” Emily Haynes said of the sixty-degree day. Tucking a windblown wisp of gray hair under a bright green headwrap, she had the worn look of a woman who could be anywhere between forty-five and ninety.
Haynes was a sharecropper’s daughter and had spent much of her childhood in the fields, using the baskets she now wove for tourists. “You tossed the rice up and down and let the wind blow the chaff away,” she said. “Fan-’em baskets, what we called ’em.” She laughed, exposing a solitary molar. “Now white folks use ’em for fruit and flowers and such.”
It was in the rice fields that Haynes learned what little she knew about the Civil War. “I forgot the tune but the words went like this.” She cleared her throat and recited:
Abraham Lincoln, King of the Jews,
Pinchbeck britches and cowbelly shoes.
She resumed her weaving. “Pinchbeck meant funny pants, blown up like a balloon,” she said. “Don’t know about cowbelly shoes. Sounds poor. Abe was a hick, I guess.” I asked why he was known as King of the Jews. “Cause he led slaves to freedom, same as Moses,” she said. “That’s why the gang got him, same’s they got Martin Luther King. The gang didn’t want him to have their chair.”
The “gang” had also kept poor people down. Blacks once owned much of the farmland around Charleston but they’d been “fooled out of it,” Haynes said. “My daddy always said, ‘White people will out-figure you and take your money.’” This reminded her of another ditty, popular during the Depression:
A nickel’s worth of sugar, a dime’s worth of lard,
I would buy more, but times too hard.
Times were better now. Haynes sold her baskets for $30 each—more, she reckoned, than her father cleared in a year. I let her fool me out of $30 for one. As I got up to go, I asked how she felt about her neighbor selling rebel trinkets in an adjoining stall.
Haynes shrugged, gathering fronds in her lap for a fresh basket. “They can remember that war all they want,” she said. “So long’s they remember they lost.”
CHARLESTON—TOURIST INDUSTRY CHARLESTON—preferred to forget the War altogether. The city’s main museum displayed a few Confederate relics but made no mention of secession or Sumter. Across the street, at Charleston’s huge visitors’ center, the introductory slide show opted for a passive construction of events: “Shots were fired on Fort Sumter and Charleston was plunged into the dark days of the Civil War.” Then the show moved quickly to other calamities in the city’s history: fires, earthquakes, the hurricane Hugo. I asked a woman at the desk about Civil War sites I might visit. Apart from Sumter, she couldn’t name any. “There’s used to be an old museum in the Market, I think,” she said, loading me instead with brochures for carriage rides, garden shows, plantation visits.
Returning to the Market, I found an antebellum building modeled on the Temple of Nike in Greece. A sign above the portico said “Confederate Museum” but there were boards over the windows; the building had been closed since Hugo damaged it in 1989. It was only by chance, at a shop down the street, that I noticed a handwritten flyer saying that the museum had set up temporary digs on a back street and was open for a few hours each weekend.
The location turned out to be a kindergarten, and the museum’s curator a Daughter of the Confederacy who taught there during the week. “The kindergarten said it was okay if we put a few of our things here for the time being,” June Wells said, gesturing at a small, dimly lit room cluttered with dusty cases.
The “things” included the first rebel flag to fly over Fort Sumter and wooden wheels from the first Confederate-made cannon—crammed, for lack of space, in one of the kindergarten’s toddlersized toilet stalls. “We’re not politically correct, you see,” Wells said of the museum’s circumstances. “The city says it can’t fix our building downtown because of money. But they’ve built a new park, a new school, a new aquarium and have fixed all the other buildings damaged by the storm.”
Wells told me this without rancor. She was about seventy, with delicate features and an hourglass figure. I found myself wondering what she had looked like as a young woman. It wasn’t just her appearance. It was also her gentle laughter and direct, almost coquettish gaze. “You’re from Virginia? Oh, we’re deeply flattered,” she said as I signed the guest book. Mine was the first name on a blank page labeled January.
I told her about my travels so far, and the impressions I’d begun forming about Civil War remembrance. “What a wonderful project,” she said. “May I offer you a few of my own thoughts?”
“Of course, m’am. I’d be grateful to hear them.” The best thing about Southern manners was that they seemed to improve my own, at least temporarily.
“We’re a different sort of people in Charleston, then and now, and I’m sure that’s why we started it all,” she said of the War. “We were a well-educated city that cared about
issues and had never been through the poverty stage of colonization.”
Wells’s own family arrived on the “first ship” and had stayed in the city ever since. She knew dozens of families with similar pedigrees. “We’re not a migrating people,” she said. “We live in our old houses and eat on our old dishes and use the old silverware every day. We’re close to the past and comfortable with it. We’ve surrounded our lives with the pictures of all these relatives hanging on the walls, and we grow up hearing stories about them. It gives these things a personality beyond just the material they’re made of.”
She stood up and smoothed her paisley dress. “May I show you what I mean?” She gently grasped my wrist and led me to a glass case with a punch bowl inside. The woman who donated it, she said, was the daughter of the chief Confederate engineer at Fort Sumter. At a Confederate reunion in the 1890s, the woman served punch from the bowl to hundreds of distinguished veterans.
“Although she was a young woman, she had false teeth,” Wells said. “As she leaned over to pour the punch, her teeth fell in the bowl. She looked at the line of people waiting to be served, and she looked at the punch. The dentures had sunk to the bottom. So she decided to go ahead serving until she could discreetly remove her teeth.” Wells laughed. “She told me that forty years ago, but I still can’t look at that punch bowl without thinking of those teeth.”
She moved on to another glass case and another strange story. “A woman I’d never heard of in my life calls the museum one day and says, ‘I’m going to die before tomorrow. I have a uniform. If you want it you have to come and get it.’” When Wells arrived, the woman served her sherry in a silver goblet and talked for two hours. “Then she said, ‘I’m dying now, so if you want my granddaddy’s uniform it’s upstairs in a closet.’”