Dixie Betrayed
Page 5
Beauregard received the news on April 10. By this time the tension among Charlestonians, among Anderson and his men in the fort, and among patriotic Southerners and Northerners had reached a fever pitch. During the first week of April, a large crowd gathered at Charleston’s waterfront battery. Anderson and his little garrison sat inside the fort and waited. Surrounding them, scattered about the city and in various forts and batteries in the harbor, were more than six thousand secessionists itching for a fight. 8
Not all Charlestonians agreed with the Confederate response. James Louis Petigru, a prominent attorney and statesman, said that South Carolina was too small to be a nation and too large for an insane asylum. 9 But the majority of residents felt wronged by the North and saw no other way to react to Lincoln and the rest of the Yankees than to fight. Virginian Roger Atkinson Pryor, a young lawyer, editor, and politician, gave a rousing speech in Charleston on April 10. “I thank you especially that you have annihilated this accursed Union, reeking with corruption and insolent with excess of tyranny,” he said. “Thank God! It is blasted with the lightning wrath of an outraged and indignant people.” 10
Advised to surrender by the local South Carolina militia and by representatives of the Confederate government, Anderson would not budge. Instead he drew up a formal reply. “I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication demanding the evacuation of this fort,” he wrote, “and to say, in reply thereto, that it is a demand with which that I regret that my sense of honor, and of my obligations to my Government, prevent my compliance.” 11 Informally, Anderson told his potential enemies he was running low on supplies and that he would probably be starved out in a few days if the Southern guns didn’t “batter us to pieces.” Men inside the fort rolled out powder kegs, worked on the guns, and watched the various positions of Confederate weapons facing them, trying not to expose themselves on the parapets. Night fell over the fort with the stars overhead and the gleam of lights on the horizon in Charleston. Inside the fort Anderson had no oil for lamps, and so the three-story brick fortress stood in near-total darkness.
Early on the morning of April 12—around 1:30 a.m.—the fort’s officers were awakened by a boat bearing a white flag. Four emissaries came: James Chesnut, Stephen D. Lee, Alexander R. Chisholm, and Roger A. Pryor. These aides brought a letter suggesting that if Anderson agreed to evacuate the fort at a stated time without firing on Confederate forces, the transfer of the fort could be accomplished bloodlessly. Anderson stated he would abandon Sumter by noon on April 15 only if his command and flag would not be fired on and unless otherwise instructed by the Lincoln government. By 3:20 a.m. Chesnut and Lee concluded the terms were not acceptable—they wanted the Yankees out of South Carolina immediately—and that the fort would be fired on beginning in one hour. “By authority of Brigadier-General Beauregard, commanding the Provisional Forces of the Confederate States,” wrote Chesnut and Lee, “we have the honor to notify you that he will open the fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter in one hour from this time.” 12 If they never again met in this world, God grant that they may meet in the next, Anderson replied. The emissaries then withdrew.
Within the fort, sleep was out of the question. “We arose and dressed,” wrote Union officer Samuel Wylie Crawford, “and before our arrangements were completed, the firing began.” 13 It was almost exactly 4:30 a.m. on April 12 when it started. The great honor of firing the first shot of the war, coveted by officers at Fort Johnson, had been offered to the fiery secessionist Roger Pryor, who had retreated to that point by 4 a.m. Oddly, however, he turned down the offer, later saying, “I could not fire the first gun of the war.” The first shot, a ten-inch mortar shell sent as a signal round to activate the other batteries, was fired by the fort’s commander, Capt. George S. James. “A flash as of distant lightning in the direction of Mount Pleasant, followed by the dull roar of a mortar, told us that the bombardment had begun,” James Chester, a Federal soldier, wrote. 14 In a few minutes’ time, the sudden flashes and a surprising number of projectiles, along with the acrid, sulfurous smell of gunpowder and sight of wafting smoke, arced over the fort. After several hours, particularly after dawn, most of the batteries gained an effective range and started spitting shells and balls into the fort with frightening accuracy. In a variety of locations, some Southerners stoked hot-shot furnaces to heat their iron balls into fire starters, hoping to ignite Sumter’s wooden barracks. Bricks were smashed, and splinters of wood, brick dust, and mortar chunks cascaded into the air. The soldiers scattered and took cover. “A ball from Cummings’s Point lodged in the magazine wall,” wrote Union officer Abner Doubleday of the first moments of the war, “and by the sound seemed to bury itself in the masonry about a foot from my head, in very unpleasant proximity to my right ear.” 15 What had been one of the most magnificent fortifications in North America was disintegrating into a pile of rubble.
The fire from Southern guns increased in accuracy and frequency after daybreak, when a breeze carried the fumes and sounds of war more effectively into the city. Observers watched the spectacle with amazement as the night turned into day. The youthful Confederacy had struck its first blow.
With such a small amount of ammunition available, Anderson had no reason to react quickly. After breakfasting on a small amount of farina, some of the Federals mounted a response using several cannon, but only a few guns were brought to bear. Doubleday fired the first Yankee cannon of the war. Crawford reported knocking out a gun in the floating battery. But the volume of shells being fired at Sumter was magnificent; it already had ignited a small fire in the wood-framed quarters and knocked away a chimney.
During the afternoon, the Confederate bombardment of Sumter continued without pause, raining shot and shell into and over the fort. Some of Anderson’s soldiers were wounded slightly by flying debris; most were unscathed, but the fort’s walls were becoming pocked with hits and cracks, and brick dust was accumulating on the parade. Pvt. John Carmody tested the Rebels at Fort Moultrie by sneaking up to the parapet and firing the heavier guns in quick succession at the fort; this only prompted the Confederates into returning a heavy fire onto Sumter. With the approach of nightfall, the firing from Confederate batteries lessened. Amazingly, there had been no deaths on either side.
On the evening of April 12, rain fell on Charleston. Anderson ordered his firing suspended. On the Confederate side, an occasional mortar shell was sent toward Sumter throughout the night. The Federal soldiers finally had the chance to sleep, “well but hungry.” Meanwhile, five Federal ships approached, stocked with provisions and the opportunity for escape if necessary. Lincoln’s special agent Gustavus Vasa Fox attempted to coordinate the movements of the Harriet Lane, the Pawnee, the Baltic, the Powhatan, and the Pocahontas. Fox, a former naval lieutenant and woolen goods merchant, was a Massachusetts native who would several months hence become the assistant secretary of the navy. But the movements coordinated by Fox were impeded by heavy seas and a dense fog that formed before dawn.
On the morning of April 13, the storm subsided. Gunfire from Sumter was slowed considerably in order to conserve ammunition. Confederate fire was hot, however, in both senses of the word. By 8 a.m. hot shot from Rebel guns started a fire in Sumter’s officers’ quarters, and despite the improvised firefighting efforts, the blaze was slowly spreading. Anderson and his officers worried about the possibility of flames or sparks reaching the magazine, which would be catastrophic.
The shot and shell rained in as heavily as ever. Sparks, cinders, and burning pieces of debris launched upward only to rain down on the spreading fire, eventually igniting several shells and kegs of powder, causing a few large explosions. Desperate, Anderson had much of the powder thrown into the harbor.
By now the whole fort was becoming an inferno; the Federal ships were nowhere in sight, and the sally port and heavy entrance gates had been wrecked by shell fire. The flagstaff had been splintered repeatedly. At 1:30 p.m. the flagstaff in Sumter fell. Col. Louis Trezevant Wigfall had re
turned to his native state and had joined G. T. Beauregard’s staff as an aide-de-camp. James Simons, a brigadier general of the South Carolina militia, was determined to find out if this act meant surrender. Before Simons could get an official party off in a nearby rowboat, however, Wigfall demanded that Pvt. Gourdin Young of the Palmetto Guard row him out to the fort. In a bizarre scene aboard a skiff, Wigfall and Young moved north amid the hail of metal. Once Wigfall reached the esplanade, he tied a white kerchief to his sword, got out of the boat, and approached the sally port.
Wigfall found Capt. Jefferson C. Davis (no relation to the Confederate president) and exclaimed that Beauregard had suggested surrender was inevitable. Wigfall then went atop the parapet and waved a white flag, but the firing continued. Anderson approached and said he would capitulate to leave now, rather than on April 15, if the garrison could take its arms and property, honor the United States by saluting its flag, and be transported northward. This was acceptable, said Wigfall. Wigfall had absolutely no authority from Beauregard or anyone else to accept such terms; he did so of his own volition.
The politician returned to Morris Island in the skiff, which flew a white flag, and firing died down from all points. Now, to confuse the issue further, Beauregard’s authorized emissaries—Pryor, Lee, and the politician William Porcher Miles—approached the fort. They inquired about Anderson’s needs and discussed the situation of the blaze, which was dying down. They asked Anderson about surrender terms, and he replied that terms had already been agreed on with Wigfall. The three Confederates were dumbfounded and explained that Wigfall had no such authority and that he hadn’t even seen Beauregard for two days. Confused, the men stood inside the crumbled and burning fort and discussed the surrender. Anderson became upset about the misunderstanding. “Very well, gentlemen, you may return to your batteries,” he snapped at his artillerists. 16 But Pryor, Lee, and Miles convinced him to continue a cease-fire until they could talk again with Beauregard, who accepted all the terms except for allowing the Yankees to salute their flag.
After further negotiation, the parties agreed to evacuate and transfer themselves and their supplies on the next morning, Sunday, April 14. The Yankees marched out of the fort “with colors flying and drums beating,” Anderson recounted. 17 After thirty-four hours of bombardment, the first engagement of the war was over, and the Confederates had won. The battle had been bloodless. Ironically, however, the pomp and circumstance of the departure ceremony killed two: one of the cannon fired by Anderson’s command produced a spark that was blown into a stand of gunpowder. The resulting explosion mortally wounded both Pvt. Daniel Hough and Pvt. Edward Galloway. They were the first to die in America’s greatest conflict. Many more were now to come.
Chapter 4
The War Department
ESTABLISHED with the other Confederate agencies in February 1861, the War Department had jurisdiction over all matters pertaining to the Confederate army and to Indian tribes as well. All orders were subject to Jefferson Davis’s approval, and because Davis had served as secretary of war for Franklin Pierce and fancied himself the nation’s leading military mind, his meddling in the department’s affairs soon would become legendary.
Davis’s choice for war secretary was a poor one, made to balance political favors handed to various states for representation in the government. Leroy Pope Walker, age forty-four, was an Alabama politician who, as the son of a U.S. senator, grew up with politics in his blood. Balding and with a fluffy gray beard, Walker looked like a small-town lawyer concentrating on petty legal disputes rather than someone who would run a powerful governmental department. A successful attorney, Walker staunchly had defended Southern rights and slavery throughout his career and, in 1860, served as an aide in the Alabama legislature to Senator William L. Yancey. Walker had spoken frequently for Southern candidate John C. Breckinridge in the presidential canvass and served briefly as a brigadier general of the Alabama militia. When Davis looked to Alabama for cabinet representation, Walker was the third choice. (The two most prominent politicians of the state, Yancey and Clement C. Clay, declined Davis’s invitation.) The appointment was a shaky one, as Walker had little military experience, and Davis was determined to start micromanaging the war effort from day one.
In Montgomery the business of the Confederacy was established at the Government Building, a two-story brick edifice standing on Bibb and Commerce streets, within a block of the Exchange Hotel. It was, thus, near where most officials were staying and convenient to those who came downtown to seek office, of which there were many. But the Government Building was not the most attractive of structures. (It appeared as “a great red brick pile” to one observer and “a handsome, first-class warehouse” to another.) 1 Nonetheless, Walker established his office of war to greet the arrivals of hundreds of army officers and would-be officers from all parts of the country. Veterans of the U.S. Army with loyalty to the South—P. G. T. Beauregard, Joseph E. Johnston, and Edmund Kirby Smith included—flocked to see Walker. Indian fighters, including the celebrated officers Earl Van Dorn and Ben McCulloch, also showed up. Soldiers of fortune traveled to Montgomery and offered their services to the Confederacy, including escapees from military adventurer William Walker’s Nicaraguan filibustering journey and from the Hungarian revolution of the late 1840s.
Following Fort Sumter’s bombardment and surrender by the Yankees, tens of thousands of Southern boys flocked to recruiting stations in scattered towns, anxious for a fight. The men holding these boys’ fate represented a mixture of skill and incompetence, some experienced general officers and others glamorized clerks. The War Department’s nine bureaus all operated under the direction of Walker, but each bureau chief had considerable authority of his own. The most important of these bureaus was the Adjutant and Inspector General’s Department, run by Samuel Cooper. A Yankee who had married a Southern girl, Cooper was a native of Hackensack, New Jersey, and was past his prime at sixty-two when the war started. As adjutant and inspector general of the army, Cooper would be the chief communicator between armies in the field and the Davis administration.
A long-standing veteran of the U.S. Army, Cooper had graduated in the West Point class of 1815 and spent most of his service as an artillerist before becoming a staff officer. He served ably in the Seminole and Mexican wars, after which he was made adjutant general of the U.S. Army, rising to the grade of colonel in the regular army. In 1827 Cooper married Sarah Mason, granddaughter of George Mason of Virginia, a celebrated statesman of the Revolution. This alliance made Cooper a social force in the South and a dedicated Virginian, living on an estate near Alexandria. He became fast friends with Jefferson Davis during the latter’s term as secretary of war, an association that would carry over into the Confederacy’s struggle for independence, and he joined an intellectual circle that included Robert E. Lee of Arlington House, a significant estate near Cooper’s own. Cooper was notable also for his treatises on regulations for the volunteer and militia army troops and for his manual of cavalry tactics. With his earnest yet unremarkable eyes, wavy gray hair, and plain face with its bulbous nose—coupled with a slow, methodical way of thinking—Cooper quickly came to be thought of as a rubber stamp for Davis. One of his subordinates described him as “uniformly courteous and uniformly non-committal . . . self-effacing, something of a mystery.”
Cooper had resigned his commission in the U.S. Army on March 7, 1861, just after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as president. Cooper might have simply returned to Alexandria to live out his retirement years, but the second aspect of his defection from the North was to go South, offering his services to the fledgling Confederate army. This offer led to Cooper becoming the ranking officer of the entire Confederate army: its senior general. His catapult to the top was, in part, thanks to his relationship with Jefferson Davis. During the days of Cooper as adjutant general and Davis as war secretary, Davis recalled, “my intercourse with him was daily, and I habitually consulted him in reference to the duties I had to perform,
as well because of the purity of his character, as of his knowledge of the officers and affairs of the army.” Continued Davis,
Though calm in his manner and charitable in his feelings, he was a man of great native force, and [he] had a supreme scorn for all that was mean. To such a man, a life spent in the army could not fail to have had its antagonisms and friendships. . . . The Confederate States had no military organization, and save the patriotic hearts of gallant men, had little on which to rely for the defense of their country. The experience and special knowledge of General Cooper was, under these circumstances, of incalculable value. 2
Aside from the adjutant general’s office, the chief bureau immediately involved with War Secretary Walker was the Bureau of War, also known as the war office, which consisted of clerks and messengers who assisted the secretary. The Bureau, as it would be known, was led by a curious fellow named Albert Taylor Bledsoe. Age fifty-two, a regular army castoff who dabbled in theology, Bledsoe was a friend and Kentucky classmate of both Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee’s at West Point. After West Point Bledsoe taught mathematics at Miami University in Ohio and then moved to Springfield, Illinois, where he had taken up practicing law next door to another young attorney, Abraham Lincoln. Later Bledsoe taught math at the University of Mississippi and the University of Virginia before emerging into the infant Confederacy, where he was famous for his hatred of all things Northern and his vitriolic diatribes against Thomas Jefferson and democracy.