The Class of 1846

by John Waugh

  In a few moments Captain Foster emerged, bounded angrily up the two or three steps that led to the terreplein, smashing his hat in his fist. He was clearly upset and it apparently had nothing to do with the laundry service. He was heard muttering something about the flag and “trample on it.”6

  The indignant soldiers and their wives and children—everybody was on the parapets now—watched as the Star of the West turned and steamed back toward the open sea. They were outraged, wild with impatience to avenge the affront to the flag, yet Anderson apparently was not going to do anything.

  It was more than the tall young wife of Private John H. Davis could stand. Baring her slim white arm and with a friction tube in her fingers, she sprang to one of the guns exclaiming that she would fire it herself. Captain Doubleday gently pulled her back.

  “You have a great deal of courage,” he said.

  “Courage!” she stamped impatiently. “I should think, Sir, a soldier’s wife ought to have courage!”7

  It was no good. The vessel had recrossed the bar. As quickly as it had begun it was over, and the guns of Sumter had remained silent throughout. Anderson had been unwilling to start a war over a merchant vessel.

  But he was willing to protest to South Carolina. Was the firing on the vessel flying a United States flag done with his sanction or authority? he angrily enquired of Governor Pickens. If it was, he would henceforth permit no vessels to pass peaceably within range of Sumter’s guns. When Pickens answered that he had authorized the firing and that it was perfectly justified, Anderson hurried to consult Washington. He dispatched Lieutenant Theodore Talbot to the war department in person to ask about the Star of the West, to explain Anderson’s actions, and to request instructions.8

  So this was the answer from the North, fumed Abner Doubleday. This was the craven manner in which the flag had come, “in a timid, apologetic way, and not as a representative of the war power of the Government.”9

  Foster was also upset. He wrote his superiors at the Corps of Engineers in Washington saying he feared the incident had “opened the war.” He reported three days later that “the temper of the people of this state is becoming every day more bitter, and I do not see how we can avoid a bloody conflict.”10

  From the public in the North there was an angry outcry. The incident was “a calm dishonorable, vile submission,” wrote one New Yorker in his diary. “I fear we are a decomposing nation.”11

  However, few in the country blamed Anderson personally for not answering the batteries. Secretary Holt apologized to him for not forewarning the garrison that the vessel was coming. It was understandable under the circumstances, the secretary admitted, that Anderson didn’t “feel the force of the obligation to protect her approach.” He wrote the major that the government had no further plans to try to reinforce the garrison, since any attempt was likely now to bring a collision of arms, a calamity the president was most anxious to avoid.12

  Harper’s Weekly saluted Anderson with a limn of Columbia herself and a stanza of bad doggerel:

  Bob Anderson, my beau, Bob, when we were first acquent,

  You were in Mex-i-co, Bob, because by order sent;

  But now you are in Sumter, Bob, because you chose to go;

  And blessings on you, any how, Bob Anderson, my beau!13

  But something now had to be done about the soldiers’ wives and children. “We have one another yet, though, thank God,” one of the wives had said when so many things were found lost or missing in the hasty move from Fort Moultrie.14 Now they weren’t even to have each other. Major Anderson had decided that they, like the officers’ wives, must leave. By the time Lieutenant Talbot returned from Washington on January 17 with the news that there would be no further attempt to reinforce or resupply the fort, the want of fuel had become a hardship. On the nineteenth the trips to the markets in Charleston had stopped. The Star of the West incident had ratcheted the tension up another turn. That an attack was forthcoming was evident. The wives and children had to leave. It just wouldn’t do to have them there.

  This distressed the wives. They had left Moultrie with their husbands, now they were leaving Sumter without them. But they were good soldiers. “With smothered sighs and suppressed tears,” they prepared to say their last good-byes and depart. God knew when, or if ever, they would see one another again.15

  “We have been seven years married, and I never had reason to find fault with you,” one wife told her husband as she turned to leave. “Now, whatever may happen, I know I shall never have cause to blush for you.” Another told the man she loved, her wet tears betraying her bold words, “And I don’t want you to think of us, Ben; the children and myself will get along, and you’ll have enough to think of here.” Private Thomas Carroll’s Irish wife issued these parting orders to her husband: “May God bless, and take care o’ you, Thomas,—I’ll never cease to pray for you; but do you juty, darlint;—God forbid that my love should interfere with that.”16

  The forty-two women and children boarded the steamer in a high wind on February 1, and the storm that followed kept them in the harbor for two more days. But at noon on Sunday, February 3, they stood out toward the bar and the open sea, bound for New York. As the steamer passed under the guns of Fort Sumter the men crowded the parapets, firing a single shot in a final farewell, answered by the steamer. Three cheers rose from the parapets; answering handkerchiefs fluttered on the deck of the ship. The men continued to stand and stare after the steamer until it was lost to view on the far horizon.17

  Now they were alone, surrounded by hostile neighbors who coveted their last four acres of land in the harbor. An attack was a foregone conclusion—it was only a question of time. It seemed that too much was being made over a half-finished slab of masonry erected on an artificial island built on imported chips of Yankee granite. But such as it was, it was now the only home they had, and they were bound to defend it.

  Foster set to work with Yankee efficiency making it ready for a vigorous defense. He erected galleries, traverses, and splinter-proof shelters; plugged embrasures with brick, stone, earth, iron, lead, and concrete; mined the wharf and the gorge; cleared the parade; opened communications throughout the fort and its quarters; and finished mounting the guns.18

  Positioning the necessary guns on the lower tier and the eight-inch columbiads on the upper tier was comparatively easy work and went rapidly. Placing two of the heavier ten-inch columbiads on the upper tier was something else again. It involved a big-time hoisting operation, lifting eight-ton monsters fifty feet above the parade. It required a jury-rigged derrick and lusty choruses of “On the Plains of Mexico.” Even so, the second columbiad had only risen as high as the level of the terreplein, when it let loose and hurtled back down breech first, burying itself trunnion-deep in the sand. The second try after the derrick was repaired succeeded, but there was no attempt to hoist the third gun. It was mounted instead as a mortar on the parade and pointed toward Charleston. It became a ritual after retreat each evening to see who was man enough to carry a 128-pound shot up the three flights of stairs.19

  As Foster armed the fort, the inventive Seymour, using the chemicals he had purchased from the apothecary in Charleston, improvised a “flying fougasse,” or what the men called a bursting barrel. This diabolical machine was an ordinary cask filled with broken stones—Yankee granite doubtless—and rigged with a fuse connecting the powder in the canister with a friction primer in the bung. It was designed to be rolled off the parapet at the appropriate moment like a shell grenade, and when the lanyard attached to the eye of the primer was pulled, to explode at invader level, spewing stones in every direction at bullet velocity. In a test firing, the stones lashed the surface of the water well out in the harbor. The boiling foam was observed with alarm in Charleston, and stories of an “infernal machine” made the papers the next day. Seymour was so pleased he built three of them.20

  For men in their situation, morale at the fort remained unaccountably high. The soldiers—many of them but
recent immigrants from Europe and in the army because it was the best job they could get—were eager to “strike a blow for ‘Uncle Sam.’ ”21 Even Foster’s forty loyal workmen still on the job caught the spirit. No grumbling was heard until the soldiers ran out of tobacco and were forced to gratify their cravings on spun yarn. The tobacco gave out long before the rations did, and raised a far louder outcry.22

  Anderson seemed satisfied with his officers. Besides himself, there were Doubleday and the two West Pointers from the class of 1846, Foster and Seymour—all captains. First Lieutenant Theodore Talbot, a cultivated Kentuckian, had served in the Frémont expeditions in the West in his younger days. Doubleday described him as “equally ready to meet his friend at the festive board, or his enemy at ten paces.” But Talbot was sick—dying of tuberculosis.

  The post physician, Surgeon Samuel Wylie Crawford, was a doctor who wanted to be a soldier and who would one day be a general, and whom Doubleday found to be “a genial companion, studious, and full of varied information.” Crawford had seen service on the frontier and had been with the garrison since September. The frail, bearded first lieutenant of artillery with the ironic name of Jefferson C. Davis had won both his commission in the regular army and his nickname, the “boy-sergeant of Buena Vista,” with his heroism in Mexico. As the nickname implied, he was “brave, generous, and impetuous.” Three young recent graduates from West Point rounded out the officers’ corps. Lieutenant Norman J. Hall was Anderson’s adjutant. Lieutenants G. W. Snyder and R. K. Meade were Foster’s assistant engineers. All three were, in Doubleday’s opinion, “full of zeal, intelligence, and energy.”23

  And there were the two civilians who were part of the family: Foster’s brother-in-law and clerk, Edward Moale; and Anderson’s resourceful former New York policeman and orderly sergeant, Peter Hart, who was a jack of all trades.

  When Foster wasn’t making Sumter ready, he was squinting through his binoculars, watching what was happening in the harbor. Nearly every day now he was identifying a new gun in place that hadn’t been there the day before. He methodically noted them all, assessing their firepower, adding it all up, and reporting daily to Washington. Batteries were going up all around them, a ring of potential fire growing more awesome day by day. Foster was so familiar with them by now that he had taken to criticizing their engineering. While the work appeared to Anderson to be well devised and well executed, to Foster’s discerning engineer’s eye the new floating battery the rebels had built “does not meet expectations.… I do not think [it] … will prove very formidable.”24

  But the work in general was good enough. Guns were either turned now directly on them or pointed down the channel to welcome any help Washington might think of sending. It was awesome enough for one of Doubleday’s artillerymen to write home, “When once the ball is commenced, God only knows where or when it will end.”25

  As Foster peered intently in three directions of the compass, ticking off the batteries as they grew, Seymour sketched, making drawings of what his classmate was seeing through his glasses. They were artful sketches representing, Anderson thought, “very prettily and accurately the batteries within our view”—pretty enough to hang in a gallery. Anderson was enclosing them in the daily reports he was sending in the mails to the war department in Washington.26

  Foster was now also writing his daily report to the chief of engineers, “if only a line, so that you may know if there is any interruption of the communication.”27 Between the reports of the two officers and Seymour’s sketches, Washington was being kept current on what was happening daily inside and outside the fort—as far as it could be seen and interpreted.

  As Anderson studied the shoreline through his glasses, he felt more and more like “a sheep tied watching the butcher sharpening a knife to cut his throat.”28 There wasn’t much he could do but watch. His latest instructions from Secretary Holt were still the same: to act strictly on the defensive, and to avoid if possible a collision with the angry forces surrounding him.29

  Given those orders, Anderson did not ask for reinforcements—didn’t want them—fearing that from the moment it was known they were coming he would be immediately attacked and a civil war would be under way. Anderson was like many of his peers, a military man who detested war because he knew how horrible it was. “An appeal to arms and to brute force is unbecoming the age in which we live,” Anderson wrote his South Carolina friend Robert N. Gourdin in December. “Would to God that the time had come when there should be no more war, and that religion and peace should reign throughout the world.” He was secure for the present in his stronghold, and his intention was to keep still, preserve peace if possible, buy time for the excitement to die down, and hope to avoid bloodshed. He had asked for reinforcements when he first arrived in Charleston. But the time when they might have been safely sent had passed weeks ago.30

  Anderson and his garrison were not heartened by what they read in the Charleston newspapers arriving on the daily mail boat. Anderson complained to the war department of “the animus of these people.” There was no escaping it, even in the obituary columns. Young Thaddeus S. Strawinski, only eighteen, a volunteer with the Columbia Artillery at Fort Moultrie, had been mortally wounded by an accidental shot from a revolver. His obituary in the Charleston Mercury reported that while being carried by his comrades to the hospital he had said, “Friends, O, how sorry I am you are to attack Fort Sumter without me!”31

  Now the batteries ringing the harbor were taking regular target practice, lobbing shells out into the ship channel. The garrison watched and noted that the range and accuracy were both improving. Anderson calculated all this with his keen artilleryman’s eye, and admitted it was “pretty good.” He regretted he had no ammunition to spare, to “show them our proficiency.”32

  Only Lieutenant Talbot, ill with his consumption, had seen any harbinger of good will. As he was alone in his room reading, a little bird “came gently tapping at the window pane having halted on his way to some more favored spot.” Talbot confessed in a letter to his mother that he was not particularly superstitious, “but I chose to consider this a kindly omen without pretending to its exact interpretation.”33

  In the middle of February the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States in Montgomery took over in Charleston. Anderson’s enemy was now the Confederacy, led by Jefferson Davis, a fellow West Pointer and one-time secretary of war. Davis had assigned a newly appointed brigadier to run the show in Charleston, and when Anderson heard who it was, he must have smiled ruefully. It was ironic. Anderson knew the man well; he had taught him all he knew about artillery.

  The new commander and old friend, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, one of the young engineering wizards of the Mexican War, arrived on March 1. He was forty-two now and graying slightly, but he still had that compact figure and that same quick intelligence and practiced engineer’s eye. Until a few weeks ago when Louisiana had seceded, he had been the new superintendent of the military academy. Now he was in Charleston in rebellion against the flag he had served all those years, ordered to seize Fort Sumter at the first opportunity, and until then to prevent it from being reinforced.34

  Nobody knew Fort Sumter better than Beauregard. As an army engineer he had helped build it. He knew its strengths and weaknesses and its interior arrangements in detail. He understood well what firepower Anderson could and couldn’t bring to bear against his batteries in the harbor. He knew if properly garrisoned and armed, it would be “a perfect Gibralter,” impregnable to anything but endless shelling, night and day, from the four points of the compass. He knew that his principal asset was the small size of the garrison now manning it. It must be kept small.35

  He also knew the officers in the garrison. As he gazed across the harbor at the unfinished fort, he must have thought of Robert Anderson, his dear friend and mentor, with mixed emotions. When Beauregard was a cadet, Anderson had been his instructor of artillery, and after he graduated Beauregard had stayed on for a while as his assistan
t. It would be no picnic exchanging cannonades with so skillful a cannoneer. Beauregard hoped it would not come to that.

  Another officer in the new Confederate provisional army, Major David Rumph Jones, Beauregard’s chief of staff, was also looking across the water at Sumter with mixed emotions. He also had friends in the garrison—friends and classmates—Foster and Seymour, as dear to him as Anderson was to Beauregard. Jones was the same agreeable man they had all known as “Neighbor” at West Point. He was more stately and mature now, and he had married into the upper echelons of Confederate society. His wife, Rebecca, a niece of Zachary Taylor, was also a cousin of Jefferson Davis’s first wife.36

  The three officers in Sumter, who had such binding ties to their enemy, knew that in Beauregard they faced a dangerous and resourceful foe. There was no question in their minds that his presence insured that whatever the rebels now did would be done with skill and sound judgment. On March 4 Anderson saw through his binoculars a flurry of movement around the harbor and knew that his old friend and protégé had assumed command and was making an inspection. They could now expect the noose to tighten.37

  The changes began to come immediately. A system of detached batteries went up along the shores of both Morris and Sullivan’s islands. Foster observed mortar batteries appearing just beyond the range of Sumter’s guns at every available point on the bay. It was clear that Sumter was to be the center of a circle of fire. Beauregard was correcting some of the faults Foster had criticized when the engineering was in South Carolina’s hands. The rebel commander was making no attempt to disguise anything he was doing. He was hiding nothing from them. There was no need to.38

  Bending over maps and plans in his office in Charleston, flanked on either side of his table by two vases filled with freshly cut flowers,39 Beauregard worked quickly. He was having to change some misconceptions, and he was trying to do it with tact and sensitivity. By March 8 he was able to report some progress. “Every one here,” he wrote Confederate Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker, “seems to be gradually becoming aware, through my cautious representations, that we are not yet prepared for the contest.” He agreed with Walker that the first priority was to keep reinforcements from Fort Sumter by strengthening the channel defenses. He hoped to accomplish that “in about a week or ten days.” In the meantime, he assured the secretary, “I will go on organizing everything around me.” By mid March he was celling Walker: “I am straining every nerve.… I believe in a very few days I will be ready at all points.”40