1861

by Adam Goodheart

  *The Republicans’ first nominee, John C. Frémont, in 1856, had been the first bearded presidential candidate in American history.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Shot in the Dark

  World take good notice, silver stars have vanished;

  Orbs now of scarlet—mortal coals, all aglow,

  Dots of molten iron, wakeful and ominous,

  On the blue bunting henceforth appear.

  —WALT WHITMAN,

  “Rise, Lurid Stars” (manuscript fragment, 1861)

  Charleston Harbor, April 1861

  AN 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.

  AFTER 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 h
is 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

  Three essential things the boat from Charleston continually failed to bring: reinforcements, provisions, and orders from Washington.14

  Back in December, as Doubleday’s boat approached Sumter on its night voyage from Moultrie, he had thought the new fortress resembled a prison. Now it had become one in fact. On bright days, the men played at ball and leapfrog on the parade ground, but sunlight was a rare and fleeting thing. Dusk came early and dawn late within the gloomy walls of encircling brick. During those long hours of darkness, there was no light to read or write by; nothing to do but huddle beneath blankets and wait out the slowly passing hours. The damp, raw cold of late winter penetrated the masonry and the men’s bones. Coal and firewood were running short along with the food and candles, and a guard was placed over the dwindling supply. The soldiers fished out passing driftwood to burn, before they began tearing down some of the fort’s outbuildings for fuel. Still, they could barely keep themselves warm. Doubleday sacrificed a handsome mahogany table that he had carried with him from his well-appointed quarters at Moultrie.15

  Amid this gloom and tedium, the men worked to shore up the fort’s defenses. Sumter, created decades before to withstand an attack on Charleston by a foreign fleet, had been designed with its strongest bastions overlooking the main shipping channel and with the weakest flank, known as the gorge wall, directly facing the nearest land, Cummings Point, just twelve hundred yards distant. This rear flank was where, for safety’s sake, the engineers had placed the main gate, hospital, and ordnance room. Now, with the enemy’s guns on Cummings Point, Sumter’s occupants must have wished they could lift up the entire fortress and rotate it 180 degrees. They had to make do instead with walling off the main gate with brick and stone, mounting howitzers above it, and constructing shrapnel-proof barriers in front of the fragile buildings. The Confederates, they expected, would try to storm the fort from this side. Captain Seymour, an inveterate tinkerer, devised makeshift weapons to drop on the attackers’ heads: barrels, charged with gunpowder and loaded with paving stones, that would explode like giant grenades as they hit the ground. Every so often, the harbor echoed with booms as one side or the other tested its heavy guns, and one morning a live round, fired mistakenly by an onshore battery, crashed into the water just off Sumter’s wharf. The Confederates hastily sent an officer over to apologize.16

  While Sumter might have seemed at times like an island without a country—neither Northern nor Southern, Union nor Confederate—its occupants were nevertheless constantly reminded that they were situated in the middle of slave territory. The Union officers even had their own slave, a lively and brig
ht teenager named James, whom they had rented from his master in Charleston to serve as their factotum around the fort and to run small errands in the city. James became a cause of contention—and of a rare breach of decorum between besiegers and besieged—when he failed to return from one of these errands. The officers soon learned that his master had seized him and was refusing to give him back, in violation of the rental agreement, because James, who was apparently literate, had exchanged letters with his mother about a possible slave uprising. In a letter to Major Anderson, a South Carolina official rudely suggested that the boy’s “temper and principles” had clearly been corrupted by exposure to the Yankee degenerates at Sumter—an insult that brought Anderson nearly to the point of challenging the man to a duel.17

  For the most part, though, quiet reigned. The excitement of December and January—when Anderson’s men had expected a Southern assault at any moment and were ready, even eager, to fight—had given way to a surreal calm, a stasis that seemed as if it might last forever, with the little band of soldiers fixed eternally on a point around which history’s wheel would continue to turn, never touching them.

  In some ways, the nine officers formed a microcosm of the Union itself, with men representing almost every region and every political orientation in the country, including one young Virginia lieutenant who later, when his state seceded, ended up switching sides, fighting—and dying—in the Confederate service. They also included a wide range of personalities. The officer corps of the “Old Army,” as the career military would be fondly remembered after the war, was a kind of men’s club, a close-knit, sometimes affectionate, often rambunctious fraternity. You started at West Point before you could shave, and then worked your way through the ranks, flying hither and thither among states and territories at the mysterious whim of the War Department, until you were a grizzled pensioner—unless, of course, a Mexican bullet or a Comanche arrow found you first. Everybody seemed to know everybody else, and a single moment of glory or disgrace—whether on the battlefield or the dueling ground, in the barroom or the brothel—could seal an officer’s reputation, and his fate. In many respects, though, a spirit of tolerant worldliness prevailed. The Old Army was one of antebellum America’s few truly national institutions, and certainly the only one that required the sons of Georgia planters to bunk alongside those of New England schoolteachers, not to mention do daily business (peaceably or not, as circumstances might require) with Mormon emigrants and Sonoran bandits. “I have in my pilgrimage thus far found mankind nearly the same in every region,” Major Anderson once reflected. There was room for many kinds of men around the officers’ mess table—and Sumter’s was no exception.18