1861 (29 page)

Beauregard’s offer was a generous one. He would send vessels to carry Anderson and all of his men to safety. They would be allowed to take their personal possessions and any of their companies’ arms and property and be granted passage to any port in the United States
that they wished. And before departing, they would be permitted to salute “the flag which you have upheld so long and with so much fortitude, under the most trying
circumstances”—before, of course, lowering it.

The rebels clearly wanted the battle to begin before Fox’s arrival. They had no idea what sort of naval force might be accompanying his tugboats, and it made little sense to hold fire until they found out. At this moment, they sought the fort, and nothing more; certainly not a major clash of arms. Anderson courteously asked Beauregard’s aides to wait while he conferred with his staff.
⁷⁵

The eight officers gathered in the major’s quarters, standing around him in expectant silence. They had a decision before them, he said, that involved not only their military position but perhaps also their lives. He did not mention their honor. He did not mention their country. He read Beauregard’s missive to them aloud.

“Shall we accede?” Anderson asked his officers.
⁷⁶

But before they could reply, their commander unfolded another piece of paper, this one dog-eared and creased. It was the letter he had received almost four months earlier and shared with no one until now: his final, secret orders from Secretary Floyd, addressed to him at Fort Moultrie, where they had reached him two days before Christmas:

The words rang strangely in the small room. They seemed to come from another eon of history. Floyd was long gone now, under congressional investigation in absentia on charges of treason and peculation in office. Buchanan was back on his farm in
Pennsylvania, reviled and already half forgotten. Moultrie’s ramparts, manned now by Confederate gunners, seemed more distant and unreachable across the harbor than Sumter had ever been.
How strange that Anderson should share those orders at this moment, after so many months—rather than, for that matter, reminding them about the dispatch that had come from Secretary Cameron just three days earlier, and which could be interpreted as giving him similar latitude to capitulate when necessary. And
weren’t those orders from December the ones that he had already disobeyed, in spirit if not in letter?

But Floyd’s words burned as if they somehow formed the throbbing center of the anguish that Anderson had barely concealed almost since his arrival in Charleston Harbor. They were the ones he had gone over in his mind again and again, poking and probing them like a wound: What was the
honorable
thing to do, not just for his own sake but for his country’s? Could honor permit opening his guns upon his own countrymen, upon the fort his father had
defended long ago? Was the honorable course the same as the
brave
one, or might it be braver to save the nation from
civil war, even at the expense of his own reputation? And what would a truly
humane
man, a devout man, do? How best to avoid the senseless carnage that had so horrified him along the Indian trails of Illinois and among the villages of Mexico?

The thought of Fox’s expedition turned his stomach: that foolish little man and his pathetic tugboats pounded to pieces in the harbor, along with the soldiers and sailors unlucky enough to come under his command. Just a few days before, after receiving the news, Anderson had written to the War Department: “I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced.” He had sent that letter via his friend in Cameron’s
office, then asked him not to deliver it. Still, his officers all knew his heart, for they had all been there on the morning of the move to Sumter, when a rebel envoy came to demand an explanation and Anderson told the man ruefully, “In this controversy between the North and the South, my sympathies are entirely with the South. These gentlemen”—here he turned to the group of blue-coated officers—“know it well.”
⁷⁸

And yet those men knew other things about their commander, too. Most of them had been to West Point and had read—had suffered bravely through—Anderson’s manual of field artillery instruction, a book of such intricately crafted dullness that even a few paragraphs made the unfortunate cadet’s head spin and his eyeballs ache:

 … and so on, and on, and on, through 214 different maneuvers, each of them, and no others whatsoever, approved by the secretary of war, “with a view to insure uniformity throughout the army.” These maneuvers were illustrated by neat copperplate diagrams just as devoid of human volition, with every gun drawn as a little cross, each man as a squarish dot.
⁷⁹

Could the author of such a treatise—whatever his personal feelings, whatever his inner pain—possibly strike his colors without returning fire? One might as well ask cannoneers Nos. 5, 1, and 4 to seize the handles of the gun carriage with their right hands instead of their left ones, or tell the squarish dots to abandon their little crosses and scamper off the margins of the page!

“The red tape of military duty,”
John Hay would later sneer, “was all that bound his heart from its traitorous impulses.”
⁸⁰
Though it may also have reflected Lincoln’s private views, this was unfair. For, as Anderson stood before his officers, the men who had lived with him at close
quarters for the past six months, none doubted that in the end he would fight.

Reemerging from his quarters, Sumter’s commander addressed the Confederate officers. “I shall await the first shot,” he told them calmly—and then added: “If you do not batter us to pieces we shall be starved out in a few days.”

The envoys returned to their boat. Just before they departed, Anderson called after them with a final question: “Will General Beauregard open his batteries without further notice to me?”

One of the three men, Colonel James Chesnut of the provisional Confederate Army—until recently, the Hon. James Chesnut of the United States Senate—hesitated a moment before replying. “I think
not,” he finally said. “No, I can say to you that he will not, without giving you further notice.”

Then Chesnut and the others stepped aboard and the slave oarsmen pushed off, carrying word to General Beauregard of his old professor’s intransigence.

N
OTICE CAME IN THE SMALL HOURS
of the night. It can be found today among Anderson’s papers in the
Library of Congress: a single elegant sheet of lavender-blue notepaper, neatly creased where it was once folded between the gloved fingers of a Confederate adjutant. It reads:

After receiving this missive, Anderson went to tell his officers and men—who had been anxiously awaiting news—that all except the sentries should return to their beds and try to get some sleep. It was clear that Sumter’s defenders could accomplish little until sunrise, since the garrison had no lights; the fort’s lamp oil and candles had long since run out. After breakfast, such as it might be, they would begin to return fire. The only other
order he gave was to raise the fort’s flag, which was duly run up its staff into the blackness above. But most of the officers and soldiers waited quietly on the ramparts to see the war begin.
⁸²

Beauregard’s first shot, the signal shot, arrived ten minutes after its appointed time. Private
John Thompson was one of the men who stayed on the parapet to watch it explode overhead like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July. Later, his clearest memory of the moment was glimpsing his comrades’ faces in that quick flash of light: no one seemed afraid, Thompson wrote, but “something like an expression of awe crept
over the features of everyone.”

In the minutes that followed, one battery after another opened up around the harbor, until nineteen of them were hammering away at the fort, sending solid rounds and mortar shells flying in from all sides. The Confederate artillerymen were mostly shooting high, as inexperienced gunners usually did: “Shot and shell went screaming over Sumter,” said Sergeant
James Chester, “as if an army of devils
were swooping around it.” But they would eventually find their range.
⁸³

Abner Doubleday was among the few men to choose safety over scenery, no matter how awe-inspiring. He stayed in bed, in the makeshift but protected quarters he had improvised within one of the fort’s deep powder magazines.
⁸⁴

The second shot of the Civil War crashed into the masonry at what seemed a foot away from Doubleday’s head—“in very unpleasant proximity to my right ear,” he recalled much later. Big patches of plaster cracked off the ceiling and fell in clouds of dust. The chamber shuddered again as another shell struck near the ventilation shaft, sending a burst of hot smoke roiling in, and Doubleday looked with some alarm at the crates of gunpowder stacked
along one wall. He noticed, too, that some of the black powder had been carelessly spilled on the floor, where any stray spark might ignite it. The captain prudently dressed and went down early to breakfast, which consisted of tepid water and a little of the half-rancid pork.
⁸⁵

Clouds hung low in the gray sky, and mist over the water, dimming the faint rays of dawn. At long last, enough light shone through for Sumter’s defenders to return fire. To Doubleday fell the honor, if honor it was, of firing the Union’s first shot. After breakfast, Anderson had divided the soldiers into three combat details, whereupon Doubleday marched his squad promptly to the cannons that pointed toward the
Iron
Battery at Cummings Point, whose heavy columbiad guns had been pelting Sumter steadily with solid shot for three hours. Now the captain would try to lob a thirty-two-pound ball inside one of its narrow embrasures. “In aiming the first gun fired against the rebellion I had no feeling of self-reproach,” he later recalled, “for I fully believed that the contest was inevitable, and was not of our seeking. The United States was called upon not only to defend its
sovereignty, but its right to exist as a nation. The only alternative was to submit to a powerful oligarchy who were determined to make freedom forever subordinate to slavery. To me it was simply a contest, politically speaking, as to whether virtue or vice should rule.”
⁸⁶

Perhaps the captain should have been less mindful of these political
reflections, apropos as they were, and more attentive to his aim: his cannonball missed its mark by just a few yards, bounced harmlessly off the Iron Battery’s slanting roof, and landed with a splash in the nearby swamp. For the next two hours Doubleday’s men kept up a slow but steady fire, while from the other side of the fort—where the surgeon Crawford, having
successfully pestered Anderson to let him join the fray, was commanding one of the gunnery details—they could hear round after round launched in the direction of rebel-held Fort Moultrie.
⁸⁷

Sumter was now clenched within a ring of fire and smoke. From all sides, metal tore through the sky. Solid iron balls smashed against masonry; huge mortar shells buried themselves in the earthen parade ground and then exploded, the entire fort shuddering deep within itself like some wounded beast struggling to keep its footing. Men at their posts reeled as streams of dust and debris poured down onto their heads. Most terrifying of all were the wickedly pointed
projectiles that occasionally came hurtling toward them, as straight and accurate as the shots of a dueling pistol, from the direction of Cummings Point, apparently discharged by some diabolical weapon none of the enlisted men had seen before. (This was a rifled cannon known as a
Blakely gun, recently developed in
England, that had arrived direct from
London just three days
earlier, a gift from some South Carolina expatriates there.) Its shots tore into the vulnerable gorge wall or sometimes, with ruthless accuracy, pierced the gun embrasures, the narrow openings through which the Union artillerymen fired.
⁸⁸

P
RIVATE
T
HOMPSON WAS HELPING
man one of Sumter’s cannons from behind one embrasure, inside a narrow brick box known as a casemate. Like almost all the enlisted men, he had never been on the receiving end of an artillery barrage. Thompson was an Irishman, and he would vividly describe the battle later in a letter to his father back in the old country. “The hissing shot came plowing along leaving wreck
and ruin in their path,” he said. Soon the cannoneers were black with smoke and soot, and several men’s faces, cut by broken chunks of masonry knocked loose from the casemate walls, were covered with blood.