CHARLESTON HARBOR

A Proper Commander

NOVEMBER 1860

COL. JOHN L. GARDNER, SIXTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, WAS GROWING increasingly worried. As commander of U.S. Army forces in Charleston, South Carolina, he was in charge of several forts and a federal arsenal, the most important of which, at the moment, was Fort Moultrie, a squat fortress on Sullivan’s Island roughly four miles east of Charleston proper. It was here that an eighteen-year-old soldier named Edgar Allan Poe was stationed from November 1827 to December 1828, and where he later set his 1843 story “The Gold-Bug,” about a man’s hunt for the buried treasure of Captain Kidd. The other properties in Gardner’s charge included Castle Pinckney, a small fort just off the city’s waterfront, and Fort Johnson, an abandoned relic of the Revolutionary War. The biggest of them all was Fort Sumter, a “sea fortress” situated in the middle of Charleston’s ship channel, currently manned only by laborers working on the seemingly endless task of finishing its construction, which had been underway for thirty years.

The presidential election had markedly intensified the secessionist mood of Charleston, causing Gardner to become concerned that Fort Moultrie could be seized even by a mob of armed citizens. The fort in its current state was uniquely vulnerable. It was designed from the start to defend against the ships of hostile foreign nations, with little attention paid to the potential for an attack from behind by fellow Americans; as a consequence its rear flank faced open land that could be readily traversed by ladder-bearing ground troops arriving from the north and east—although in the fort’s current condition the ladders would hardly be necessary. The sand hills behind it had risen to the point where enemy sharpshooters occupying their weedy summits could hold full sway over the fort’s interior. Wind-driven sand routinely piled up so high against the fort’s rear wall that cows from the surrounding neighborhood now and then wandered in over the ramparts.

Gardner had few soldiers, and these soldiers had few small arms. In a letter to the U.S. Army Ordnance Department in Washington on November 5, 1860, the day before Lincoln’s election, he had recommended that his garrison at Sumter be issued muskets from the city’s federal arsenal. But Gardner of late also began to worry about a threat closer at hand, this from the civilian workers at the forts, all free men, many of them immigrants from Europe, “of whom,” Gardner wrote, “it is prudent to be somewhat suspicious.” A total of 260 men worked on the forts, with 125 assigned to Sumter, far outnumbering the garrison’s seventy-five officers and privates. Upon being questioned about their attitudes toward secession, Gardner wrote, the laborers had replied “to the effect that they were indifferent, and intimated that the largest bribe would determine their action, and they can, you know, discharge themselves of their public obligations at any moment, and thus be free to choose sides.”

Gardner feared that the workers, if armed, might “unrestrainedly deliver up the post and its contents on a bribe or demand.” Instead of guns, he urged, send troops: two companies, to occupy both Sumter and Castle Pinckney.

Gardner’s superiors, meanwhile, were growing concerned about him, that he might not be the man for such a volatile situation. What was obvious, or should have been, to any observer was that sending troops to occupy Sumter in the current climate would be viewed by the Carolinians as tantamount to declaring war. Moreover, an inspection of Gardner’s fiefdom conducted by a visiting Army official had revealed lapses in management. The hospital and storage buildings at Fort Moultrie were aging wood-framed structures situated outside the fort walls “and not secured by the presence or watchful eye of a sentinel from the acts of evil-disposed persons. An incendiary could in a few minutes destroy all the supplies and workshops of the command.”

The fort’s obvious vulnerability invited attack, but now, thanks to Gardner’s lax management, even the act of shoring up its defenses risked inflaming the populace. A “proper commander” would have done it already, the inspector wrote; now the situation had grown precarious. “All could have been easily arranged several weeks since, when the danger was foreseen by the present commander,” the inspector wrote. He further reported that Colonel Gardner’s cadre of noncommissioned officers and privates, while evidently intelligent and obedient, “do not move with an alacrity and spirit indicating the existence of a strict discipline.”

In Washington, senior Army officials recognized that the colonel had to be removed and proposed to replace him with Major Anderson. A Kentuckian by birth and a former owner of enslaved laborers, Anderson was sympathetic to the South but staunchly loyal to the U.S. Army. He had taught artillery tactics at West Point and proven himself in battle in the Black Hawk and Seminole Wars of the 1830s, and in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848, in which he was severely wounded. He was given light duty afterward, first with a garrison in Maine, then as governor of the Army’s Western Military Asylum at Harrodsburg, Kentucky, a job he loved, mainly for its proximity to family. An obscure Army rule forced him from the post. Before taking command in Charleston, Anderson had been promoted and assigned to help establish an “Artillery School of Practice” at Fort Monroe in Norfolk, Virginia, another important federal fortress, which guarded the U.S. Navy’s Gosport Shipyard. On May 4, 1860, he wrote to his wife proudly and with a tincture of irony that he had just received his epaulettes and his sash. “I am now ready for all duties,” he told her. He was apparently already well known to the public at large, for in October 1860 he received an invitation to a ball at New York’s Academy of Music to honor the Prince of Wales, Queen Victoria’s son, then in the midst of a tour of North America.

It helped, too, that Anderson knew Fort Moultrie well: Early in his career, in 1845–46, he had been stationed at the fort before moving on to a post in Florida. And the fact was, Anderson was ready for a change. His posting at the Fort Monroe Artillery School had proven unsatisfactory. He felt his talents were going unrecognized and his living quarters were not suitable to his rank. In October he asked to be relieved. A month later, on November 12, the Army’s adjutant general ordered Anderson to report to Secretary of War John B. Floyd in Washington “without unnecessary delay.” For the time being Anderson was living at his wife’s Brevoort House apartment in New York, assigned to finish a handbook he was writing on best artillery practices.

Three days later, the Army issued Special Order No. 137: “Major Robert Anderson, First Artillery, will forthwith proceed to Fort Moultrie, and immediately relieve Bvt. [Brevet] Col. John L. Gardner, lieutenant colonel of First Artillery, in command thereof.”

CHARLESTON OCCUPIED THE END of a peninsula at the convergence of two rivers, the Ashley and the Cooper, which in turn fed a broad bay that stretched to the Atlantic. Most visitors arrived by train or by one of the many passenger steamships that plied the eastern seaboard. Anyone approaching by these steamers first had to cross the notorious Charleston Bar, a submerged triangular mass of shifting sand that the largest ships could only traverse at high tide, and even then only with the help of an experienced harbor pilot. The bar’s southernmost portion, a persistent threat to shipping, had long been known as “the Coffin Land.” Another hazard, to the north, was Drunken Dick Shoal, where at low tide great Atlantic breakers would lather the horizon. A number of channels crossed the bar, the deepest and best of which was the aptly named Ship Channel. Any captain whose vessel made it this far would find himself in a broad swath of water between two barrier islands, Sullivan’s Island (with Fort Moultrie) on the right, Morris Island on the left. Dead ahead lay Fort Sumter, a threatening presence despite the fact that its guns had yet to be mounted and its interior structures were far from complete.

At night, from the parapets at Moultrie, sentries could see the lights of Charleston’s southernmost wards. These were the comeliest streets in the city, lined with two- and three-story homes embedded in rich, fragrant gardens. Many were encircled by airy verandas, which Charlestonians called piazzas. A few taller structures towered above these, including the city’s two most luxurious hotels—Mills House and the Charleston—and the tall steeples of its most prominent churches, St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s. Wharves filled its eastern waterfront, where scores of masts and the tall smokestacks of steamships jutted into the sky, and where the grim slave ships of the now banned African trade once unloaded hundreds of men, women, and children at a time. Swamps and mechanical industries occupied the city’s west front. The Battery and its beloved esplanade formed the city’s southernmost end and was fronted by the mansions of the chivalry, filled with fine art and troves of silver and crystal, which, by local custom, the owners displayed with untempered ostentation.

But the streets were unpaved, and on hot, dry days breezes raised clouds of dust. An unexpectedly primordial source aided in the city’s sanitation, as observed by one British visitor, John Benwell, author in 1857 of An Englishman’s Travels in America. “As you walk the streets of Charleston, rows of greedy vultures, with sapient look, sit on the parapets of the houses, watching for offal,” he wrote. The birds were protected; anyone caught killing one was subject to a ten-dollar fine. “They appeared to be quite conscious of their privileges, and sailed down from the house-tops into the streets, where they stalked about, hardly caring to move out of the way of the horses and carriages passing.”

While Benwell seemed unlikely to choose Charleston as a place to live, one of his countrymen, author Charles Rosenberg, decided that he himself “should very decidedly relish settling” there, but with a caveat as to timing. The city had an heirloom quality; it seemed somnolent, “very staid and remarkably slow,” he wrote, as if it had fallen into the “Lethe,” the mythical Greek river of forgetfulness or oblivion. That might be just the thing for an older man, he imagined, one who “had passed that fatal half-century which leaves man dragging on his path towards the tomb.”

For many visitors, however, there was also an undercurrent of brutality they found hard to abide. Enslaved Blacks transported from the upper South in the extremely lucrative domestic trade arrived by ship and train, but also on foot in “coffles,” groups of captive men, women, and children often tethered together with chains and iron collars. The city had thirty-two slave brokerages, which held frequent auctions. One traveler who out of curiosity paused to witness an auction found himself deeply repulsed. “The scene was most painful, humiliating, and degrading,” he wrote. “I became quite affected myself, and was obliged to hurry away, for fear of showing what I felt.” Out of concern for alienating visitors, the city had banned outdoor sales between 1839 and 1849, but then, in accord with the rise of the so-called proslavery movement, reinstated them. After all, if slavery was good, why be ashamed? But Charleston banned them again in 1856 because of increasingly vicious coverage in northern newspapers and abolitionist journals. On the day the ban took effect, an enterprising trader, Thomas Ryan, sensing opportunity, opened his Ryan & Sons Mart on Chalmers Street a few blocks from the waterfront, complete with a four-story “barracoon,” a prison for holding captive Blacks until the day of sale. Locals called it “Ryan’s n—r jail.” It had a kitchen and, ominously, a morgue. In the big indoor showroom that fronted Chalmers, the enslaved climbed onto a platform three feet off the ground and about ten feet long to foster easier examination by buyers.

Ryan’s Mart became the center of slave trading in Charleston and was used routinely by traders to sell enslaved Blacks of all ages, as on January 9, 1860, when the Mart hosted the sale of a “Prime Gang of 235 Negroes” from the estate of a once influential planter, Gen. James Gadsden. Buyers had to put down cash for one-half of the purchase price but could pay the rest through a twelve-month bond, effectively a mortgage secured by the value of the slaves themselves. A flyer for the sale identified them by name, age, and whether they were attached to a family. Here were Chloe, eight months old, from a family of three, and Aesop, five months, from a family of seven. His parents, Caroline and Witty, and siblings Charlotte, fifteen; Cupid, eleven; Robert, six; and Peter, three; were also up for sale. The young ones were appreciating assets: As they grew up, their value would increase unless yellow fever or malaria—“autumnal fever”—killed them first. The list included an infant, unnamed, newly born to a family of five. The flyer also identified any skill or disorder deemed worth noting. A thirty-three-year-old male named Monday was identified as “dropsical”; a six-year-old boy, George, was “idiotic”; seventy-year-old Jara was blind; but Tom was a cooper, Henry a wheelwright, and Bess a cook.

None of this troubled Anderson, or his wife, for that matter. She, too, was born in the South—in her case the Deep South. Her father was Gen. Duncan Lamont Clinch, a Georgia planter, revered as a veteran of the War of 1812. On General Clinch’s death, his lands went to his sons in accord with Southern law and custom, but he made sure to leave his daughter a robust income and some twenty-nine enslaved Blacks, who remained in Georgia. The Andersons appear to have sold these in 1860, reportedly for $1,300, or an average of forty-five dollars each, a steep discount considering that by then the price in Georgia for a single “prime” field hand ran as high as $1,800. A Charleston steamboat was named for Eba’s father: the General Clinch.

Anderson felt no enmity for the South, per se, though he had little patience for the antics of South Carolina. In a letter from Fort Sumter to an old friend in Washington he wrote, “Like yourself my sympathies are in the matter of the sectional controversy all with the South, but I must confess that I have lost all sympathy with the people who govern this state. They are resolved to cement their secession with blood.”

Having grown up in Kentucky, Anderson understood the South and its passions and resentments in a way that the new president, Abraham Lincoln, appeared not to. Slavery was central to that life. Anderson, who was still given to describing enslaved Blacks as “darkies,” embraced the proslavery ethos that slavery was in fact a positive good, both for the slaves and for society as a whole. He accepted without challenge the often espoused argument that the Bible expressly permitted slavery.

“Unfortunately, he desired not only to save the Union, but to save slavery with it,” wrote one of Anderson’s senior officers, Capt. Abner Doubleday, an ardent abolitionist from New York. Doubleday believed that in supporting slavery, Anderson—like many in the South—had fallen out of step with the great global shift that had driven the North and the advanced societies of Europe to reclassify it as a wholly repulsive moral wrong. “He could not read the signs of the times, and see that the conscience of the nation and the progress of civilization had already doomed slavery to destruction,” Doubleday wrote. Anderson saw himself “more like an arbiter between two contending nations than a simple soldier engaged in carrying out the instructions of his superiors.”

UNTIL THE RECENT UNREST, the Moultrie garrison had maintained a comfortable relationship with the citizens of Charleston. On summer nights the garrison’s band would play as civilians from surrounding homes and from Moultrie House, a summer hotel up the beach, strolled along the fort’s parapet for their nightly promenade. The day Anderson arrived at Moultrie, November 21, he sought to establish as nonthreatening a tone as possible. After meeting with his predecessor, Colonel Gardner, at his home, Anderson emerged to find a crowd of locals apparently hoping for a look at the new commander. Anderson walked to the fort’s entry gate and received the sentry’s salute but did not immediately enter; he called for the officer in charge of the fort’s protective guard and ordered him henceforth to leave the gates open. Anderson then “turned to the crowd,” as one sergeant recalled, “and with a courteous gesture, said: ‘Walk in, gentlemen, if you wish to. We have no secrets here.’”

Two days later Anderson filed his first report from Charleston conveying the results of his own inspection of the forts now under his command. After reviewing their obvious weaknesses, he echoed his predecessor’s recommendation that Fort Sumter, across the channel, be reinforced with troops, including half a dozen ordnance men experienced in preparing ammunition. The power of Sumter, once completed, was self-evident, but Anderson also argued that it was important to strengthen Castle Pinckney, the smallest of the forts, because it was the closest to Charleston and might discourage unruly citizens from attempting to seize Sumter and Moultrie. Guns installed there could easily reach all the city’s neighborhoods and the Battery promenade. “The Charlestonians would not venture to attack this place”—meaning Moultrie—“when they knew that their city was at the mercy of the commander of Castle Pinckney,” Anderson wrote. Throughout his report he emphasized that strength was the best deterrent. “I need not say how anxious I am—indeed, determined, so far as honor will permit—to avoid collision with the citizens of South Carolina,” he wrote. “Nothing, however, will be better calculated to prevent bloodshed than our being found in such an attitude that it would be madness and folly to attack us.”

The work of reinforcing the forts would have to proceed quickly, he knew; agitation for secession was intensifying, and Carolina authorities had made no secret of their desire to seize control of all federal property in the harbor.

THAT SAME NIGHT IN CHARLESTON, scores of young men styling themselves as the Young Men’s Secession Association, or YMSA, marched through the heart of the city following a chaotic zigzagging path from the Citadel, the state’s premier military academy, down through the chivalric wards and back up again, bearing torches and firing off rockets and Roman candles. “Here lies the Union,” one banner proclaimed: “Born 4th July 1776. Died 7th Nov. 1860.”

“The clouds are threatening,” Anderson wrote in his report to Washington, “and the storm may break upon us at any moment.”

In fact, the clouds had been gathering for decades.