CHARLESTON HARBOR

A Confidential Visit

DECEMBER 11–14

AT FORT MOULTRIE, ONE OF THE GARRISON’S ARTILLERY OFFICERS, Capt. Truman Seymour, thirty-six, also a veteran of the Seminole Wars and the Mexican War, gave Major Anderson a three-page memorandum conveying his thoughts on how to defend the fort against an attack that he was certain would soon occur. Seymour was a particularly acute observer: At West Point, which required cadets to take drawing lessons, he had studied under the famed painter Robert Walter Weir, whose Embarkation of the Pilgrims had been installed in the Capitol rotunda in 1843. Seymour demonstrated such prowess that West Point made him an assistant professor of drawing. Soon, at Moultrie, he would be supplying sketches of the fort and its officers, including Anderson, to Harper’s Weekly in New York in response to a request by its managing editor. Sensing trouble, the editor, John Bonner, told Anderson, “I shall await anxiously the promised sketches.”

Seymour had thought deeply on the subject of making Moultrie more resistant to attack. He suggested that the Carolinians might attempt a ruse by setting fire to a building outside the fort, “and while our attention is drawn off, the rush is made from any point where assailants are hidden.”

But he also reminded Anderson that in the coming battle the garrison’s honor would be at stake. “The country will be ashamed of us and of our science if every possible precaution is not taken to defeat an attack by surprise,” he wrote, then warned: “There’s no time left us.”

Another of Moultrie’s officers likewise believed that a “collision” was inevitable. Samuel Wylie Crawford, thirty-one, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in Philadelphia, was technically an assistant surgeon, but for the time being, with his superior away on leave, he was the Army’s sole doctor in Charleston. He had been at Moultrie only since September, but in that time, especially after Lincoln’s election, he had seen the populace around him grow ever more resentful and belligerent. In a letter to his brother, A. J. Crawford, he wrote, “If you have yet any ideas of further compromise, or that these people will take one step backward, I beg you to relinquish them.”

He forecast that South Carolina would secede and immediately demand possession of Moultrie, Fort Sumter, and the other federal properties in Charleston.

“Let me assure you,” he continued, “that this State is in revolution. I never saw before such unanimity and I never in my life believed that such hatred could be exhibited to the Union.” Even children were caught up in the secessionist fervor, Crawford wrote; if anything, the women were more ardent than the men. “The time for argument my dear brother is past and past forever, and you and I have lived to see the saddest sight that will ever be witnessed by man. I never knew, I never felt how much I loved my country until now.”

There would be no gentle disengagement, he warned. “We are preparing for war with these mad Carolinians.”

ON TUESDAY, DECEMBER 11, Major Anderson received a visitor at his Moultrie headquarters, Assistant Adjutant General Don Carlos Buell, whose name would soon become familiar—and at times decried—in both North and South. For now, however, Major Buell was serving as a messenger, dispatched from Washington in secret by Buchanan’s war secretary, John B. Floyd, to deliver verbally an overarching directive as to how Anderson should manage his garrison and the forts under his command as the crisis in South Carolina deepened—verbally because the telegraph and mails were deemed too permeable.

The instructions were anything but precise; rather, they seemed to reflect Floyd’s own conflicting loyalties. “You are carefully to avoid every act which would needlessly tend to provoke aggression,” Buell relayed, “and for that reason you are not, without evident and imminent necessity, to take up any position which could be construed into the assumption of a hostile attitude. But you are to hold possession of the forts in this harbor, and if attacked you are to defend yourself to the last extremity.”

Floyd’s directive acknowledged that Anderson’s garrison was too small to effectively occupy and defend all three of the most important forts—Sumter, Moultrie, and Castle Pinckney—but authorized him that if any of them were attacked, he could then put his men into whichever fort “you may deem most proper to increase its power of resistance.”

Now came the obfuscating element. “You are also authorized,” Buell said, “to take similar steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.” Exactly what might constitute “tangible evidence” was left for Anderson to decide.

Anderson warned Buell that in this increasingly antagonistic environment secrecy was impossible; the nature of his visit would be discovered. And indeed, the day before Buell’s arrival, the Washington correspondent for the Charleston Mercury had notified his editor that Major Buell and several other officers were on their way to Charleston. “They were sent for no good to us,” he wrote. “See that they make no change in the distribution of soldiers, so as to put them all in Fort Sumter. That would be dangerous to us.”

The correspondent’s letter soon appeared in the Mercury as a brief news item, which Anderson then clipped and forwarded to Adj. Gen. Samuel Cooper in Washington, Buell’s superior, to show him “the almost impossibility of keeping anything secret.”

For the moment, Anderson wrote, things were relatively calm. “I shall, of course, prepare here for the worst.”