CHARLESTON HARBOR

Turmoil

DECEMBER 27–31

IN CHARLESTON ON DECEMBER 27, THE DAY AFTER ANDERSON OCCUPIED Sumter, South Carolina governor Francis W. Pickens, newly elected, ordered the state militia to seize all remaining federal properties in Charleston Harbor. He did not necessarily have the power to do so, since the governorship of South Carolina was mainly ceremonial, but he did it anyway, even overriding the objections of the state legislature.

First to fall was Castle Pinckney, situated on a small, uninhabited island called Shutes Folly less than a mile from the Charleston waterfront. At around four P.M., some 150 state militia crossed to the fort aboard the patrol steamer Nina, then stormed ashore bearing long ladders to scale the walls. First, however, they tried to enter through the fort’s main entrance. Not surprisingly the gate was locked. They deployed the ladders. A dozen or so men clamored up and over the walls, and upon descending to the fort’s interior found its grounds all but empty, occupied only by a lieutenant, an ordnance sergeant and his family, and a dozen or so workmen. They promptly raised the palmetto flag. An officer of the invading militia found Kate Skillen, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the ordnance sergeant, weeping as if bereft and told her not to worry, they would not harm her.

“I am not crying because I am afraid!” she sneered through her tears (this according to Captain Doubleday’s account).

“What is the matter, then?” the officer asked.

She pointed to the palmetto flag. “I am crying because you have put that miserable rag up there.”

From Sumter’s parapets, Anderson’s men watched this adventure with amusement, despite the obvious gravity of the moment. Pvt. John Thompson, in his letter to his father in Northern Ireland, offered a wry commentary: “They can scale the walls of an unoccupied Fort with a gallantry highly commendable. In fact their martial ardor seemed to have taken a turn in this direction for the same day they assaulted the remaining empty Fort in the harbor and amid shouts exultantly raised their Palmetto flag, to announce their bloodless victory.”

The second fort was the now vacant Moultrie, which the militia seized that evening, again with no resistance. Also that day, a force of Carolina militia seized Charleston’s federal arsenal just as Captain Foster of the engineers ventured into the city to withdraw money to pay the laborers he had discharged. “There I found the greatest excitement to exist,” he wrote to a Baltimore friend, John H. B. Latrobe, “and although I saw nothing to warrant apprehensions of personal violence, yet I was informed by many friends to leave the city, because it was generally believed that I had come to blow up the arsenal. Before I left I had the satisfaction of seeing two companies in quick march to seize and protect the arsenal from my incendiary presence.”

WITH CHRISTMAS BEHIND HER, Mary Chesnut left her friends’ plantation on the Combahee River and returned to Charleston, where she was reunited with her husband, James, still serving as a delegate to the secession convention. They stayed at a well-appointed boarding house at 43 Church Street managed by Mrs. P. R. Gidiere about four blocks south of Ryan’s Mart, the city’s thriving slave market. In Charleston at this time, as in many locales, boarding houses were a popular form of accommodation for visiting planters and yeomen alike.

On Thursday morning, December 27, Mrs. Gidiere returned from market and announced Anderson’s move into Sumter. “Very few understood the consequences of that quiet move of Major Anderson—at first it was looked on as a misfortune,” Mary wrote in her diary. But it prompted other states to move quickly to seize federal properties within their boundaries, and in so doing to accelerate their own drive for secession. This all felt familiar to Mary. She had grown up in a household that embraced and promoted states’ rights. Her father had been governor of South Carolina during John C. Calhoun’s nullification campaign and wholly supported it. “So I was of necessity a rebel born,” Mary wrote.

Still, she wasn’t at all sure that South Carolina’s leaders were up to the job of managing the state’s exit. She bemoaned the kind of men now in charge: “Invariably some sleeping dead head long forgotten or passed over. Young and active spirits ignored. Places for worn out politicians seemed the rule—when our only hope is—to use all the talents God has given us.”

She described Governor Pickens as “a great old horse fly buzzing and fuming and fretting.”

ANDERSON’S MOVE ENRAGED THE Carolina commissioners in Washington, who saw it as a complete betrayal of Buchanan’s pledge not to alter the military status quo in Charleston. By now that murky pledge might as well have been engraved in marble. Their honor bruised, their hubris abruptly deflated, the commissioners composed a peevish note to the president. In prose that dripped presumption, they told Buchanan that they had initially planned to negotiate “with the earnest desire to avoid all unnecessary and hostile collision, and so to inaugurate our new relations as to secure mutual respect, general advantage, and a future of good will and harmony, beneficial to all the parties concerned. But the events of the last twenty-four hours render such an assurance impossible.”

They demanded that Buchanan immediately withdraw all federal forces from Charleston Harbor. “Under present circumstances they are a standing menace which renders negotiation impossible, and, as our recent experience shows, threatens speedily to bring to a bloody issue questions which ought to be settled with temperance and judgment.”

With the help of Secretary of State Black and Attorney General Stanton, Buchanan drafted a reply. He told the commissioners that upon learning of Anderson’s move, “my first promptings were to command him to return to his former position.” But then he learned that state authorities, “without waiting or asking for an explanation,” had acted within hours to seize the other forts.

Evacuation of Sumter was therefore no longer possible, Buchanan wrote, for the simple reason that there was no place left to evacuate to. “In the harbor of Charleston we now find three forts confronting each other, over all of which the Federal flag floated only four days ago; but now over two of them this flag has been supplanted, and the palmetto flag has been substituted in its stead. It is under all these circumstances that I am urged to withdraw the troops from the harbor of Charleston, and am informed that without this, negotiation is impossible.”

With a surprising display of backbone, the president declared: “This I cannot do; this I will not do.”

It was now clear to the commissioners that there would be no meeting with Buchanan. The next day, New Year’s Day 1861, the commissioners launched their final retort, laced with frustration and hurt feelings. These men were, after all, the most upstanding of the South Carolina chivalry, accustomed to having their way with slaves and yeomen alike.

They charged that Anderson, in moving to Sumter, had “waged war.” The state, in seizing Moultrie and the other federal holdings, had merely acted in “simple self-defense.” They closed their letter with a mighty wag of fingers. “By your course,” they wrote, “you have probably rendered civil war inevitable. Be it so.”

Buchanan refused to take delivery, according to the official U.S. record: “This paper, just presented to the President, is of such a character that he declines to receive it.”