FORT SUMTER

Ominous Doings

DECEMBER 28–31

BEYOND SUMTER’S WALLS, THERE WERE MENACING SIGNS THAT South Carolina was preparing for outright war. Governor Pickens urged planters to establish their own gun batteries along the Santee River, the second-largest river on the nation’s East Coast, and also on the shores of Winyah Bay, fifty miles north, which afforded access to the port city of Georgetown. Pickens sought to rally the planters with an allusion to the role their forebears played in winning the Revolutionary War: “I doubt not that the same Patriotism which characterized your Sires burns as strongly in your Breasts now.”

On December 28 Pickens banned all shipments of arms and supplies to Fort Sumter (he permitted mail service), claiming the ban was meant “to prevent irregular collisions, and to spare the unnecessary effusion of blood.” But Anderson’s lookouts saw signs that Carolina forces were establishing new outposts on nearby islands. On New Year’s Eve, steamers deposited eighty soldiers, draught horses, and an array of construction equipment on Morris Island, just south of Sumter. To Anderson it was obvious that the state planned to erect new artillery batteries in easy range of the fort.

Anderson was perplexed by Governor Pickens’s bellicosity; it seemed foolhardy. “He knows not how entirely the city of Charleston is in my power,” Anderson wrote in a letter to Adjutant Cooper on January 1. “I can cut his communication off from the sea, and thereby prevent the reception of supplies, and close the harbor, even at night, by destroying the light-houses.” He added: “These things, of course, I would never do, unless compelled to do so in self-defense.”

Anderson was perversely pleased to learn that South Carolina military officials, during a meeting, had unanimously praised his move to Sumter as “one of consummate wisdom; that it was the best one that could have been made.” He told Cooper: “I must confess that I feel highly complimented by the expression of such an opinion (from those most deeply affected by it) of the change of position I felt bound to take to save my command and to prevent the shedding of blood. In a few days I hope, God willing, that I shall be so strong here that they will hardly be foolish enough to attack me.”

Although former war secretary Floyd had not approved of Anderson’s move, many others in the U.S. Army had, including America’s top general, Winfield Scott, who communicated his praise through an intermediary. For the moment, however, the general’s powers were at a decidedly low ebb. As the nation spiraled into its gravest domestic crisis ever, its senior-most military commander, its general-in-chief, was suffering extravagantly from a several-day siege of diarrhea that had robbed his nights of sleep and left him exhausted and more or less incapacitated. On Sunday, December 30, however, the general managed to rouse himself enough to compose a secret message to President Buchanan with his recommendation for how to support Major Anderson and his garrison. As always in his formal communiqués, General Scott referred to himself in the third person.

“It is Sunday,” Scott wrote. “The weather is bad, and General Scott is not well enough to go to church. But matters of the highest national importance seem to forbid a moment’s delay, and if misled by zeal, he hopes for the President’s forgiveness.

“Will the President permit General Scott, without reference to the War Department and otherwise, as secretly as possible, to send two hundred and fifty recruits from New York Harbor to re-enforce Fort Sumter, together with some extra muskets or rifles, ammunition, and subsistence stores?

“It is hoped that a sloop of war and cutter may be ordered for the same purpose as early as tomorrow.”

What General Scott envisioned was a show of force; the ship he had in mind was the new U.S.S. Brooklyn, a large steam warship moored at the Gosport Naval Shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia. It was a “screw sloop,” driven by propellor rather than paddle wheels, and carried twenty-one guns. Its captain was David G. Farragut of eventual “Damn the torpedoes” fame.

This was exactly the thing that Anderson’s men at Sumter hoped to see through their spyglasses, according to Captain Doubleday. “As the insurgents at this period had but few field-guns, and a very scanty supply of cannon-powder, the Brooklyn alone, in my opinion, could have gone straight to the wharf in Charleston, and have put an end to the insurrection then and there.” The garrison at the time had no knowledge of any specific plan involving the Brooklyn or any other warship but nonetheless watched the distant bar closely for smoke from a ship’s funnel or the glint of a tall sail. “If we ascended to the parapet, we saw nothing but uncouth State flags, representing palmettos, pelicans, and other strange devices,” Doubleday wrote. “No echo seemed to come back from the loyal North to encourage us. Our glasses in vain swept the horizon; the one flag we longed to see was not there.”

On New Year’s Eve, General Scott sent a message directly to the commander of Fort Monroe in Virginia, which protected the Gosport shipyard, ordering him to get the Brooklyn ready and to load it with troops and arms, and provisions to last ninety days.

“Manage everything as secretly and confidentially as possible,” Scott admonished, and added: “Look to this.”