STAR OF THE WEST

Under Fire

JANUARY 9

NOW THE BATTERY TOOK AIM AT THE SHIP ITSELF. THE MEN ON DECK could follow the progress of the balls as they arced through the air. Several flew overhead.

“One shot just passed clear of the pilot-house,” Captain McGowan wrote, “another passed between the smoke-stack and walking beams of the engine, another struck the ship just abaft the fore-rigging and stove in the planking, while another came within an ace of carrying away the rudder.” The walking beams, a crucial component of the ship’s propulsion system, transferred power from its steam pistons to the giant side wheels. One shot came bounding across the surface of the water and, according to Lieutenant Woods, “struck us in the fore-chains, about two feet above the water line, and just below where the man was throwing the lead.” This was pronounced led and referred to the plummet the crew was using to conduct the sounding.

The Star of the West was a large vessel and presented an easy target. That the guns failed to do much damage could have been due to the inexperience of the fifty or so cadets who manned them, on duty only since New Year’s Day. In the Citadel’s lexicon, these were “first-classmen,” meaning seniors, and “second-classmen,” juniors. One observer noted that the battery appeared to fire wildly.

Two guard steamers approached, one towing an armed schooner, a confiscated Union cutter. The hidden battery continued to fire, and soon guns at Fort Moultrie began firing as well.

The Star of the West raised and lowered its U.S. flag in an apparent effort to get Fort Sumter’s attention.

AT SUMTER, DOUBLEDAY WOKE Anderson and told him of the ship’s arrival and the attack from the hidden battery. Anderson ordered him to have the garrison drummers beat the “long roll” to summon the troops to their posts. This was a blood-spurring tattoo consisting of briskly repeated beats. Anderson also ordered Doubleday to station gunnery crews at the cannon on the fort’s parapets.

In minutes the guns were ready. A corporal, Francis J. Oakes, stood by a howitzer with its lanyard in his hand, ready to fire.

Anderson saw the ship lower then raise its flag and, intending to reply, ordered the fort’s flag dipped as well, but its halyard had become tangled around the flagstaff and could not be moved.

As Anderson watched the ship approach, the Moultrie guns began to fire, prompting Sumter’s Lt. Jefferson Davis to suggest that the fort open fire on Moultrie. This, he argued, would be more fruitful than attempting to silence the hidden battery on Morris. Implicit in the lieutenant’s remarks was the assumption that Anderson would indeed order Sumter’s guns to fire. How could he not? A ship clearly flying the American flag was now under brisk attack by the forces of a rebel state.

For Anderson, this was a difficult moment. His affinity for the South and his duty to the U.S. Army created a conundrum that offered no clear solution. He had the guns and the authority to fire if he wished, and his sense of duty required that this insult to the American flag be redressed. At the same time he had good reason to resent the position in which he now found himself, for he had received no official word that a relief ship was on its way, let alone that it would be so vulnerable a vessel.

To fire, he knew, was to ignite the war everyone feared. The state’s forces—planters, planters’ sons; the chivalry—held themselves to an almost cult-like sense of honor that would leave them no choice but to fire back with every gun at their disposal. They seemed, in fact, to be hoping for just such a pretext.

But Anderson’s sense of duty was exacting. He felt no loyalty toward the North; he loathed the abolitionist fanatics of New England. But he had sworn fealty to the United States Army.

Anderson ordered Lieutenant Davis to report to the lower tier of the fort and prepare two of the big guns aimed at Moultrie.

Another lieutenant, R. K. Meade, one of Sumter’s engineers and a native of Virginia, urged Anderson to hold fire, lest he trigger all-out civil war.

ABOARD THE STAR OF THE WEST, Lieutenant Woods, commander of the Army forces aboard, assessed the situation he now faced. Cannonballs were hissing past; the harbor steamer towing the armed cutter was fast approaching; the tide had already fallen three feet. If the Star of the West were to retreat it would have to do so soon, before the receding tide made it impossible to escape the harbor. If the ship stalled at the bar, or worse, ran aground, it would be an easy prize and an even more humiliating loss for the Union.

“Finding it impossible to take my command to Fort Sumter,” Lieutenant Woods wrote, “I was obliged most reluctantly to turn about.”

Owing to the ebb tide, the ship retreated with caution, sounding all the way. The firing from the cadets’ battery continued but did no damage, and soon the shots began falling into the sea behind the ship. At the bar, the keel touched bottom “two or three times,” according to Lieutenant Woods, but the ship managed to cross safely. Captain McGowan immediately turned north and set a course to New York. A steamer from Charleston followed for several hours, then turned back.

The two hundred soldiers aboard the Star had been below decks the whole time, never in view; the ship carried no cannon. If secrecy had prevailed, the ship very likely could have entered the harbor without challenge, just another merchant vessel plying the port. But as Anderson had warned, secrecy was impossible.

Lieutenant Woods would write in his official report, “From the preparations that had been made for us I have every reason to believe the Charlestonians were perfectly aware of our coming.”

THE U.S. NAVY’S BROOKLYN, meanwhile, missed the entire show. The ship searched for the Star of the West but never found her and eventually sailed home.