FORT SUMTER

Lethal Secrets

JANUARY 11–28

OF THE TWO EMISSARIES SENT NORTH BY MAJOR ANDERSON, THE first to return was Lieutenant Talbot, who brought with him a letter from War Secretary Joseph Holt. Just a day earlier Holt had shed his acting status to become Buchanan’s official appointee; he was promptly confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The fort’s other emissary, Quartermaster Hall, and his South Carolina counterpart, Isaac Hayne, were still in Washington.

As Talbot walked to the city’s wharf, he encountered an unsettled mass of civilians who at times seemed to threaten violence. Members of the crowd told Talbot they harbored a particular dislike for Sumter’s Captain Doubleday, widely known to be an abolitionist. His reputation had grown progressively darker as the crisis deepened until he became the equivalent of a villain in a fable. Upon arriving at the fort, Talbot made sure to convey to Doubleday the current state of his ignominy.

“He brought me the pleasant information that the mob were howling for my head, as that of the only Republican, or, as they called it, ‘Black Republican,’ in the fort,” Doubleday wrote. Soon afterward, Doubleday received a letter from a Charleston resident “informing me that, if I were ever caught in the city, an arrangement had been made to tar and feather me as an Abolitionist.”

If Major Anderson had hoped for a specific directive from Secretary Holt as to how to proceed, he was now to be disappointed. The letter, dated three days earlier, once again left him adrift, though Holt reassured him that the War Department approved of his conduct thus far. “You rightly designate the firing into the Star of the West as ‘an act of war,’ and one which was actually committed without the slightest provocation,” Holt wrote. “Had their act been perpetrated by a foreign nation, it would have been your imperative duty to have resented it with the whole force of your batteries.”

Holt told Anderson that his recent dispatches and Talbot’s personal report “have relieved the Government of the apprehensions previously entertained for your safety. In consequence, it is not its purpose at present to re-enforce you. The attempt to do so would, no doubt, be attended by a collision of arms and the effusion of blood—a national calamity which the President is most anxious, if possible, to avoid.” Instead, Holt instructed Anderson merely to report “frequently” on his condition and on the preparations of the South Carolina forces arrayed around him. “Whenever, in your judgment, additional supplies or re-enforcements are necessary for your safety, or for a successful defense of the fort, you will at once communicate the fact to this Department, and a prompt and vigorous effort will be made to forward them.”

In fact, the threat to Fort Sumter was rising by the day. South Carolina forces and over a thousand enslaved Blacks worked furiously around the clock to turn the harbor’s beaches into a ring of armor and guns. The state had secured much of this weaponry when it seized Fort Moultrie, Castle Pinckney, and the Charleston arsenal—fifty-five cannon at Moultrie, twenty-two at Pinckney, and from the arsenal, 22,423 rifles, muskets, carbines, and pistols. From the parapets at Sumter, Captain Doubleday, watching through his spyglass, estimated that some six hundred slaves were at work shoring up the defenses of Moultrie alone. He also noticed that the opposing forces had painted their guard boats black to make them as invisible as possible at night.

Especially troubling was a new battery that the Carolinians were building at Cummings Point on Morris Island, just 1,325 yards south of Sumter, opposite its weakest flank, the rear wall or gorge. Through telescopes, Captain Doubleday and Sumter’s engineering chief, Captain Foster, closely monitored the battery’s construction and noted that there, too, large numbers of enslaved Blacks comprised the workforce. The workers first laid a frame of heavy timbers, then covered this with a layer of wood planking to produce a roof that leaned away from the beach at a forty-five-degree angle to better deflect shells and shot. Over this they added one more layer, the most crucial and novel element: a roof of iron rails ordinarily meant for railroad tracks, which caused the emplacement to be named “the Iron Battery.” Atop this layer the workers piled a deep berm of sand, making the battery, in Doubleday’s view, “almost impregnable.” They would learn eventually that the design was the brainchild of a cashier at a bank in Charleston.

Now was the time to open fire, Doubleday knew, but Anderson stuck to his orders to avoid “collision” at all costs. Doubleday found it maddening that he and the rest of the garrison could do nothing but watch as the opposing battery took shape. The work was so close to Sumter that he could hear the sound of heavy materials being maneuvered into place. Steamers came and went, dropping off timber, rails, draught animals, supplies, men, and provisions without any interference from the very men against whom the battery’s guns would be used. “The troops opposite to us were now regularly receiving supplies and re-enforcements, and drilling daily, while all the necessaries of life were constantly diminishing with us,” Doubleday wrote.

Ominously, Major Anderson learned that South Carolina would soon receive from England three cannon of a new and particularly effective design, capable of firing rifled shells along a nearly horizontal trajectory. “Such an addition to their battery would make our position much less secure than I have considered it,” he wrote to Adjutant Cooper in Washington. In the event of a “collision,” he warned, these guns alone would make reinforcement of Sumter a necessity.

TOWARD THE END OF January a violent storm moved in with high winds and heavy rain that hampered outdoor work both at Sumter and among the Carolina batteries. The storm lasted over a week, during which Anderson turned to measures that acknowledged the full reality of what a battle would involve. He ordered the removal of flagstone paving from the parade in the hope that any explosive shells that fell there would sink into the earth before exploding, and do less damage. Chief engineer Foster placed two howitzers—small cannon—outside the walls to sweep right and left, these capable of being fired from inside the fort using extra-long lanyards. Intended for use against attacking troops, the guns would fire grapeshot, which would lacerate the wharf beyond and cause a disheartening degree of carnage. A test of these guns using blank charges had the unfortunate and unexpected effect of diminishing the fort’s already limited supply of rice. Possibly owing to the awful weather, no one thought to open the windows in the gorge wall when the guns were test-fired. The concussion shattered not just the window panes but some of their wooden sashes as well, throwing splinters of glass into rice that had been laid out to dry.

For the moment, at least, the spoiled rice posed no particular worry. The fort had an adequate supply of provisions, and more food was in the offing—if Anderson chose to accept it. This was because Lieutenant Talbot’s return from Washington, for reasons unclear, had brought forth a new mood of conciliation from Governor Pickens. On January 19, the state’s quartermaster notified Anderson that he had been directed by the governor to send, by the next morning’s mail boat, “two hundred pounds of beef and a lot of vegetables” and thereafter supply whatever Anderson wished on a daily basis.

Before Anderson could reject the offer, as he planned to do, the boat arrived at Sumter with the provisions. Asst. Surgeon Crawford watched its approach and found the ensuing scene amusing. “The boat had hardly touched the wharf before one quarter of beef was on its way to the mess hall,” Crawford wrote. Having learned of Anderson’s intention, Crawford went down to the wharf to try to stop the delivery. “Each man had a vegetable, poor fellows, they had not tasted anything but pork for so long.”

Crawford ordered the supplies returned to the boat. The meat made it back; the vegetables got away, spirited to the men’s quarters and hidden under pillows, in bedding, in knapsacks.

Anderson’s rejection of the provisions tickled his men, even though it meant a continuation of tedious meals of salt pork and water. “Anderson showed a good deal of proper spirit on this occasion,” conceded Captain Doubleday. Sumter’s Pvt. Samuel Millens, after detailing for his father the earnest preparations the state was making for attack, added, “Oh—by the by—they took pity on us a few days ago, laboring under the idea that without doubt we were in a starving condition, [and] kindly or contemptuously sent us some fresh meat, but we deeming it inconsistent with our honor to eat their meat to-day, and cut their throats (if forced to it) to-morrow, returned it untouched.”

Anderson did, however, take this opportunity to request that the state allow the women and children of the fort to be evacuated to New York by steamer. “The compliance with this request,” Anderson wrote, in a letter to Secretary of War Jamison, “will confer a favor upon a class of persons to whom similar indulgences are always granted, even during a siege in time of actual war, and will be duly appreciated by me.” Governor Pickens authorized the evacuation.

All this mollycoddling infuriated at least one prominent Charlestonian, however. Fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett grew so frustrated that he strode into Governor Pickens’s office and demanded that he immediately authorize the taking of Sumter.

Pickens and Rhett detested each other, but the governor reacted with forbearance and wit.

“Certainly, Mr. Rhett; I have no objection!” Pickens replied. “I will furnish you with some men, and you can storm the work yourself.”

“But, sir, I am not a military man!”

“Nor I either,” Pickens said, “and therefore I take the advice of those that are!”

ALL IN ALL, the beef incident was imbued with the South’s peculiar sense of chivalry: The state would be civil, generous, courteous, while also planning to exterminate the garrison with a bombardment on a scale the nation had never seen—akin to serving a man his favorite meal before slipping a noose around his neck. As a Southerner, Anderson understood the rules of honor. He knew that these kindnesses from Pickens meant nothing in terms of the ultimate fate of Anderson’s garrison and the fort. On that score he and his men had no illusions. The state continued to erect and reinforce gun batteries, and to dig entrenchments to allow the passage of troops between the batteries and their quarters. In his letter to War Secretary Holt, Anderson estimated that his little garrison of seventy-five men was now opposed by some two thousand Carolina soldiers.

IN WASHINGTON, BUCHANAN’S CABINET experienced yet more upheaval. On January 11, his new treasury secretary, Philip F. Thomas, who had succeeded the departed Howell Cobb, submitted his resignation after just one month on the job, having failed to arrange a bond to pay interest on the national debt.

Buchanan replaced him with John A. Dix, a former U.S. senator from New York, who as a northern Democrat had supported Buchanan’s presidential campaign.

Dix was more than a mere stand-in appointed to fill an empty post for the remaining forty-four days of Buchanan’s term. Buchanan considered Dix a friend, and friends were what he needed most. With neither a wife nor close family circle, he grew increasingly lonely amid the mounting turmoil.

As the secession crisis deepened and talk of civil war became prevalent, Buchanan invited Dix to move into the White House. He needed the company. There, like some ghostly spirit, Buchanan would visit Dix in the night to talk about the national crisis.

AFTER SHOVELING A LITTLE treason, Edmund Ruffin left Charleston and returned to his home in Virginia, where he stayed only briefly. On Monday, January 21, he headed to Richmond to do what he could to foster rebellion among his fellow Virginians. Along the way he learned of Georgia’s secession, which put the dilatory efforts of his home state in even starker relief. Yes, the Virginia legislature had voted to seat a secession convention, set to start early in February, but otherwise Ruffin saw only a wish for delay and a lack of will. He returned home “heartily disgusted.”

During this time, however, he found his own stature lofted a bit higher by the publication of two positive reviews of his bloodthirsty novel, Anticipations of the Future, in the prestigious De Bow’s Review and the Literary Messenger. “These are almost the first indications I have had that my book had not fallen dead from the press—neither denounced by enemies nor noticed by friends, if not unknown to all.”

On Monday, January 28, he received the “joyful news” about Louisiana’s secession, which brought the total of seceded states to six. Everything that Ruffin had hoped for seemed to be coming to pass, albeit without the bloodshed that he seemed to crave, and without the participation of Virginia. It was thrilling: A new nation, a Southern empire free of Northern tyranny, was being born. The seceded states were to converge on Montgomery, Alabama, in a week to bind themselves, officially, as a new confederacy and to craft its governing constitution.

He found it remarkable that the U.S. government had not yet employed military force to impede secession, and attributed this to “the imbecility” of Buchanan’s administration. But Lincoln would soon take office, and when he did, his abolitionist government, as Ruffin described it, would gain full control of all federal arms. By then, Ruffin believed, the South needed to have built as large and united a confederacy as possible with a dozen or more slaveholding states.

“Under such circumstances,” Ruffin wrote, “it would be a degree of folly or infatuation altogether inconceivable, for the northern section to attempt the coercion and conquest of the south by war.”

AT SUMTER, HEAVY WIND and rain persisted. It hampered the departure of the fort’s families and deepened the gloom raised by the prospect of their leaving. As always, Asst. Surgeon Crawford kept a close record of the weather:

MONDAY, JAN. 21: “Day cold, and wet, rain at night.”

TUESDAY, JAN. 22: “Day wet and cold.”

WEDNESDAY, JAN. 23: “Rainy and cold—no mail—no news. Sick in my room all day.”

FRIDAY, JAN. 25: “Rainy and cold.”

SATURDAY, JAN. 26: “Rainy and cold.”

ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, a “lighter,” a barge-like vessel used for the transfer of passengers to and from larger ships, took the families across the bay to Charleston. They were allowed to bring their trunks, bedsteads, bedding, and some articles of furniture. They stayed at one of the city’s preeminent hotels, the Mills House, until the storm subsided and their ship, the Marion, a large side-wheeled steamer, could leave for New York. The rough weather continued through the next day, Saturday, with sufficient intensity to halt work at Sumter and at the Carolina batteries. It was suddenly a lot quieter at the fort with no children or women on the grounds, but there was also a sense of relief that at least the families would be safe. Their departure had a further practical benefit in that it reduced demand for the fort’s supply of food, water, candles, and, importantly, soap.

Rain was still falling as of eleven A.M. on Sunday morning, but the Marion at last departed. Barely visible in the murk and windblown spume, the ship sailed near Sumter and the families gathered on deck. “As they passed the fort outward-bound,” Captain Doubleday wrote, “the men gave them repeated cheers as a farewell, and displayed much feeling; for they thought it very probable they might not meet them again for a long period, if ever.” The men fired a gun in salute.