FOR THE MEN AT FORT SUMTER, THE STRESS AND FATIGUE OF HEAVY work and constantly being on guard was taking an increasing toll. Asst. Surgeon Crawford had always been in robust health, but the stress was wearing him down. “If we get out of this place safely I must have some holiday,” Crawford wrote to his brother. “I need rest and quiet. My throat still burns like a coal and my general health for the first time in my service is not good. My heart is sad at the condition of the country and as far as I can see there is no prospect of better times.”
He made no effort to reassure his brother. “You have cause for all your concern for us, for we daily, I may say hourly anticipate an attack,” he wrote in another letter. “Everything foreshadows it and it cannot be long postponed. We have not been reinforced and you ask with great pertinence, Why. Why indeed. Simply because the ‘don’t initiate’ policy of Mr. Buchanan has led us on by degrees to the point at which to reinforce us would require an army and a general battle.” The Carolinians were working at a furious pace twenty-four hours a day, Crawford wrote. “I have just looked over at their works at Cummings Point. They look like bees, so large a force is at work there.”
Crawford expressed a degree of bitterness, leavened with pride, and made it clear that he had no illusions about the subtext of what was occurring. “We are to be left to ourselves and our own exertions as a sacrifice to turn public opinion against those who attack us, and then if possible save the border states and the Union,” he wrote. “But there is a power behind the throne, the first gun fired at our fort will call the country to arms; the bugle that sounds the attack upon us will echo along the slopes of the Alleghenies, and the granite hills of the North, along the shores of the great lakes, and far away on the rolling prairies of the west and the earth will shake with the tread of armed men.”
His foremost hope, he told his brother, is that “we come honorably out of our difficulties. That is my earnest prayer now.”
ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 22, Major Anderson broke his commitment to conserving ammunition and authorized his gun crews to fire a salute in honor of George Washington’s birthday.
This began at noon. The men fired thirty-four times, one shot for each state, including the seceded states, at thirty-second intervals. “These were loaded with canister and produced a fine effect,” wrote Asst. Surgeon Crawford, who happened to be on guard duty. He directed the fire of guns located at Sumter’s gate. Spectators crowded the ramparts of the opposing forts now in Confederate hands, Crawford noted, and “drew their inferences as to what shot and shell would do from the same sources.”
Diligent always, Major Anderson wrote a message to his superiors notifying them of the tribute, even as the guns were booming and gusting white smoke into the air.
“THE INSOLENT WRETCH!” WROTE Mary Chesnut in her diary when she learned of Anderson’s salute several days later. “Anderson fired 34 guns for all the original United States—in utter scorn of our ‘Confederate States.’”