FORT SUMTER

To Lift a Columbiad

MARCH 9

AT FIRST ANDERSON WANTED TO PLACE HIS TEN-INCH COLUMBIADS, the big fifteen-thousand-pound guns, on the topmost tier of the fort, the barbette or parapet level, where he believed they would be most effective. His engineers managed to improvise a block-and-tackle apparatus capable of lifting that much weight. Still, the effort of raising the first gun required brute strength. The men successfully hauled it up to the top level and slowly heaved it into position.

Then came the second gun. Again the men struggled, and slowly the big gun rose. It passed the first level. It passed the second.

Just as it came even with the top level, a key element of the lifting apparatus broke “and down it came,” wrote Asst. Surgeon Crawford in a letter to his brother. “It went into the ground butt foremost and buried itself to the trunnions.” The trunnions were axle-like protrusions midway up the barrel.

No one was hurt. They decided to leave it where it was and take advantage of its convenient partial burial by converting it into an improvised mortar, a kind of cannon that fired projectiles along a steep upward trajectory so they could soar over walls and other obstacles.

The men repaired the lifting apparatus and began hoisting the third columbiad. This one ascended without hazard.

TO PROTECT AGAINST INVADING infantry, the fort’s chief engineer, Captain Foster, had his men seal the main gate, which was at the center of the rear, west-facing wall, the “gorge.” The weakest wall.

Here, just inside the gate, Foster installed a new barrier six feet high and nearly four feet thick, with an entryway only twenty inches wide. He called this a “manhole,” an apt description because it was only wide enough to admit one soldier at a time. If an invader somehow made it through he would find himself confronting an eight-inch howitzer aimed directly at his chest.

Foster, whose imagination verged on the diabolical, also arrayed 225 explosive shells at various points along the parapet to be shoved off onto soldiers below. Lanyards affixed to these shells would engage at a point about four feet—roughly chest height—above the esplanade that surrounded the fort. At several locations he installed “thunder barrels,” large containers filled with stone, brick, and other materials and packed with explosives. He had his men dig two pits and likewise filled these with debris and gunpowder, and hid them from view in a ditch at the base of the exterior walls. These were “fougasses.” By this point in history bits and pieces of material in an exploding shell were already being called “shrapnel” thanks to one Henry Shrapnel, an early-nineteenth-century British officer, who, borrowing an idea from Leonardo da Vinci, invented ordnance that would rupture and disperse small bits of metal in all directions.

Foster also installed two mines under the wharf, each containing about twenty-five pounds of powder.

LIFE AT SUMTER WAS not all centered on sowing death and mayhem. Along with board games and cards, the men played leapfrog and, according to Asst. Surgeon Crawford, “ball.” He did not specify what kind, but it was likely a variant of baseball, by then a popular sport that fellow officer Captain Doubleday would often, wrongly, be credited with inventing.

They fished for blackfish and eels. On Sundays, when the weather allowed, they rowed a six-oared barge around the fort’s perimeter.

There were fewer opportunities in the evening. The fort had run out of candles, so reading books and writing letters became difficult. For light they filled bowls with oil from the fort’s beacon and floated wicks on the surface using small rafts of wood.

They were also out of soap. This they could not improvise.