FORT SUMTER

Practice Makes Perfect

MARCH 12–21

EACH DAY THE QUIET AT SUMTER WAS PUNCTUATED BY THE BOOMING of cannon from Confederate batteries as their inexperienced crews practiced firing and sought to determine optimal angles for hitting the fort and ships in the main channel.

Firing a heavy gun was an art, and a dangerous one; practice was necessary. A mistake at the wrong moment could be fatal. A typical gunnery crew, as specified by the Army’s Heavy Ordnance Manual of 1861, had seven men—a gunner and six cannoneers. The gunner directed the action. In casual usage, however, the term gunner could be used to describe all members of the crew.

Among artillery men, a cannon was known as a “piece.” Three cannoneers stood on each side of the barrel about three yards apart; the gunner, also known as the “chief of piece,” stood behind and to the left. Various “accoutrements” lay nearby to be used in loading the gun and adjusting its position and for the all-important step of sponging the barrel between each shot. The gunner’s pouch, which contained various tools for sighting the gun, was hung from the “cascabel,” the knob at the rear of the barrel, as was the “tube-pouch,” which contained the firing lanyard and ignition devices, called friction tubes. The ammunition was piled to the left of the cannon’s muzzle.

On the gunner’s command From Battery! the men used long, heavy poles of wood, or handspikes, to back the gun away from the embrasure. The gunner guided the process by repeating the command Heave! The cannoneers positioned their spikes at various points under the gun carriage and levered the gun far enough away from the wall to allow access to its muzzle.

Next the gunner shouted Load! If the gun had just been fired, the first step was to shove a sponge on a long pole into the barrel. At the command Sponge! two men forced the sponge against the bottom of the barrel and gave it three turns, left to right, and then three more, right to left. This was to ensure that no spark or flame remained in the barrel from the previous discharge. Either could cause a premature detonation of the next round as the gun was being loaded, with a lethal result.

Now the round and its powder-filled cartridge were shoved into the barrel and rammed to the bottom. A small opening at the exterior base of the barrel, called a vent, allowed the gunner to insert a sharp pick to tear a tiny hole in the cartridge bag jammed within. The gunner then commanded In Battery! and the six cannoneers muscled the piece back into firing position.

Next the gunner ordered Point! and directed the cannoneers through a series of adjustments in the gun’s position to “lay,” or aim, the weapon. Once it was properly laid the cannoneers stepped aside. One man attached the lanyard to a friction tube and then pushed the tube through the vent into the cartridge bag within. He stretched the lanyard taut. At the gunner’s command Fire! this cannoneer gave it a final yank. If all went well—if the charge detonated, if the barrel did not explode—the round within would rocket off toward whatever destiny awaited, and the firing process would begin anew. Typically a heavy gun could be fired a dozen times per hour.

A misstep could be lethal. U.S. Navy records, for example, show more than thirty fatal artillery accidents during the Civil War, including one that would occur on Christmas Eve 1864 during the Union navy’s bombardment of a Confederate fort in North Carolina, when a very large cannon exploded aboard the U.S.S. Ticonderoga, killing eight men and wounding half a dozen others. Other ordnance accidents during the same bombardment killed or injured dozens of men on four other ships. A Navy surgeon listed the dead and wounded and described their injuries. One sailor was Theodore Abos, a second-class fireman: “left leg, thigh, hip, arm, and forearm fractured; soft parts extensively lacerated; killed by hemorrhage and shock.” Another was Henry Payne, an officer: “both thighs broken, cavity of the pelvis, and part of the abdomen opened; death by shock.” And then there was young James D. Ennels, first-class boy: “left leg and thigh shattered and lacerated; died shortly after amputation.”

David Dixon Porter (the Navy officer who encountered an elated Varina Davis leaving her house on the night South Carolina seceded) was by this point a rear admiral and wrote the official report on the Ticonderoga incident. The gun in question was a “Parrott rifle” that fired one-hundred-pound shot and had by this time gained a reputation for bursting despite the innovative barrel reinforcement developed by its designer, Robert Parker Parrott. The guns, Porter concluded, were “calculated to kill more of our men than those of the enemy.”

ON TUESDAY, MARCH 12, the guns at Fort Moultrie alone fired off one hundred blank cartridges. Sumter’s Captain Foster monitored their progress, and saw great improvement. During one practice session Confederate gunners using live shot fired repeatedly and accurately toward a buoy five-eighths of a mile from Sumter. “The practice was excellent, all the shot striking the water nearly in the same spot,” Foster reported, “so it will be seen that the ranges are well understood now, and any vessel coming in must not expect to fare as well as the Star of the West.”

The Confederates also began practicing with heavy mortars installed on Morris Island, these capable of launching shells high into the air so that they would drop within Sumter’s walls and then explode. Beauregard’s forces continued to add additional firepower. A new battery appeared on Sullivan’s Island, near Moultrie House, the resort hotel up the beach that was now occupied by Confederate officers and soldiers who watched the gunnery practice from the piazzas that encircled the building.

Sumter’s guns remained silent. Its supply of cartridges was so limited that Major Anderson ordered Quartermaster Hall to retrieve a supply of flannel shirts from storage to be cut up and turned into cartridge bags. The men sewed five hundred of them. Anderson lamented the fact that he could not engage in the same window-rattling display as the Confederates, who seemed to have an unending reserve of shot, shell, and powder. “I have no ammunition to spare,” he told his superiors in Washington, “and, therefore, do not show them our proficiency in artillery practice.”

His supplies of provisions were running low as well. After Anderson rejected Governor Pickens’s offer of free beef and vegetables, he secured from Pickens permission to acquire such foods on his own from city suppliers using the fort’s existing contracts. But delivery was erratic. Attempts to acquire even minor supplies, such as condiments, required permits from Pickens himself. It was a small humiliation but it prompted Anderson to write a long letter of complaint to the governor, in which he sulked that it might be better to have no supplies at all.

Anderson complained, too, that South Carolina authorities had detained the fort’s only hired servant, a free Black named Thomas Moore Lynch, after he had ventured into Charleston bearing a permit signed by the U.S. secretary of war. The boy’s return, Anderson told Pickens, “was undoubtedly called for in this case by common civility and courtesy, as the officers have no opportunity of replacing him.”

Civility and courtesy thus invoked, the incident now became a matter of honor. David Jamison, South Carolina’s secretary of war, replied on the governor’s behalf and told Anderson that in fact Thomas Lynch was a slave, and that it was “the unquestionable privilege of a slave owner to permit or not, at his own pleasure, the return of his slave to a hostile fort.”

But there was more to the story, Jamison wrote. Charleston police had discovered that Lynch was carrying on “a very improper correspondence” with his mother. They found a letter in his possession in which the boy told her that if a battle broke out in Charleston between Sumter’s men and the state, “the negroes would rise” and assist the federal forces. This of course raised the specter of the kind of insurrection slaveholders had always feared. Moreover, Jamison wrote, the police investigation had turned up letters written by Lynch’s mother in which she described “operations in this city which were not proper to be communicated to anyone in your garrison.”

But now Jamison managed, perhaps unknowingly, to impugn Anderson’s honor by recounting how the Black servant’s behavior “clearly showed that his temper and principles had not been improved by a residence in Fort Sumter.”

This drew a testy reply from Anderson in which he first took to task “the professed owner of the boy, who, neglecting his duty as owner or master for months, had permitted the boy to hire himself out, every one supposing him to be free.” But Anderson, former slaveowner, understood the rules and told Jamison that if indeed the boy was someone’s property “of course, that ends the matter.”

What really irritated Anderson, however, was Jamison’s remark about the boy’s experience at Sumter. “I regret exceedingly,” he wrote, “that your letter contains the remark it does in reference to the effect of a residence at Fort Sumter on the boy’s ‘temper and principles,’ and am satisfied that, upon further consideration, you will regret it.”

He heard nothing back.