FORT SUMTER

Any Minute Now

APRIL 1–3

AT FORT SUMTER, EVERY DAY BROUGHT THE EXPECTATION THAT A messenger from Washington would arrive with the order to vacate the fort, or that Ward Lamon himself would return and tell the garrison to get ready for departure. Anderson was prepared to fight if necessary but had come to believe that abandoning the fort was the only way to avoid bloodshed. This was not, however, something he felt authorized to do on his own. Capitulate under fire, yes; walk away, no. Doing so, moreover, would confirm the suspicions of those who wondered about his loyalty, and might make him appear to be another General Twiggs, the U.S. Army commander in Texas who had surrendered all federal outposts in the state. Once again Anderson was left without clear direction from Washington.

Tempers at the fort flared. Anderson took to calling the garrison’s tenure at Sumter “imprisonment.” On Monday, April 1, he sent a report to the Army’s new adjutant general, Col. Lorenzo Thomas, who had assumed the post after his predecessor, Samuel Cooper, fled Washington to join the Confederacy. Thomas and Anderson were friends.

“I have the honor to report that everything is still and quiet, as far as we can see, around us,” Anderson told Thomas. Which at that moment was not all that far. A dense fog had turned Sumter into a fortress of ghosts. Sentries stood watch, but with visibility reduced to a few yards, they saw only a wall of gray.

Anderson told Thomas some startling news: The fort’s supply of food would be expended a lot sooner than he had previously indicated. His prior estimate was based on discharging the civilian laborers from the fort, thereby reducing consumption of food, but orders authorizing him to do so had never arrived from Washington, and now Governor Pickens wouldn’t allow the workers to leave. Pickens understood that the longer they stayed and consumed the fort’s provisions, the sooner Anderson would have to surrender. Pickens had also sharply reduced the flow of beef and vegetables from Charleston markets; he halted entirely the delivery of butter. This tightening convinced Anderson that Pickens would soon cut off all access to supplies.

As a consequence, Anderson told Thomas, he was compelled to revise his estimate. He now expected his provisions to last just one more week, or until about April 8, and even then only if the governor allowed the laborers to leave. Pickens seemed unlikely to do so.

Thomas received the letter four days later and passed it on to Lincoln.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF Wednesday, April 3, a 180-ton schooner, the Rhoda H. Shannon, en route from Boston to Savannah with a load of ice, arrived at what its captain, Joseph Marts, believed to be the entrance to the Savannah River off Tybee Island. Powerful winds scoured the sea and raised a spume that impaired his ability to locate navigational waypoints. Hoping to draw the attention of a distant pilot vessel, he ordered one of his crew to display an American flag in the schooner’s fore-rigging. No pilot approached.

Captain Marts decided to proceed anyway, despite the rough surf. He ordered the flag taken down and continued onward, until he realized that this was not, after all, the Savannah River. In fact, he had entered Charleston Harbor seventy-five miles to the north.

A cannon boomed and a shot passed in front of his boat. Marts thought this was a signal that he should display his ship’s colors, so he again raised the American flag.

Two more shots hissed past.

Unsure of what the authorities on shore wanted him to do, he kept to his course and sailed deeper into the harbor until he was abreast of Morris Island and its new channel-facing batteries. Fort Sumter was still roughly a mile ahead. Captain Marts was aware of the unrest in Charleston but had heard reliable reports that Sumter was soon to be turned over to the Confederacy. He continued onward.

Now the guns started firing at his ship. One shot passed through his mainsail two feet above the boom. He turned the schooner about and ran back toward the harbor mouth with hardshot falling around him. Instead of continuing on into the Atlantic, however, he anchored just inside the bar in a zone of rough water. The Morris Island guns continued to fire but at too great a distance to have any effect.

At Sumter soldiers manned and loaded their guns. These could not have reached the battery that fired on the schooner but could easily have struck Fort Moultrie and batteries elsewhere on Morris Island. Captain Doubleday advocated action. Anderson, however, merely sent two officers over to Charleston “in a boat with a white flag to ask for an explanation, with the usual result,” Doubleday groused. The officers—Artillery Capt. Truman Seymour and Engineering Lt. G. W. Snyder—met with Confederate officers and then rowed out to visit the schooner and interview Captain Marts. They returned to Sumter.

As it happened, the incident had another audience. Governor Pickens and General Beauregard watched the whole thing unfold while standing on the piazza at Moultrie House, the hotel near Fort Moultrie. They, too, were perplexed by what they saw and conducted an investigation of their own.

The next day, Thursday, April 4, Sumter’s Lieutenant Snyder met with Governor Pickens and Beauregard and learned that a Confederate guard boat that should have been on patrol outside the bar to warn unauthorized ships against entering had not been on duty. Its captain had claimed “that the weather was too boisterous and the sea too rough,” Snyder wrote in his report.

Governor Pickens assured Snyder that the guard boat’s captain had been summoned to account for his actions and would be dismissed. The governor further stated that “peremptory orders had been sent to Morris Island to stop this random firing.”

Once again, civility and courtesy ruled. But this time Anderson’s forbearance took a toll on the garrison’s morale. Captain Doubleday understood his motivation but found his inaction frustrating. “In amplifying his instructions not to provoke a collision into instructions not to fight at all, I have no doubt he thought he was rendering a real service to the country,” Doubleday wrote. “He knew the first shot fired by us would light the flames of a civil war that would convulse the world, and tried to put off the evil day as long as possible. Yet a better analysis of the situation might have taught him that the contest had already commenced, and could no longer be avoided.”

Asst. Surgeon Crawford likewise believed Anderson should have fired back. He and Anderson had a long conversation during which the major invited him into his office and showed him the orders he had received thus far from Washington, all urging him to avoid collision unless the safety of his command was at stake. “I regard this as the qualifying clause which will cover him in not firing yesterday,” Crawford wrote in his journal. “—But I still think we should have fired as we would have been sustained by the whole world. Not one word has yet come to us from the new administration … The Major is very greatly depressed in Spirits, and today told me he thought of taking down our flag. Without supplies, without encouragement, we are left to ourselves, and the greatest depression prevails among us.”

IN CHARLESTON, THE INCIDENT served to increase anxiety. A new wave of rumor came rolling through the harbor with contradictory news. Some reports posited with absolute certainty that a Northern fleet would soon arrive; others with equal certainty that Sumter would shortly be evacuated.

On Thursday night, April 4, the fiery Louis Wigfall of Texas was summoned to give an impromptu speech to a crowd that had gathered in front of the city’s Mills House hotel. War with the North was beyond doubt, he declared; within the next year he would return to Washington “in the saddle.” When Mary Chesnut learned of the speech, she knew at once that his saddle remark was an allusion to Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake, for she knew Wigfall well and knew his penchant for quoting romantic literature in his speeches. In Scott’s novel, the heroic knight, James Fitz-James, proclaims his intention to suppress the unruly Clan Alpine. “Like Fitz-James—when he visits Clan Alpine again—it is to be in the saddle, &c&c.,” Mary wrote, gently mocking the Texan. “So let Washington beware.”

She was at dinner with friends during the speech itself and was sad to have missed it. “But the supper was a consolation,” she wrote: “—pâté de foie gras, salad, biscuit glacé, and champagne frappé.”

Later that night, her mood more serious, she wrote: “A ship was fired into yesterday and went back to sea. Is that the first shot?

“How can one settle down to anything? One’s heart is in one’s mouth all the time. Any minute this cannon may open on us, the fleet come in, &c&c.”