THE WORKERS AT SUMTER AND THE ENSLAVED MEN IN THE CONFEDERATE batteries continued building defenses in preparation for battle, an outcome that with each day seemed more and more inevitable as the expected evacuation of Sumter failed to materialize.
The weather hampered both sides. Over several days high winds raked the bay and turned the weather cold. Throughout Saturday night and into Sunday morning, rain fell heavily and steadily, making sentry duty a misery. All day Sunday frequent intervals of heavy rain whitened the waters and drove workers indoors. The gloom and cold were oppressive and struck some Carolinians as ominous.
“The bad weather continues,” wrote planter Keziah Brevard on Monday, April 8; she contended that wind and clouds had persisted ever since “Cessession,” as she chose to spell it.
“—now near 2 O’clock P.M. and ’tis raining quite hard—such weather adds bad feelings to our sad hearts—Oh Lord save us!! save us!! but I see nothing to hope for”—
As she was writing this, lightning flared, followed quickly by thunder. She feared for her chickens.
“—my poor little chickens and two feeble little turkeys, I wish the sun could shine to dry your little bodies.”
None of this disrupted the social firmament of Charleston, however. “Yesterday it rained and we paid visits,” wrote Mary Chesnut.
She made the rounds despite a bad cold. She went first to the home of Henry King, then to the James Legares, then the Dr. Robert Wilson Gibbeses; the next morning she had breakfast with Mrs. Wigfall, wife of the famed Texas fire-eater, during which Mrs. Wigfall declared that Mary’s husband, Colonel Chesnut—Mr. C—would have been a “splendid match” for herself, as would Mary for her own husband. Then on Monday, April 8, there was tea with Dr. Gibbes and several others—“Mr. C offended because I did not wait for him,” Mary noted. After this came a session with another four people, including one Mrs. Letitia Gamble Holliday Latrobe, who, Mary added, “has had two husbands in two years.”
In the background there was always the minor chord of impending threat. On Sunday afternoon Mary tried reading to distract herself—an essay on the nineteenth-century feminist and transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, killed in a shipwreck in 1850 off New York’s Fire Island. Mary did not succeed. “The air is too full of war news,” she wrote. “And we are all so restless.” On Monday, her husband spoke of joining an artillery company. This only added to her unease. “News so warlike I quake.”
Others appeared not to share her concern. Mary noted that during one social encounter the wife of Isaac Hayne, the rebuffed emissary to Washington, said that all she felt about the coming conflict was pity for people who could not be present in Charleston to see it unfold.
Mary observed that Louis Wigfall, whom she nicknamed the Stormy Petrel, seemed to revel in the tension. He was, she wrote, “the only thoroughly happy person I see.”
ON THAT SUNDAY, GENERAL BEAUREGARD notified Anderson that the fort would no longer be permitted to acquire any supplies from Charleston. The halt, Beauregard wrote, was ordered by the Confederate government in Montgomery “in consequence of the delays and vacillations of the United States Government at Washington relative to the evacuation of Fort Sumter.” The mails, however, would continue.
In Washington, President Lincoln dispatched two messengers to Charleston to deliver to Governor Pickens his formal notice that he planned to resupply Fort Sumter with provisions, peacefully if possible, but if not, by force of arms. The two agents were Robert S. Chew of the State Department and Sumter’s Captain Talbot, who also carried a copy of Lincoln’s instructions to Anderson, to be delivered to the major in person. The copy posted by Secretary of War Cameron was still making its way south by mail.
If all went well—if the unusually foul weather did not slow their journey, if their trains did not derail, as happened all too often—Chew and Talbot would arrive on Monday evening, April 8.