THE ATLANTIC

Storm

APRIL 8

BY MONDAY, APRIL 8, CAPTAIN FOX WAS READY TO LAUNCH HIS FLEET. He was proud beyond proud: He had been a Navy man; he had left the service to toil in the obscurity of civilian industry, and now glory beckoned. With the Powhatan among his force, as he believed it to be, his expedition to Charleston could not fail.

The first vessel to depart was the tug Uncle Ben, which left New York that Monday evening. Fox himself embarked the next morning aboard the Baltic confident that all his tugs and ships would rendezvous off Charleston two days later.

The ship exited New York Harbor into a full-on Atlantic gale. The Baltic was well designed and handled the seas well, but the storm impeded and scattered the rest of Fox’s fleet, especially the ocean tugboats. It forced the Uncle Ben to seek shelter in the harbor at Wilmington, North Carolina. Another tug, the Yankee, was blown past Charleston and found refuge in Savannah. The tug Freeborn avoided the storm altogether: Deeming the risks of the expedition simply too great, its owners decided at the last minute to hold the vessel in New York.

Fox did not know any of this. He had no means of communicating with other ships except by visual signaling or veering close enough to shout. As best he could tell, his plan for the relief of Fort Sumter was unfolding exactly as planned, if probably a bit behind schedule because of the gale. He expected to find the other ships of his fleet waiting for him just outside the entrance to Charleston Harbor. He would be especially happy to see the Powhatan, its troops and powerful guns at the ready.

THAT MORNING, MONDAY, APRIL 8, Major Anderson and his men were startled by an explosion near Fort Moultrie across the channel to the east. The blast shattered a wooden house situated up the beach from the fort and revealed behind it a wholly new Confederate battery.

As best they could tell, it contained four large guns. The orientation of these was deeply troubling and forced Anderson and his engineers to rethink their own strategy for defending Sumter. “The discovery of this battery,” wrote Asst. Surgeon Crawford, “produced a marked and depressing effect upon Major Anderson. He seemed nervous and anxious.” Engineer Foster saw that the new guns exposed Sumter’s topmost tier to direct fire and likewise exposed an area outside the fort walls where deep-draft ships would be most likely to anchor and discharge their cargo. Anderson decided the new battery made the parapet level simply too dangerous and ordered its guns off-limits. “This, of course, was much less dangerous for the men,” Doubleday wrote, “but it deprived us of the most powerful and effective part of our armament.”

The new battery brought to nineteen the number of Confederate gun emplacements arrayed around the harbor, all fully manned. But Anderson knew that even without this numerical superiority the Confederates held a tremendous advantage: They had only one target to shoot at; Sumter confronted many.

IN WASHINGTON, THE CONFEDERATE commissioners told Justice Campbell of their growing unease and urged him to convey this to Secretary Seward. Campbell was apprehensive as well, increasingly concerned that Seward was using him to deceive the Southerners. He met with Seward on Sunday, April 7, and asked him whether the assurances he had given the commissioners thus far were “well or ill founded.”

The next day, Monday, April 8, Campbell received at his quarters a mysterious envelope containing a brief statement with neither date nor signature: “Faith as to Sumter fully kept; wait and see; other suggestions received, and will be respectfully considered.”

Campbell brought it to the commissioners, who surmised that Seward was its author. It did nothing to ease their concerns.

Weary of the “constant vacillation” of Lincoln’s government, the commissioners at last sent their official secretary, James Pickett, to the State Department to demand a formal answer to their original request for a meeting with Lincoln. What he received in response was the memorandum Seward had written on March 15 and that had lain in the department’s archive ever since.