FORT SUMTER

Confession

APRIL 8

THE THREE- OR FOUR-DAY DELAY IN MAIL DELIVERY BETWEEN WASHINGTON and Fort Sumter confounded and confused communications and deepened Major Anderson’s sense of isolation. But no one trusted the telegraph. Telegrams passed through too many nodes where they could be intercepted and forwarded to unauthorized parties. The mail was sacrosanct, its confidentiality honored by both sides.

Or so Anderson certainly expected.

On April 7, he at last received a copy of Lincoln’s instructions and learned of his decision to resupply the fort, apparently using a plan devised by Capt. Gustavus Fox. Anderson was shocked. It utterly contradicted his understanding that Sumter would be evacuated. The next day, Monday, April 8, he wrote a confidential letter to his friend, Adjutant General Thomas in Washington, in which he advised that upon reading the letter, “you will be pleased to destroy it.”

Fox’s expedition, Anderson warned, would be seen by the South as a betrayal, given the assurances apparently made to the Confederate commissioners. “It is, of course, now too late for me to give any advice in reference to the proposed scheme of Captain Fox,” Anderson wrote. “I fear that the result cannot fail to be disastrous to all concerned.” He told Thomas that Lincoln’s aide, Ward Lamon, had convinced him that the garrison would be evacuated, but now clearly that was not the case. He was annoyed. “I ought to have been informed that this expedition was to come,” he wrote.

And then he bared his soul—to the extent, that is, that a military man like Anderson could do so. “We shall strive to do our duty,” he wrote, “though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced.”

The letter never made it to Washington; it came to rest instead on a desk across the bay, in the Charleston Hotel.