CHARLESTON

Rumor and Cannon Fire

APRIL 9

MARY CHESNUT, STILL MISERABLE WITH A BAD COLD, SPENT Tuesday, April 9, reading and packing for her return to Mulberry plantation, “thinking nothing could induce me to dress and go out.” But a friend, Robert Gourdin, called and she relented.

“I was sitting quietly talking to Mr. G when John Manning walked in, seated himself by me and in mock heroic style began, ‘Madam your country is invaded.’”

She asked what he meant; he replied that “six men of war were outside the bar—and Talbot and Chew had arrived to announce war.” These were the Lincoln messengers now on their way back to Washington; the part about the warships was false, however, an artifact of stressed imagination and the very bad visibility caused by the storm.

“I immediately told Mr. C who came in after inquiry & confirmed the story,” Mary wrote. Next Wigfall arrived, this time quoting Byron: “There was a sound of revelry by night,” the first line of Byron’s “The Eve of Waterloo.”

“All was stir and confusion,” Mary wrote. “My heart beat so painfully. The men went off. Mrs. W and I retired to my room, &c, where she silently wept and we disconsolately discoursed upon the horrors of Civil War.”

Then a cannon boomed, she wrote, “and then shouts.”

IT WAS ELEVEN P.M.; heavy rain fell. Six more cannon blasts followed. In the Chesnuts’ boarding house and throughout the city fear spiked. Mary encountered the “blanched face and streaming eyes” of a fellow lodger, Mrs. Allen Green.

A man in a dressing gown emerged from his rooms and approached Mary in the hall. This was another former governor, John Means, a planter who had been a delegate at the state’s secession convention. He came out, she wrote, “to tell me that Pickens, the queer goose, had ordered seven cannon to be the signal for the gathering of the 17th regiment.”

Means knew this because he was a colonel in the regiment. The seven blasts meant that its members were to muster and board steamers that would transfer them to Morris Island in preparation for the expected Union assault.

Seven cannon, at night, with dozens of giant guns and mortars pointing every which way throughout the harbor, and a fleet of Union ships rumored to be waiting to attack: It was unnerving, almost cruel.

“Of course no sleep for me last night,” Mary wrote. “The streets were alive with soldiers—marching, shouting, &c.”

Edmund Ruffin, writing in his own diary in a tent on Morris Island as heavy rain thundered against its walls, observed with a degree of understatement, “The people of the city [are] greatly excited.”