CHARLESTON

Confusion

THURSDAY, APRIL 11

BEAUREGARD DID NOT OFFER AN EXPLANATION FOR HIS “SPECIAL reason,” but the reality was that he was simply not yet ready to wage war. For one thing, the general was running short of gunpowder. The exuberant displays by his batteries had wasted a lot of it, enough so that he ordered his forces to cut down their practice firing. He had only enough powder to sustain fire against Fort Sumter for a few hours and could not risk the humiliation of running out before the fort was subdued or destroyed. A fresh supply was on its way from Augusta, Georgia, due to arrive that night, but this would have to be distributed to the various batteries by steamboat, within easy range of Sumter’s guns. It was a passage best achieved without guns blazing away throughout the harbor.

Beauregard’s biggest problem was the lack of training and coordination among his officers and troops. The officers, while enthusiastic and dedicated, many from the state’s finest planting families, were inexperienced, daunted by the strain of managing thousands of scantily trained volunteers. New companies of such troops arrived each day from all over the state; three thousand were expected to arrive that Wednesday alone. The soldiers on Morris Island “are not in as complete a state of organization as I desire,” Beauregard told War Secretary Walker in Montgomery, “but I hope, in the event of an attempt to land by the enemy, that I will be able to give you a satisfactory account of them.”

The raw state of recruits had been a problem all along, as Col. Roswell Ripley, commander of Fort Moultrie, had reported to Beauregard’s headquarters a month earlier when he complained that he had “some 290 indifferent artillerymen” and “318 helpless infantry recruits, almost without arms, without clothing, and totally and entirely unfit to meet the enemy.”

These problems persisted, but Beauregard had little patience for complaints. On Wednesday he sent a message to Ripley’s superior in which he stated, “This is one of those moments when the word impossible must be ignored.”

Now and then hints of desperation crept into the otherwise matter-of-fact exchange of messages between Beauregard and his officers. On Wednesday night, one officer, Henry J. Hartstene (who had taken Capt. Gustavus Fox to meet Anderson), warned that on a night this dark the Northern fleet could reinforce Sumter by using boats launched from ships outside the bar. He told Beauregard that time was running short; if he planned to seize Sumter, he “had better be making a beginning.” Hartstene composed this letter while aboard one of his steamers, the Gordon, where ambient conditions had put him in a dismal mood. “Excuse my bad writing,” he wrote. “My hands are so cold, and my light is so bad that I can scarcely see.”

One key officer seemed to wilt under the strain: Maj. W.H.C. Whiting, a Confederate engineer serving as assistant adjutant general on Morris Island. He found himself in charge of managing the disposition of a mélange of batteries and newly arrived troops, all of them volunteers, all untested and more or less untrained. It was all hopelessly disorganized. “I am expected to be engineer and everything else,” Whiting complained to Beauregard. “Cannot you take charge, or at least come here and see the state of affairs?”

The island’s batteries had been ordered to be “in readiness,” Whiting wrote, but all he saw was confusion. “We are ready, perhaps, to open fire, but we are not ready to support it,” he told Beauregard on Thursday, April 11. “For God’s sake have this post inspected by yourself, or some one else competent, before you open fire. I am alone here, as you know, and heretofore have been exclusively occupied with the construction of batteries.” One newly arrived contingent of men was “helter-skelter,” he complained; all were volunteers. “There are no regulars here at all.”

Beauregard tried to calm him. “Things always appear worst at first sight when not perfect,” he wrote. “We cannot delay now.”

“EXCITEMENT INCREASES HOURLY,” Edmund Ruffin wrote in his diary.

At six P.M. Thursday, his regiment, the Palmetto Guard, was mustered and ordered to quick-march to their gun batteries, located at Cummings Point at the northern tip of Morris Island, about a third of a mile away. Ruffin brought his musket. His post, the rail-roofed Iron Battery, housed three large cannon—columbiads—capable of firing sixty-four-pound ordnance. Another ten guns and mortars stood elsewhere on the island. Of all the gun emplacements in Charleston Harbor, those at Cummings Point were nearest to Sumter, which was only thirteen hundred yards away. The bombardment was to begin with the firing of a signal round from a mortar at Fort Johnson, the hitherto abandoned colonial fort. Early orders issued before the final ultimatum had indicated this would be done at eight P.M.

Beauregard assigned the honor of firing the first actual combat shot to the Palmetto Guard, which in turn offered it to Ruffin. This was to be fired immediately after the signal round. Ruffin was thrilled. “Of course I was highly gratified by the compliment, and delighted to perform the service,” Ruffin wrote. His designated cannon was one of the big sixty-four-pounders loaded with an exploding shell.

At eight o’clock, Ruffin was at his gun and holding the lanyard that would ignite the powder in the cannon. He and the men around him waited “in anxious expectation and great excitement” for the signal to fire.

NEARBY, CONFEDERATE ASST. SURGEON Francis LeJau Parker took note of the mood around him. “For days,” he wrote, “the community had anticipated commencement of hostilities, public suspense was at its height … All eyes were turned towards the signal point. Eight o’clock came, no shell. Nine o’clock came and passed and still no sign of commencing hostilities. We began to think there would be no fight, men wondered why; some said they knew it would be so.”

General Beauregard ordered the batteries to stand down. Among the gunners, excitement gave way to disappointment and perplexity. But then came reassuring news that the bombardment was merely postponed and might begin early the next morning.

Just in case, Ruffin resolved that he would go to bed in his clothing. He dined on a personal supply of cheese and crackers, then settled in for the night on a pallet under two thick blankets. He removed only his coat and his shoes.

Outside, rain fell; the wind hissed through the adjacent beach grass. Quiet settled over the camp. Asst. Surgeon Parker observed that everything was “hushed in sleep.”

Then came the drums.