CHARLESTON HARBOR

The Angel of Death

FRIDAY, APRIL 12

CAPT. GUSTAVUS FOX, ABOARD THE BALTIC, ARRIVED AT HIS FLEET’S planned rendezvous point ten miles off Charleston at three A.M. on Friday, April 12, amid punishing surf and high winds.

He scanned the horizon for lights. It was still too dark to see the pillars of smoke that ordinarily would have marked the approach of the other ships. The Powhatan was the one he most hoped to see. He sailed in toward the bar, and then back out, and repeated the process in hopes of coming across one of the ships. During one such foray, his own Baltic was driven aground on a submerged ridge named Rattlesnake Shoal, but was soon able to pull away. He saw no sign of the Powhatan, which was at this moment far to the south in waters off Florida.

Of all the ships assigned to his own expedition, only one was present, the Harriet Lane, and it had experienced a near mutiny.

En route to Charleston, its captain, John Faunce, found himself confronting an unhappy crew. The ship, ordinarily assigned to the Treasury Department, was a dozen hours south of New York when Faunce opened sealed orders that told him for the first time where he was headed and what his objective would be. The orders included instructions for Faunce to lower the flags that identified the ship as a Treasury vessel and replace them with those of the U.S. Navy. The ship’s crew, accustomed to the relatively tame occupation of collecting taxes and customs fees, balked. Fighting a battle at sea, they grumbled, was not in their bailiwick.

Faunce mustered the men. He was an accomplished captain and did not brook dissent.

“I appreciate your surprise and point of view,” he told the men. “Still, as your commanding officer, I will say right here and now that every man must do his duty and obey orders implicitly, or”—he gathered steam—“by God, he will never have a chance to see a gun fired in action! My orders are to take the ship to Charleston and to report to the senior officer, and I’m going to do so if I have to bury half of this ship’s company on the way.

“Go forward, now, and do your duty like good Americans.”

He dismissed them; the ship proceeded without further incident.

AT SUMTER, CAPTAIN DOUBLEDAY, perhaps improvidently, moved his bedding into a powder magazine set against the wall that faced Cummings Point on Morris Island. Though the magazine was mostly empty, it had been used to fashion and fill gun cartridges; loose powder lay on the floor around him. He was sound asleep until awakened at about four o’clock Friday morning “by someone groping about my room in the dark and calling out my name.”

This was Major Anderson, who had come to tell him about Beauregard’s final ultimatum, which three Confederate officers, including James Chesnut, had just delivered. The Confederate batteries would begin firing at four-twenty A.M., Anderson said; he told Doubleday that he would not return fire until after sunrise.

“As we had no lights,” Doubleday wrote, “we could in fact do nothing before that time, except to wander around in the darkness, and fire without an accurate view of the enemy’s works.”

Doubleday went back to sleep.

ACROSS THE BAY, IN CHARLESTON, word spread quickly as to the time when the bombardment would begin. To Capt. Samuel Ferguson, the Beauregard aide-de-camp, it seemed as though everyone in the city were converging on the Battery esplanade and the wharves along the eastern flank of the city to await the start of the firing. Many others, he saw, watched from windows and rooftops. As the moment approached, the crowd went quiet.

“The silence became oppressive,” Ferguson wrote; “it was weird, unnatural in so dense a throng, and seemed almost as though the Angel of Death had already passed over.”

ON MORRIS ISLAND, the drumming began at four A.M., the “long roll,” rousing Edmund Ruffin, Asst. Surgeon Parker, and the Palmetto Guard. “Men were seen emerging in hot haste from their tents and running quickly to their respective batteries,” Parker wrote. “Surgeons with bandages and lint in hand, with pocket case under their arms, with laudanum and chloroform and splints, all hurried to the posts assigned them.”

The morning was black under a carpet of thick clouds. Rain fell; a ragged surf snapped at the beach. Off in the murk lay Sumter, which Parker described as seeming “quiet as death.” At four-thirty—ten minutes later than Beauregard’s promised start of four-twenty, a delay that irked the general—the mortar at Fort Johnson fired the signal round. The shell rose in a high luminous arc, “the lit fuze trailing behind, showing a glimmering light, like the wings of a fire fly,” one witness reported. On Charleston’s Battery, anticipation grew. There was joy, and dread. People prayed. Captain Ferguson heard an occasional long “deep drawn sigh.”

Ferguson watched the shell rise. As it tore through the sky it made a hissing sound like an angry cat. “At first, it ascended rapidly, sending out a long jet of flame, then more and more slowly as it neared the highest point of its flight; then it seemed to pause for a moment, next, its descent began, at first slowly, then with ever accelerated velocity, until it was lost to sight beyond the dark walls of Sumter.”

THIS WAS RUFFIN’S CUE. He yanked the lanyard on his gun. The resulting blast launched a sixty-four-pound exploding shell that soared off into the darkness and struck the fort’s parapet at its northeast corner. Hitting an immense fortress roughly a mile away was still considered an act of remarkable accuracy, especially for an initial firing. Ruffin could take no credit, however. The big gun had been aimed by its more experienced attendants.

“THE THRILL THAT RAN through our veins at this time was indescribable,” wrote Private Thompson at Sumter. He saw no fear among his fellow soldiers, “but something like an expression of awe crept over the features of everyone, as battery after battery opened fire and the hissing shot came plowing along leaving wreck and ruin in their path.”

Shell and shot arrived from four distinct directions. Hardshot hammered Sumter’s walls; shells exploded in the parade and surrounding structures. A rifled “Blakely” gun on Morris Island, capable of precision firing, posed the greatest danger. “Almost every second shot would come in through the embrasure,” Thompson wrote, “and those who failed to come in had struck all around the embrasure knocking it completely out of shape and endangering the men’s lives inside from the showers of broken brick, knocked loose at every shot.” Three men sustained facial injuries, but none of these was serious enough to require treatment by Asst. Surgeon Crawford.

Still Sumter did not return fire. The Confederate guns began firing more rapidly, and more accurately. Two hours passed. “They no doubt expected that we would surrender without a blow,” Thompson wrote, “but they were never more mistaken in their lives.”

A ball fired from a Confederate gun on Cummings Point slammed into the exterior of the wall just behind Sumter’s Captain Doubleday, “and by the sound seemed to bury itself in the masonry about a foot from my head, in very unpleasant proximity to my right ear,” he wrote. Large chunks of masonry began to “crumble and fall in all directions.”

Now he did get out of bed.

THE MOST DANGEROUS ROUNDS were those fired by mortars, which lobbed explosive shells that soared in high arcs over Sumter’s walls, then descended along an almost vertical trajectory to land on the parade within the fort.

Brick and mortar seemed to erupt everywhere; plumes of pulverized masonry rolled through the fort propelled by gale-force winds. Rain fell.

ON MORRIS ISLAND, RUFFIN was worried. Despite a punishing barrage from the Confederate batteries, Fort Sumter still did not return fire. Round after round poured into the fort or burst overhead. An hour passed, and none of Sumter’s guns replied. Then two hours. It made Ruffin uneasy. This was, after all, an affair of honor. There was nothing manly or chivalric about firing at an opponent who would not fire back. In fact, the Code Duello forbade it and dismissed such behavior as “children’s play.” Ruffin and his fellow militia feared a repeat of the caning of Charles Sumner, who endured a withering attack but did not strike his assailant.

Ruffin was concerned that Anderson’s men might be so well protected in Sumter’s sturdy casemates that he planned not to fire at all, a depressing prospect. “It would have cheapened our conquest of the fort, if effected, if no hostile defense had been made,” he wrote.

Sumter’s guns stayed mute.

AT MRS. GIDIERE’S BOARDING house, Mary Chesnut and fellow boarders climbed to the roof despite the foul weather. “Prayers from the women and imprecations from the men, and then a shell would light up the scene.” Mary grew tired. “Up on the housetop I was so weak and weary I sat down on something that looked like a black stool,” she wrote.

A man shouted, “Get up, you foolish woman—your dress is on fire.”

She stood. “And he put me out,” she wrote. “It was a chimney, and the sparks caught my clothes.” Another man and a woman came to help. “But my fire had been extinguished before it broke out into a regular blaze.”