FORT SUMTER

Sunrise

FRIDAY, APRIL 12

AT DAWN, CAPTAIN DOUBLEDAY WENT TO BREAKFAST. REVEILLE WAS at six A.M., announced by drums; the call for breakfast, six-thirty. He found the other officers already seated at a long table in the mess room used by the fort’s company of engineers. They dined on salt pork and water and a small portion of farina that Asst. Surgeon Crawford had found in his hospital. They also cooked the last of the rice that had been rescued from the shattered windows. “Our party were calm, and even somewhat merry,” Doubleday wrote.

After breakfast, the officers divided the garrison force into gunnery squads so that once a squad grew weary, another could step in and resume firing. Doubleday led the first group to the guns in the casemates that faced the Iron Battery at Cummings Point on Morris Island, due south. “In aiming the first gun fired against the rebellion I had no feeling of self-reproach,” he wrote, “for I fully believed that the contest was inevitable, and was not of our seeking.” As Doubleday saw it, he was fighting for the survival of the United States. “The only alternative was to submit to a powerful oligarchy who were determined to make freedom forever subordinate to slavery.”

He did have one regret, however—that the fort’s biggest and most effective guns, those on the parapet, were by Anderson’s order not to be used. These stood in the open, protected only by the top of the wall in front of them, which would have provided ample protection if the opposing force were a fleet of ships in the shipping channel. But with Confederate guns firing from all directions, the parapet guns were too exposed and their use would put the men at grave risk. The casemates on the lowest level, however, were virtually bombproof.

At six-thirty, Major Anderson at last gave the order to fire. Doubleday pulled the lanyard to discharge Sumter’s first shot. It struck the Iron Battery on Cummings Point but bounced off its sloped roof and caused no damage. Ball after ball did likewise, though one appeared to disable an iron shutter that shielded the battery’s embrasure between firings, thereby putting the gun behind it out of action.

More of Sumter’s guns fired and added fresh bursts of smoke and muzzle flare to the ambient cacophony. “It would be useless for me to attempt to describe the scene for the next four hours,” wrote Private Thompson. “If viewed from a distance it must have been grand.”

THE CONFEDERATE GUNS FIRED briskly. “Showers of balls from ten-inch Columbiads and forty-two-pounders, and shells from thirteen-inch mortars poured into the fort in one incessant stream, causing great flakes of masonry to fall in all directions,” Doubleday wrote. Mortar rounds became embedded in the soft ground of the parade. When these exploded, Doubleday wrote, the blasts “shook the fort like an earthquake.”

The Confederate gunners seemed particularly intent on bringing down Sumter’s American flag, the Stars and Stripes. Shot after shot rocketed past the flagstaff and landed in the water beyond the fort. On three occasions shells set fire to the officers quarters, but these fires were quickly extinguished. Fire was the great danger, given the three hundred barrels of powder—over thirty thousand pounds—stored in the fort’s main magazine. All day the wind blew at gale force and rain fell heavily as cannonballs hissed overhead and shells exploded seemingly everywhere, launching squalls of iron shrapnel.

The men at the embrasures were trained to step to the side whenever they saw the burst of smoke and flame that indicated that a Confederate gun across the channel had fired, just in case the ball or shell happened to pass through the opening. Now and then a cannonball clipped the edge of an embrasure and sent a swarm of brick shards into the casemate chamber. Doubleday’s men worked the guns for three hours, which, given the labor involved in preparing and loading them between firings, brought the men to the point of exhaustion. A fresh squad arrived, led by Capt. Truman Seymour, who was known to have a sense of humor.

“Doubleday,” he said, “what in the world is the matter here, and what is all the uproar about?”

“There is a trifling difference of opinion between us and our neighbors opposite,” Doubleday said, “and we are trying to settle it.”

“Very well, do you wish me to take a hand?”

“Yes,” Doubleday said, “I would like to have you go in.”

The firing resumed.

ON MORRIS ISLAND, at the Iron Battery, Confederate gunners likewise watched for the muzzle flare of Sumter’s guns. The transit of a ball or shell would take four to six seconds. Lookouts watched for the flare and called out a warning with each discharge. They were able to see the balls and shells as they moved through the air. The lookouts’ warnings gave Ruffin and the men at his battery time to duck behind a thick berm of sand or a reinforced bulwark.

Ruffin saw a number of men, eight or ten, running “at their utmost speed” away from the beach and at first thought they were running because they were terrified. In fact, they were gleefully chasing the balls that had missed their mark and now were rolling across the terrain. The men were hoping “to secure them as memorials or trophies,” Ruffin realized. This was a dangerous pastime, given that a rolling cannonball could easily break an arm or a leg. “This hunt was eagerly pursued by the men throughout the siege, whenever a ball from the fort stopped near enough to be noticed and recovered.”

After firing his gun, Ruffin became one of the lookouts. He warned of approaching shells, but mainly monitored the accuracy of his own battery’s fire and called out directions to improve it. Soon other soldiers not engaged in firing guns joined him on the battery’s makeshift parapet “to indulge their curiosity,” Ruffin wrote.

Meanwhile Confederate balls and explosive shells ripped into Sumter’s walls. The men watching from Morris Island critiqued each shot, as recorded by Asst. Surgeon Parker: “Cries of that’s a good one, hurrah for that one—bad—poor—try it again.”

This drew the attention of the battery’s commander, Col. Wilmot G. De Saussure, a prominent planter and slaveholder, who ordered Ruffin and his fellow onlookers to get off the parapet, “lest we should attract the notice and fire of Major Anderson,” Ruffin wrote. The colonel replaced him with a private named Henry Buist, himself a member of Charleston’s chivalry. Disappointed and a little hurt, Ruffin found other locations from which to observe the action.

He was by now drenched. He had not bathed for days; his white hair clung to his scalp and hung over his shoulders in wet daggers. Out of sympathy or pity, Ruffin was invited by various gun crews to fire their cannon, and so the old secessionist, musket in hand, made his way from gun to gun, drawing cheers as cannon boomed and smoke billowed and projectiles of all configurations flew toward Sumter at seventeen hundred feet per second. He was a popular cannoneer; in all he fired guns twenty-seven times.

Despite the rain and cold, the atmosphere on Morris Island was festive and lighthearted. The men at the Confederate batteries cheered each time Fort Sumter fired a shot, to honor the gallant Major Anderson, whose performance thus far was deemed very much in accord with the chivalry’s code of honor. For the moment, at least, this was not war but rather an elaborate if perilous form of sport.