CHARLESTON HARBOR

The Great Darkness

FRIDAY, APRIL 12

AT MIDDAY FRIDAY, SUMTER’S PRIVATE THOMPSON SAW THAT A THIRD large steamship had joined the two that had lain off the bar since dawn. “We were certain they were an expedition fitted out to relieve us, and the hopes of speedily getting assistance compensated for the lack of anything in the shape of dinner.”

The ships remained in place. This did not surprise Thompson. He expected they would wait until nightfall, and then, “it being as dark as pitch and raining,” they would come.

CONFEDERATE LOOKOUTS SPOTTED THE ships as well and alerted their superiors. They counted three large steam vessels and were able to identify them. Two were warships, the Pawnee and Harriet Lane. The third was the Baltic. One of the ships appeared to be carrying row boats large enough to land troops.

Using a field glass, Ruffin surveyed the damage done thus far to Fort Sumter. Two or three guns on its topmost level were disabled, knocked from their carriages. Half a dozen chimneys on structures within the fort had been destroyed. There was no way to tell what kind of harm the projectiles had done within the fort itself, but myriad holes and gouges in the outside walls bore evidence of accurate fire from the Confederate side. Still, no clear breach of the walls had been achieved.

The Sumter guns fired back only with hardshot, and at long intervals. Most of these missed the Morris Island emplacements and fell into the marsh beyond, though Ruffin estimated that nine or ten balls had struck his Iron Battery and been deflected harmlessly away by its angled iron roof. The men at the Confederate batteries continued to cheer each new shot fired from Sumter.

TO EVERYONE’S SURPRISE, the federal warships stayed where they were, now and then prompting disdainful jeers from the Confederate gunners, who attributed the fleet’s restraint to cowardice. Nightfall, however, brought renewed anxiety. It seemed highly likely that once the bay was fully enveloped in darkness, the warships would launch a flotilla of boats filled with soldiers and provisions.

The wind and rain persisted; shortly after nightfall a pounding rain hammered the Confederate emplacements for half an hour. The firing from Sumter ceased; the Confederate batteries fired mortar rounds through the night, but at twenty-minute intervals to discomfit Anderson’s men and interrupt their sleep. “After dark,” Ruffin wrote, “I went out of our tent to observe the appearance of the shells, in their luminous course, as seen in the night. A line of light shows along the whole curve of the course, preceded by the brilliant explosion of the discharge of the shell from the mortar, and another made by the final bursting of the shell.”

The tide reached its peak, but still the federal fleet remained off the bar. The men on Morris Island found it disgraceful that the ships were not now racing to rescue the courageous Major Anderson. “Tide going down,” Asst. Surgeon Parker noted; “no signs of fleet, miserable cowards … the execrations of our men are loud against them.” Parker took note of the weather: “Night black and stormy, rain is falling with lightning and thunder.”

At seven P.M. Ruffin returned to his tent to try to sleep, but could not, and went outside again hoping to catch a glimpse of the federal ships in the quicksilver glare cast by periodic emanations of sheet lightning.

At about twelve-thirty A.M., having returned to his tent and finally fallen asleep, he was jarred awake by the sound of small arms fire and shore cannon. “I hastily struck a light,” he wrote. He threw on his clothes, grabbed his musket, and stepped outside, “thinking that the enemy from the ships had certainly landed, or were trying in the great darkness to pass in boats up the channel.”

As Ruffin approached the beach, a shell hissed into the sky, fired with the apparent goal of providing a burst of illumination over the bay.

Down the beach from him, out of his visual range, a boat had in fact landed.

THE SOUND OF MUSKET fire pocked the darkness; one of the channel guns fired. A small boat with two men went aground on the beach. Confederate soldiers raced to seize it but then hurriedly stepped away as a cry rose behind them: “Clear the beach, we fire.”

A howitzer boomed. In the next instant, grapeshot meant to be used at close range against advancing infantry peppered the boat and the water around it. By now Asst. Surgeon Parker was on the scene and saw the two occupants of the boat throw themselves into its bottom. “Friends!” the men shouted. “Southern Confederacy, don’t shoot for God’s sake!”

The boat began to drift down the beach, pushed along by the surf. Soldiers followed and fired their muskets.

“Don’t shoot,” the men in the boat cried. “We are friends.”

As the waves pushed the boat back to shore, soldiers again rushed it and seized the two men. They proved to be drunk and lost, surgeon Parker wrote. They had rowed over earlier in the day to ferry two Palmetto guardsmen to Cummings Point and had decided to put ashore for the night. In the storm-wracked darkness, the little boat had caught the Confederate soldiers by surprise, despite sentries stationed on the beach and gunners watching from the channel batteries. As a precaution against another such surprise, two companies of infantry now quickly converged on the point through the wind and drenching rain. Once the confusion subsided and the identity of the two boatmen was made clear, most of the soldiers turned in for the night inside armored shelters known as “rat holes.” But Ruffin returned to his tent, wholly exposed to weather and gunfire, “and,” as he proudly noted in his diary, “was the only lodger therein for that night.”

Sumter’s guns remained quiet; the fort had stopped firing an hour before nightfall. The Confederate batteries kept up their dirge-like barrage, launching one mortar shell every twenty minutes, a reminder that more would come at dawn.

IN THIS RELATIVE LULL, Sumter’s chief engineer, Captain Foster, went outside onto the esplanade that surrounded the fort to inspect the walls for damage. He found none that concerned him, only myriad scars that marked where balls had struck the brick face and become embedded there or bounced off.

A detail of men continued to sew cartridge bags into the night by the scant glow of candles. As before, they cut up extra clothing, but now they also used surplus hospital bed linen and whatever coarse paper they could find. It was slow going: They had six needles. At midnight Anderson ordered them to stop.

The tide was up, the night black, but still the federal ships did not advance. Now that a battle had actually begun and the fear of starting one was moot, the men at Sumter earnestly hoped to receive the reinforcements those ships seemed likely to offer. It was a matter of pride and honor; also, they were starving, down to a half ration of rice and coffee. They were surrounded by heavy artillery and vastly outnumbered, and Union warships had come to rescue them. So why did they not get on with it?

Periodic spasms of lightning revealed that the ships had not moved from their positions outside the bar. Explosive shells from the Confederate guns continued to land in and around the fort throughout the night, but at a slower pace. Between these orange eruptions and the intermittent waxy glow of lightning, the swirl of wind and the silvery curtains of rain, the parade ground could have been a set for Faust, the popular Gounod opera that had debuted two years earlier in Paris.

Exhausted by labor and stress, Anderson’s men went to bed in the casemates while sentries stood watch, listening hard for the sound of oars and the rhythmic splash of approaching steamers. “The enemy kept up a slow but steady fire on us during the entire night, to prevent our getting any rest,” wrote Private Thompson. “I for one slept all night as sound as ever I did in my life.”