CHARLESTON HARBOR

The Worst Fear

SATURDAY, APRIL 13

SATURDAY MORNING THE AIM OF THE CONFEDERATE GUNNERS seemed to improve, according to Sumter’s chief engineer, Captain Foster, who noted the change in his engineering journal. In a telling shift in rhetoric, Foster referred to Sumter’s opponents as “the enemy.” The pace of their fire increased. One shot struck the rim of one of Sumter’s ground-level embrasures and sent a cascade of masonry fragments into the casemate, along with the spent ball. The fragments injured four men, none seriously. An explosive shell landed inside the fort and detonated near the casemates, wounding a laborer. It became apparent that the Confederate batteries had begun firing “hot shot,” cannonballs heated in furnaces. One or two balls came to rest inside the fort, where one of them set a man’s bed on fire.

At about nine o’clock, a shell from a mortar burst through the roof of the officers quarters. Heavy smoke rose from within. The location of the fire was too exposed to allow men to effectively fight it, Foster realized. He alerted Anderson that if the fire continued to burn out of control, it could detonate the fort’s cache of gunpowder, the thirty thousand pounds stored in barrels in Sumter’s main magazine.

ACROSS THE CHANNEL, ON Morris Island, Confederate Asst. Surgeon Parker reveled in the beauty of the morning. “The sun has risen, the lingering clouds are flying across the heavens,” he wrote; “everything looks bright and cheerful, our men are in fine spirits and the firing is steady, continuous and determined. Sumter shows no signs of yielding.”

When the fort resumed firing, it seemed to Parker to focus its attentions solely on Fort Moultrie and the floating battery. This made Parker sad. There was no heroism in sitting around watching other soldiers engage in battle. “She seems to have forgotten Cummings Point and Morris Island batteries entirely,” Parker wrote.

He and Ruffin and their fellow Guard members converged at the camp mess for breakfast. For the first time in forty hours, Parker sat at an actual table. He observed with satisfaction how readily they all had grown accustomed to being fired at with heavy guns. “Would our friends think we could so casually take our meal while amidst the cannon balls!”

After breakfast Parker and the men around him began lighting cigars and settled back to smoke. This was interrupted when, at about nine A.M., a loud cheer rose from the direction of the beach. They ran toward it “pell mell,” Parker wrote, and found their fellow soldiers standing on every available promontory cheering wildly. The sound was deafening. “It goes on, from hill to hill till it reaches the farthest end of the Island.”

Fort Sumter, they saw, was on fire.

THIS FIRE PERSISTED AND INTENSIFIED. A succession of mortar shells fell into and around the burning structure, as did salvos of incendiary cannonballs. Walls and woodwork caught fire. Captain Doubleday, like Foster, recognized that this fire now threatened the main powder magazine, which was embedded within the ground floor of the burning structure. Though the magazine was heavily shielded with masonry and a heavy copper door and thus largely bombproof and fireproof, the risk remained that an errant spark might penetrate the chamber through its ventilator and detonate powder stored inside, with catastrophic consequences.

The men used axes to cut away walls, stairs, posts, and timbers to starve the fire of as much fuel as possible. Anderson decided the powder was still too vulnerable and ordered his men to move the barrels to the casemates at the opposite side of the parade. The task was hazardous beyond calculation. It required the men to open the magazine’s door and leave it open for prolonged periods, which left the powder within exposed. They rolled each barrel across the grounds, then covered them with water-soaked blankets. They did this as mortar shells and superheated cannonballs landed in and around the burning building. The Confederates fired at a faster rate, with the obvious intention of worsening the blaze. At this they succeeded.

Sumter’s men managed to rescue ninety-six barrels of powder before the fire grew so intense and the shell bursts so frequent that the men had to suspend the work and close the copper door. Soon after this, a shot struck the door itself and damaged its lock, making the door impossible to open. By eleven A.M. about one-fifth of the fort was on fire, by Captain Doubleday’s estimate. Three iron cisterns full of water suspended over hallways were ruptured by shot and flooded the quarters below. This had the effect of briefly suppressing the fire, but the loss of so much water also hampered subsequent attempts to fight it. Smoke rose in a dense, black mass; the wind blew the smoke across the compound and forced it into the casemates where the men sheltered. “It seemed impossible to escape suffocation,” Doubleday wrote. “Some lay down close to the ground, with handkerchiefs over their mouths, and others posted themselves near the embrasures, where the smoke was somewhat lessened by the draught of air.”

The smoke became so dense, so suffocating, that Doubleday climbed outside the fort through an embrasure and sat on the exterior esplanade, fully exposed to Confederate fire. The opposing gunners had little sympathy and now fired at Doubleday.

The smoke and flames brought all firing by the Sumter garrison to an end. The cessation appeared to cause an outburst of jubilation among the Confederate forces, which irked Doubleday. “I thought it would be as well to show them that we were not all dead yet, and ordered the gunners to fire a few rounds more.”

IN CHARLESTON, THE CHIVALRY and their wives gathered by the hundreds on the city’s Battery in the now fine weather to watch the destruction of the fort. Doubleday longed to fire a shell in their direction, but the only weapons at Sumter capable of reaching the city—the improvised mortars on the parade—were too exposed to be used safely amid the rain of shells being lobbed into the fort by Confederate mortars.

“The scene at this time was really terrific,” Doubleday wrote. “The roaring and crackling of the flames, the dense masses of whirling smoke, the bursting of the enemy’s shells, and our own which were exploding in the burning rooms, the crashing of the shot, and the sound of masonry falling in every direction, made the fort a pandemonium.”

A tower capped each of the five angles formed by the fort’s walls. One of these held a large store of shells that began to explode from the heat and fire. The tower shattered. The building that housed the officers quarters was a forest of charred timbers. The fire also destroyed the fort’s immense main gate, which had been made of wood studded with large iron nails. Behind this, Sumter’s engineers had built their backup wall with its “manhole” entry. Now this lay shattered as well.

Had Beauregard decided to launch an infantry assault against Sumter at this moment, his men could simply have walked inside.

ON MORRIS ISLAND, RUFFIN had his breakfast—crackers and coffee from a tin cup—at one of the mortar batteries. Afterward, with no task assigned to him, he sat against the inside of a protective wall made of squared logs in front of a mortar, and there fell asleep. The gun crew at the mortar surely saw him there and knew who he was.

Nonetheless, they fired it.

The sound and shock wave jolted Ruffin awake. The roar was stupefying and deafening, all the more so because he was seated so near the mortar and more or less in front of it, though the muzzle was pointed skyward. “Thus placed, the sound and concussion were unusually powerful, and I was roused not only by the loud and close report, but by a great shock to my ears and sense of hearing,” he wrote. He feared the damage was permanent, but went on firing guns anyway, all day long. “It was after this,” he wrote, “that I fired off the greater number of the 27 discharges which, in all, I let off, of cannon and mortars, but took care not again to be in front of the mouths of the mortars when fired off.”

Across the bay, the conflagration intensified. The smoke grew blacker, the flames higher. As Ruffin watched, he experienced a clash of emotions. “I looked on, with my feelings of joy and exultation at our new certain prospect of speedy success mixed with awe and horror at the danger of this terrible calamity, and pity for the men exposed to the consequences—and with high admiration for the indomitable spirit of the brave commander—who seemed determined to hold his position to the last extremity.”

The Confederates may have appreciated Anderson’s gallantry, but this did not stop them from seeking to take utmost advantage of the moment. They continued to pour shell after shell into the western end of the fort to worsen the conflagration and keep Anderson’s men from putting it out. On Morris Island, the gunners in the Iron Battery filled its three giant columbiads exclusively with exploding shells and fired at will. The island’s three ten-inch mortars dropped shell after shell into the fort as its twin forty-two-pounders also blasted away. The only gun that did not fire was the new Blakely rifle, which had long before run out of what Ruffin called “its peculiar ammunition.”

Now and then flames appeared above Sumter’s parapets; a geyser of white smoke suggested the fire had ignited a cache of gunpowder. At intervals small bright explosions burst from the smoke as well. “It was manifest that the flames, or heat, had reached a magazine of loaded shells and hand grenades,” Ruffin wrote.

The fire gained ferocity as it moved eastward with the wind. “The only remaining buildings were consumed, and it seemed, to our outside view and inferences, that the whole area of the fort must have been so hot, and full of suffocating smoke, as to be intolerable to the garrison.”

AT 12:48 P.M. SATURDAY, the Confederate gunners at last succeeded in bringing down the fort’s flag. A ball or shell shattered its staff and the great flag collapsed into the smoke below. “Then arose the loudest and longest shout of joy—as if this downfall of the flag, with its cause, was the representation of our victory,” Edmund Ruffin wrote in his diary.

The disappearance of the flag was not immediately apparent to all observers, however. Huge rollers of black smoke obscured the view.