FORT SUMTER

Bloody Sunday

SUNDAY, APRIL 14

SUNDAY MORNING, APRIL 14, THE DAY SET FOR THE EVACUATION of Sumter, was warm and sunny. Black smoke boiled from the fort. On Morris Island, Edmund Ruffin and the Palmetto Guard mustered at ten A.M. and boarded a steamer that took them to within 150 yards of the fort before dropping anchor. All around them white sails flashed and smoke spindled from an armada of schooners, cutters, and steamers that had set off from all points of the bay so that the chivalry, many in holiday finery, could take part in this moment of heart-thumping elation: the departure at last of Anderson and his garrison. They waited for hours.

The evacuation was supposed to occur at nine that morning, but delay after delay pushed the moment well into the afternoon. A pocket steamer, the Catawba, was to pick up the garrison and transport it to another harbor steamer, the Isabel, which would then take the men out beyond the bar and deposit them aboard the waiting Baltic. When the Catawba arrived, Major Anderson went aboard and introduced himself to its captain. Someone on the vessel asked Anderson if the planned cannon salute would involve thirty-four firings, one for each state in the former Union. Anderson at last let the strain of the past two days show. “No,” he said, “it is one hundred, and those are scarcely enough.” At which point he began to sob.

DURING THE WAIT, THE men aboard Ruffin’s steamer compared stories about their experiences during the siege. “We now first heard from all the remote batteries, and learned that they, like ours, had not had a man killed or wounded,” Ruffin wrote. “It was more remarkable that the garrison had been almost equally exempt, there having been only a few slight wounds from flying splinters or fragments.” Ruffin observed that Sumter had withstood the barrage without significant damage. “The walls outside were thickly sprinkled with marks of cannon balls, which had not penetrated more than from 6 to 18 inches, and had nowhere made a breach.”

It was almost three o’clock when Ruffin and the others heard the first of the hundred cannon reports that would mark the end of Anderson’s tenure at Sumter. Smoke still rose from the burning buildings within, but outside the fort, all was blue and peaceful in the spring sun.

Ruffin had counted forty-seven discharges when an additional blast occurred that seemed out of rhythm with the others. Soon after this, a boat from the fort came out to his steamer seeking the help of any surgeon aboard.

AT ABOUT TWO O’CLOCK Captain Doubleday had ordered his drummers to muster the garrison. The men formed up in a line; the laborers gathered as well and stood at attention, though not quite as crisply as the soldiers. The guns to be fired were those on the parapet, which Anderson had forbidden his men to use during the fight. By agreement with General Beauregard, the guns were to be fired one hundred times as the fort’s U.S. flag was lowered and the nails at its side removed. The flag would then be carefully folded and given to Anderson. The time officially recorded as the moment of surrender was two-thirty P.M.

At the forty-seventh shot, a private named Daniel Hough—“an excellent soldier,” Doubleday said—loaded a cartridge into one of the guns. Apparently the barrel had not been thoroughly sponged after the preceding shot. The cartridge exploded and tore the private’s arm off; the blast killed him in an instant. Sparks then detonated other cartridges hidden under nearby debris and caused a second blast that blew the adjacent gunners into the air. One of these, Pvt. Edward Galloway, would later die in a Charleston hospital. Four others were injured but survived. The salute was suspended to give the garrison time to dig a grave in the parade for Private Hough.

The private was placed in a coffin. Confederate and Union soldiers stood at attention on opposite sides of the grave. As the coffin was lowered, they solemnly presented arms. Confederate and Union soldiers alike removed their caps and stood at attention. “A unique and most impressive sight,” wrote Beauregard aide Captain Ferguson, “considering the fact that only a few hours before they were actively engaged in trying by every known means to destroy each other.”

The salute resumed, but Anderson directed that it be shortened to fifty discharges, half of his original demand. At four o’clock, with the salute completed, Anderson ordered the long roll beaten. The men lined up in parade formation. As Sumter’s band played “Yankee Doodle,” the garrison marched out through the fort’s shattered gate and onto the waiting steamer. Shortly afterward they transferred to the Isabel.

During the day’s delays the tide had receded and the light had faded, making it risky for the Isabel to cross the bar. The men remained in the harbor overnight, where they were compelled to stand witness to Charleston’s jubilant celebration. Rockets tore through the sky and bonfires flared, mimicking the battle just concluded. In Charleston, Mary Chesnut and several friends drove along the Battery promenade in an open carriage. “What a changed scene,” she wrote. “The very liveliest crowd I think I ever saw. Everybody talking at once. All glasses still turned on the grim old fort.”

For Sumter’s men on the Isabel, the indignity was eased somewhat the next morning by a gesture of gallantry from the Confederate forces. As the steamer passed Morris Island on its way toward the bar, Confederate gunners and infantry lined the shore and in silence removed their hats.

SOMETHING HAD BEGUN, THOUGH exactly what was not yet clear. Was this the start of a war, or the beginning of a new relationship between the Confederacy and the Union?

As far as Governor Pickens, General Beauregard, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis were concerned, it was the moment when at last the Union took the South seriously. The Confederacy had reduced and seized one of the most powerful forts in the land, the symbol of Northern tyranny, as three of the Union’s warships stood by.

That no one had been killed in the bombardment itself was remarkable given that the Confederate batteries had fired 3,341 shells and balls, and Fort Sumter about a thousand. To the religiously inclined, it was a miracle and seemed a harbinger of peace ahead. Few among South Carolina’s chivalry expected that a real war would result; and even if war did come, they believed it would be short and unremarkable. A common expression often attributed to Col. James Chesnut forecast that the total amount of blood likely to be shed in a war over secession would fill “a lady’s thimble.” Chesnut also made the vivid pledge to drink whatever blood actually did get shed.

Here lay the greatest of ironies: In thirty-four hours of some of the fiercest bombardment the world had ever seen, no one was killed or even seriously injured, yet this bloodless attack would trigger a war that killed more Americans than any other conflict in the country’s history.