Authors: Adam Goodheart
Three essential things the boat from Charleston continually failed to bring: reinforcements, provisions, and orders from Washington.
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Back in December, as Doubleday’s boat approached Sumter on its night voyage from Moultrie, he had thought the new fortress resembled a prison. Now it had become one in fact. On bright days, the men played at ball and leapfrog on the parade ground, but sunlight was a rare and fleeting thing. Dusk came early and dawn late within the gloomy walls of encircling brick. During those long hours of darkness, there was no light to read or write by; nothing to do but
huddle beneath blankets and wait out the slowly passing hours. The damp, raw cold of late winter penetrated the masonry and the men’s bones. Coal and firewood were running short along with the food and candles, and a guard was placed over the dwindling supply. The soldiers fished out passing driftwood to burn, before they began tearing down some of the fort’s outbuildings for fuel. Still, they could barely keep themselves warm. Doubleday sacrificed a handsome mahogany
table that he had carried with him from his well-appointed quarters at Moultrie.
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Amid this gloom and tedium, the men worked to shore up the fort’s defenses. Sumter, created decades before to withstand an attack on Charleston by a foreign fleet, had been designed with its strongest bastions overlooking the main shipping channel and with the weakest flank, known as the gorge wall, directly facing the nearest land, Cummings Point, just twelve hundred yards distant. This rear flank was where, for safety’s sake, the engineers had placed the
main gate, hospital, and ordnance room. Now, with the enemy’s guns on Cummings Point, Sumter’s occupants must have wished they could lift up the entire fortress and rotate it 180 degrees. They had to make do
instead with walling off the main gate with brick and stone, mounting howitzers above it, and constructing shrapnel-proof barriers in front of the fragile buildings. The Confederates, they expected, would try to storm the fort from this side.
Captain Seymour, an inveterate tinkerer, devised makeshift weapons to drop on the attackers’ heads: barrels, charged with gunpowder and loaded with paving stones, that would explode like giant grenades as they hit the ground. Every so often, the harbor echoed with booms as one side or the other tested its heavy guns, and one morning a live round, fired mistakenly by an onshore battery, crashed into the water just off Sumter’s wharf. The Confederates hastily sent an
officer over to apologize.
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While Sumter might have seemed at times like an island without a country—neither Northern nor Southern, Union nor Confederate—its occupants were nevertheless constantly reminded that they were situated in the middle of slave territory. The Union officers even had their own slave, a lively and bright teenager named James, whom they had rented from his master in Charleston to serve as their factotum around the fort and to run small errands in the city. James
became a cause of contention—and of a rare breach of decorum between besiegers and besieged—when he failed to return from one of these errands. The officers soon learned that his master had seized him and was refusing to give him back, in violation of the rental agreement, because James, who was apparently literate, had exchanged letters with his mother about a possible slave uprising. In a letter to Major Anderson, a South Carolina official rudely suggested that the
boy’s “temper and principles” had clearly been corrupted by exposure to the Yankee degenerates
at Sumter—an insult that brought Anderson nearly to the point of challenging the man to a duel.
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For the most part, though, quiet reigned. The excitement of December and January—when Anderson’s men had expected a Southern assault at any moment and were ready, even eager, to fight—had given way to a surreal calm, a stasis that seemed as if it might last forever, with the little band of soldiers fixed eternally on a point around which history’s wheel would continue to turn, never touching them.
In some ways, the nine officers formed a microcosm of the Union itself, with men representing almost every region and every political orientation in the country, including one young Virginia lieutenant who later, when his state seceded, ended up switching sides, fighting—and dying—in the Confederate service. They also included a wide range of personalities. The officer corps of the “Old Army,” as the career military would be fondly remembered
after the war,
was a kind of men’s club, a close-knit, sometimes affectionate, often rambunctious fraternity. You started at West Point before you could shave, and then worked your way through the ranks, flying hither and thither among states and territories at the mysterious whim of the War Department, until you were a grizzled pensioner—unless, of course, a Mexican bullet or a Comanche arrow found you first. Everybody seemed to know everybody else,
and a single moment of glory or disgrace—whether on the battlefield or the dueling ground, in the barroom or the brothel—could seal an officer’s reputation, and his fate. In many respects, though, a spirit of tolerant worldliness prevailed. The Old Army was one of antebellum America’s few truly national institutions, and certainly the only one that required the sons of Georgia planters to bunk alongside those of New England schoolteachers, not to mention
do daily business (peaceably or not, as circumstances might require) with Mormon emigrants and Sonoran bandits. “I have in my pilgrimage thus far found mankind nearly the same in every region,” Major Anderson once reflected. There was room for many kinds of men around the officers’ mess table—and Sumter’s was no exception.
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Abner Doubleday, the garrison’s blunt-spoken second in command, hailed from Auburn, New York, the antislavery Republican heartland, where his fellow townsfolk included William H. Seward and
Harriet Tubman. The bulldoggish captain was used to being regarded as slightly eccentric, both for his radical politics and for his metaphysical turn of mind—neither of these being quite standard issue at West Point. He pored over
Spanish poetry, theories of the afterlife, and transcendentalist essays—years earlier, in fact, as a freshly minted lieutenant, he had written Emerson a swoony fan letter, inviting the philosopher, whom he had never met, to come and stay for a visit at the fort where he was stationed off the coast of
Maine, “my quarters being large for a bachelor.”
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But Doubleday could also be entertaining company. He had a boyish love of practical jokes and coarse anecdotes that could relieve the often dreary life of an army outpost—it took little prodding for him to regale his messmates with the story of General Kearney, General Sumner, the Irish cook, and the watermelon; or the one about Secretary Floyd’s encounter with the Sioux Indian chief;
or of how Lieutenant Tom Jackson—not yet known as Stonewall—got fleeced by a horse trader back at
Fort Hamilton.
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The captain’s connection to Cooperstown and the legend that he invented
baseball are equally specious, alas. Versions of the game existed long before his birth, and Doubleday himself would mention baseball just once in any of his surviving writings: in 1871, while in
command of a fort in Texas, he would ask the War Department for permission to purchase bats and balls for the members of a colored infantry
regiment at the post. (This request was apparently denied.)
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In a certain respect, however, it made sense for a later generation of Americans to associate the sport with a famously tenacious Union officer. Baseball was just coming into its own as the Civil War began—the first reference to it as a national pastime dates from 1856—and Americans associated it
with some of the same ideas that were percolating through the political culture of the era, ideas that they would also come to associate strongly with the Northern cause. (Indeed, one political cartoon in 1860 showed Lincoln preparing to hit a home run, with a fence rail inscribed
Equal Rights and Free Territory
as his bat, and the words
Wide Awake
on his belt.) Writers praised it as a “manly” game, one that inculcated principles of
self-reliance and free competition perfectly suited to “our go-ahead people.” They promoted it as a “national institution” that could unite Americans in every region. In New York, where the baseball craze truly took off, an 1857
Herald
article exhorted: “Let us have base ball clubs organized … all over the country, rivaling in their beneficent effects the games of Roman and Grecian
republics.” Perhaps the enlisted men
at Sumter did play baseball—Crawford’s diary records them as “playing ball,” without further specifics—but even so, a career officer like Doubleday would almost certainly have considered it inappropriate to join them.
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Doubleday may have been the garrison’s champion raconteur, but it was Crawford, the surgeon, who would eventually provide the most detailed account of life inside Sumter. As a medical man, Crawford had attended not West Point but rather the University of Pennsylvania, in his native state. After nearly a decade in the army, he still brought the eye of an outsider, and of a scientist, to bear on things around him. From the beginning of the crisis he had been taking
meticulous daily notes—with an eye toward not only history but also the literary marketplace. “It will be a book eagerly sought after, I think, and would certainly pay,” he wrote to his brother more than a month before the Confederate attack. “Two different firms have applied.” An accomplished draftsman, the surgeon (like Captain Seymour) also made sketches of the fort and sold them by mail to
Harper’s Weekly
for the handsome sum of
$25 apiece. Crawford was ambitious, self-assured, and rather vain, sporting a pair of magnificent side-whiskers that hung down over his epaulettes like Spanish moss on a stately oak. Moreover, he craved fame not just as a litterateur, but also as a warrior, making no secret of the fact that he would happily trade his scalpel for a saber.
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Like Doubleday, he was also quite
open about his politics—though
unlike his fellow officer, his time in the South had made him sympathetic to the slaveholders, and he blamed the
Union’s current predicament on the sentimental foolishness of Northern abolitionists.
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Truman Seymour, a Vermont preacher’s son, was a man of a very different stamp. Dark-eyed and ruminative, with thick hair swept back from his forehead in Byronic fashion, he seemed at first more like an artist or poet than a warrior. Indeed, Captain Seymour was a fine watercolorist—a painter of precise, delicately hued landscapes—had taught draftsmanship for several years at West Point, and had recently taken a year’s leave from the army to
roam across Europe and commune with the works of Titian, Rubens, and Veronese. During his rare sojourns at home in
New England, he loved to hike the
Green Mountains with his sketchpad and brushes, fascinated not just by the misty peaks but by the complicated geology beneath them, which he had begun studying seriously as a teenager. Like them, Seymour concealed a stony core beneath a luxuriant exterior: while still
a boy lieutenant, he had been brevetted twice for gallantry in Mexico, and later fought in
Florida during the army’s ruthless final campaign against the Seminoles. With little of the bellicose swagger affected by Doubleday and even Crawford, he was perhaps a better soldier than either: the kind who viewed the garrison’s predicament at Sumter not as a hopeless cause, nor as a chance at patriotic glory, but as a logistical puzzle to be
solved with cool ingenuity.
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Ultimately, however, Sumter’s fate would depend on the man whose inmost thoughts were the most illegible.
For months after Major Anderson’s arrival at Charleston, the skeptical Doubleday had done his best to get inside the new commander’s head. He had observed the pious Kentuckian intently, tried to draw out his opinions, and even baited him on the subject of slavery. Anderson confessed he was disgusted by the North’s refusal to enforce the
Fugitive Slave Act, and quoted the
Bible to demonstrate that God himself had ordained human bondage. Doubleday, in turn, wheeled the Bible around like a swivel gun and fired it straight back at Anderson, pointing out that since the slaves in the Old Testament were white, he saw no reason why some pious Southern master should not enslave the major himself, “and read texts of Scripture to him to keep him quiet.” Anderson, he later boasted, was unable to counter his
merciless logical volley. (A less tolerant superior might have clapped the captain in irons.)
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Had Doubleday been slightly more sensitive, he might have realized that Anderson’s reliance on revealed truth was no mere rhetorical strategy. Rather, it bespoke a profound discomfort with earthly affairs, a preference to render unto Caesar.
There was a brittleness to Anderson, Doubleday noticed—almost, it sometimes seemed, a kind of fragility. The strain and uncertainty were clearly taking a mental and physical toll on the major: soon there were a pallor to the man’s skin and a dullness to his eyes and, abandoning his long-accustomed reticence, he began sharing his private opinions almost recklessly. In conversations around the officers’ mess table, he blamed
secession on the North, and confessed that if he were in charge in Washington, he would promptly surrender all the Southern forts. He could never take up arms against the Stars and Stripes, he said, but if his native state of
Kentucky left the Union, he would be sorely tempted to do likewise—that is, resign his commission and move to some quiet corner of Europe.
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Was this a man to be trusted with the most delicate military assignment in American history? Certainly not, Doubleday had thought at first. In an act of plain insubordination, he had even managed to convey his misgivings directly to the new commander-in-chief. The previous autumn, Doubleday had begun sending frank letters about the situation at Charleston, written in a private code, to his brother Ulysses. Ulysses, a Republican campaign operative in New York City, then
decoded them and sent them on to the candidate Lincoln and other “leaders of public opinion” across the North. Some of the early dispatches went so far as to hint that Anderson might soon show his true colors as a secessionist traitor.
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