Authors: Adam Goodheart
Yet there were facets to the new commander that Doubleday did not immediately appreciate. One of these was Anderson’s deeply felt sense of honor and duty—a quality apparent in the move from Moultrie to Sumter.
Another, which revealed itself more slowly, was Anderson’s hatred of war itself. Carnage sickened him, and he had already witnessed far too much in the course of his career. As a young officer in the struggle against
Chief Black Hawk in
Illinois, he had watched helplessly as the local settler militia, berserk for Indian blood, massacred unarmed civilians; had seen and smelled the emaciated
bodies of women and children left rotting by the road under an August sun. He had rescued a four-year-old Indian girl, maimed by a musket ball, from beneath the corpse of her dead mother. He had beheld senseless misery, he wrote then to his brother, “exceeding any I ever expected to see in our happy land.”
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He had prayed God to spare his country from
enduring the like ever again.
It was to peace that Anderson was most loyal, Doubleday began to realize. The major’s experiences of war, his piety, and his staunch conservatism all committed him to preserving the Union—and not
in name alone, but the Union as only a politically innocent man could conceive it: a Union without sectional strife, without secessionists, without abolitionists. Without even North and South, perhaps. Civil war, disunion, radicalism: these
were anathema to every fiber of Anderson’s being. Eventually Doubleday began to feel sympathy, verging on admiration, for his commander. “I feel deeply for him,” he wrote in February. “I consider him an honorable and brave man [and] as much as we differ in the propriety of some of his acts, I have a high respect for him as a man and as an officer.”
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All those in the fort had come to detest what they called the secessionist “madmen.” But most had little more love, if any, for the incoming Republican administration. On March 4, a few hours after Lincoln had taken the oath of office, Dr. Crawford wrote to his brother back home in Pennsylvania: “A vulgar, third rate politician, a man without anything to entitle him to the position he holds, an uncouth Western Hoosier is now our President.…
How any party could have … elected [such] a character as the present rail splitter is more than a mystery to me. He is however under the control of Mr. Seward almost entirely and from that single circumstance I permit myself to hope for the best.”
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From the Northern newspapers that came on the daily mail boat, the men at Sumter knew that they had become famous. On distant Broadway,
P. T. Barnum’s “Museum” was staging “Union Drama, Anderson and Patriots at Sumter in ’61,” which spectacle filled the house twice daily at twenty-five cents a ticket. (A tall, handsome actor named
J. H. Clark played Doubleday,
who was portrayed—not without some justice—as the most warlike among the “Patriots,” itching to unleash the fury of Sumter’s cannons upon the rebels.) During the long hours of standing watch or supervising work on the fortifications, the junior officers whiled away their time in idle speculation about how their grateful country would eventually reward their heroism—heroism that, of course, had not yet included firing or withstanding a single
shot. Crawford thought that the War Department should confer on each of them a brevet promotion in rank and pay grade. Doubleday actually designed a medal for Congress to bestow upon the garrison’s members, depicting the
evacuation of Fort Moultrie on one side and the word
Fidelity
on the other.
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Fidelity was a virtue all too rare in America that winter. Newspapers from the North also brought reports of a steady exodus of career military men resigning from the army to join the Confederate forces. These defections came as personal blows to the men at Sumter. “We cannot repress the sadness that comes over us when we see one by one of our old comrades dropping away, men with whom we have [shared]
many a bivouac in the far distant
frontier,” Crawford wrote in his diary. “How are we to regard them as our enemies now?”
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On that same day, March 6, came word of Lincoln’s inaugural speech, with its pledge to “hold, occupy, and possess” the Southern forts. Across Charleston Harbor, a new flag unfurled above the city, alongside the familiar palmetto banner. From Sumter’s ramparts, it looked at first, confusingly, like the defenders’ own flag, “the one flag we longed to see,” as Doubleday called it. But as they took turns with the spyglass,
they got their first good look: three broad red and white stripes and a circle of seven stars—the banner of the new Confederate nation.
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From that moment on, the garrison’s position felt even less tenable than before.
The officers and men at Sumter put little stock in Lincoln’s rhetoric—let alone in the bluster of Republicans across the North who said the fort must be defended. Its ultimate fate could hardly be in doubt. Anderson had shared with the War Department the estimates of how many troops would be required to hold or resupply his post, and neither the major nor his subordinates could believe that elder statesmen like Secretary Seward and General Scott would
approve a doomed mission that would lead inexorably to internecine war. Fort Sumter, Crawford wrote to his brother, “must be given up and the sooner the administration appreciate this the better. All this talk of ‘occupying, holding, and possessing’ the forts is nonsense. There is neither Army enough to do it, nor is it likely there soon will be.” If it were up to him, he said bitterly, he would simply blow up the fort and leave the accursed harbor
forever—and then, like Anderson, depart for Europe rather than remain in the “rump” of his former country. Yet even at the same time Crawford pined for escape, he expressed, paradoxically, an oddly sentimental attachment to the place, as if Sumter itself were the last remaining shred of the nation that he had loved and served: “I cannot tell you how grieved I am at the thought of leaving this fort, where every stone and surrounding is so impressed upon my
heart.” By the middle of March, both Northern and Southern newspapers were reporting confidently that evacuation was imminent, with some even announcing that the orders had been signed by the president and were on their way to Anderson. Meanwhile, the surgeon attended to his routine tasks, dutifully dispensing medicines and filing sick reports. As March drew to a close, he was treating one case of asthma, three of bronchitis, one of syphilis. Dysentery was spreading quickly,
to no one’s surprise.
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By the first days of April, the men were packing up their belongings for what they assumed was their impending departure. Crawford
stowed away most of his medical supplies. Captain
John G. Foster, the fort’s chief engineer, even wrote to a friend serving with the Confederate forces across the harbor, telling him (“strictly entre nous”) that he regretted having to leave without saying good-bye,
and making arrangements to return a borrowed mustard spoon. Major Anderson had larger concerns. He agonized ceaselessly about the lack of orders from Washington. Within a week, he knew, the last crumbs of food would be utterly exhausted. At any time, he might simply send a polite request to Beauregard, and the officers and men under his command would be escorted to safety, rescued from the pointless siege. Yet he was ever conscious of his honor. In a letter to the War Department on
April 5, he pleaded not to be “left without instructions,” adding bitterly: “After thirty odd years of service I do not wish it to be said that I have treasonably abandoned a post and turned over to unauthorized persons public property entrusted to my charge. I am entitled to this act of justice at the hands of my Government.”
In his heart, though, Anderson was no longer certain he could expect even this. Not from the new commander-in-chief, the dangerous fanatic who had brought the country to such a terrible pass. If only the nation had a soldier at its head once more: a General Jackson, a General Harrison, a General Taylor, even a General Pierce! Instead, it had a party hack whose only armed service had been as a militiaman in the
Black Hawk War, at the
head of one of those bumpkin companies that Anderson had so despised. (Anderson probably did not recall that on May 29, 1832, he had personally mustered the future president into temporary U.S. Army service as a rank private.)
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Spring should have arrived, but still the winter lingered. On April 8, the men awoke to a damp chill. Wind and rain swept the bleak waters of the harbor. Yet on all sides of the fort, things seemed suddenly different. The familiar patrol boats that had passed continuously at a distance now hovered nearby hour after hour. Other vessels were landing men and matériel near the rebels’ newly constructed artillery battery on Cummings Point. Toward midmorning, a
sudden boom came from the opposite side of the harbor, at the tip of
Sullivan’s Island, near Moultrie, and Sumter’s startled sentries looked through their spyglasses to see a large wooden house explode into splinters. As the cloud of dust drifted into the misty air, they could make out something glinting beyond it, brutal and metallic: the blunt-nosed muzzles of four heavy cannons. The Confederates had unmasked yet another battery, one
that they had been constructing in secret. It was brilliantly placed, allowing them to rake the fort’s principal bastions from both sides, to dominate the only spot where a friendly ship might have anchored,
and to fire directly into Sumter’s uppermost tier, where Anderson had placed his heaviest artillery, the only weapons that might pose a serious threat to the enemy’s fortifications. Now any men who attempted to work those guns would be cut
to pieces by flying metal within minutes. General Beauregard had checkmated his old professor.
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The most marked change to be observed on that dispiriting morning was in the major himself. The officers were not privy to his official correspondence with Washington, but for days they had noticed Anderson’s usual stoicism sinking into depression. He seemed even grayer and more melancholy than ever, as if oppressed by some new and secret care.
The following day brought a sudden change in the weather, a strange new portent—and an explanation. The ninth of April dawned fine and clear. Against the rooftops of the city, three miles distant, a fresh skyline seemed to blossom as hundreds of sails unfurled along Charleston’s wharves. Not long afterward, the men at Sumter watched the departing armada pass them: more than forty
merchant ships running free before the
northwest breeze toward open water, their sails like so many white petals, each curled edge sharp against the blue. Charleston Harbor was left almost empty. “It was a beautiful sight I assure you,” wrote Crawford in his last letter to his brother, a letter that would never be delivered.
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It was not many hours after this that Anderson gathered his officers and shared his private burden of almost two full days. He had received the long-awaited orders from Washington, in the form of a terse six-sentence communiqué from
Simon Cameron, the new secretary of war. A relief expedition was already on its way with provisions and reinforcements. The garrison was to hold out, if at all possible, until its arrival. And
Cameron conveyed a message from Lincoln himself: “It is not, however, the intention of the President to subject your command to any danger or hardship beyond what, in your judgment, would be usual in military life; and he has entire confidence that you will act as becomes a patriot and soldier, under all circumstances.”
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At long last, the Kentuckian in the
White House had made his wishes known to the Kentuckian in Fort Sumter. What unfolded in the coming days would depend, more than anything else, on these two men.
A
S
A
NDERSON’S MEN
were counting their crumbs one night during the last week of March, President and Mrs. Lincoln were hosting their first official dinner at the White House. Anxious about Washington
protocol, they had sought the discreet coaching of Secretary Seward and his able staff—and by all accounts this initial Republican foray into formal entertaining was competent enough, if
not exactly splendid. The gaslight and candles had been artfully arranged to conceal the State Dining Room’s shabbiness, and the air was perfumed by fresh spring blossoms in gilt-silver vases, a refreshing change from the artificial flowers preferred by the previous administration. Mrs. Lincoln appeared, arrayed in garish silk, her plump hand clutching a fan that she fluttered energetically—coquettishly, she seemed to think.
William
Howard Russell, the acerbic correspondent for the
London Times,
peered at her through his wire-rimmed spectacles, taking mental notes on every detail of this frontier queen’s curious mannerisms. (They were, he would tell his readers, “stiffened … by the consciousness that her position requires her to be something more than plain Mrs. Lincoln, the wife of the Illinois lawyer.”)
With the exception of Russell, the guest list was, as might have been expected, an unadventurous one: the entire cabinet was in attendance, seated stiffly in their drab frock coats like a conclave of Methodist parsons, their ranks enlivened only by twenty-one-year-old Kate Chase, the treasury secretary’s captivating daughter. The menu, too, was conservative: imported wines accompanied fish prepared
à la française.
In the end, it was the
president himself who set his guests at ease, resting his bony elbows on the table and treating everyone to a comical yarn about a drunken Irish coachman he’d met in his days as a young lawyer riding the circuit.
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Only one of the administration’s senior counselors was conspicuously absent: General Scott, the hero of 1812 and 1848, and typically a fixture at such occasions, his monumental bulk, gold-braided and brass-buttoned, making an impressive centerpiece at any Washington function. (Nor had Scott, whose appetite for good food and fine wine was almost as legendary as his martial exploits, ever been known to decline a dinner invitation.) The other guests awaited his
appearance at table for some time—several of them had glimpsed him in the reception room as they came in—until finally word came that the general was indisposed. He had indeed come to the White House, everyone was told, but one of his myriad physical ills—known to include gout, rheumatism, and dropsy—had compelled him to retire to a guest bedroom upstairs for the remainder of the evening.
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