Authors: Adam Goodheart
Almost immediately afterward, the Convention took up another pressing matter: what should be done about “the property of the United States”—now considered a foreign nation—“in South Carolina.” This referred especially, everyone knew, to the three harbor forts.
One of Moultrie’s officers, Assistant Surgeon Samuel Wylie Crawford, was in the city on the historic day. He even made his way into the Convention itself, where he took note of a gavel on the Speaker’s desk with the word secession cut deep into it in black letters. In the streets he saw almost every hat sporting palmetto leaves or a blue secession cockade, and almost every shop and house flying a palmetto flag. There were also, as he would recall years
later, “coarse representations on canvas” crudely allegorizing the politics of the moment: one portrayed the detestable old rail-splitter himself,
Abraham Lincoln, wielding his axe ineffectually against a stout palmetto log, while another “showed the anticipated prosperity of Charleston, the wharves crowded with cotton bales and negroes.”
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Still, Crawford discovered, very few of the patricians who had led the charge toward secession actually wanted all-out war. Rabble-rousing newspaper editors, upcountry militiamen, and assorted urban rowdies might clamor for the chance to shed Yankee blood, and even take a few potshots at Fort Moultrie, but most worldly men of good sense believed that the South should, and eventually would, be left to go in peace. There would be heated talk on both sides, negotiation,
some gentle—or, if necessary, not so gentle—arm-twisting, but in the end, frock-coated dignitaries of the North and of the South would come to an understanding, and the federal garrison in Charleston Harbor
would board a government steamer and vanish conveniently into the wide Atlantic. Indeed, some of the South’s best statesmen were already in Washington, working discreetly toward just such a resolution.
Yet it was also obvious to Crawford that Charlestonians were doing a collective war dance. The city’s streets were filled with men in militia uniforms, from young recruits performing their first musket drills to old colonels, buttoned laboriously into epauletted tunics they had last worn twenty years before. “Military organizations marched in every direction, the music of their bands lost amid the shouts of the people,” Crawford later wrote.
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There could not have been a greater contrast with the lassitude and bureaucratic foot-dragging of the “loyal” commanders back in Washington.
Across the water on Sullivan’s Island, the noose seemed to be drawing tighter. Word came that the harbor pilots of Charleston were all made to swear an oath that they would not bring any U.S. government vessel into port, lest it be carrying reinforcements. Steamers manned by secessionist militia—each with more men aboard than were in the entire federal garrison—patrolled the harbor every night, their dark silhouettes visible from the parapets of
Moultrie.
For each of the fort’s officers, these days of anxiety and frustration were also tinged with melancholy. Trained to defend their nation against its foreign enemies, they now faced siege and possible attack by their own countrymen. Whatever might be the outcome of the present crisis, the nation they had grown up in already seemed irretrievably lost. Not long after the secession vote, an elderly South Carolina statesman, Judge
James L. Petigru (born days after George Washington’s inauguration), came across the harbor to bid a sad farewell to the garrison, and, by proxy, to the United States of America. Doubleday went down to the wharf to greet the old man. “The tears rolled down his cheeks,” the Yankee captain later recalled, “as he deplored the folly and the madness of the times.”
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*
And all the while, just across the water—so close that you could almost touch it—loomed the commanding citadel of Sumter, seeming to represent all that Doubleday and his comrades longed for: Safety. Honor. Perhaps even, in the end, victory. The junior officers redoubled their pleas. Their commander, as ever, refused to budge.
What the junior officers didn’t know is that beneath his inscrutable gray exterior, the major was as frustrated as any of his men. Since the
third day after his arrival, Anderson had been barraging Washington with ever-more-urgent letters and telegrams, pleading with his superiors for orders to make just such a move. It was as obvious to him as to anyone that an attack on Moultrie could end only in a humiliating surrender or the wholesale
slaughter of his force. The War Department sent cursory replies, blithely assuring him that no assault on Moul-trie was imminent—this despite the shrill war cries in almost every newspaper of the South—but that if one were, he was, of course, to defend it “to the best of your ability.” On December 23, an adjutant arrived with a two-paragraph letter from the secretary of war himself, the first time that Floyd had deigned to communicate directly with
Anderson.
Writing on the morning after secession became official, the secretary wished to clarify—in strictest confidence—Anderson’s previous instructions. While the major ought to defend himself if attacked, he must not take this to mean that he should sacrifice his men’s lives “upon a mere point of honor.” Indeed, it was neither wished nor expected in Washington that Anderson should undertake “a hopeless conflict in defense of
these forts.” Floyd continued: “If they are invested or attacked by a force so superior that resistance would, in your judgment, be a useless waste of life, it will be your duty to yield to necessity, and make the best terms [of surrender] in your power. This will be the conduct of an honorable, brave, and humane officer, and you will be fully justified in such action.”
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Floyd’s meaning was unmistakable. If Anderson were threatened directly by any military force stronger than his own contingent of sixty-four men and a brass band, he was free to surrender all of Charleston Harbor without firing a shot. Perhaps the letter even assumed that Anderson, a good Southerner, would be happy to do so. Between the lines, Floyd could almost be seen winking.
But the secretary of war had misjudged his man.
To the civilian Floyd, Anderson looked like a reliably obedient officer, and he was. But even more, he was a career soldier. The middle-aged bureaucrat had—although he rarely spoke of it—fought against Black Hawk and the Seminoles, and marched on Mexico City under General Scott, in that glorious advance from the shores of the Gulf to the Halls of Montezuma. At Molino del Rey, nearly at the gates of the enemy capital, he had charged the Mexican lines and
taken a bullet in the shoulder, leading his outnumbered regiment through another two hours of battle before collapsing from loss of blood.
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Such perils came all in the due course of military life, as they had also done for Anderson’s
father, a soldier of the
American Revolution who had defended the old palmetto
fort right here at Moultrie more than eighty years ago. Anderson had seen secretaries of war come and go—and he must certainly have known a good deal, mostly unflattering, about this particular one—but he also knew that acts of courage or cowardice on the battlefield echoed down through generations.
It would be one thing if President Buchanan had simply announced that he was withdrawing the troops from Charleston Harbor and turning the forts over to South Carolina, a decision that Anderson would certainly have obeyed, perhaps even welcomed. But he would be damned if he was to surrender—even worse, perform a shabby pantomime of surrender—before a rabble of whiskey-soaked militiamen and canting politicians. Still, an officer’s orders were his
orders. Anderson felt trapped.
But after poring untold hours over Floyd’s infuriating letter, he suddenly saw a window—a narrow one, but perhaps a way out. One might say it was not Anderson the gallant soldier who noticed it but rather Anderson the meticulous academic and scrupulous translator. Floyd had told Anderson to mount no hopeless defense of the
forts,
plural. This was possibly just a slip of the pen: the secretary was not known for verbal precision. But it could also
be construed to mean that Anderson and his men were responsible for defending all three of the forts, not just Moultrie. In that case, a move from one to another would be no violation of orders, merely a slight tactical shift, like wheeling a cannon to a different side of the battlements. Nowhere in the previous orders had Floyd or his adjutants directly commanded Anderson
not
to occupy Sumter. They had merely ignored his pleas to do so.
It must have been just after Anderson’s small epiphany that the sharp-eyed Captain Doubleday noticed something odd. He was out on Moultrie’s parapet with his commander, discussing the need to purchase some wire to make an entanglement at the base of the fort’s walls. “Certainly; you shall have a mile of wire, if you require it,” Anderson replied—but in such a peculiar, distracted way that it was clear the major was no longer
thinking much about Moultrie at all.
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Anderson now sent his quartermaster over to the city to charter some boats, ostensibly to carry the fort’s women and children out of harm’s way. (Many of the men had their families living with them.) On Christmas Day, all hands at the fort were kept busy loading supplies aboard, on the pretext that these were only the families’ effects and necessary supplies. A couple of local citizens showed up at the wharf to watch the
preparations—incredibly enough, civilians were still
permitted to wander freely into and out of the fort, perhaps because suddenly barring them would have put the secession forces on alert—and became suspicious when they saw a crate marked “1,000 ball cartridges” being stowed aboard. They were quickly assured that this had been just an error, and left after seeing the box off-loaded again.
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On the 26th, just as the sun was setting, Anderson gave his officers and men twenty minutes to gather up whatever personal possessions they could and board the boats. He ordered the guns of Moultrie to be aimed at the passage to Sumter, ready to sink any vessel that might attempt an interception. The major left a small rear guard, with instructions that once the rest of the garrison was safely across, it should spike the cannons (that is, hammer spikes into the
touchholes so that they couldn’t be fired), burn the gun carriages, and finally cut down the flagpole so that nothing but the Stars and Stripes could ever fly upon it. Then Anderson himself took the folded garrison flag and, tucking it snugly under his arm, stepped aboard.
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The next morning, astonished Charlestonians saw smoke from the smoldering gun carriages curling into the clear air above Moultrie. At
Castle Pinckney, secessionist riflemen stormed the all-but-abandoned fort.
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In Washington, Secretary Floyd was already dictating a furious telegram.
But by noon at Sumter, a flag—the one Anderson had carried with him from his father’s old fort—was raised upon a new staff. It hung limp for a moment before the wind stirred life into its folds. Then it unfurled itself, the red stripes of war and white stars of union, a banner defiant.
I
N THE SUMMER OF 2008,
in a crumbling plantation house on the Eastern Shore of
Maryland, my students and I discovered an attic full of family papers spanning thirteen generations of the owners’ family—more than three hundred years of American history. There were land deeds in the spidery handwriting of the seventeenth century, from the earliest years of the colonial settlement. There was
business correspondence about a slave purchase in Philadelphia during the
American Revolution, transacted as the
Continental Congress was meeting just a few blocks away in Independence Hall. But what fascinated me the most was a small bundle of old documents, wrapped in paper and bound up tightly with a faded yellow silk ribbon that clearly had not been untied in more than a century. On the outside of the wrapper
was a date: 1861.
Carefully untying the ribbon and opening the wrapper’s stiff folds, we found a series of private letters written in the spring of that year. They involved a member of the family, a career officer in the
U.S. Army stationed at a remote fort in the Indian territory of the far West. Writing to his wife and brother back East, the colonel agonized over which side he should choose in the impending conflict. He was
a Southerner and a slaveholder—yet in his heart of hearts he looked forward to the day when slavery would end. He was a close friend of
Jefferson Davis’s; had been at the Academy with
Robert E. Lee—yet could he betray the flag under which he had served ever since that remote day when, at the age of fourteen, he had first donned the scratchy gray uniform of a West Point cadet?
In the end, the colonel chose to stand by his country. In the process of deciding on that course, though, he had to wrestle with many different questions—and not simply those of honor, patriotism, and politics. What would his choice of allegiance mean for his family, for his friendships, for his ancestral farm, for his career? Whichever side prevailed in the war, the nation was clearly about to change forever: what kind of country did he want to live in, what
kind of country would he want for his children? “It is like a great game of chance,” his wife wrote. The urgent exchange of letters brought out tensions among his loved ones, too, as the colonel tried to assimiliate conflicting reports and advice from two thousand miles away. His wife, a Northerner, had one set of ideas; his plantation-owning brother had another.
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Reading those letters, across the distance of almost a century and a half, gave me a new appreciation of how history is decided not just on battlefields and in cabinet meetings, but in individual hearts and minds. The
Civil War had fascinated me since I was a teenager, but most of the books about it seemed to dwell on whose cavalry went charging over which hill. (One historian has described this approach as treating the war like
“a great military Super Bowl contest between Blue and Gray heroes.”)
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Or else they treated American society as a collection of broadly defined groups—“the North,” “the South,” “the slaves”—each one mechanically obeying a set of sociological and ideological rules.