Authors: Adam Goodheart
In contrast to the garrison’s officers, almost nothing is known of its ordinary soldiers. Only a few of their letters survive, and even those may well have been written on their behalf by more literate superiors.
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A recent immigrant who listed his civilian occupation as “laborer,”
John Thompson, was not atypical. As
many as two-thirds of the men in the
U.S. army in the 1850s were foreigners, mostly German and Irish. Officers often complained of soldiers who could not understand commands in English, and a significant share of recruits were unable to sign their own names to the enlistment form, let alone pen a letter. Sumter’s garrison was even more heavily foreign-born than average: of the seventy-three enlisted men whose birthplaces are known, only
thirteen were born in the United States. The roster of privates reads like the roll call in an old World War II movie: Murphy, Schmidt, Onorato, Klein, Wishnowski.
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At those rare moments when the entire nation went to war—1775, 1812, 1846—soldiering suddenly became a proud calling for patriotic Americans of every class and condition. The peacetime “regular army” was a different matter. Service in its ranks was considered a last resort for men who couldn’t get by otherwise in the merciless economy of nineteenth-century America—or the first resort of immigrants with no resources or
connections. “Uncle Sam” (a figure known even to those newcomers) provided a roof over their heads (it was often one made of canvas), shoddy woolen uniforms, and food consisting mainly of bread and coffee, with occasional salt pork. Enlisted men existed in a different world than officers, even in such unusually close confines as Sumter’s: the officers’ letters and memoirs almost never mention soldiers as individuals, much less by name, and everyone took it
for granted that officers would get the last of the rice and pork, while privates enjoyed their one daily biscuit apiece.
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It might seem inevitable that in the months of tension and uncertainty, crowded and makeshift quarters, and sparse rations, this heterogeneous cohort of enlisted men would have been driven to quarrels, brawls, or worse. Throughout the winter of 1861, newspapers in both North and South buzzed with rumors of soldiers at Sumter being shot for mutiny. Yet the reports from inside the fort show quite the opposite case: the longer the siege lasted, the more tightly the group
knit itself together. Even the snobbish Crawford wrote often of the men’s high spirits, and said that when the final battle loomed, “it increased their enthusiasm to the highest pitch.” If anything, the common soldiers’ morale was higher than their officers’. Although it is often said today that half the U.S. Army resigned in 1861 to join the Confederacy, this is untrue. Very few enlisted men in peacetime came from the South. Only twenty-six
privates out of all sixteen thousand ended up defecting to the rebels—compared to more than three hundred out of the thousand or so men in the officer corps.
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The Sumter privates’ sense that they were actors in an important moment of history seems to have intensified their sense of being Americans—even among those who, technically speaking, weren’t. Thompson, though looking forward to the end of his enlistment in a few months so he could go back home to his family in County Derry, spoke of the pride and defiance he shared with his comrades when they “hoisted our colors the
glorious ‘Stars and Stripes,’ ” and of their scorn for the “rash folly” of the rebels: “They no doubt expected that we would surrender without a blow, but they were never more mistaken in their lives.”
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Nineteenth-century cannon warfare required not just a brave heart but also a strong back. Artillery was thought the least glamorous branch of the service, with none of the élan of the cavalry or even the occasional chance at heroism offered by the infantry. Its men were considered mules; its officers technicians. In fact, artillery combat took considerable skill and coordination. Four cannoneers plus a crew chief, or gunner—usually a noncommissioned
officer—fired each of Sumter’s big casemate guns. After each shot, the men used iron handspikes and a roller to heave the gun back onto its wheeled carriage, no small feat considering that the barrel of one cannon might be more than ten feet long and weigh over four tons. Two men sponged out its still-hot chamber with a wet swab, lest the next charge ignite prematurely. To load the gun, they rammed in the cartridge (a woolen bag of gunpowder) and a cannonball weighing
anywhere from twenty-four to forty-two pounds. Then they heaved the cannon forward again, and the gunner, with help from one of the cannoneers, used a handspike to aim the barrel left or right and an elevating screw to move it up or down. A cannoneer pushed a friction primer down into the vent hole at the back of the barrel, with a long lanyard attached that would set the primer aflame as it was pulled out. When the gunner gave the order to fire, the cannoneer yanked the lanyard, the
charge exploded in the barrel, and the cannonball hurtled toward its target.
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The crash of an enormous cannon firing within a confined casemate could be literally deafening; the concussion that shook the massive brick walls forced the breath out of men’s lungs, and left them gulping black smoke. Sumter’s soldiers were, moreover, already dizzy from lack of food and sleep. It was only the adrenaline of combat that kept them, though barely, on their feet. They worked the guns in three shifts, and when a crew’s turn ended, they
collapsed into whatever seemed a protected spot, their heads spinning and stomachs tight with hunger.
As for the officers, they kept up their esprit de corps as best they could, even to the point of trading wisecracks. When Seymour came to relieve Doubleday at the end of a three-hour shift, he facetiously asked his friend, “Doubleday, what in the world is the matter here, and what is all this uproar about?”
“There is a trifling difference of opinion between us and our neighbors opposite,” Doubleday replied, “and we are trying to settle it.”
“Very well,” said Seymour, “do you wish me to take a hand?”
“Yes, I would like to have you go in.”
“All right, what is your elevation and range?”
“Five degrees, and twelve hundred yards.”
“Well,” said Seymour, “here goes!” And his gun crews stepped to their places.
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D
ISPIRITINGLY, THOUGH,
all this labor was having almost no effect on the enemy. Sumter’s casemate guns were designed to smash the hulls of wooden warships entering the nearby channel, not shore fortifications that lay at the very limit of their range. The fort’s cannonballs glanced off the
Iron Battery, one Confederate observer said, like marbles tossed at a turtle’s back; Doubleday
himself compared them to peas thrown on a plate. (One lucky hit did bring down its rebel flag, though, to cheers from Sumter’s gun crews.) Shots aimed
at Moultrie and the other rebel batteries had, if anything, even less effect, burrowing harmlessly into the sandbags and cotton bales that the Confederates had piled against the ramparts. This is to say nothing of the limits of manpower: Sumter’s gun crews were so severely shorthanded
that only a few cannons could be fired at a time. And Major Anderson refused even to let his gunners near the fort’s heaviest artillery, its mortars and columbiads on the upper tier of the fort, for fear of exposing the men to undue harm.
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For their part, the Confederate cannons had as yet inflicted no more than minor injuries on any of Sumter’s defenders. A muzzle-loading artillery piece could fire twelve times an hour at most without risk of exploding, so even at the height of the attack, the rebel shots were coming in at an average of just a few per minute, and could be spotted well before impact. Ex-sergeant
Peter Hart, Anderson’s old Mexican War aide,
took the hazardous duty of stationing himself on the fort’s parapet. “Now fire away, boys,” he told his comrades, “I can’t fight without breaking a soldier’s word, but I’ll tell you where your shots strike, and where to look for danger.” Every time Hart spied an incoming
round, he called out “Shot!” or “Shell!” and the men ducked into a protected corner of the casemates, as if
playing some deadly version of dodgeball.
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Union and Confederate gunsmoke drifted, commingling, across the harbor. At midday, the clouds and mist gave way to sheets of rain. At last, through the downpour, Anderson and his officers spotted three vessels steaming toward the mouth of the harbor: the first detachment of Captain Fox’s relief expedition. Briefly, the men’s morale lifted. But then the friendly ships stopped and anchored outside the bar, to remain there, stolidly immobile, for the rest of
the battle. (Fox would later blame his inaction on a combination of the weather and lack of firepower.)
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Gradually, the ceaseless Confederate volleys were taking their toll on the fort. The place that had been the men’s little world for more than three months—whose every stone, Crawford had written, had impressed itself on his heart—was being obliterated. Cannonballs smashed through the brick walls of the officers’ quarters and knocked down its chimney; exploding shells blew off large chunks of the parapet. And the constant battering was gnawing
away, bit by bit, at Sumter’s massive outer defenses. By the end of the afternoon, a gaping hole had opened in one corner of the gorge wall.
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Even more surreal, though, was the sight of Charleston—an American city, where a few months earlier, the men had strolled with their wives and sweethearts along the Battery or picnicked on the beach at
Sullivan’s Island—become enemy territory. Fort Moultrie, where some of the men had lived for years, was now a target of their guns.
As evening fell and the rebel gunfire gradually slackened, Sumter’s defenders faced new worries. Chester later wrote: “The fleet might send reinforcements; the enemy might attempt an assault. Both would come in boats; both would answer in English. It would be horrible to fire upon friends; it would be fatal not to fire upon enemies.” Meanwhile, Sumter’s supply of cartridges was running low. The men cut up extra clothing and bedsheets to sew
into bags for the gunpowder, and Major Anderson contributed several dozen pairs of his socks.
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The rain, meanwhile, had become a full-blown storm. Amid the rumble of thunder and the occasional crash of enemy fire, the crews loaded their guns with grapeshot and canister, aimed them toward the most vulnerable points in the outer wall, and at last, after midnight, bedded down next to them as comfortably as they could. “The enemy
kept up a slow but steady fire on us during the entire night, to prevent us from getting any rest,”
Thompson recalled, “but they failed in their object for I for one slept all night as sound as I ever did in my life.”
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By daybreak the storm lifted, and the morning of April 13 shone bright and clear. No rebels had stormed the fort by night—but no help had come, either. Fox’s three ships lay outside the harbor, exactly where the men had last seen them.
Enemy fire rained down on Sumter more briskly than ever—and, thanks to the better weather, more accurately. As the soldiers struggled to work their guns, several were badly cut up by flying pieces of masonry; a shell bursting just outside one of the casemates sent metal fragments tearing into a man’s legs. Soon the defenders could see the enemy firing red-hot cannonballs, heated in furnaces ashore. The rebel gunners were now truly shooting to kill. A
mortar round plowed through the roof of the half-ruined officers’ quarters, and the large building soon became a roaring tower of flame. The iron water tanks inside burst, and a scalding cloud of steam and smoke, acrid from the slow burning of damp pine floorboards and rafters, poured into the casemates as the artillerymen fell, blinded and choking, to the ground, masking their faces with wet handkerchiefs. Most of the garrison would have suffocated to death, Doubleday said
later, had not the wind mercifully shifted and begun blowing the smoke in the opposite direction. But the men soon confronted an even more terrifying threat as the blaze that had begun in the officers’ quarters began closing in on the cannoneers’ gunpowder stores. The men heaved barrel after barrel out of the embrasures.
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Doubleday ordered his cannoneers to shoot off a few rounds, just to show the enemy “that we were not all dead yet.” But everyone knew that they could not keep even this going for much longer. Only the casemates’ fifteen-foot-thick walls sheltered the spent fighters from the inferno around them, and it was unclear how long even these could withstand the attack. “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,” Doubleday later remembered.
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Across the harbor, meanwhile, the sun still shone. Thousands of Charlestonians—“male and female, white and black, young and old,” one observer wrote—were watching the battle from wharves, rooftops, and church steeples. By midday, disappointingly little of the fort was visible: it was as if a volcano had risen from the sea at the center of
the harbor, vomiting smoke. All that the spectators could make out through the thick
clouds was Sumter’s flag on its tall staff.
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The smoke hid even that flag for a while. When it drifted away once more, the enemy banner—the familiar Stars and Stripes—had disappeared. Cheers rang from the rooftops. All around the harbor, the rebel gunners held their fire. Fort Sumter, they congratulated themselves, had finally struck its colors.
O
N THE ISLAND,
the air began clearing enough for the battered garrison to continue its fight. Several guns boomed forth defiant once more. But just as Private Thompson and the rest of his gun crew were loading their cannon, they heard a commotion from the adjacent casemate. Cannoneers were seizing muskets and pointing at something, or someone, on the beach just outside the fort. And then—astonishing and absurd—a man’s
face appeared, right in the embrasure through which Thompson was about to fire his cannon.