by Bruce Catton
During the war that was about to begin, various generals would write demands for surrender. This document, however, had a tone all of its own. It had the dignity and the odd, formal politeness of an age that was ending; it was, furthermore, pure Beauregard from start to finish, as if it had been written partly to make a demand on Major Anderson, partly to satisfy Beauregard’s own sense of what was correct, and partly for the appraisal of history. It might have been a restrained argument addressed to a wayward friend rather than a trumpet blast announcing violence. It read:
“Sir: the Government of the Confederate States has hitherto foreborne from any hostile demonstration against Fort Sumter, in the hope that the Government of the United States, with a view to the amicable adjustment of all questions between the two Governments, and to avert the calamities of war, would voluntarily evacuate it.
“There was reason at one time to believe that such would be the course pursued by the Government of the United States, and under that impression my Government has refrained from making any demand for the surrender of the fort. But the Confederate States can no longer delay assuming actual possession of a fortification commanding the entrance of one of their harbors, and necessary to its defense and security.
“I am ordered by the Government of the Confederate States to demand the evacuation of Fort Sumter. My aides, Colonel Chesnut and Captain Lee, are authorized to make such demand of you. All proper facilities will be afforded for the removal of yourself and command, together with company arms and property, and all private property, to any post in the United States which you may select. The flag which you have upheld so long and with so much fortitude, under the most trying circumstances, may be saluted by you on taking it down.”10
The three Southern officers waited alone for perhaps an hour, while Anderson called his officers together, read the message to them, and asked for their comments. The officers said about what they could have been expected to say, and no one bothered to make a record; they were professional soldiers in a fort which they had been ordered to keep, and to surrender on demand would have been unthinkable. Major Anderson composed a reply to General Beauregard. Like the letter he had just received, what the major wrote had dignity, courtesy, and firmness, and yet there was in his note a flavor faintly odd—as if his voice, had he been saying this instead of writing it, would have quavered just a little.
“General,” wrote Major Anderson, “I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication demanding the evacuation of this fort, and to say, in reply thereto, that it is a demand with which I regret that my sense of honor, and of my obligations to my Government, prevent my compliance. Thanking you for the fair, manly and courteous terms proposed, and for the high compliment paid me, I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant, Robert Anderson, Major, First Artillery, Commanding.”
This letter was given to the Confederate officers, and they started back to their boat, Major Anderson walking with them. At the edge of the wharf he asked whether Beauregard would open fire at once, without giving further notice. Colonel Chesnut hesitated, then replied: “No, I can say to you that he will not, without giving you further notice.” Anderson said he would take no action until he was fired upon; then, moved by the thought that had been preying on his mind for many days—the almost complete exhaustion of the fort’s supply of food—he burst out: “If you do not batter us to pieces we will be starved out in a few days.”
The remark seems not to have registered, right at first, and the Southern officers got into their boat. Then Colonel Chesnut did a double-take: if the major had said what the colonel thought he had said, there might be no need to open a bombardment. Quickly Colonel Chesnut asked Major Anderson to repeat his last remark. Major Anderson did so, and Colonel Chesnut asked if he might include this in his report to General Beauregard. The major was not enthusiastic about having that casual remark put in a formal report, but he said that he had stated a fact and the colonel could do as he liked.11
Like a good subordinate, Beauregard passed the whole business on to the Confederate Secretary of War, telegraphing the text of Anderson’s written response and adding the remark to Colonel Chesnut. To show that he wanted Montgomery to say whether the bombardment should be called off, Beauregard ended his telegram with the single word: “Answer.”
Jefferson Davis was perfectly willing to call off the shooting, but he wanted something better than Major Anderson’s offhand remark on the wharf. Beauregard was informed, in a telegram signed by Secretary Walker but undoubtedly composed by President Davis, that he had better get it in writing.
“Do not desire needlessly to bombard Fort Sumter,” said the telegram. “If Anderson will state the time at which, as indicated by him, he will evacuate, and agree that in the mean time he will not use his guns against us, unless ours should be employed against Fort Sumter, you are authorized thus to avoid the effusion of blood. If this or its equivalent be refused, reduce the fort as your judgment decides to be most practicable.”
Neither Davis nor Beauregard could overlook the chance that somebody might be trying to pull a fast one. Major Anderson was saying that he would be starved out very soon, but while the major seemed to be a truthful man, Washington of late had been a hotbed of deceit and falsehood. It was known that food was on its way to Fort Sumter. Some sort of Yankee ships—warships, transports, or whatnot—were known to be cruising to and fro off the Charleston bar, and Captain H. J. Hartstene, of the Confederate navy, had just said that in his opinion it was quite possible for these ships to send supplies to Major Anderson at night in small boats. All in all, this was no time for Southerners to be too confiding. To cancel the attack because Major Anderson was about to starve, and then to find that his larder had just been filled and that he could hold out indefinitely, would be a very poor way to begin the Confederacy’s struggle for independence.12
Beauregard undertook to nail it down. He wrote another letter to Major Anderson, and at eleven o’clock on the night of April 11 the three aides got into their boat once more and started for Fort Sumter, reaching the wharf a little after midnight. Major Anderson took the letter they gave him and once more called his officers into council.
The only real question was the length of time the garrison could hold out, on the food that was available. One week earlier, Lieutenant Hall had made a tabulation. The fort then contained ⅔ of a barrel of flour, 5 barrels of hard bread, just under a barrel of rice, 100 pounds of sugar, 25 pounds of coffee, ⅙ of a barrel of salt, 24 barrels of salt pork, 2 barrels of vinegar, 40 pounds of hominy grits, and ½ a barrel of corn meal. To eat this there were in the fort 10 commissioned officers (including 3 from the Corps of Engineers), 74 enlisted men, and 1 functionary listed as a mail carrier. There were also 43 civilian employees whom Major Anderson had been trying to send ashore but whom he was compelled to keep because the South Carolina authorities would not let him get rid of them—figuring, no doubt, that these men would serve the South by helping to consume the major’s food. Most of the stuff Lieutenant Hall had listed was gone by now, and the best judgment Major Anderson could get was that the garrison might possibly hold out for five more days. On the last three of those days there would be no food whatever.
One more letter to General Beauregard, then: Major Anderson would evacuate the fort on April 15, if General Beauregard would furnish him with transportation, and Major Anderson would not before that date open fire—provided that the Confederates did not commit, or seem obviously about to commit, some hostile act against Fort Sumter or against the United States flag, and provided also that Major Anderson did not in the meantime receive new instructions or provisions from his government. This was reduced to writing, and the message was given to the Southern officers, who were waiting in one of the casemates of the fort.
Major Anderson’s answer was of course no answer at all, as far as the Confederacy was concerned, since it really committed him to nothing, and Beauregard’s aides did not even feel that they needed to make
the long trip back to Charleston to get Beauregard’s verdict. (Consistently with the pattern that had been followed all along, the final activating decisions would be made by remote subordinates, exercising authority that had been delegated down the long chain of command.) With Colonel Chesnut dictating, Captain Lee writing it down, and Lieutenant-Colonel Chisholm copying the reply as fast as Captain Lee got it down—they were a busy trio, as Chisholm admitted afterward, for a few candle-lit minutes there in the casemate—Major Anderson got his reply in five minutes: “By authority of Brigadier General Beauregard, commanding the Provisional Forces of the Confederate States, we have the honor to notify you that he will open the fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter in one hour from this time.” As the note carefully stated, it was then 3:20 on the morning of April 12.13
Since Major Anderson and several of his officers were present when Colonel Chesnut dictated all of this, the written reply was no surprise. Major Anderson studied it, and Captain Lee thought he was profoundly moved: “He seemed to realize the import of the consequences, and the great responsibility of his position.” Major Anderson walked out on the wharf with the three Southerners and saw them into their boat. Shaking hands with them, he murmured: “If we never meet in this world again, God grant that we may meet in the next.” The boat moved off in the darkness, and Major Anderson and his officers went through the fort, arousing the sleeping soldiers, telling them that the battle was about to start, and warning everybody to stay under cover until further notice; Anderson would not try to return the fire until daylight. Most of the officers went to the barbette to take a last look around.14
There were bonfires and torches going in all of the Confederate camps and batteries. Sumter was ringed by an almost complete circle of flickering lights, with darkness off to seaward; clouds hid the stars, and there was a hint of rain in the air. From batteries and camps came a jumble of far-off sounds, as soldiers fell in line for roll call, trundled guns into position, made all of the other last-minute preparations. In a Charleston bedroom Colonel Chesnut’s wife waited in an agony of suspense. Her husband had told her what was going to happen; she looked out over the dark harbor with the twinkling lights on its rim, listening.…
The three aides went ashore at old Fort Johnson, where Major Anderson had once thought he could quarter the families of the married members of his garrison. A Confederate battery was there now, and the officers gave their orders to its commander, Captain George S. James, who had a seacoast mortar tilted at the proper angle; it was to be the signal gun which would tell the encircling troops, the city of Charleston, and the world at large that the most momentous bombardment in American history had begun.
Roger Pryor had gone out to the fort with the military aides, although he had remained in the boat while the others went inside. Now he came in to Captain James’s battery, and the captain bowed to him and asked him if he would like to have the honor of firing the first gun. (The blow Pryor had been asking for was about to be struck. It would have the exact result he had predicted, pulling Virginia into the conflict and into the Confederacy, and into a long, tragic bloodletting. It would also make a true prophet out of Robert Toombs.)
Pryor seemed as emotionally disturbed as Major Anderson. His voice shook as he told Captain James: “I could not fire the first gun of the war,” and Captain James passed the order on to Lieutenant Henry S. Farley. Then Pryor and the three aides got back into the boat and set off for Charleston, to make report to General Beauregard. Before the boat had gone very far, they told the oarsmen to stop rowing, and the boat drifted in utter silence for ten minutes while the men looked toward Fort Johnson. Lieutenant Farley was a little late, but it made no difference. At 4:30 there was a flash of light and a dull explosion as he fired the mortar. Arching high in the night, the shell could be traced by its glowing red fuse. A gunner on Morris Island thought it looked “like the wings of a firefly.” It hung in the air, started down, and exploded squarely over Fort Sumter. The boat resumed its journey. In her bedroom, Mary Chesnut went to her knees and prayed as she had never prayed before.15
5: White Flag on a Sword
In the moment of its beginning the Civil War was an improbable spectacle to make the pulse beat faster. The guns flashed on the rim of the night like holiday fireworks, the fuses of the soaring shells drew red lines across the dark sky, and there was a romantic unreality to the hour of long-awaited action. The young men who fired the cannon, like the people in Charleston who stood on the water front, leaned out of windows, or climbed to the house tops to watch, felt that something great was beginning and they were glad to be part of it. Hard knowledge of war’s reality would come later; at the hour of its dawn, with a new day’s light coming in from the open sea, and a thin haze rising to soften the hard outlines of fort and city and mounded batteries, the war had an incredible and long-remembered beauty.
Beauregard’s men had been on the alert since midnight. By the guns little pyramids of shells had been built. In the hot-shot furnaces fires had been lit, so that solid shot could be heated and driven like glowing coals into the woodwork of Major Anderson’s stronghold. Officers who had been told what the schedule was kept looking at their watches while they waited for the signal gun. Along the sand dunes on Morris Island sentries peered out to sea, expecting to discover at any moment boatloads of armed Yankees; logically, a relief expedition would land troops on this island to storm the batteries so that ships might reach the fort undamaged, and the infantry was waiting. Beauregard had obtained and mounted searchlights of a sort, but these lit up nothing except the tumbling surf close inshore, and they were not being used. Somewhere out in the darkness there were Confederate picket boats, which would set off blue rockets if any hostile craft approached.1
The flash and the report of the first shell sent a flutter of nervous movement through all of the batteries, as gun crews hurried to open fire, and there was much postwar argument about who fired next. (The veterans argued that Captain James’s opening gun was not really the first gun of the war; it was merely a signal gun, and the next gun was the first one fired with intent to do harm. Captain James took no part in these arguments, because he was killed in action in the fall of 1862 at South Mountain, in Maryland.)
The next gun to be fired may have been one in Fort Moultrie, or it may have been another of Captain James’s pieces, or it may conceivably have been one of the guns on Cummings Point, the northern tip of Morris Island, a scant three quarters of a mile away from Fort Sumter. Sentimentalists always insisted that it was a gun in the iron battery—a set of heavy-duty Columbiads protected by an armored shield, at Cummings Point—and said that it was fired by that legendary hero of the secessionist movement, Edmund Ruffin; and inasmuch as the war began in a stir of sentiment and returned its memories to a sentimental mist afterward, that story was very widely accepted, both then and later.
Ruffin was certainly present as a soldier that night, and he did fire one of the first guns. The old gentleman had presented himself to Captain George Cuthbert, of the Palmetto Guards, two days earlier, asking permission to volunteer—with certain conditions. He would be a gunner, but if the Yankees made a landing, he claimed the right to serve in the infantry that was to drive them back into the sea; and his term of service would expire once the Confederate flag floated over Fort Sumter. He was accepted, the oldest and surely the most appealing of all of Beauregard’s soldiers on opening day.
A youthful volunteer who saw him could never forget the looks of him—an old man, his gray hair worn long and done up in a queue in the style of the eighteenth century; six feet tall, or close to it, slender and straight as an Indian brave, his uniform coat buttoned to his throat, joining his company with a musket in one hand and a carpet bag in the other, accepted by his comrades in arms as an ornament but taking his duties most seriously. The night before the action began, the rest of the company got together and agreed that Ruffin ought to fire the first gun, and when Captain Cuthbert told him about it, Ruffin was greatly pleased.
He slept that night without removing his uniform, and when the drums called the men to action stations just before four in the morning, the old patriot hurried to his post. After the signal gun was fired, Ruffin pulled the lanyard of his piece, firing the first shot from this particular battery; and if several guns in other emplacements fired before this battery did, the flavor of the legend was not harmed. Someone took a photograph of the old man in full uniform a day or so later, and it was circulated all over the South, a propaganda piece of immense power. They do not make old men much more fiery than Edmund Ruffin.2
He had no monopoly on patriotic ardor, and if there is a wild and unreal beauty to the first hours of the war, much of it comes from the spirit with which the intense Southerners went into action. Quite typical of the lot was boyish D. Augustus Dickert, who was a member of “Captain Walker’s company, from Newberry, South Carolina,” and who stood at the opposite end of the scale of ages; he was just fifteen, and he had been on his way to school one morning when Captain Walker’s company marched past, all brass buttons, palmetto cockades, bright uniforms, and music, and he forgot about school and hurried off to enlist. When he first applied, he was rejected because he was too young—inside of three years the Confederacy would be reaching out for boys of fifteen, whether or no, but in the hour of its beginning there was youth to spare—but he went on to Charleston anyway, slipped past the guards to Morris Island, and made connections. He was put to work, along with all the others, building fortifications, used wheelbarrow and shovel for the first time in his life, and found that his excitement, his sense of being a part of something glorious and uplifting, survived even this drudgery. Now he was a unit in Beauregard’s little army, helping to tighten the vise on the hated fort as the stars grew dim and the morning light slowly became stronger.3
