by Bruce Catton
The Confederate bombardment was heavy—by the innocent standards of April 12, 1861, anyway—and it was fairly effective, considering the fact that every shot was being fired by amateur gun crews. Some of the gunners tried to sweep the open parapet of the fort, firing too high at first but improving their aim as the daylight grew. Others tried to explode shells on or just over the open parade ground inside the fort, and still others attacked the solid masonry walls. Beauregard had laid out a routine in advance, and his men followed it. In Captain James’s command, the opening mortar had hardly been fired when his engineers exploded a mine to destroy a house that blocked the field of fire of a battery the captain had posted on a little hill. The smoke and debris from this explosion had no sooner settled than this battery was in action. (Long afterward, men from this battery insisted that neither Fort Moultrie, Edmund Ruffin, nor anyone else fired before they did.) Beauregard’s aides reached Beauregard with their formal report of Major Anderson’s refusal to accept terms long after the firing had started, but it made no difference.
Fort Sumter itself, meanwhile, was strangely silent, firing not a gun in reply, and some of the Confederate gunners were disturbed—the Yankees ought to be firing back. The only sign of life from the fort as the full light of day came was the fact that the flag was flying. (It had been hoisted during the night, immediately after Colonel Chesnut had served notice that the shooting was about to start.) Anderson kept his men under cover throughout the early hours of the bombardment. Around seven o’clock they were given breakfast—salt pork and coffee. Then, at 7:30, the drums beat the assembly, and the men were paraded in spite of the intermittent explosions of Confederate shell. Anderson divided the garrison into three reliefs, or shifts, ordered specified batteries to be manned, and opened fire.4
In laying out his battle plan, Anderson was under difficulties. He had more guns than he could use; short of supplies, he was also woefully short of men, and he could neither maintain a proper volume of fire nor use his most powerful weapons. His only chance, actually, was to lie low as much as possible and try to hold out until Captain Fox’s relief expedition reached him. (Its arrival, if indeed it showed up at all, would present a new set of problems, but they could be met when the time came.)
Fort Sumter itself was solid enough—brick walls five feet thick, rising forty feet above the water, designed to carry three tiers of guns. The two lower tiers were in casemates: that is, each gun was fully protected, in a roomy compartment of heavy masonry, firing through a comparatively small embrasure or gunport. The third tier was on top, on what military jargon of that day called the terreplein, or barbette, the guns completely in the open, firing over a parapet that was their only protection. Anderson had forty-eight guns in position, half of them in casemates on the lower tier, the rest mounted on the barbette; none had been put in the second tier, and the casemates there were bricked up. The casemate guns, unfortunately, were the weakest of the lot—32-pounders and 42-pounders, firing nothing but solid shot. The heavy Columbiads and eight-inch howitzers, which could fire shell and had much greater range and smashing power, were all on the barbette. Not all of the guns would bear on any proper target, and Anderson did not have nearly enough men to fire all of his guns in any event, even though most of the civilian workers who had had to stay in the fort agreed to carry powder and shot or to serve in the gun crews.
The major’s biggest handicap was that he could not afford to have very many casualties. He had 128 men, forty-three of whom were civilians, and he had to figure that after a day or so of bombardment Beauregard might send out infantry in boats, after dark, to take the place by storm. For that kind of fighting the Confederates had a huge advantage in numbers; Beauregard commanded probably 7000 men, and with the war actually begun he could get reinforcements without difficulty. The Federals had done their best to get ready for him. The wharf was mined and could be blown to bits at a moment’s notice, heavy shell converted to hand grenades were distributed behind the parapet, and various infernal machines—each of which had a keg of gun powder as its operating mechanism—were ready to be dropped on any intruders; all in all, the little garrison could give an assaulting party a very warm welcome. But it would be touch and go, at best, and if any appreciable number of Anderson’s men became casualties the case would be utterly hopeless. No matter what happened the major had to keep his men protected.5
Now the only guns with which he could make any effective reply to Beauregard’s fire were the Columbiads and howitzers on the open barbette. The Confederates were already showing a dismaying ability to explode shell just above the fort and they had at least seventeen mortars firing; it was as certain as anything could be that Yankee gun crews on the barbette would take a very hard beating. Anderson would lose men much more rapidly than he could afford to lose them if he tried to keep the barbette guns in action.
As a result, Anderson ordered all hands under cover; he would use only the casemate guns in the lower tier, and although this meant that he could fire nothing but solid shot and could hardly hope to silence any of the guns that were firing at him, it could not be helped. His gun crews would be pretty well protected; if Fox should try to bring in reinforcements—the topmasts of the Federal warships could be seen on the horizon, and Sumter’s flag had been dipped to show that they had been recognized—then the heavy guns could be manned to beat down Confederate fire and make it possible for the reinforcements to get to the fort. Until then the barbette guns would be left all alone, loaded but unmanned.
(One minor nightmare that plagued the Federal officers was the thought that if armed men in boats approached the fort in pitch darkness, there would be no sure way to tell whether they were reinforcing Federals or attacking Confederates. It would be terrible to obliterate a party of friends; it would be fatal to let enemies get to close quarters unharmed. The war was not half a day old before men began to see that fighting a foe who speaks the same language as one’s friends can present special problems.)
With Captain Doubleday in general charge, Anderson’s first shift went on duty, and six of the lower-tier guns opened fire. The fire was almost completely ineffective. Shooting at the ironclad battery on Morris Island, the Federals quickly discovered that their solid shot hit the shield and bounded off harmlessly, and after a time they left that target altogether and began shooting at Fort Moultrie. Here their luck was no better. Beauregard’s engineers had given the old fort a protective coating of cotton bales and sand bags many feet thick, with more cotton bales used as shutters to close the embrasures between shots; nothing that Sumter’s guns could do seemed to have the slightest effect. Doubleday’s gun crews were hot and irritable, and the sight of a crowd of civilian spectators on the beach of Sullivan’s island, well out of the line of fire and enthusiastically pro-Confederate to the last man and woman, was more than two of the old regular army sergeants could bear. When no officer was around they swung two of their 42-pounders about and fired at this crowd. Luckily, their shots were high—they smashed into the Moultrie House, which was flying a hospital flag but which contained no wounded, no Confederate having yet been hit—and the crowd scattered in vast haste. Naturally enough, the Charleston papers next day discoursed on the barbarity of Yankees who shot at civilians and hospitals.6
There were other incidents. Once a veteran sergeant stole up to the barbette and, all by himself, fired every gun that bore on Fort Moultrie. He hit nothing, and he had to scamper back downstairs in a hurry before he could be detected, but the Confederates thought Anderson was beginning to use his heavy guns and shot at the parapet with everything they had. Another time two sergeants crept to the barbette and fired a ten-inch Columbiad at the iron battery on Cummings Point. It was a near miss; encouraged, they reloaded, and although it was impossible for the two of them to run the huge gun back into proper firing position, they tried one more shot. The recoil made the huge gun turn a backward somersault, and all seven and a half tons of it left its carriage and crashed halfway downstairs, almost ma
shing one of the sergeants. The two managed to creep away safely, and once more the Confederates swept the barbette with shell and solid shot.… Sergeants in the Sumter garrison, apparently, averaged fairly tough.7
Meanwhile, the fort was taking a bad pounding. On Morris Island the Confederates had an English Whitworth gun, a breechloader of immense power, sent over as a gift by a South Carolinian who lived in London. This gun began to gouge big chunks out of the fort’s southeast corner, showing an amazing capacity for destroying first-class masonry; luckily for the Federals it soon ran out of ammunition, or the wall would have been breached then and there. Shell and red-hot shot set the wooden barracks on the parade ground on fire, and the fire-fighting details were whistled into action. Seeing the rising smoke, the Confederates increased their rate of fire, and the men fought the flames while ten-inch shell burst overhead. The blaze was put out, rekindled, put out again, started again, put out once more; shell fragments wrecked water tanks that had been installed under the barracks roof, and the deluge helped quench the flames—and sent choking clouds of steamy smoke all through the casemates as an added trial for the men at the guns. Major Anderson noticed that leading the fire fighters in their dangerous work was Sergeant Peter Hart, doing his best to live up to the role Mrs. Anderson had chosen for him.8
The day wore away, Beauregard’s guns chipping steadily at the fort, Anderson’s guns replying ineffectively; and out at sea Gustavus Fox came steaming up in the liner Baltic and discovered that for all the good he could do he might as well have stayed in New York.
Fox had come down from Sandy Hook in a twisting gale, and early on the morning of April 12 he met the warship Pawnee and the revenue cutter Harriet Lane cruising on station a dozen miles east of Charleston harbor. When Fox said that he was going to reprovision Fort Sumter and asked for an escort, Commander Stephen C. Rowan, of Pawnee, refused to go along; his orders were to stand by and await the arrival of the more powerful warship Powhatan (long gone by now on her way to Pensacola, with impish David Porter on the quarter deck), and if he went blundering in on his own he might start a civil war. Neither Rowan nor Fox nor anyone else on the open sea knew that the shooting had already started.
Fox stood in toward the bar with Harriet Lane plugging along cheerfully in his wake, and he presently learned that Commander Rowan’s scruples were out of date. The brisk wind brought him tag ends of ragged powder smoke, and the bumping echoes of the firing of great guns, and it was all too evident that the war had begun. The same thing dawned on Rowan before long, and he brought Pawnee in at full speed, calling out to Fox as his ship came abreast that he wanted a pilot—he was going to go into the harbor and share in the fate of his brethren of the army. Fox went aboard Pawnee and managed to persuade Rowan that the government expected no such sacrifice; he explained the orders that governed his own conduct, and the three ships hove to and waited for Powhatan. With that ship, Fox believed, he could do something about forcing an entrance, or sending in a small-boat expedition; without it, he could do nothing. The weather continued bad, with a high wind and a heavy sea. A number of merchant ships came up and anchored, awaiting the result of the bombardment; from Morris Island the cluster of masts made the Confederates think that a large Federal fleet lay just offshore, and Beauregard alerted the island command to be prepared to resist a storming party on the beaches that night.9
There would be no storming party, and Fox’s sense of frustration kept rising. Baltic tossed restlessly on the swell all night, waiting for Powhatan; the soldiers aboard the liner were seasick, but they were made to practice getting in and out of small boats just the same, and Fox wrote admiringly of the behavior of the army’s Lieutenant Robert O. Tyler, who helped organize the detail although he himself was as seasick as anyone. The morning of April 13 came in foggy, with the sea as ugly as ever; trying to get close in shore, Baltic ran aground briefly on Rattlesnake Shoal, but got off undamaged. From Pawnee’s deck a huge column of black smoke could be seen rising from Fort Sumter, its base lit now and again by the flash of Anderson’s guns. Fox concluded that there was no use waiting for Powhatan any longer, but he found that he could not go through with his small-boat program either; none of the tugs had arrived, and the naval officers all insisted that no open boats carrying any load at all could reach Fort Sumter in the prevailing seas.
U.S.S. Pocahontas came along shortly after noon, and Fox learned at last what had happened to Powhatan. Refusing to give up, he commandeered a schooner from among the flotilla of seagoing idlers that had collected, planning to build a night expedition around her; but his preparations had not advanced very far before the lookouts reported that Major Anderson’s flag was no longer flying, and before dusk Fox learned that it was all over.10
In the fort, things had been going from bad to worse. The night had been uneasy, with sentries looking anxiously for approaching boats, hoping they could tell the difference between a relief expedition and a landing party; every ten minutes all night long a Confederate mortar would toss a shell into the fort, just to keep everybody on the alert. With daylight on April 13 the bombardment was resumed, and it seemed to the Federals that the Confederate fire was heavier than ever. Flames broke out again, the officers’ quarters were destroyed, all of the casemates were full of blinding smoke, and the men at the guns wore wet rags over their faces, and staggered to the embrasures between shots for a breath of air. It seemed likely that the blaze would reach the magazine before long, and powder barrels were moved into the casemates; in the heavier bombardment this was no safe place, and some of the barrels were thrown into the harbor. At noon the flagstaff was shot down. A new one was improvised, and Lieutenant G. W. Snyder and Sergeant Peter Hart went topside and managed to fasten it to a gun carriage on the shell-swept barbette.11
The Confederates saw the flag come down, and saw the heavy smoke clouds going up, and correctly deduced that Major Anderson was in trouble. Beauregard ordered up a small boat with a flag of truce, and sent his aide, Captain Lee (with Porcher Miles and Roger Pryor for company), out to the fort to ask the major if he needed assistance: a courtly offer of help to an enemy, and also a tactful way of inquiring whether the Federal should not now surrender. Captain Lee set out on his mission, saw the flag hoisted again, turned to go back to the shore, then noticed that the United States flag had been lowered and that a white flag had been hoisted. Once more he turned about and made for the fort, where he found himself taking part in an amusing, unimportant, and wholly characteristic little farce.12
During the height of the contest, while Lieutenant Snyder and Sergeant Hart struggled to get the flag flying, and the gun crews stumbled through the smoke to maintain some sort of fire, a cannoneer in a lower-tier casemate, going to the muzzle of his piece to reload, saw a strange fellow looking in the embrasure—a burly civilian with a swarthy, piratical face, red sash and sword belt incongruously belted about his middle, a naked sword with white flag knotted about the blade gripped in one hand—altogether a wholly improbable-looking figure. This man announced that he was Colonel Wigfall, recently United States Senator from Texas, now an aide to General Beauregard; he wanted to see Major Anderson, and he wanted even more to get safely inside the fort because he was at the moment squarely in the line of Confederate fire—“Damn it, they are firing at me from Fort Moultrie.” After a certain amount of discussion he was led to Major Anderson; the rowboat that had brought him out, manned by a white man and a colored boy, remained tied up at the wharf. Colonel Wigfall addressed the Federal commander with bluff heartiness:
“Major Anderson, I come from General Beauregard. It is time to put a stop to this, sir. The flames are raging all around you and you have defended your flag gallantly. Will you evacuate, sir?”
The major was ready to call it quits. Washington had specifically told him that a last-ditch sacrifice was not expected of him. He had defended his flag long enough to meet all requirements; his magazine might explode before long, his cartridges were nearly all gone, and with flames and gl
owing embers all over the place, it was impossible to make new ones, and, besides, the main gate had been blown in and a storming party could overrun the fort any time it cared to make the effort. Anderson said he would surrender on the terms originally proposed—that he be allowed to salute his flag and then, with all the honors of war, take his men and their personal property back to New York. Wigfall said that this was a deal: “Lower your flag, and the firing will cease. I will see General Beauregard and you military men will arrange all the terms.” Anderson reflected that his men were at the point of exhaustion, and it seemed to him that Wigfall’s coming was providential. Down came the United States flag, and up went the white flag of surrender.
At this point Captain Lee and his two civilian companions got to the fort. Presented to Major Anderson, Lee said that Beauregard had sent them to offer assistance, if assistance happened to be needed, and to find out what all of this raising and lowering of flags meant. Anderson, puzzled, explained that he had just surrendered to Colonel Wigfall, whereupon his three visitors exchanged baffled looks; then they explained that although Wigfall did belong to Beauregard’s staff, he had not seen the general for two days and had come out to the fort strictly on his own hook. Anderson muttered: “Gentlemen, this is a very awkward business,” which stated the case accurately; he had just surrendered to a man who had no authority either to demand or to receive a surrender. Anderson ordered the white flag hauled down and the national flag raised; the fighting would be resumed.13
In the end, though, things were arranged. Captain Lee suggested that everything be left as it was while they got in touch with Beauregard; Anderson wrote out his understanding of the terms on which he and Wigfall had agreed; the Confederates took this letter to the general and made explanation, and in two or three hours—white flag still flying, and all the guns silent—they came back and it was settled. The surrender was official, as of that moment, but on the next day Anderson could hoist his flag, salute it, haul it down again, and march forth to board one of Captain Fox’s steamers. The fighting was over … there had been too much of it for this one seaport town to contain, and it had brimmed over the rim; it would run all across the South, and into the North as well, going on and on until nobody could see any end to it.
