1861
Page 19
Abner Doubleday, the garrison’s blunt-spoken second in command, hailed from Auburn, New York, the antislavery Republican heartland, where his fellow townsfolk included William H. Seward and Harriet Tubman. The bulldoggish captain was used to being regarded as slightly eccentric, both for his radical politics and for his metaphysical turn of mind—neither of these being quite standard issue at West Point. He pored over Spanish poetry, theories of the afterlife, and transcendentalist essays—years earlier, in fact, as a freshly minted lieutenant, he had written Emerson a swoony fan letter, inviting the philosopher, whom he had never met, to come and stay for a visit at the fort where he was stationed off the coast of Maine, “my quarters being large for a bachelor.”19 But Doubleday could also be entertaining company. He had a boyish love of practical jokes and coarse anecdotes that could relieve the often dreary life of an army outpost—it took little prodding for him to regale his messmates with the story of General Kearney, General Sumner, the Irish cook, and the watermelon; or the one about Secretary Floyd’s encounter with the Sioux Indian chief; or of how Lieutenant Tom Jackson—not yet known as Stonewall—got fleeced by a horse trader back at Fort Hamilton.20
The captain’s connection to Cooperstown and the legend that he invented baseball are equally specious, alas. Versions of the game existed long before his birth, and Doubleday himself would mention baseball just once in any of his surviving writings: in 1871, while in command of a fort in Texas, he would ask the War Department for permission to purchase bats and balls for the members of a colored infantry regiment at the post. (This request was apparently denied.)21 In a certain respect, however, it made sense for a later generation of Americans to associate the sport with a famously tenacious Union officer. Baseball was just coming into its own as the Civil War began—the first reference to it as a national pastime dates from 1856—and Americans associated it with some of the same ideas that were percolating through the political culture of the era, ideas that they would also come to associate strongly with the Northern cause. (Indeed, one political cartoon in 1860 showed Lincoln preparing to hit a home run, with a fence rail inscribed Equal Rights and Free Territory as his bat, and the words Wide Awake on his belt.) Writers praised it as a “manly” game, one that inculcated principles of self-reliance and free competition perfectly suited to “our go-ahead people.” They promoted it as a “national institution” that could unite Americans in every region. In New York, where the baseball craze truly took off, an 1857 Herald article exhorted: “Let us have base ball clubs organized … all over the country, rivaling in their beneficent effects the games of Roman and Grecian republics.” Perhaps the enlisted men at Sumter did play baseball—Crawford’s diary records them as “playing ball,” without further specifics—but even so, a career officer like Doubleday would almost certainly have considered it inappropriate to join them.22
Doubleday may have been the garrison’s champion raconteur, but it was Crawford, the surgeon, who would eventually provide the most detailed account of life inside Sumter. As a medical man, Crawford had attended not West Point but rather the University of Pennsylvania, in his native state. After nearly a decade in the army, he still brought the eye of an outsider, and of a scientist, to bear on things around him. From the beginning of the crisis he had been taking meticulous daily notes—with an eye toward not only history but also the literary marketplace. “It will be a book eagerly sought after, I think, and would certainly pay,” he wrote to his brother more than a month before the Confederate attack. “Two different firms have applied.” An accomplished draftsman, the surgeon (like Captain Seymour) also made sketches of the fort and sold them by mail to Harper’s Weekly for the handsome sum of $25 apiece. Crawford was ambitious, self-assured, and rather vain, sporting a pair of magnificent side-whiskers that hung down over his epaulettes like Spanish moss on a stately oak. Moreover, he craved fame not just as a litterateur, but also as a warrior, making no secret of the fact that he would happily trade his scalpel for a saber.23 Like Doubleday, he was also quite open about his politics—though unlike his fellow officer, his time in the South had made him sympathetic to the slaveholders, and he blamed the Union’s current predicament on the sentimental foolishness of Northern abolitionists.24
Truman Seymour, a Vermont preacher’s son, was a man of a very different stamp. Dark-eyed and ruminative, with thick hair swept back from his forehead in Byronic fashion, he seemed at first more like an artist or poet than a warrior. Indeed, Captain Seymour was a fine watercolorist—a painter of precise, delicately hued landscapes—had taught draftsmanship for several years at West Point, and had recently taken a year’s leave from the army to roam across Europe and commune with the works of Titian, Rubens, and Veronese. During his rare sojourns at home in New England, he loved to hike the Green Mountains with his sketchpad and brushes, fascinated not just by the misty peaks but by the complicated geology beneath them, which he had begun studying seriously as a teenager. Like them, Seymour concealed a stony core beneath a luxuriant exterior: while still a boy lieutenant, he had been brevetted twice for gallantry in Mexico, and later fought in Florida during the army’s ruthless final campaign against the Seminoles. With little of the bellicose swagger affected by Doubleday and even Crawford, he was perhaps a better soldier than either: the kind who viewed the garrison’s predicament at Sumter not as a hopeless cause, nor as a chance at patriotic glory, but as a logistical puzzle to be solved with cool ingenuity.25
Ultimately, however, Sumter’s fate would depend on the man whose inmost thoughts were the most illegible.
For months after Major Anderson’s arrival at Charleston, the skeptical Doubleday had done his best to get inside the new commander’s head. He had observed the pious Kentuckian intently, tried to draw out his opinions, and even baited him on the subject of slavery. Anderson confessed he was disgusted by the North’s refusal to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, and quoted the Bible to demonstrate that God himself had ordained human bondage. Doubleday, in turn, wheeled the Bible around like a swivel gun and fired it straight back at Anderson, pointing out that since the slaves in the Old Testament were white, he saw no reason why some pious Southern master should not enslave the major himself, “and read texts of Scripture to him to keep him quiet.” Anderson, he later boasted, was unable to counter his merciless logical volley. (A less tolerant superior might have clapped the captain in irons.)26 Had Doubleday been slightly more sensitive, he might have realized that Anderson’s reliance on revealed truth was no mere rhetorical strategy. Rather, it bespoke a profound discomfort with earthly affairs, a preference to render unto Caesar.
There was a brittleness to Anderson, Doubleday noticed—almost, it sometimes seemed, a kind of fragility. The strain and uncertainty were clearly taking a mental and physical toll on the major: soon there were a pallor to the man’s skin and a dullness to his eyes and, abandoning his long-accustomed reticence, he began sharing his private opinions almost recklessly. In conversations around the officers’ mess table, he blamed secession on the North, and confessed that if he were in charge in Washington, he would promptly surrender all the Southern forts. He could never take up arms against the Stars and Stripes, he said, but if his native state of Kentucky left the Union, he would be sorely tempted to do likewise—that is, resign his commission and move to some quiet corner of Europe.27
Was this a man to be trusted with the most delicate military assignment in American history? Certainly not, Doubleday had thought at first. In an act of plain insubordination, he had even managed to convey his misgivings directly to the new commander-in-chief. The previous autumn, Doubleday had begun sending frank letters about the situation at Charleston, written in a private code, to his brother Ulysses. Ulysses, a Republican campaign operative in New York City, then decoded them and sent them on to the candidate Lincoln and other “leaders of public opinion” across the North. Some of the early dispatches went so far as to hint that Anderson might soon show his true colors as a secessionist traitor.28
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sp; 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.”29 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.”30
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.”31
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.32
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?”33
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.34 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.35
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.)36
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.37