by Alan Axelrod
The shots fired by The Citadel boys could accurately be called the first of the Civil War. What followed them, however, was—well, nothing, or at least nothing much.
For his part, President Buchanan again settled into inaction. He made no further attempt to reinforce or resupply Fort Sumter. Pickens sent to the president another emissary, Isaac W. Hayne, bearing a demand that he order Fort Sumter evacuated. Instead of sending Hayne packing, President Buchanan allowed him to “negotiate” until early February. In the end, it was Hayne who gave up. No one, it seemed, could outdo Buchanan when it came to passive noncompliance. In the meantime, of course, the men of Fort Sumter were running out of food. Fearing that he would look inhumane or, worse, ungentlemanly, Governor Pickens ordered, on January 20, some food parcels to be delivered to the fort. Incredibly, Major Anderson returned them, enclosing a message to the effect that he and his command would do without rations until he was allowed to purchase food from local suppliers—just as he always had. Pickens responded by allowing Anderson to send forty-five women and children, the families of some of the garrison, to New York. For more than a week, Pickens had cut off mail to and from Sumter. He now allowed it to resume.
In Charleston, a growing number of fire-eaters insisted that Pickens take some action, while a diminishing number of moderates pleaded with him to do nothing. In Washington, President Buchanan was also being pressed, but he decided that he had a way out: just wait out the slow tick-tock of his waning presidency. When he received a new letter from Pickens on January 31, 1861, demanding the surrender of Fort Sumter on the grounds that federal possession of it was “not consistent with the dignity or safety of the State of South Carolina,” he simply ignored the missive. When more demand letters followed, he ignored those, too.
So weeks passed. At last, to James Buchanan’s unutterable relief, March 4 finally came, and the outgoing occupant of the Executive Mansion welcomed the new inmate. “Sir,” he said to Lincoln on the carriage ride back from the inauguration, “if you are as happy entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland [the Buchanan residence in Lancaster, Pennsylvania], you are a happy man indeed.”
Major Robert Anderson was anything but happy. He sent the new president a report explaining that he was critically low on supplies and that he needed food, reinforcements, and naval support if he was to have any chance of holding the fort. Lincoln consulted with “Old Fuss and Feathers,” Major General Winfield Scott, the lavishly bemedaled, over-age, and corpulent general-in-chief of the United States Army. Scott was a gallant soldier, a hero of the War of 1812 and the US-Mexican War, but, in the present situation, he told Lincoln that there was only one thing to do: evacuate Fort Sumter. Lincoln turned next to his cabinet. Every member agreed with Scott, except for Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, who pressed Lincoln to reinforce the fort. Secretary of State William Seward, for his part, met with a fresh delegation from the Confederacy, to whom he implied (without consulting Lincoln, toward whom, early in Lincoln’s presidency, he was often condescending) that all of the southern forts would soon be evacuated. As the deliberations and speculations continued in Washington, Major Anderson, waiting in Charleston Harbor at the mouths of Confederate cannon, was kept in the dark.
General P. G. T. Beauregard, who had arrived in Charleston early in March to take command there, used the period of uncertainty to build up the defenses of Charleston and to train more guns against Fort Sumter. The prewar United States Army was small, with 16,367 troops on the rolls, of whom 1,108 were commissioned officers. Those in command in the South knew those in command in the North. General Beauregard knew Major Anderson very well, since it was Anderson who, at West Point, had instructed him in the artillerist’s art. Beauregard raised no objection when former US naval officer Gustavus V. Fox requested permission to visit the fort. Perhaps the Confederate thought he could talk some sense into his former instructor. Anderson told Fox that the food would run out by April 15, and Fox reported this to Lincoln, who nevertheless continued to withhold communication from Anderson. Absent word from the president, the major began an exchange of messages with his former student. Between Anderson and Beauregard, the two planned the conditions for the evacuation of the fort.
At last, but without alerting Anderson, Lincoln ordered preparation of a flotilla of Navy vessels, including the brand-new steam sloop-of-war USS Pawnee, the older but more heavily armed steam sidewheel frigate USS Powhatan, the small-armed screw steamer USS Pocahontas, and the Revenue Cutter USRC Harriet Lane, together with a civilian steamer, the Baltic, to carry supplies and reinforcements to Fort Sumter. The flotilla conveyed about 200 troops and was accompanied by three civilian tug boats to tow troop and supply barges. Although he was no longer an active naval officer, Gustavus Fox was given command (and would, on August 1, be appointed assistant Secretary of the Navy). The vessels of the flotilla set off from various ports beginning on April 6, the very day that a State Department clerk named Robert L. Chew was dispatched to Charleston to inform Governor Pickens that a “resupply convoy” was steaming to Fort Sumter. On April 8, Anderson finally received a letter from Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, informing him of the approaching expedition.
Now, at last, the pace of events accelerated. Pickens informed Confederate President Jefferson Davis that President Lincoln had dispatched warships to Fort Sumter. Davis summoned his cabinet.
Now was the decisive moment for the Confederacy. If secession was real, if it was serious, it required backing by force and payment in blood. Anything less was surrender.
The cabinet unanimously concurred with Jefferson Davis. The approaching warships would be resisted, and Fort Sumter would be taken. Accordingly, Leroy Pope Walker, the Confederacy’s first secretary of war, sent a telegram to Beauregard instructing him to demand the surrender of Fort Sumter. If the demand was refused, he was to proceed with the “reduction” of the fort.
Having received the telegram, the Confederate commander delayed sending the surrender demand just long enough to make his final preparations to conduct a prolonged artillery bombardment against Fort Sumter and to fire upon the flotilla, when it arrived. When he was satisfied that all was in place, on the afternoon of April 11, Beauregard put three men in a boat and sent them to Fort Sumter to formally demand its surrender. They presented an elaborately chivalrous note from General Beauregard: “All proper facilities will be afforded for the removal of yourself and command,” the note promised, “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.”
Had Beauregard framed his demand as a threat, perhaps Anderson would have indignantly rejected it. But it was instead a proper and respectful request. So Anderson summoned his officers and polled their opinions. To a man, they voiced unconditional opposition to giving up the fort. Personally, Anderson was torn. He was by birth a Kentuckian married to a Georgian, and his nature was more Southern than Northern. But, above this, he prized his vocation as an officer of the army of the United States. He therefore wrote out a refusal to surrender in a note as formal as the demand he had received. The general’s demand was one “with which I regret that my sense of honor, and of my obligations to my government, prevent my compliance,” he wrote. As he handed the emissaries this message, he commented without a touch of defiance: “Gentlemen, if you do not batter us to pieces, we shall be starved out in a few days.”
The rendezvous point designated for the relief flotilla was off the Charleston bar. Harriet Lane arrived first, just after sundown on April 11, 1861. As for Beauregard, he read and reread his former artillery instructor’s message carefully, and he listened very closely when one of the emissaries repeated Anderson’s apparently off-handed comment that he and his command would soon be starved out. This prompted Beauregard to send his commissioners back to the fort. He wanted them to ask Anderso
n precisely how long it would be before want of food would prompt his surrender.
The emissaries arrived at the fort just after midnight on April 12. Warning Major Anderson that artillery bombardment was imminent, they put the question: When, precisely, will you surrender? Anderson did not instantly return an answer, but retired to confer privately with his officers for a long time. At length emerging, he told his interlocutors that, barring further orders or supply from “my government,” he would evacuate the fort by April 15.
It was the very date Anderson had communicated to Lincoln and was therefore a truthful answer to Beauregard’s question. The leader of the commissioners, James Chesnut, seems to have taken it as nothing more or less than a play for more time. His tone abruptly changed. It was too long, he said with finality. General Beauregard would open fire in an hour, at 4:30 a.m. With that, the commissioners left.
Tradition long had it that Edmund Ruffin, aged sixty-seven, a rural Virginia newspaper editor and a defender of slavery, pulled the lanyard on the gun that (discounting the four cannonballs fired by The Citadel cadets on December 9, 1860) fired the first shot of the Civil War. He did deliver one of the earliest shots at the fort, but firing the very first shot, a signal to commence the general bombardment, was an honor mortar battery commander Captain George S. James offered to Roger Pryor. Pryor had resigned his seat in the US Congress, as a representative from Virginia, to join the Confederate army on March 3, 1861. He was what the divided nation called a “fire-eater,” a true believer, who had, on the eve of secession, exhorted the people of South Carolina to “Strike a blow!” Offered the opportunity now to do just that, he gravely shook his head, protesting weakly that he “could not fire the first gun of the war.” With the appointed hour—4:30—approaching, Captain James turned to Lieutenant Henry S. Farley. It was he who, on schedule, fired a single shell burst over the fort as a signal to open fire.
Exactly 4,003 guns were trained on Fort Sumter that early morning. However, short on ammunition—something that would be true of the Confederate artillery throughout the war—Beauregard was determined to carry out a sustained bombardment but to do so with a minimum of waste. He therefore ordered his guns to fire not in volleys, but one at a time, in a counterclockwise sequence around the harbor. There was to be a two-minute pause between shots. This would allow the Confederate gunners to fire continuously for forty-eight hours.
Major Anderson, of course, was even more critically short of ammunition than General Beauregard, and, undermanned, he could not afford to suffer heavy casualties. He held off for two and a half hours before returning fire, and, when he finally did, he decided that he would use only the guns from the lowest of the fort’s three tiers. True, the best artillery was in the upper tier, but that was the most vulnerable to incoming fire, so he left it unmanned. The self-imposed restriction to fire only the cannon of the lowest tier gave Anderson just twenty-one usable guns—against Beauregard’s 4,000 plus. The honor of returning the first shot was given to Captain Abner Doubleday, who history remembers far more as the “inventor” of baseball than for anything he did in the Civil War. (This remains true today, despite the fact that virtually all historians agree that Doubleday did not, in fact, create the national pastime. Indeed, Doubleday himself never claimed to have done so.)
As mentioned, Fort Sumter was designed to defend against an assault from the sea, not a barrage from the land. The cannon on naval warships were not capable of firing at high trajectories. This meant they could not lob shells over the fort’s fifty-foot-high walls. They could fire into the walls, but the walls’ five-foot masonry thickness was enough to withstand most low-trajectory hits. Land-based artillery, however, could easily be elevated sufficiently to get balls and shells over the fort’s walls, which meant that the target was highly vulnerable. While the walls and gun tiers of the fort were brick, the buildings within those walls were wooden. Before mid-morning, “hot shot”—cannonballs heated red hot in a furnace before being fired—set the fort’s main barracks ablaze, forcing Anderson to divert many men from gunnery duty to instead fight the flames.
Nevertheless, Anderson and his men had reason to take heart, even amid the flames. For now, at least, they saw three ships of the relief flotilla off the harbor bar. The defenders of Fort Sumter had high hopes that resupply and reinforcement would be forthcoming under cover of darkness. They just needed to hold out during the rest of the day.
Fox, commanding the flotilla, awaited the arrival of the largest warship of the flotilla, sidewheel steam frigate USS Powhatan. No one in Washington had thought to inform him that Secretary of State William Seward had ordered the ship diverted to relieve Fort Pickens, Florida. Seward had not informed the president, either, and when Lincoln issued a belated countermand, David Dixon Porter, the Powhatan’s skipper, refused to honor it because the original order had been signed by Seward, not Lincoln. In Porter’s view, only Seward could legally countermand it. The absence of the Powhatan was critical, since Fox believed that, without this major warship, he would never make it past the Confederate harbor defenses. Nevertheless, by about six on the evening of April 12, Fox decided that he had to act. He loaded some landing craft with supplies and sent them toward the fort. As he feared, however, heavy Confederate artillery fire soon drove them back.
With neither resupply nor reinforcement, Anderson ceased fire at nightfall. Earlier, he had already ordered a radical reduction in return fire, down to just six guns, because of a shortage of cloth gunpowder bags to hold the charge that fired the projectiles. Anderson improvised to make more, putting his men to work sewing bags out of clothing and bed linen, and even contributing his own spare socks. At nightfall, the Confederates reduced their own rate of fire to one shot every four minutes, but they never ceased firing. At dawn on April 13, Beauregard resumed the original rate of a shot every two minutes, quickly reigniting the barracks. Well trained at West Point by Robert Anderson, Beauregard ordered hot shots to be again used, so that, by noon, his artillery had succeeded in igniting most of the wooden buildings within the fort’s masonry walls. As flames crept toward the central powder magazine, Anderson’s soldiers began rolling out the first of the 300 powder barrels stored there. Only about a hundred had been removed before Major Anderson ordered the magazine doors closed. Of the hundred powder barrels that had been moved out, those that could not be rapidly moved to safety Anderson ordered to be rolled into the sea. The tide was against the Union, and the barrels kept floating back to the fort, where they were often ignited by incoming rounds. Although Anderson quickened the pace and volume of his return fire, Beauregard’s gunners laid down more and more hot shots, intensifying the blazes within the fort.
At one in the afternoon, a cannonball snapped the flagstaff from which the Stars and Stripes flew. The flag was retrieved, and a makeshift staff was quickly erected—but an overeager Texan, former US Senator and now Confederate Colonel Louis Wigfall, seeing the flag disappear, assumed that Anderson was surrendering. Without consulting any other officer, he rowed himself out to Fort Sumter. Waving a white handkerchief from the tip of his sword, he called out to the defenders, asking if they had surrendered. When the reply was returned in the negative, he was undaunted and asked if he might meet with Major Anderson. The major agreed.
“You have defended your flag nobly, Sir,” Wigfall said. “You have done all that it is possible to do, and General Beauregard wants to stop this fight. On what terms, Major Anderson, will you evacuate this fort?”
Surrounded by water and surrounded by fire, low on ammunition and out of food, Major Robert Anderson must have reflected on two remarkable facts. First, he and his men had endured nearly 4,000 incoming rounds—and had endured them nobly. Second, he had suffered not a single casualty.
Whether by design or happenstance, Wigfall had used the verb “evacuate” rather than “surrender.” This may have been enough to prompt Anderson to ask for a truce to commence at two. With that, Wigfall removed his handkerchief from his sword and displayed it
on the improvised flagstaff that had replaced the one shot away. On his return to Charleston, several Confederate officers indignantly disavowed Wigfall’s unauthorized offer of a truce. But General Beauregard saw that white “flag” and, seeing it, sent an official delegation, which offered the same terms that had been offered on April 11—withdrawal from the fort with full military honors. In point of fact, those who had been firing on Fort Sumter believed its defenders were worth honoring. They had behaved as men, gentlemen, and worthy adversaries. This gave them reason to believe that the war now begun would be a chivalrous dispute between men of honor.
On April 14, Beauregard proved himself to be as good as his word. Major Robert Anderson was permitted to order a fifty-gun salute to the flag he now lowered and folded and was allowed to take with him. As the Union artillery sounded for the last time, a stray ember touched off a nearby powder keg. The resulting blast injured five people and killed one, Union Private Daniel Hough. He was the first soldier killed in the Civil War. No one attending that ceremony could have imagined that, in the next four years, more than 620,000 others would join him.
4
September 22, 1862
Lincoln Issues the “Preliminary” Emancipation Proclamation
Why it’s significant. Legalistically cautious in tone and severely limited in application, the “Preliminary” Emancipation Proclamation enlarged the moral dimension of the Civil War, transforming it into both a struggle to make a fractured United States whole and to liberate some four million American slaves.
