1861 Read online

  In fact, the reason Floyd had dispatched Anderson to Moultrie in the first place was his expectation that the major would not raise any sort of fuss. Anderson, a Virginian by ancestry and a Kentuckian by birth, was known to sympathize with the grievances of Southern slaveholders. His wife, a more ardent Southerner, was the daughter of one of Georgia’s wealthiest rice planters; she and the major had recently sold off most or all of her inherited slaves and their progeny, causing him once to quip that “the increase of her darkies” had made him rich.20 Nor did the major appear to be the sort to attempt an inconvenient act of heroism. When Floyd plucked Anderson out of the middle ranks of the officer corps for the Charleston appointment, he was serving on a commission to revise the curriculum at West Point, where he had once been an instructor. Anderson’s rigid deference to military duty was, as everyone in the service knew, exceeded only by his Christian piety.21

  Even the junior officers at Moultrie were at times beginning to suspect their new commander of disloyalty to the Union or simple lack of backbone—not that it was clear what even a loyal stalwart could have done without more arms and men. Their best tactical move, Doubleday and Seymour knew, would be to occupy Castle Pinckney, where they could easily bring Charleston to heel by lobbing artillery shells into the city at close range. But, as Doubleday put it sardonically, “with only sixty-four soldiers and a brass band, we could not detach any force in that direction.”22 Pinckney lay more than three miles across the harbor from Moultrie, a stone’s throw from the downtown promenade known as the Battery, with its high row of fine mansions that housed many of Charleston’s wealthiest citizens—and its leading secessionists. Even under cover of darkness, there was no way that Anderson’s men could make it there without being intercepted.

  Their other option was Fort Sumter. Sumter sat on its own artificial island—a sturdy pedestal of granite boulders, hewn from the quarries of New England—just inside the narrowest part of the harbor’s mouth, alongside the main ship channel. Though still unfinished after decades of fitful progress, because no one had expected that Charleston Harbor would ever again become a key strategic point, its 360-degree view of the surrounding water made it more or less impregnable to sneak attack, and its high brick walls, designed by the Army Corps of Engineers to withstand modern artillery fire, were much more formidable than Moultrie’s. Its armaments included a fearsome array of heavy mortars and columbiads, the bulbous ten-ton cannons that could hurl a heavy projectile as far as three miles—though many of these guns still lay dismounted and inoperable beneath the unfinished gun platforms. Sumter’s location in the port’s tight entrance, with land close by in three directions, might make it vulnerable to shot and shell fired from batteries onshore: the fort’s builders, like Moultrie’s, had never anticipated the need to defend against an attack from “friendly” territory. But that position, however vulnerable, did command the shipping lane. Most critical of all, Fort Sumter lay barely a mile from Moultrie—just close enough that the garrison might, with a bit of luck, slip across under the secessionists’ noses.

  The junior officers, Doubleday most of all, pleaded with their commander to make that move. Anderson dug his heels in and refused. The War Department had assigned him to Fort Moultrie, he said, and he would not budge without an official order to do so. The officers pointed out that if the Carolinians themselves occupied Sumter—which they might do at any moment without so much as firing a shot—its columbiads turned against Moultrie could pound the old fort’s walls into rubble. Still the major blandly demurred. His resistance seemed incredible. Any captain or lieutenant in the army was used to dealing with the stubbornness or even stupidity of his superiors, but Anderson’s position defied common sense, as well as basic principles of military science that he had taught at West Point. Worse yet, in the event of forced surrender, the power and prestige of the entire army—perhaps even the entire national government—might be sacrificed to a few thuggish traitors.

  In bewilderment, the staff officers returned to overseeing the ceaseless—and, it seemed, pointless—work of digging sand away from the walls, building picket fences, and moving cannons from one place to another.23 Occasionally Captain Doubleday would relieve his frustration by loading a howitzer with double rounds of canister shot, pointing it out to sea, and blasting a furious volley against the insolent Southern waves. It was the only thing he could do.

  Just before sundown on December 20, the rooftops and church steeples of Charleston lit up with flashes of red, as the reflected lights of bonfires and Roman candles flared amid the gathering darkness. From across the harbor, the soldiers at Moultrie could hear booming cannons and pealing bells. The city was celebrating. Delegates to the Convention of the People of South Carolina, meeting downtown in St. Andrew’s Hall, had voted unanimously that afternoon to approve a resolution: “The Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of the ‘United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”

  Almost immediately afterward, the Convention took up another pressing matter: what should be done about “the property of the United States”—now considered a foreign nation—“in South Carolina.” This referred especially, everyone knew, to the three harbor forts.

  One of Moultrie’s officers, Assistant Surgeon Samuel Wylie Crawford, was in the city on the historic day. He even made his way into the Convention itself, where he took note of a gavel on the Speaker’s desk with the word secession cut deep into it in black letters. In the streets he saw almost every hat sporting palmetto leaves or a blue secession cockade, and almost every shop and house flying a palmetto flag. There were also, as he would recall years later, “coarse representations on canvas” crudely allegorizing the politics of the moment: one portrayed the detestable old rail-splitter himself, Abraham Lincoln, wielding his axe ineffectually against a stout palmetto log, while another “showed the anticipated prosperity of Charleston, the wharves crowded with cotton bales and negroes.”24

  Still, Crawford discovered, very few of the patricians who had led the charge toward secession actually wanted all-out war. Rabble-rousing newspaper editors, upcountry militiamen, and assorted urban rowdies might clamor for the chance to shed Yankee blood, and even take a few potshots at Fort Moultrie, but most worldly men of good sense believed that the South should, and eventually would, be left to go in peace. There would be heated talk on both sides, negotiation, some gentle—or, if necessary, not so gentle—arm-twisting, but in the end, frock-coated dignitaries of the North and of the South would come to an understanding, and the federal garrison in Charleston Harbor would board a government steamer and vanish conveniently into the wide Atlantic. Indeed, some of the South’s best statesmen were already in Washington, working discreetly toward just such a resolution.

  Yet it was also obvious to Crawford that Charlestonians were doing a collective war dance. The city’s streets were filled with men in militia uniforms, from young recruits performing their first musket drills to old colonels, buttoned laboriously into epauletted tunics they had last worn twenty years before. “Military organizations marched in every direction, the music of their bands lost amid the shouts of the people,” Crawford later wrote.25 There could not have been a greater contrast with the lassitude and bureaucratic foot-dragging of the “loyal” commanders back in Washington.

  Across the water on Sullivan’s Island, the noose seemed to be drawing tighter. Word came that the harbor pilots of Charleston were all made to swear an oath that they would not bring any U.S. government vessel into port, lest it be carrying reinforcements. Steamers manned by secessionist militia—each with more men aboard than were in the entire federal garrison—patrolled the harbor every night, their dark silhouettes visible from the parapets of Moultrie.

  For each of the fort’s officers, these days of anxiety and frustration were also tinged with melancholy. Trained to defend their nation against its foreign enemies, they now faced siege and possible attack by their own countrymen. Whatever might be the outcome of th
e present crisis, the nation they had grown up in already seemed irretrievably lost. Not long after the secession vote, an elderly South Carolina statesman, Judge James L. Petigru (born days after George Washington’s inauguration), came across the harbor to bid a sad farewell to the garrison, and, by proxy, to the United States of America. Doubleday went down to the wharf to greet the old man. “The tears rolled down his cheeks,” the Yankee captain later recalled, “as he deplored the folly and the madness of the times.”26*

  And all the while, just across the water—so close that you could almost touch it—loomed the commanding citadel of Sumter, seeming to represent all that Doubleday and his comrades longed for: Safety. Honor. Perhaps even, in the end, victory. The junior officers redoubled their pleas. Their commander, as ever, refused to budge.

  What the junior officers didn’t know is that beneath his inscrutable gray exterior, the major was as frustrated as any of his men. Since the third day after his arrival, Anderson had been barraging Washington with ever-more-urgent letters and telegrams, pleading with his superiors for orders to make just such a move. It was as obvious to him as to anyone that an attack on Moultrie could end only in a humiliating surrender or the wholesale slaughter of his force. The War Department sent cursory replies, blithely assuring him that no assault on Moul-trie was imminent—this despite the shrill war cries in almost every newspaper of the South—but that if one were, he was, of course, to defend it “to the best of your ability.” On December 23, an adjutant arrived with a two-paragraph letter from the secretary of war himself, the first time that Floyd had deigned to communicate directly with Anderson.

  Writing on the morning after secession became official, the secretary wished to clarify—in strictest confidence—Anderson’s previous instructions. While the major ought to defend himself if attacked, he must not take this to mean that he should sacrifice his men’s lives “upon a mere point of honor.” Indeed, it was neither wished nor expected in Washington that Anderson should undertake “a hopeless conflict in defense of these forts.” Floyd continued: “If they are invested or attacked by a force so superior that resistance would, in your judgment, be a useless waste of life, it will be your duty to yield to necessity, and make the best terms [of surrender] in your power. This will be the conduct of an honorable, brave, and humane officer, and you will be fully justified in such action.”27

  Floyd’s meaning was unmistakable. If Anderson were threatened directly by any military force stronger than his own contingent of sixty-four men and a brass band, he was free to surrender all of Charleston Harbor without firing a shot. Perhaps the letter even assumed that Anderson, a good Southerner, would be happy to do so. Between the lines, Floyd could almost be seen winking.

  But the secretary of war had misjudged his man.

  To the civilian Floyd, Anderson looked like a reliably obedient officer, and he was. But even more, he was a career soldier. The middle-aged bureaucrat had—although he rarely spoke of it—fought against Black Hawk and the Seminoles, and marched on Mexico City under General Scott, in that glorious advance from the shores of the Gulf to the Halls of Montezuma. At Molino del Rey, nearly at the gates of the enemy capital, he had charged the Mexican lines and taken a bullet in the shoulder, leading his outnumbered regiment through another two hours of battle before collapsing from loss of blood.28 Such perils came all in the due course of military life, as they had also done for Anderson’s father, a soldier of the American Revolution who had defended the old palmetto fort right here at Moultrie more than eighty years ago. Anderson had seen secretaries of war come and go—and he must certainly have known a good deal, mostly unflattering, about this particular one—but he also knew that acts of courage or cowardice on the battlefield echoed down through generations.

  It would be one thing if President Buchanan had simply announced that he was withdrawing the troops from Charleston Harbor and turning the forts over to South Carolina, a decision that Anderson would certainly have obeyed, perhaps even welcomed. But he would be damned if he was to surrender—even worse, perform a shabby pantomime of surrender—before a rabble of whiskey-soaked militiamen and canting politicians. Still, an officer’s orders were his orders. Anderson felt trapped.

  But after poring untold hours over Floyd’s infuriating letter, he suddenly saw a window—a narrow one, but perhaps a way out. One might say it was not Anderson the gallant soldier who noticed it but rather Anderson the meticulous academic and scrupulous translator. Floyd had told Anderson to mount no hopeless defense of the forts, plural. This was possibly just a slip of the pen: the secretary was not known for verbal precision. But it could also be construed to mean that Anderson and his men were responsible for defending all three of the forts, not just Moultrie. In that case, a move from one to another would be no violation of orders, merely a slight tactical shift, like wheeling a cannon to a different side of the battlements. Nowhere in the previous orders had Floyd or his adjutants directly commanded Anderson not to occupy Sumter. They had merely ignored his pleas to do so.

  It must have been just after Anderson’s small epiphany that the sharp-eyed Captain Doubleday noticed something odd. He was out on Moultrie’s parapet with his commander, discussing the need to purchase some wire to make an entanglement at the base of the fort’s walls. “Certainly; you shall have a mile of wire, if you require it,” Anderson replied—but in such a peculiar, distracted way that it was clear the major was no longer thinking much about Moultrie at all.29

  Anderson now sent his quartermaster over to the city to charter some boats, ostensibly to carry the fort’s women and children out of harm’s way. (Many of the men had their families living with them.) On Christmas Day, all hands at the fort were kept busy loading supplies aboard, on the pretext that these were only the families’ effects and necessary supplies. A couple of local citizens showed up at the wharf to watch the preparations—incredibly enough, civilians were still permitted to wander freely into and out of the fort, perhaps because suddenly barring them would have put the secession forces on alert—and became suspicious when they saw a crate marked “1,000 ball cartridges” being stowed aboard. They were quickly assured that this had been just an error, and left after seeing the box off-loaded again.30

  On the 26th, just as the sun was setting, Anderson gave his officers and men twenty minutes to gather up whatever personal possessions they could and board the boats. He ordered the guns of Moultrie to be aimed at the passage to Sumter, ready to sink any vessel that might attempt an interception. The major left a small rear guard, with instructions that once the rest of the garrison was safely across, it should spike the cannons (that is, hammer spikes into the touchholes so that they couldn’t be fired), burn the gun carriages, and finally cut down the flagpole so that nothing but the Stars and Stripes could ever fly upon it. Then Anderson himself took the folded garrison flag and, tucking it snugly under his arm, stepped aboard.31

  The next morning, astonished Charlestonians saw smoke from the smoldering gun carriages curling into the clear air above Moultrie. At Castle Pinckney, secessionist riflemen stormed the all-but-abandoned fort.32 In Washington, Secretary Floyd was already dictating a furious telegram.

  But by noon at Sumter, a flag—the one Anderson had carried with him from his father’s old fort—was raised upon a new staff. It hung limp for a moment before the wind stirred life into its folds. Then it unfurled itself, the red stripes of war and white stars of union, a banner defiant.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2008, in a crumbling plantation house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, my students and I discovered an attic full of family papers spanning thirteen generations of the owners’ family—more than three hundred years of American history. There were land deeds in the spidery handwriting of the seventeenth century, from the earliest years of the colonial settlement. There was business correspondence about a slave purchase in Philadelphia during the American Revolution, transacted as the Continental Congress was meeting just a few blocks away in Independence Hall. But what fas
cinated me the most was a small bundle of old documents, wrapped in paper and bound up tightly with a faded yellow silk ribbon that clearly had not been untied in more than a century. On the outside of the wrapper was a date: 1861.

  Carefully untying the ribbon and opening the wrapper’s stiff folds, we found a series of private letters written in the spring of that year. They involved a member of the family, a career officer in the U.S. Army stationed at a remote fort in the Indian territory of the far West. Writing to his wife and brother back East, the colonel agonized over which side he should choose in the impending conflict. He was a Southerner and a slaveholder—yet in his heart of hearts he looked forward to the day when slavery would end. He was a close friend of Jefferson Davis’s; had been at the Academy with Robert E. Lee—yet could he betray the flag under which he had served ever since that remote day when, at the age of fourteen, he had first donned the scratchy gray uniform of a West Point cadet?

  In the end, the colonel chose to stand by his country. In the process of deciding on that course, though, he had to wrestle with many different questions—and not simply those of honor, patriotism, and politics. What would his choice of allegiance mean for his family, for his friendships, for his ancestral farm, for his career? Whichever side prevailed in the war, the nation was clearly about to change forever: what kind of country did he want to live in, what kind of country would he want for his children? “It is like a great game of chance,” his wife wrote. The urgent exchange of letters brought out tensions among his loved ones, too, as the colonel tried to assimiliate conflicting reports and advice from two thousand miles away. His wife, a Northerner, had one set of ideas; his plantation-owning brother had another.33