Chapter Two.

The Saga Of Fort Sumter:

The Tension Builds.

    Slavery stood at the very heart of the sectional strife that gave rise to the Civil War. “After all, southerners had seceded from the Union to save their slave-based social order from Lincoln’s grasp,” says historian Stephen B. Oates.[1]  Abner Doubleday agreed.  The planters of the South, he maintained, “wanted a new and powerful slave empire, extending to the Isthmus of Panama..”[2] President Lincoln stated in his first inaugural address the central issue dividing North and South as he understood it.  “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended.  This is the only substantial dispute.”[3]  In his provocative study of the political culture of the ante-bellum South,  Masters and Statesmen.  The Political Culture of American Slavery,  Kenneth S. Greenberg asserts that “Southern anxieties about England, inherited from the republican ideology of the revolutionary period and reinforced by later events, underwent a slow transformation into a fear of New England and the North.”[4]  According to Greenberg, “Northerners just seemed to copy everything that England had done -- encourage slave revolts, fail to return fugitive slaves, prevent the extension of slavery, develop an abolitionist movement, exploit labor, and threaten liberty with power.”[5] 

Mary Chesnut

     South Carolina Governor Francis W. Pickens was the grandson of Revolutionary War hero General Andrew Pickens. An aloof, egotistical, and overbearing pedant, the Governor preached that his opposition to the Yankees was equivalent to his grandfather’s exploits against the British.  He was a staunch defender of the proposition that States had the right to nullify Federal laws and, if necessary, to secede from the Union -- a concept which had first been advanced in South Carolina in opposition to Federal tariffs in the late 1820’s and early 1830’s but which later became South Carolina’s principal defense against Northern attacks upon slavery. Like most South Carolina planters, Pickens contended that the United States was a loose confederation of sovereign states, each of which retained the right to withdraw from the Union whenever it felt that the Federal government was no longer furthering the interests of that particular State.  “. . . the true checking power of all governments is the power to destroy them,” Pickens had argued in 1829.[6]

      Beginning in 1831, when the apocalyptic Nat Turner slave rebellion erupted in southeastern Virginia and when abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) of Massachusetts established the Liberator, a periodical calling for the immediate and total elimination of the institution of human bondage in the United States, the South increasingly viewed itself as a region under unremitting assault by Northerners who had no knowledge or appreciation of the peculiar needs of the South.[7] “Think of these holy New Englanders forced to have a Negro village walk through their houses whenever they see fit, dirty, slatternly, idle, ill-smelling by nature,” wrote Mary Chesnut.[8]  The white population of South Carolina in 1860 was 301,271.  They were served by 402,441 slaves.  In Charleston  there were approximately 29,000 whites and 37,000 slaves.  Outnumbered by their bondmen and bondwomen, many Southerners were convinced that abolitionists were sending secret agents into the region to foment slave rebellions.  Whites, especially slaveowners, were terrified.  The seizure of the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va. by the fanatical John Brown (1800-1859) and his small band of ardent followers in October, 1859, had greatly intensified Southern mistrust of the North. “The antebellum propaganda war between North and South had created in southern minds an image of the hated Yankee as an amalgam of money-grubbing mudsill Black Republican abolitionist Goths and Vandals,” writes James M. McPherson in What They Fought For 1861-1865.[9]

William Lloyd Garrison

      Keziah Brevard (1803-1886), a wealthy widow who resided on her plantation about ten miles east of Columbia, S.C., insisted in 1860 that Brown had intended “to cut our throats because we held property we could not do otherwise with.” [10] “I want to knock down a John Browner so bad I dunno what to do,” proclaimed Charles Manly, former North Carolina Governor, on Christmas Day 1859.[11]  On November 12, 1860, Captain F. C. Humphreys, the officer in charge of the Federal arsenal in Charleston, reported that the white residents of the city were extremely apprehensive because of the “possibility of an insurrectionary movement on the part of the servile population.”[12]  In early 1861, Paul C. Cameron, a North Carolina planter from Hillsborough, had to make an emergency trip to Mississippi.  “He was informed by Telegraph that an attempt had been made by two of his slaves he leased out this fall, upon the life of an overseer,” explained an acquaintance of  Cameron’s.[13]

     Many Southerners felt besieged. “ . . . gloomy news of the antagonistic temper of the North:  Abolitionism rampant!” wrote Catherine Deveraux Edmondston, the wife of a plantation owner in Halifax County, N. C.[14]  Ella Thomas, a planter’s wife in Augusta, Ga., characterized Abolitionists as a “miserable fanatic set.”[15]  “I fear our end is near & the Yankeys will glory over their work,” insisted Keziah Brevard.  “I do hate a Northern Abolitionist -- Lord forgive me -- but who can love those whose highest ambition is to cut our throats?”[16]  “We want to separate from them, to be rid of Yankees forever, at any price; and they hate us so,” said Mary Chesnut.[17]

      Slavery had been a legal means of acquiring labor since the very beginnings of the country.  Indeed, the United States Constitution had recognized its existence.  But now, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, people like widow Brevard and Mary Chesnut and Catherine Edmondston and Francis Pickens faced the prospect that the Federal government would ban slavery from the territories and  thereby assure that no new slave States would join the Union.  This meant that the last bastion of Southern strength -- the United States Senate -- would inevitably fall under Yankee domination.  “The South would then be powerless,” predicted the Wilmington Journal of Wilmington, North Carolina.  “Her Senators and Representatives might just as well stay at home.”[18]

     Abraham Lincoln’s assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, most Southerners believed that the Republicans would move soon to eliminate slavery where it already existed. “Oh My God!!!  This morning heard that Lincoln was elected,” Keziah Brevard lamented on November 9, 1860.  “Lord we know not,” she continued, “what is to be the result of this -- but I do pray if there is to be a crisis -- that we all lay down our lives sooner than free our slaves in our midst.”[19] Catherine Edmonston insisted that freeing the slaves was inconceivable. “She thinks we should let the ‘few Negroes go,’” Mrs. Edmonston said of her sister, “but it is not just a ‘few Negroes,’ it is the country—for I should like to know who could live here if they were freed?”[20]   In Brevard’s opinion, the great majority of black people had acquired none of the attributes that would make them decent citizens. “Oh I wish I had been born in a Christian land & never seen or known of slaves of any colour,” she wrote in her diary.  “Negroes are as deceitful & lying as any people can well be.”[21]   On December 10, 1860, she proclaimed:

                        I hope & trust in God as soon as Secession is carried out --

                        we of the South begin to find a way to get all the Negroes

                        sent back to Africa & let the generations to come after us

                        live in more peace than we do -- I can’t see how we are ever

                        to be safe with them in our midst -- I wish every soul of

                        them were in Africa contented in their own homes.[22]

A North Carolina newspaper painted an especially grim picture of what the emancipation of blacks would allegedly mean for white Southerners. “Do you desire the millions of negro population in the South, to be set free among us to stalk abroad in the land, following the dictates of their own natural instincts, committing depredations, rapine, and murder upon the whites?” asked the Salisbury Banner.[23]   To submit to Republican rule was unthinkable for most influential Southern whites.  “No Black Republican President . . . should ever execute any law within our borders unless at the point of a bayonet and over the dead bodies of our slain sons,” exclaimed James L. Orr, one of the South Carolina commissioners who was to meet with President Buchanan.[24]   Such was the tenor of the times when Major Robert Anderson and his troops occupied Fort Sumter.

Slaves Being Sold

      Anderson was adamant in characterizing the transfer of his garrison from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter as a move designed to prevent the outbreak of hostilities.  He insisted that his abandonment of Fort Moultrie on December 26^th had greatly lessened the likelihood that South Carolina troops would go to war. When Secretary of War Floyd telegraphed Anderson and expressed disbelief, even consternation, over intelligence reports that Fort Moultrie had been abandoned, Anderson answered that the reports were true.  “If attacked, the garrison never would have surrendered without a fight,” he explained.[25]  In a dispatch sent on December 31^st  Anderson said, “I did it because we were in a position we could not defend, and also under the firm belief that it was the best means of preventing bloodshed.”[26]

     The reaction of Governor Pickens to the news that Federal troops had occupied Fort Sumter was something less than appreciative.  Indeed, he felt betrayed and double-crossed.  Mary Chesnut, never one to mince words, called the news a “bombshell.”[27] “This movement changed the whole aspect of affairs,” declared Mississippian Jefferson Davis (1808-1889).[28]  Governor Pickens had been under intense political pressure to oust the Federal garrison from Charleston and to take control of the forts ever since he had assumed office at the head of the newly independent South Carolina republic on December 20^th. Until the morning of December 27^th, when the local residents awoke to see dark smoke rising above Fort Moultrie, where Foster’s rearguard  had just set fire to the gun carriages, the Governor had assumed that the oral agreement of December 10th between South Carolina’s Congressional representatives and President Buchanan was still operative.  In his view, South Carolina had demonstrated good faith by not using its locally superior military power to overwhelm the Federal forts.  Anderson, Pickens insisted, had taken advantage of South Carolina’s forbearance by concocting and, even more perniciously, implementing a sneaky scheme to strengthen his position.

James Johnston Pettigrew

      On the afternoon of December 27^th, Pickens sent Colonel James Johnston Pettigrew (1828-1863) to Fort Sumter to parley with Major Anderson. It was a friendly but brief meeting.  “He stated that when the governor came into office he found that there was an understanding between his predecessor and the President that no re-enforcements were to be sent to any of these forts, and particularly to this one, and that I had violated this agreement by having re-enforced this fort,” Anderson reported Pettigrew as saying. Pettigrew demanded that the Major take his troops back to Fort Moultrie.  “I replied that I could not and would not do so,” Anderson told his superiors.[29]  Ironically, that very morning three South Carolina emissaries or commissioners, including James L. Orr,  were in Washington, D.C., scheduled to meet with President Buchanan to initiate discussions which hopefully would lead to a peaceful solution to the crisis.[30]  Not surprisingly, when word arrived about developments in Charleston, the South Carolinians canceled the meeting, so they could learn more about what had transpired.

     President Buchanan was initially inclined to mollify Governor Pickens by instructing Anderson to take his troops back to Fort Moultrie. In a dispatch of  December 31, 1860, President Buchanan said, “. . . when I learned that Major Anderson had left Fort Moultrie and proceeded to Fort Sumter, my first promptings were to command him to return to his former position.”[31]  According to Southern sympathizer and Assistant Secretary of State William Trescott, when Buchanan first heard the news, ironically from then Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, the President exclaimed, “I call God to witness, . . . this is not only without but against my orders.  It is against my policy.”[32] On his visit with Buchanan on December 27^th,  Davis  urged the President to order Anderson to withdraw his men from Fort Sumter.  “After the removal of the garrison to the stronger and safer position of Fort Sumter, I called upon him again to represent . . . how productive the movement would be of discontent, and how likely to lead to collision,” Davis explained many years later.[33]  The Mississippi Senator responded to the President’s concern about the security of Federal property in Charleston by proposing that he obtain for Buchanan a pledge from Governor Pickens that no Federal facilities would be disturbed if the U.S. Army garrison was returned to Fort Moultrie.  “The President promised me to reflect upon this proposition,” Davis stated.[34]

     President Buchanan began to take a less conciliatory stance as early as the evening of December 27^th,  when he met with his Cabinet.  In an atmosphere infused with extreme rancor and vituperation, even for Washington, D. C., Secretary of War Floyd announced that he was resigning in protest over what Major Anderson had done.[35]  With Floyd’s departure the South lost its strongest supporter in the Federal government. Other Cabinet members, especially Secretary of State Jeremiah Black, a staunch Unionist, applauded the transfer of troops to Fort Sumter and urged the President to send reinforcements. Buchanan decided to let Anderson and his men stay put for now, afraid that to do otherwise would persuade Black and several other officials in the Cabinet to resign. Buchanan and his cohorts had scrutinized the orders that had been sent to Anderson, particularly those set forth in Buell’s memorandum of December 10^th, and had determined that the commander of the Charleston garrison had acted within the limits of his authority.

Castle Pinckney

       Any penchant President Buchanan might  have possessed to reverse his position and straightway order Anderson back to Fort Moultrie ended when word arrived on December 28^th  that Governor Pickens had instructed South Carolina military units to attack Castle Pinckney and Fort Moultrie. According to some scholars, the wresting of these two citadels from Federal control on December 27^th was the critical turning point in the crisis.  “Governor Pickens had indeed blundered,” contends historian W. A. Swanberg.  “Had he refrained from these seizures and contented himself with asking his commissioners to complain about Anderson’s move, the chances are strong that Buchanan would have moved the major right back to Moultrie.”[36]  But Pickens had no real choice.  The truth is that public opinion in South Carolina would never have allowed the Governor to postpone snatching Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney.  “This action has since been cited as a monstrous blunder,” says Pickens’s biographer, “but the clamor of public opinion left the governor no alternative at the time.”[37]

      From the outset of the crisis President Buchanan had underscored his determination to protect Federal property.  “I would rather have my throat cut, sir, than have Fort Moultrie seized by South Carolina,” he had told Secretary Floyd at the end of November.[38] On December 20^th,  Buchanan had composed the following warning to Governor Pickens.  “If South Carolina should attack any of these forts, she will then become the assailant in a war against the United States.”[39]  Buchanan informed the South Carolina commissioners, with whom he met for the one and only time on December 28^th, that the issue of the evacuation of Fort Sumter was non-negotiable.  He reiterated this position in a dispatch that he penned on December 31^st.   “In the harbor of Charleston we now find three forts confronting each other, over all of which the Federal flag floated only four days ago; but now over two of them this flag has been supplanted, and the palmetto flag has been substituted in its stead.” The President continued,  “It is under all these circumstances that I am urged immediately to withdraw the troops from the harbor of Charleston, and am informed that without this, negotiation is impossible.  This I cannot do; this I will not do.”[40]

     Governor Pickens insisted that he had acted prudently and properly in seizing the abandoned forts.  He had first sent Pettigrew to Fort Sumter to demand its evacuation, and only after Pettigrew had returned and had  informed the Governor of Anderson’s refusal to comply had Pickens issued the order to attack Castle Pinckney and Fort Moultrie.  Pettigrew led the assault. But for the decision of Anderson not to defend either citadel, these places, not Fort Sumter, would have been the locations where the first major engagement of the Civil War would have occurred.  Castle Pinckney, which is now an almost forgotten ruin, was occupied without incident in the late afternoon of December 27^th,  and Fort Moultrie was taken under similar circumstances on the same date shortly after dark.  “While this was going on, Major Anderson and myself stood side by side on the parapet, watching the scene through our spy-glasses,” wrote Abner Doubleday.[41]  Another bloodless victory occurred on December 30^th,  when South Carolina troops took control of the Federal arsenal in Charleston and its large cache of arms.

Fort Sumter

     Major Robert Anderson and the small band of troops under his command believed that a rebel attack upon Fort Sumter was imminent.  The Federal soldiers worked frantically to strengthen their defenses. “That they intend to bombard us is evident and that they will attempt to breach this work at its weakest point is equally sure,” Private John Thompson insisted.[42]  There was a big job to be done, and quickly. But first, at noon on December 27^th,  Anderson ordered all the troops and civilian laborers inside the pentagonal fortress to salute the American flag as it ascended the flagstaff.  With the Stars and Stripes fluttering defiantly overhead, the Major fell to his knees in the middle of the yard and gave thanks to Almighty God for delivering his soldiers safely to their new station. 

      “We were hard at work, mounting guns, preparing shells to be used as hand-grenades, stopping up surplus embrasures, and removing the debris which encumbered the passage from one part of the work to another,” said Doubleday.[43]  “Moving such immense quantities of material, mounting guns, distributing shot, and bricking up embrasures kept us busy for many weeks,” Captain James Chester remembered.[44]  Of the 135 guns planned for the citadel, only 15 had been mounted -- mostly  “32 pounders” -- when Anderson and his men had occupied Fort Sumter.  By April 1861, 60 guns were ready, including “42-pounders” and Columbiads.  One can conjure up compelling images of what it must have been like inside the now famous citadel during those first weeks of frenetic activity. The clanking of hammers and the  squeaking of pulleys punctuated the  sea breeze well into the night.  Scurrying about, sending laborers to their various tasks, the officers and men had little time to think about anything except the job at hand.  Men strode purposefully from one chore to another. Adrenaline surged in their blood. Bent over from utter fatigue, barely able to acknowledge one another’s presence, the men finally crawled into their bunks, only too aware that another day of unceasing labor awaited them at sunrise.  But morale was high -- a not uncommon circumstance when men labor together to achieve a seemingly insurmountable objective. “All are in excellent spirits, both officers and men, and determined to defend the fort to the last eternity,” wrote Captain Foster on January 10, 1861.[45]  “Inside here we are all, thank God, in excellent health and spirits, in fact a more contented lot of men would be hard to scare up,” John Thompson proclaimed.[46]

     The presence of Federal troops in Fort Sumter greatly complicated affairs for Governor Pickens and his associates.  From a military standpoint even Anderson’s tiny garrison of approximately 85 men posed an ominous threat, because it could subject any vessel entering or leaving Charleston Harbor to a murderous shelling.  Fort Sumter was a dagger at South Carolina’s throat.  “It is situated on the very edge of the ship channel,” said Private Thompson about his new post, “so that every vessel passing in and out of the harbor passes directly under our guns.”[47]   Doubleday insisted that Anderson “could take entire possession of the harbor.”[48]  “. . . it is the key of the harbor and completely commands all the other fortifications,” Thompson agreed.[49]  And what if reinforcements were sent to Anderson?  Then South Carolina would face the prospect of its principal harbor being continuously threatened unless a major attack, replete with significant casualties on both sides, succeeded in dislodging Federal troops from their formidable position.

     The political problems engendered by Anderson’s being at Fort Sumter were also considerable.  Governor Pickens could not help but think that South Carolina was being singled out for special humiliation.  Fort Pulaski, near Savannah, was occupied without incident by Georgia troops on January 3, 1861.  Alabama peacefully took control of Forts Morgan and Gaines on January 5^th.   State troops seized Fort Marion at St. Augustine, Fla. on January 7^th.  Indeed, the only other fortresses in the Lower South still garrisoned by U.S. troops were Fort Taylor at Key West, Fla., Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas and, most importantly, Fort Pickens on Santa Rosa Island near Pensacola, Fla.[50]

    Before December 27^th, Governor Pickens had had good reason to believe that President Buchanan and Secretary Floyd had been setting the stage for a peaceful takeover of Fort Moultrie by South Carolina authorities.  As suggested by the orders had been sent to Anderson on December 21^st,  when the commander of the Charleston garrison had been instructed not “to make a vain and useless sacrifice of your own life and the lives of the men under your command, upon a mere point of honor,” the scenario would presumably have proceeded something like this.[51]  South Carolina troops would have occupied the sand dunes and the roof tops on the landward approaches to Fort Moultrie.  A note would have been dispatched under a flag of truce to Anderson, telling the Kentuckian that resisting a rebel assault would be futile; then Anderson and his men would have turned over the keys to the citadel, boarded ships, and departed for the North.  All very neat.  All very pleasant.  Unfortunately, at least from Governor Pickens’s perspective, Major Anderson had dashed all hopes for such a tidy solution by taking his troops to Fort Sumter.  “We came here, the representatives of an authority which could at any time within the past sixty days have taken possession of the forts in Charleston Harbor, but which, upon pledges given in a manner that we cannot doubt, determined to trust to your honor rather than to its own power,” the three South Carolina commissioners had told President Buchanan on December 28^th.   “Since our arrival an officer of the United States acting, as we are assured, not only without but against your orders, has dismantled one fort and occupied another, thus altering to a most important extent the condition of affairs under which we came.”[52]

     By  year’s end both sides knew that President Buchanan would have to authorize the sending of  reinforcements and provisions to Fort Sumter if the Federal garrison was to hold out for a lengthy period.  On December 31^st,  Governor Pickens learned from informants in Washington, D.C. that  Buchanan had decided to do just that. Pickens understood he would have  to prevent any U. S. ship attempting to enter the harbor from coming under the protection of Fort Sumter’s guns.  He therefore ordered the hasty construction of an artillery battery amid the sand dunes on Morris Island at the southwestern edge of the harbor entrance some 3300 yards south of Fort Sumter -- beyond the reach of Anderson’s guns.  He obtained the agreement of Charleston Mayor Charles Macbeth to extinguish the navigation lights in the harbor and to remove the buoys marking the main channel across the treacherous Charleston bar.  He dispatched guard ships to the harbor entrance.  They were expected to sink any hostile small vessels that tried to enter the harbor and to sound the alarm if any large ships arrived off Charleston.  South Carolina artillerymen occupied Fort Moultrie and Fort Johnson.  Governor Pickens even ordered the destruction of the Charleston lighthouse and cut off mail service to Fort Sumter.  By early January the only light that pierced the winter darkness in Charleston Harbor was the beacon atop Fort Sumter, where Anderson and his men continued to strengthen their position.  “The Charlestonians are surrounding us with batteries on every point of land in the vicinity,” reported Abner Doubleday.  “. . . this is done with the hope of preventing any vessel from coming to our assistance with a view to force us ultimately to surrender the Fort.”[53]

Winfield Scott

     The first mission to reinforce and re-supply Fort Sumter was ill conceived and poorly managed from the outset.  The initial plan was to employ a tall-masted steam sloop, the U.S.S. Brooklyn.  Its 24 nine-inch guns, acting in combination with Anderson’s artillery, could certainly have overwhelmed the stopgap defenses Governor Pickens had put into place by early January at Charleston Harbor. But this sensible course of action was not followed.  Lieutenant-General Winfield Scott (1788-1866), nicknamed “Old Fuss and Feathers” because of his legendary foppishness, persuaded the President to use an unarmed civilian sidewheeler, the Star of the West,  instead.  “This was a fatal error,” Doubleday wrote many years later.[54]  Scott, head of the U.S. Army, was concerned that the Brooklyn would run aground on the Charleston bar, especially now that the way was no longer marked.  Also, he foolishly believed that by using a passenger ship that regularly ran between New York City and New Orleans and by boarding the troops away from the Manhatten docks and by hiding them below deck he would be able to catch the South Carolinians off guard and sneak undetected into Charleston Harbor at first light.  “The duty upon which you are now placed by direction of the General-in-Chief will require great care and energy on your part to execute it successfully,” Lieutenant Charles R. Wood, commander of the expedition, was told on January 5, 1861, “for it is important that all your movements be kept as secret as possible.”[55]

     The fundamental flaw in Scott’s thinking was his belief that the mission could be kept clandestine. Governor Pickens would not let himself be caught napping again. There was no war between North and South, at least not yet.  There was no censorship.  There was no martial law.  Washington, D. C. was teeming with Southerners and Southern sympathizers who were eager to tell all.  Jacob Thompson, Buchanan’s Secretary of the Interior until January 3^rd, informed the South Carolinians that reinforcements were on their way to Fort Sumter.  Reporters for Northern newspapers wrote openly about what was about to happen.  “The Star of the West is, without doubt, already on her way to Charleston,” said The New York Times on January 7^th.[56]  This information gave the South Carolinians ample time to prepare. On Morris Island 40 cadets from Charleston’s Citadel academy got word from Governor Pickens to make final arrangements for defending their beloved city.  Abner Doubleday stood amid the ramparts at Fort Sumter and watched these young lads through his spyglass as they practiced loading and firing their artillery pieces.  “The day was cold and rainy, and the wind blew fiercely,” Doubleday recollected.  “We wondered how long these boys would keep up their enthusiasm amidst the hardships and trials of the real war which was now fast approaching.”[57]

     Robert Anderson and his fellow officers read the reports in Northern newspapers saying that a relief mission was heading their way, but they had received no official orders from Washington confirming the veracity of these stories. Fearing that South Carolina authorities would send telegrams containing bogus information,  U. S. Army headquarters had  decided to send instructions to Charleston after January 5^th by regular mail.  The orders about the relief mission never reached Fort Sumter, because Governor Pickens had ordered the mail stopped.    “We had seen a statement in a Northern paper that a steamer named the Star of the West . . . was to be sent to us with a re-enforcement of several hundred men and supplies of food, but we could not credit the rumor,” Doubleday remembered.[58]  If the dispatches had gotten through, the Civil War undoubtedly would have begun in January, not April, 1861.  “Should a fire, likely to prove injurious, be opened upon any vessel bringing re-enforcements or supplies, or upon tow-boats within the reach of your guns, they may be employed to silence such fire,” the orders had stated[59]  Everything in Anderson’s background suggests that he would have obeyed these explicit instructions to defend any ship that  attempted to reinforce his garrison.

     At dawn on January 9, 1861, Abner Doubleday was atop the parapet of Fort Sumter peering through his spyglass at ships and boats entering and leaving the harbor. Although he put little faith in the newspaper reports about a relief expedition, the New York artilleryman could not help but take a bit greater interest in the comings and goings of local maritime traffic that particular morning.  “I fancied, from a signal I had observed the previous evening on a pilot-boat, that something must be coming,” Doubleday explained[60]  Think how he and the other soldiers at Fort Sumter must have felt.  Only a few days earlier Doubleday had remarked, “If we ascended to the parapet, we saw nothing but uncouth State flags, representing palmettos, pelicans, and other strange devides.  No echo seemed to come back from the loyal North to encourage us.  Our glasses in vain swept the horizon.” [61]  Maybe this morning would be different.

    The wind tussled Doubleday’s hair.  Seabirds soared overhead, their flight made almost motionless by the seemingly incessant wind.   The sea looked steely gray in dawn’s first light.  All seemed to be routine.  Major Anderson was asleep in his quarters below.  Then Doubleday pointed his spyglass toward the open ocean.  What he saw brought him up short. He was heartened to observe a large steamer crossing the Charleston bar and entering the Morris Island channel.  It was flying a United States flag!  It appeared to be a civilian vessel.  “I came to the conclusion it must be the Star of the West,” Doubleday later wrote.[62]  Relief was at hand!  Help had finally come!  The New York artilleryman watched as the steamer approached the harbor entrance.  Then he saw a puff of smoke and a few seconds later heard the boom of a cannon from the South Carolina battery on Morris Island. Next through the spyglass he could see a large or garrison flag being raised above the Star of the West.  This was obviously a signal that the ship needed support from Fort Sumter’s guns. It all happened very fast.  Doubleday scampered down the stone steps and ran to Anderson’s apartment to awaken the garrison commander and to tell him the spine-tingling news.  “Without waiting to ascertain the result of the firing, I dashed down the back stairs to Anderson’s room, to notify him of the occurrence,” Doubleday explained.  “He told me to have the long roll beaten, and to post the men at the guns on the parapet.  I ran out, called the drummers, and had the alarm sounded.”[63]

     It had been an uneventful voyage.  “Nothing unusual took place during the passage, which was a pleasant one for the season of the year,” said John McGowan, a veteran of the U.S. Revenue Service who commanded the Star of the West.[64]  The steamer had sailed from New York City on January 5^th  and had arrived off Cape Hatteras, N. C. on January 7^th.  Here the some 200 soldiers aboard had been told where they were headed.  On the morning of January 8^th,  McGowan had steamed past Cape Fear off Wilmington, N.C.  and  had come to a complete stop near Gerogetown, S. C., about 50 miles up the coast from Charleston.   There the Star of the West had remained anchored for most of the afternoon.  McGowan had even allowed the troops to come up on deck and spend a few hours fishing.  Finally, at 1:30 A.M. on January 9, 1861, the Star of the West had arrived off Charleston.  Far beyond the perilous shallows of the Charleston bar, the solitary beacon at Fort Sumter proudly proclaimed that Anderson and his men were still holding out.  With no buoys to mark the way, Captain McGowan had decided to wait until dawn to begin the dangerous run into the harbor.

      At first light McGowan gave the order to start up the engines. The troops, muskets loaded, waited below deck, expecting at any moment to hear the order to rush to the small boats that would take them to Fort Sumter.  A sailor was sent to the bow to take soundings so he could warn the captain if the ship was about to go aground.  The paddlewheels on both sides of the steamer rotated against the tide.  Smoke rose from the stacks. “We proceeded with caution, running very slow and sounding,” McGowan  reported.[65]

     Behind the sand dunes near the northern end of Morris Island  Major Peter F. Stevens ordered the 40 Citadel cadets to run to their guns and make ready to fire.  A South Carolina steamboat, the General Clinch, raced up the main channel, “sending off rockets, and burning lights until after broad daylight,” McGowan explained.[66] Among the young warriors at the makeshift artillery battery of outdated 24-pounders on Morris Island that fateful morning was George Edward Haynesworth, a boy barely sixteen years old from Sumter, S.C..  He drew the lanyard to his cannon taut. Everybody thought that this was the decisive moment.  There was seemingly no turning back now.  It was approximately 7:30 A.M., January 9, 1861.  “Fire,” Stevens shouted to his young compatriots.  Haynesworth jerked his lanyard.  Boom!  A cannon ball arched across the morning sky and splashed into the water just in front of the Star of the West.  Undeterred, John McGowan ordered his seamen to raise the garrison flag above the unarmed steamer, so that Anderson would know that the time had come for Fort Sumter to open fire.  Sidewheels spinning, the Star of the West steamed on toward the harbor entrance. All the while the Citadel cadets worked feverishly at their posts, loading and firing their guns at irregular intervals but with minimal effect.  Only two artillery shells struck the Star of the West.  They inflicted little damage.

     A scene of high drama was playing itself out along the ramparts of Fort Sumter.  The Federal troops rushed to their stations, anticipating that they would soon be instructed to open up on the South Carolinians. “The long roll was beaten, and the batteries were manned almost before the guns of the hidden battery (on Morris Island) had fired their second shot,” boasted Captain James Chester.[67]  But Anderson did not give the order to commence firing.  He kept his cannons silent even when the Star of the West cleared Morris Island, moved into the harbor, and came under attack from the South Carolina gunners in Fort Moultrie.  Catherine Edmondston, who was visiting Charleston, watched the dramatic scene unfold from shore and wondered when Fort Sumter would join in the fray.  “Will Sumter respond?” she asked.  “No, not yet.  Another from Moultrie.  How with Sumter now?  Silent!”[68]

      Abner Doubleday was flabbergasted.  McGowan’s ship was defenseless, but Anderson did nothing to help!  “I think the people in Fort Moultrie, who expected to be driven out to take refuge behind the sand-hills, were especially astonished at our inaction,” the New Yorker exclaimed.[69] According to Captain Chester, when Captain Foster learned that Anderson was not going to engage the enemy, the New Hampshireman  walked away, “smashing his hat, and muttering something about the flag, of which the words ‘trample on it’ reached the ears of the men at the guns.”[70]   Foster was uncharacteristically  intemperate  in a letter he wrote the next day, especially when he described the actions of the South Carolina troops on January 9^th and suggested how the United States should respond to the rebellious behavior of Governor Pickens and his associates. “They seem perfectly insane in their efforts,” Foster declared.  “Yesterday morning they fired upon a steamer bearing the ‘American flag’ because she carried the American flag.”[71] Foster went on to urge that the United States send army and naval forces to “lay Charleston in ashes, in order to avenge the wanton outrage upon the American flag perpetrated by order of the Governor yesterday.”  “Then retire and let them be in peaceable separation, if necessary,” the indignant engineer proclaimed.[72]  Unsupported, the Star of the West, turned about and headed out to sea.  The steamer had come so close to the wharf that the troops in Fort Sumter had been able to look down on the decks, but no troops had came ashore.  The relief expedition had failed. “The vessel turns slowly,” observed Catherine Edmondston.  “Is she stuck?  No one can tell.  But slowly, reluctantly as it were, almost with a baffled look, the steamer retreats down the channel.  Thank God.”[73]

     The rationale for Anderson doing nothing to aid the Star of the West is not difficult to fathom.  Anderson  knew that to open fire would have terminated all hopes for securing the one objective he had consistently sought since coming to Charleston -- a peaceful settlement of the crisis. Abner Doubleday commented many years later on Anderson’s state of mind during those fateful weeks in early 1861.  “I have already stated the reasons for his inaction,” the New York artilleryman declared.  “In amplifying his instructions not to provoke a collision into instructions not to fight at all, I have no doubt he thought he was rendering a real service to the country.  He knew the first shot fired by us would light the flames of a civil war that would convulse the world, and tried to put off the evil day as long as possible.”[74]  

      There is reason to believe that Anderson was  displeased by the appearance of the Star of the West.  At the very least he considered the sending of a relief expedition to be unnecessary and unwise. He might even have considered it a troublesome intrusion. On January 6^th, Anderson had penned a communiqué to Army headquarters in which he had stated that his command was in “excellent health and in fine spirits.”  “At the present,” he had warned, “it would be dangerous and difficult for a vessel from without to enter the harbor, in consequence of the batteries which are already erected and being erected.”  “I shall not ask for any increase in command,” Anderson had declared.[75]  This message had not reached Washington until after the Star of the West had left New York City.  If it had, the expedition would have been canceled.  Indeed, when President Buchanan saw Anderson’s dispatch, he attempted to rescind the order directing the Star of the West to sail to Charleston, but it was too late.[76]

     The extraordinary restraint Major Anderson displayed throughout the crisis manifested itself again during negotiations he conducted with Governor Pickens just after the Star of the West incident.  Unquestionably, the unprovoked attack upon Captain McGowan’s steamer had been an act of war  -- a fact that Anderson chose to ignore or overlook.  It is true that on January 9^th the garrison commander informed Pickens by special messenger that unless the Governor disowned the actions of the South Carolina artillerymen as an unauthorized deed by subordinates, the Federal garrison would not “permit any vessels to pass within range of the guns” at Fort Sumter.  “In order to save, as far as in my power, the shedding of blood, I beg that you will have due notification of this my decision given to all concerned,” Anderson implored.[77]  Pickens did not disclaim what his troops had done.    He was  defiant.  “The act is perfectly justified by me,” the Governor insisted. According to Pickens, South Carolina was now an independent republic and therefore  possessed the right to protect its territory from hostile attack. “To repel such an attempt is too plainly its duty to allow it to be discussed,” the Governor proclaimed.[78]  Pickens did inform Anderson that a warning shot had been fired across the bow of the Star of the West.

     Disgusted by the thought that he might be responsible for the onset of Civil War, Anderson persisted in his efforts to postpone the outbreak of hostilities.  He seized upon the news that the South Carolina troops had attempted to warn the Star of the West.  This fact, he insisted, suggested that delay was still the appropriate course to follow. The Major conferred with his officers and on January 11^th decided to send Lieutenant Theodore Talbot from Fort Sumter to Washington to obtain instructions as to how the Federal garrison should respond to recent developments and in the interim  not to fire upon any ships entering or leaving the harbor.  “Major Anderson hopes that the delay of sending to Washington may possibly  prevent Civil War,” wrote Captain Foster.  “The hope, although a small one, may be the thread that prevents the sundering of the Union.”[79]

      Governor Pickens welcomed this respite.  He used the time to strengthen Charleston’s defenses.  Moreover, he ordered his own emissary, South Carolina Attoney General Isaac W. Hayne, to go to Washington to parley with the Buchanan administration.  The Governor did contribute to the easing of tensions by reestablishing mail service to Fort Sumter and, even more importantly,  by letting supplies of fresh meat and vegetables reach Anderson and his men.  Ironically, Talbot and Hayne left Charleston on the same train on January 12^th.    

     Joseph Holt (1807-1894), like Anderson a Kentuckian, had succeeded Floyd as Buchanan’s Secretary of War.  Holt did not have to wait for Lieutenant Talbot to arrive in Washington to know what had happened to the Star of the West.  He received reports on January 10^th concerning what had transpired at Charleston the previous day.  Holt’s assessment of Anderson’s conduct was unreservedly positive.  “I avail myself of the occasion to express the great satisfaction of the Government at the forbearance, discretion, and firmness with which you have acted,” he declared on January 10^th.  The Secretary of War, a staunch Unionist, told Anderson to “continue, as heretofore, to act strictly on the defensive; to avoid, by all means compatible with the safety of your command, a collision with the hostile forces by which you are surrounded.”[80]

      It is obvious that President Buchanan still wanted to avoid a confrontation with South Carolina, particularly during the final weeks of his term.  Abraham Lincoln would be inaugurated in less than eight weeks.  Let him deal with the crisis.  The only reason the Star of the West had been sent to Charleston in the first place was the mistaken  belief in Washington that reinforcements and supplies were desperately needed at Fort Sumter.  Now that Major Anderson had allayed concerns about the immediate condition of his command, President Buchanan was more than willing to let matters drift until he left office.  On January 16, 1861, Holt sent a dispatch to Anderson in which the Secretary of War set forth the policy that the Federal government would follow regarding the situation at Fort Sumter until the advent of the Lincoln administration.

                       Your late dispatches, as well as the very intelligent state-

                        ment of Lieutenant Talbot, have relieved the Government

                        of the apprehensions previously entertained for your safety.

                        In consequence, it is not its purpose at present to re-enforce

                        you.  The attempt to do so would, no doubt, be attended by

                        a collision of arms and the effusion of blood--a national calamity   

                       which the President is most anxious, if possible, to avoid.[81]

The arrangement was clear.  If Governor Pickens refrained from attacking the Federal garrison, Washington would continue its policy of appeasement and do nothing to strengthen Fort Sumter, at least as long as Anderson did not notify his superiors that he needed supplies or reinforcements to maintain control of the fort.  No such message was sent or received before Buchanan left office.

   The remaining weeks of James Buchanan’s presidency were devoid of dramatic military developments.  It was on the political scene that pivotal events transpired.  Six additional Southern states, comprising the so-called Lower South, passed articles of secession in early 1861 -- Mississippi (January 9^th), Florida (January 10^th), Alabama (January 11^th), Georgia (January 17^th), Louisiana (January 26^th), and Texas (February 1^st).  On February 4, 1861, delegates from six states assembled in Montgomery, Alabama to establish a new Southern Republic.  A Constitution for the provisional government of the Confederate States of America was adopted on February 8^th, and the next day the convention elected Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as provisional president.[82]  “My opinion was . . . that there would be war, long and bloody, and that it behooved everyone to put his house in order,” Davis declared many years later.[83]

      On February 12^th, Confederate authorities notified  Governor Pickens that they were assuming responsibility for the conduct of affairs surrounding the crisis produced by Federal occupation of Fort Sumter.  The resolution announced that the Confederate government was taking “under its charge the questions and difficulties now existing between the several States of the Confederacy and the Government of the United States of America, relating to the occupation of forts, arsenals, navy-yards, and other public establishments.”[84]  That very evening Governor Pickens sent a telegram to Montgomery acknowledging with pleasure his receipt of notification that the Confederate government was taking control of the situation in Charleston Harbor.

     In a letter he sent the next day to Howell Cobb, president of the Provisional Congress of the Confederacy, Pickens set forth the reasons why Federal occupation of Fort Sumter “involved a denial of the rightful independence of the State of South Carolina.”  As a sovereign State, South Carolina, he insisted, could exercise the power of eminent domain to acquire any property it had ceded to owners who no longer used the property to advance the purposes for which it had been originally granted.  Accordingly, the possession of Fort Sumter by the United States was legitimate only as long as the United States was responsible for the defense of South Carolina.  “With the termination of the political connection between South Carolina and the United States,” Pickens contended, “the obligation of the United States to defend that State ceased.”  The Governor went on to note that the right of any sovereign political entity to take control of military posts within its jurisdiction was incontestable.   “The denial, therefore, of the right of the State to have possession of the fort was, in fact, a denial of its independence.”[85]  Jefferson Davis concurred.  “A state withdrawing from the Union would necessarily assume the control theretofore exercised by the general government over all public defenses and other public property within her limits,” he stated over a decade later in his book, The Rise And Fall Of The Confederate Government.[86] Davis, however, did believe that the Federal government should receive just compensation for any property it relinquished.

       Interestingly, South Carolina did offer to pay the United States for Fort Sumter.  On January 31^st, Isaac Hayne told the Buchanan administration that South Carolina would “make such compensation in regard to Fort Sumter . . . to the full extent of the money value of the property of the United States delivered over to the authorities of South Carolina.”[87]  Secretary of War Holt responded to Hayne on February 6^th.  “The title of the United States to Fort Sumter is complete and incontestable,” he insisted.  “South Carolina can no more assert the right of eminent domain over Fort Sumter than Maryland can assert it over the District of Columbia.  The political and proprietary rights of the United States in either case rest upon precisely the same grounds.”[88]

       Here one encounters the crux of the issue which Federal control of Fort Sumter raised for both the United States and the South.  Neither side could withdraw its legal claims to ownership of the now famous citadel without undermining its fundamental legal prerogatives. That’s why the crisis was so resistant to compromise and settlement.  While resolutely determined to remain on the defensive unless Anderson were attacked, President Buchanan would not retreat one inch on the question of the legitimacy of Federal claims to Fort Sumter.  South Carolina and the Confederacy on the other hand could be satisfied with nothing less than the total withdrawal of Major Anderson and his troops.  It was checkmate, plain and simple.

     Believing that a military confrontation was becoming increasingly likely, President Jefferson Davis selected a competent engineer with special training in artillery and fortifications to assume command of Confederate military operations at Charleston.  He was Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard (1818-1893) a 43-year-old flamboyant Louisiana Creole who by 1861 had shortened his name to G. T. Beauregard.  “You will proceed without delay to Charleston and report to Governor Pickens for military duty in that State,”  Davis told Beauregard on March 1^st.[89]  Fluent in English and Spanish as well as French, which was his native tongue, Beauregard had grown up in affluence and privilege on a sugar cane plantation on the Mississippi River not far downstream from his beloved New Orleans.  When  a teenager, Beauregard had persuaded his father to seek an appointment for him as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point.  Beauregard entered West Point in 1834 at the age of sixteen and graduated in 1838 with an outstanding academic record.  Beauregard’s favorite teacher at West Point was Robert Anderson.  He even served briefly as Anderson’s assistant.[90]  In another twist of fate, with which the Civil War was so replete, the superintendent of the private school in New Orleans where two of Beauregard’s sons were students in 1860 was William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891), the Union officer who would bring devastation and destruction to the two Carolinas in the closing months of the ferocious sectional struggle that was about to grip the country.

     Like so many officers in both armies during the Civil War, Beauregard had served in the Mexican War.  It had been during that conflict that some of the more troublesome aspects of the Louisiana Creole’s makeup had begun to come to the fore.  As one of the young military engineers who served under General Winfield Scott during the campaign against Mexico City, Beauregard had demonstrated outstanding courage and had performed magnificently on the battlefield.  One of his compatriots had been Robert E. Lee.  Another had been J. G. Foster, the same engineer now with Anderson at Fort Sumter.  Beauregard had become embittered by what he thought was an insufficient recognition of his accomplishments in the Mexican War in comparison with that given to other officers, especially Lee.  “He was always touchy about his honor and always ready to defend it, with shotguns in his youth and blasts of words in later life,” writes Beauregard’s biographer.[91]  This quality tended to make Beauregard a prickly subordinate, as President Davis would learn with unmistakable clarity.

     Brigadier General G. T. Beauregard arrived in Charleston on March 3^rd and formally took command of Confederate military operations in the city and its immediate environs on March 6^th.  “I am . . . very well pleased with this place & its people, who are so much like ours in La. that I see but little difference in them,” he wrote to a friend.[92] Beauregard was less satisfied with military arrangements at Charleston. “I find a great deal of zeal and energy around me, but little professional knowledge and experience,” he told his superiors.[93]  He set out immediately to strengthen the Confederate artillery positions at the entrance to the harbor, so that his troops could block any future attempts to reinforce Fort Sumter.  “Every one here seems to be gradually becoming aware, through my cautions representations, that we are not yet prepared for the contest, and that the first work in order is to endeavor to keep re-enforcements from getting into Fort Sumter by increasing our channel defenses,” Beauregard declared in a dispatch to L. P. Walker, Confederate Secretary of War, on March 8^th.[94]  Afraid that Union forces might appear off shore at any moment or endeavor to land at some remote point along the coast, the Confederate commander urged his troops to exert themselves to the utmost in bolstering their defenses.  “By the orders transmitted to-day it will be seen that I am straining every nerve to be ready,” Beauregard proclaimed on March 15^th.[95]

    Political developments in Washington, D. C. were to demonstrate that Beauregard was correct in his assessment that the crisis was entering a more ominous phase.  Abraham Lincoln had become President of the United States on March 4^th.  “The eventful 4^th of March had now arrived, and with it a new President, representing the patriotism and vigor of the great North-west,” exclaimed Abner Doubeday in his published reminiscences.[96]  The Federal policy of appeasement was coming to an end.