“Hold on; do not fire,” Anderson commanded. “I will wait. Let the men go to their quarters, leaving two at each gun—I wish to see the officers at my quarters.”

  This infuriated Captain Doubleday, who saw the attack on the ship as an outrage against the American flag. Sumter’s inaction must have “astonished” the Southern men at Fort Moultrie, he wrote in a later recollection; Anderson should have fired back. By doing so “we could have kept down the fire there long enough to enable the steamer to come in. It was plainly our duty to do all that we could.” The ship might already have been badly hit and about to sink, he wrote. “Had she gone down before our eyes, without any effort on our part to aid her, Anderson would have incurred a fearful responsibility by his inaction.”

  The officers gathered in Anderson’s quarters. The major told them he was considering using the fort’s guns to close the harbor. He polled the officers for their views. His adjutant and quartermaster, Lt. Norman Hall, agreed with the plan, as did Captain Doubleday, who urged immediate bombardment. Others counseled delay, Lieutenant Meade of the engineers in particular. Meade, a Virginian, had often expressed sympathy for the South. He argued now that the garrison was under orders to act only in defense; he repeated his conviction that firing would lead to civil war.

  Anderson decided not to fire and not to close the harbor. He resolved instead to send a protest to Governor Pickens and to delay any drastic action until he received a response. He composed a note, which his officers approved; he then ordered Quartermaster Hall to bring it personally to the governor under a flag of truce.

  Hall arrived at Charleston in full uniform. His welcome was decidedly chilly. A rumor had circulated that his mission was in fact to put the city on notice that it was about to be shelled by the guns of Fort Sumter. A crowd followed him to the governor’s temporary office in Charleston’s city hall, where the lieutenant presented Anderson’s letter of protest.

  “Two of your batteries fired this morning upon an unarmed vessel bearing the flag of my Government,” it began. “As I have not been notified that war has been declared by South Carolina against the Government of the United States, I cannot but think that this hostile act was committed without your sanction or authority.”

  For that reason alone, Anderson wrote, Sumter’s guns did not return fire. “I have the honor, therefore, respectfully to ask whether the above mentioned act—one, I believe, without a parallel in the history of our country or of any other civilized government—was committed in obedience to your instructions, and to notify you, if it be not disclaimed, that I must regard it as an act of war, and that I shall not, after a reasonable time for the return of my messenger, permit any vessels to pass within range of the guns of my fort.”

  Pickens replied with a single, very long paragraph that reminded Anderson “that the political connection heretofore existing between the State of South Carolina and the States which were known as the United States had ceased,” and that the state was within its rights to fire on the Star of the West. “The act,” he told Anderson, “is perfectly justified by me.”

  Anderson still did not fire. His orders, after all, were to act strictly in a defensive manner. And for the moment, at least, he and his men did not seem to face imminent attack. Instead of following through on his promise to take control of the harbor, he again gathered his officers in his quarters and told them he had decided to send a man north for direct consultation with the War Department as to how to proceed. He designated Lt. Theodore Talbot, an officer perpetually on the fort’s sick list owing to a chronic lung ailment. Anderson immediately sent him to Governor Pickens with a request that he be allowed to travel through the state unmolested. Pickens assented. One of Pickens’s aides accompanied Talbot back to the wharf so that the lieutenant could retrieve his baggage without interference by a crowd of some eighty people who had gathered at his boat. Prudently, Talbot wore street clothes. The carriage took him to the train station.

  Pickens also allowed another officer, Asst. Surgeon Crawford, to pick up mail that the governor previously had prohibited from being delivered to the fort. Pickens gave no explanation for his change of heart, but Crawford attributed the “marked courtesy” shown by the governor during this meeting to his relief at Anderson’s decision not to open fire and to put the whole matter in the hands of his superiors in Washington.

  * * *

  —

  This moment of conciliation passed. Two days later, on Friday, January 11, just after noon, a small steamer named Antelope bearing a white flag approached the fort. Someone aboard shouted, “Message from the Governor.”

  Anderson dispatched a boat to meet the steamer, which then returned with two men, South Carolina Secretary of State Andrew G. Magrath, and the state’s secretary of war, David F. Jamison. Magrath was the former federal judge who had resigned after Lincoln’s election; Jamison had been president of the state’s secession convention. Anderson greeted them at the wharf, then showed them to a nearby chamber ordinarily occupied by the officer of the guard. The two men presented the major with a brief note from Pickens requesting, in the politest of terms, that he surrender the fort.

  After a lengthy conversation, Anderson once again gathered his officers and put the question to them: “Shall we accede to the demand of the Governor, or shall we not?”

  The answer was a unanimous no.

  Anderson returned to the guard room and told the Carolinians that he could not comply with their request; it was not his decision to make. He urged that they try to resolve the conflict through diplomacy and vowed, “I will do anything that is possible and honorable to do to prevent an appeal to arms.”

  Which was followed by what Crawford called “an impressive silence.”

  * * *

  —

  Anderson prepared a letter for the two Carolina officials to bring to Governor Pickens in which he reiterated his inability to comply with the governor’s surrender demand. But now he proposed sending still another man to Washington to deal specifically with the question of surrender. He further suggested that this messenger be accompanied by a South Carolina representative so that both could make their case directly to President Buchanan and the War Department.

  Pickens liked the idea. Anderson chose for this ambassador his personal aide and quartermaster, Lieutenant Hall; Pickens selected the state’s attorney general, Isaac W. Hayne, who was instructed to inform Buchanan that if he attempted to reinforce Sumter with troops, South Carolina would regard it as a “declaration of war” against the state. Hayne was directed, further, to demand the withdrawal of Anderson and his men and the surrender of the fort.

  The two reached Washington on the evening of Saturday, January 12.

  To Captain Doubleday back at Sumter, this approach seemed foolhardy—“a fatal measure.” He advocated prompt action to close the harbor. Delay, he argued, gave the state “an immense advantage.” While negotiations were underway, the United States would be honor bound not to send a naval force to secure Sumter; meanwhile, South Carolina could continue building its batteries and acquiring supplies of shot and shell, thereby increasing its ability to repel any such force. The state could install guns and stockpile provisions, while the garrison at Sumter struggled even to find firewood.

  Ruffin

  A Little Treason

  January 9–12

  E dmund Ruffin was still in Tallahassee monitoring Florida’s secession convention when on January 9, with the convention still undecided, news arrived of the attempt by the Star of the West to reinforce Fort Sumter. This seemed to have a galvanizing effect on the delegates. Some who had staunchly opposed secession now endorsed it. The next morning, the convention approved an ordinance of secession by a vote of 62 to 7. Ruffin immediately telegraphed the good news to Governor Pickens in Charleston and to the editors of the Richmond Enquirer. He also complained in his diary of the extortionate cost of doing so—six dollars and thirty cents for a total of six words (over two hundred dollars today).

  But fresh news more than balanced his displeasure. That day he learned of Mississippi’s secession and that Southern states were moving rapidly to occupy federal forts and arsenals. He credited Anderson’s transfer to Sumter and Buchanan’s willingness to let the major remain there. “If Fort Sumter had not been treacherously garrisoned,” Ruffin wrote, “no state would have seized a fort, or at least not in advance of actual secession.”

  He decided to return to Charleston. It was hard work, this secession crusade. He left Tallahassee at four p.m., first taking a train to Monticello, Florida, then a stagecoach for the twenty-seven-mile ride to Quitman, Georgia, to catch a train on the Albany Rail Road to Savannah. Even over the mostly flat topography of northern Florida the ride was bone-jarring, especially for a man of sixty-seven. The roads were unpaved and pronged with old tree stumps and where they traversed swamps were corduroyed with logs. In describing a ride of similar length, one much younger contemporary wrote, “It almost killed me.” Ruffin reached Quitman after nightfall. His train was waiting but not scheduled to depart until two hours later. The coach dropped him off fifty yards away with his trunk. He made his way over rough ground in pitch darkness, “once falling and hurting my shin over a log.” The train was stone cold, with every seat already occupied by sleeping railroad employees (including the conductor) who had turned the car into a temporary bunkhouse. Ruffin went back outside and found a group of workers clustered around two piles of burning logs and stood by the fire for the next two hours. The train departed at 3:30 a.m.; it reached Savannah nine and a half hours later. There Ruffin received more heartening news: Alabama’s secession convention had just voted to secede by a margin of 61 to 39.

  Ruffin was back in Charleston by one o’clock the next afternoon; the following day, Sunday, January 13, he joined South Carolina Secretary of War Jamison on a tour of the forts in Charleston Harbor that had been seized by state forces after Anderson’s move to Fort Sumter. Their steamer carried various engineers and civilian volunteers, as well as “100 negro slaves, sent by their owners gratuitously, to work on the fortifications,” Ruffin wrote. He added, “At Fort Moultrie, all was activity and gayety.”

  Members of the chivalry—the militia volunteers—also helped. Enslaved Blacks hauled and piled sand to be used in building protective mounds and to fill sandbags; the white volunteers directed the action and moved sand in wheelbarrows to various parts of the fort. Ruffin stood for a time near where the slaves dumped their sand and the soldiers loaded it into the barrows. Always acutely aware of how he appeared in the eyes of the public, Ruffin asked one volunteer if he might take his place for a few minutes “so as to allow me to commit a little treason to the northern government.”

  The soldier gave him his shovel, and Ruffin, white hair flying, filled the wheelbarrow.

  Fort Sumter

  Lethal Secrets

  January 11–28

  Of the two emissaries sent north by Major Anderson, the first to return was Lieutenant Talbot, who brought with him a letter from War Secretary Joseph Holt. Just a day earlier Holt had shed his acting status to become Buchanan’s official appointee; he was promptly confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The fort’s other emissary, Quartermaster Hall, and his South Carolina counterpart, Isaac Hayne, were still in Washington.

  As Talbot walked to the city’s wharf, he encountered an unsettled mass of civilians who at times seemed to threaten violence. Members of the crowd told Talbot they harbored a particular dislike for Sumter’s Captain Doubleday, widely known to be an abolitionist. His reputation had grown progressively darker as the crisis deepened until he became the equivalent of a villain in a fable. Upon arriving at the fort, Talbot made sure to convey to Doubleday the current state of his ignominy.

  “He brought me the pleasant information that the mob were howling for my head, as that of the only Republican, or, as they called it, ‘Black Republican,’ in the fort,” Doubleday wrote. Soon afterward, Doubleday received a letter from a Charleston resident “informing me that, if I were ever caught in the city, an arrangement had been made to tar and feather me as an Abolitionist.”

  If Major Anderson had hoped for a specific directive from Secretary Holt as to how to proceed, he was now to be disappointed. The letter, dated three days earlier, once again left him adrift, though Holt reassured him that the War Department approved of his conduct thus far. “You rightly designate the firing into the Star of the West as ‘an act of war,’ and one which was actually committed without the slightest provocation,” Holt wrote. “Had their act been perpetrated by a foreign nation, it would have been your imperative duty to have resented it with the whole force of your batteries.”

  Holt told Anderson that his recent dispatches and Talbot’s personal report “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.” Instead, Holt instructed Anderson merely to report “frequently” on his condition and on the preparations of the South Carolina forces arrayed around him. “Whenever, in your judgment, additional supplies or re-enforcements are necessary for your safety, or for a successful defense of the fort, you will at once communicate the fact to this Department, and a prompt and vigorous effort will be made to forward them.”

  In fact, the threat to Fort Sumter was rising by the day. South Carolina forces and over a thousand enslaved Blacks worked furiously around the clock to turn the harbor’s beaches into a ring of armor and guns. The state had secured much of this weaponry when it seized Fort Moultrie, Castle Pinckney, and the Charleston arsenal—fifty-five cannon at Moultrie, twenty-two at Pinckney, and from the arsenal, 22,423 rifles, muskets, carbines, and pistols. From the parapets at Sumter, Captain Doubleday, watching through his spyglass, estimated that some six hundred slaves were at work shoring up the defenses of Moultrie alone. He also noticed that the opposing forces had painted their guard boats black to make them as invisible as possible at night.

  Especially troubling was a new battery that the Carolinians were building at Cummings Point on Morris Island, just 1,325 yards south of Sumter, opposite its weakest flank, the rear wall or gorge. Through telescopes, Captain Doubleday and Sumter’s engineering chief, Captain Foster, closely monitored the battery’s construction and noted that there, too, large numbers of enslaved Blacks comprised the workforce. The workers first laid a frame of heavy timbers, then covered this with a layer of wood planking to produce a roof that leaned away from the beach at a forty-five-degree angle to better deflect shells and shot. Over this they added one more layer, the most crucial and novel element: a roof of iron rails ordinarily meant for railroad tracks, which caused the emplacement to be named “the Iron Battery.” Atop this layer the workers piled a deep berm of sand, making the battery, in Doubleday’s view, “almost impregnable.” They would learn eventually that the design was the brainchild of a cashier at a bank in Charleston.

  Now was the time to open fire, Doubleday knew, but Anderson stuck to his orders to avoid “collision” at all costs. Doubleday found it maddening that he and the rest of the garrison could do nothing but watch as the opposing battery took shape. The work was so close to Sumter that he could hear the sound of heavy materials being maneuvered into place. Steamers came and went, dropping off timber, rails, draught animals, supplies, men, and provisions without any interference from the very men against whom the battery’s guns would be used. “The troops opposite to us were now regularly receiving supplies and re-enforcements, and drilling daily, while all the necessaries of life were constantly diminishing with us,” Doubleday wrote.

  Ominously, Major Anderson learned that South Carolina would soon receive from England three cannon of a new and particularly effective design, capable of firing rifled shells along a nearly horizontal trajectory. “Such an addition to their battery would make our position much less secure than I have considered it,” he wrote to Adjutant Cooper in Washington. In the event of a “collision,” he warned, these guns alone would make reinforcement of Sumter a necessity.

  * * *

  —

  Toward the end of January a violent storm moved in with high winds and heavy rain that hampered outdoor work both at Sumter and among the Carolina batteries. The storm lasted over a week, during which Anderson turned to measures that acknowledged the full reality of what a battle would involve. He ordered the removal of flagstone paving from the parade in the hope that any explosive shells that fell there would sink into the earth before exploding, and do less damage. Chief engineer Foster placed two howitzers—small cannon—outside the walls to sweep right and left, these capable of being fired from inside the fort using extra-long lanyards. Intended for use against attacking troops, the guns would fire grapeshot, which would lacerate the wharf beyond and cause a disheartening degree of carnage. A test of these guns using blank charges had the unfortunate and unexpected effect of diminishing the fort’s already limited supply of rice. Possibly owing to the awful weather, no one thought to open the windows in the gorge wall when the guns were test-fired. The concussion shattered not just the window panes but some of their wooden sashes as well, throwing splinters of glass into rice that had been laid out to dry.

  For the moment, at least, the spoiled rice posed no particular worry. The fort had an adequate supply of provisions, and more food was in the offing—if Anderson chose to accept it. This was because Lieutenant Talbot’s return from Washington, for reasons unclear, had brought forth a new mood of conciliation from Governor Pickens. On January 19, the state’s quartermaster notified Anderson that he had been directed by the governor to send, by the next morning’s mail boat, “two hundred pounds of beef and a lot of vegetables” and thereafter supply whatever Anderson wished on a daily basis.