Charleston

  The Petrel’s Delight

  April 7–8

  The workers at Sumter and the enslaved men in the Confederate batteries continued building defenses in preparation for battle, an outcome that with each day seemed more and more inevitable as the expected evacuation of Sumter failed to materialize.

  The weather hampered both sides. Over several days high winds raked the bay and turned the weather cold. Throughout Saturday night and into Sunday morning, rain fell heavily and steadily, making sentry duty a misery. All day Sunday frequent intervals of heavy rain whitened the waters and drove workers indoors. The gloom and cold were oppressive and struck some Carolinians as ominous.

  “The bad weather continues,” wrote planter Keziah Brevard on Monday, April 8; she contended that wind and clouds had persisted ever since “Cessession,” as she chose to spell it.

  “—now near 2 O’clock P.M. and ’tis raining quite hard—such weather adds bad feelings to our sad hearts—Oh Lord save us!! save us!! but I see nothing to hope for”—

  As she was writing this, lightning flared, followed quickly by thunder. She feared for her chickens.

  “—my poor little chickens and two feeble little turkeys, I wish the sun could shine to dry your little bodies.”

  None of this disrupted the social firmament of Charleston, however. “Yesterday it rained and we paid visits,” wrote Mary Chesnut.

  She made the rounds despite a bad cold. She went first to the home of Henry King, then to the James Legares, then the Dr. Robert Wilson Gibbeses; the next morning she had breakfast with Mrs. Wigfall, wife of the famed Texas fire-eater, during which Mrs. Wigfall declared that Mary’s husband, Colonel Chesnut—Mr. C—would have been a “splendid match” for herself, as would Mary for her own husband. Then on Monday, April 8, there was tea with Dr. Gibbes and several others—“Mr. C offended because I did not wait for him,” Mary noted. After this came a session with another four people, including one Mrs. Letitia Gamble Holliday Latrobe, who, Mary added, “has had two husbands in two years.”

  In the background there was always the minor chord of impending threat. On Sunday afternoon Mary tried reading to distract herself—an essay on the nineteenth-century feminist and transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, killed in a shipwreck in 1850 off New York’s Fire Island. Mary did not succeed. “The air is too full of war news,” she wrote. “And we are all so restless.” On Monday, her husband spoke of joining an artillery company. This only added to her unease. “News so warlike I quake.”

  Others appeared not to share her concern. Mary noted that during one social encounter the wife of Isaac Hayne, the rebuffed emissary to Washington, said that all she felt about the coming conflict was pity for people who could not be present in Charleston to see it unfold.

  Mary observed that Louis Wigfall, whom she nicknamed the Stormy Petrel, seemed to revel in the tension. He was, she wrote, “the only thoroughly happy person I see.”

  * * *

  —

  On that Sunday, General Beauregard notified Anderson that the fort would no longer be permitted to acquire any supplies from Charleston. The halt, Beauregard wrote, was ordered by the Confederate government in Montgomery “in consequence of the delays and vacillations of the United States Government at Washington relative to the evacuation of Fort Sumter.” The mails, however, would continue.

  In Washington, President Lincoln dispatched two messengers to Charleston to deliver to Governor Pickens his formal notice that he planned to resupply Fort Sumter with provisions, peacefully if possible, but if not, by force of arms. The two agents were Robert S. Chew of the State Department and Sumter’s Captain Talbot, who also carried a copy of Lincoln’s instructions to Anderson, to be delivered to the major in person. The copy posted by Secretary of War Cameron was still making its way south by mail.

  If all went well—if the unusually foul weather did not slow their journey, if their trains did not derail, as happened all too often—Chew and Talbot would arrive on Monday evening, April 8.

  The Atlantic

  Storm

  April 8

  By Monday, April 8, Captain Fox was ready to launch his fleet. He was proud beyond proud: He had been a Navy man; he had left the service to toil in the obscurity of civilian industry, and now glory beckoned. With the Powhatan among his force, as he believed it to be, his expedition to Charleston could not fail.

  The first vessel to depart was the tug Uncle Ben, which left New York that Monday evening. Fox himself embarked the next morning aboard the Baltic confident that all his tugs and ships would rendezvous off Charleston two days later.

  The ship exited New York Harbor into a full-on Atlantic gale. The Baltic was well designed and handled the seas well, but the storm impeded and scattered the rest of Fox’s fleet, especially the ocean tugboats. It forced the Uncle Ben to seek shelter in the harbor at Wilmington, North Carolina. Another tug, the Yankee, was blown past Charleston and found refuge in Savannah. The tug Freeborn avoided the storm altogether: Deeming the risks of the expedition simply too great, its owners decided at the last minute to hold the vessel in New York.

  Fox did not know any of this. He had no means of communicating with other ships except by visual signaling or veering close enough to shout. As best he could tell, his plan for the relief of Fort Sumter was unfolding exactly as planned, if probably a bit behind schedule because of the gale. He expected to find the other ships of his fleet waiting for him just outside the entrance to Charleston Harbor. He would be especially happy to see the Powhatan, its troops and powerful guns at the ready.

  * * *

  —

  That morning, Monday, April 8, Major Anderson and his men were startled by an explosion near Fort Moultrie across the channel to the east. The blast shattered a wooden house situated up the beach from the fort and revealed behind it a wholly new Confederate battery.

  As best they could tell, it contained four large guns. The orientation of these was deeply troubling and forced Anderson and his engineers to rethink their own strategy for defending Sumter. “The discovery of this battery,” wrote Asst. Surgeon Crawford, “produced a marked and depressing effect upon Major Anderson. He seemed nervous and anxious.” Engineer Foster saw that the new guns exposed Sumter’s topmost tier to direct fire and likewise exposed an area outside the fort walls where deep-draft ships would be most likely to anchor and discharge their cargo. Anderson decided the new battery made the parapet level simply too dangerous and ordered its guns off-limits. “This, of course, was much less dangerous for the men,” Doubleday wrote, “but it deprived us of the most powerful and effective part of our armament.”

  The new battery brought to nineteen the number of Confederate gun emplacements arrayed around the harbor, all fully manned. But Anderson knew that even without this numerical superiority the Confederates held a tremendous advantage: They had only one target to shoot at; Sumter confronted many.

  * * *

  —

  In Washington, the Confederate commissioners told Justice Campbell of their growing unease and urged him to convey this to Secretary Seward. Campbell was apprehensive as well, increasingly concerned that Seward was using him to deceive the Southerners. He met with Seward on Sunday, April 7, and asked him whether the assurances he had given the commissioners thus far were “well or ill founded.”

  The next day, Monday, April 8, Campbell received at his quarters a mysterious envelope containing a brief statement with neither date nor signature: “Faith as to Sumter fully kept; wait and see; other suggestions received, and will be respectfully considered.”

  Campbell brought it to the commissioners, who surmised that Seward was its author. It did nothing to ease their concerns.

  Weary of the “constant vacillation” of Lincoln’s government, the commissioners at last sent their official secretary, James Pickett, to the State Department to demand a formal answer to their original request for a meeting with Lincoln. What he received in response was the memorandum Seward had written on March 15 and that had lain in the department’s archive ever since.

  Fort Sumter

  Confession

  April 8

  The three- or four-day delay in mail delivery between Washington and Fort Sumter confounded and confused communications and deepened Major Anderson’s sense of isolation. But no one trusted the telegraph. Telegrams passed through too many nodes where they could be intercepted and forwarded to unauthorized parties. The mail was sacrosanct, its confidentiality honored by both sides.

  Or so Anderson certainly expected.

  On April 7, he at last received a copy of Lincoln’s instructions and learned of his decision to resupply the fort, apparently using a plan devised by Capt. Gustavus Fox. Anderson was shocked. It utterly contradicted his understanding that Sumter would be evacuated. The next day, Monday, April 8, he wrote a confidential letter to his friend, Adjutant General Thomas in Washington, in which he advised that upon reading the letter, “you will be pleased to destroy it.”

  Fox’s expedition, Anderson warned, would be seen by the South as a betrayal, given the assurances apparently made to the Confederate commissioners. “It is, of course, now too late for me to give any advice in reference to the proposed scheme of Captain Fox,” Anderson wrote. “I fear that the result cannot fail to be disastrous to all concerned.” He told Thomas that Lincoln’s aide, Ward Lamon, had convinced him that the garrison would be evacuated, but now clearly that was not the case. He was annoyed. “I ought to have been informed that this expedition was to come,” he wrote.

  And then he bared his soul—to the extent, that is, that a military man like Anderson could do so. “We shall strive to do our duty,” he wrote, “though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced.”

  The letter never made it to Washington; it came to rest instead on a desk across the bay, in the Charleston Hotel.

  Washington

  Dismay and Dishonor

  April 8

  The commissioners read Seward’s memorandum, written ominously in the third person.

  “The Secretary of State understands the events which have recently occurred differently from the aspect in which they are presented by Mssrs. Forsyth and Crawford,” Seward wrote. (At the time Seward prepared the memorandum, the third commissioner, André Roman, had not yet arrived.) “He sees in them, not a rightful and accomplished revolution, and an independent nation, with an established government, but rather a perversion of a temporary and partisan excitement.”

  Seward declared himself unable to satisfy the commissioners’ request for a meeting with the president. “On the contrary, he is obliged to state to Mssrs. Forsyth and Crawford, that he has no authority, nor is he at liberty to recognize them as diplomatic agents, or hold correspondence or other communication with them.”

  The commissioners had no reason to be startled by this rejection, given Seward’s persistent unwillingness to meet, but they were outraged all the same. This was yet another affront to their Southern honor.

  Their reply steamed with anger. They accused Secretary Seward of dwelling in “delusions” and told him, “You now, with a persistence untaught and uncured by the ruin which has been wrought, refuse to recognize the great fact presented to you of a completed and successful revolution; you close your eyes to the existence of the Government founded upon it.”

  They predicted “blood and mourning” and warned that history would lay the blame for it with Lincoln. “The undersigned, [on] behalf of their Government and people, accept the gage of battle thus thrown down to them.”

  Seward felt he could not directly answer even this, lest some shard of recognition be passed along to the commissioners; instead, with a little twist of the knife, he filed a new note in the archive consisting of a single sentence in which, again adopting the third-person voice, he stated that he presumed that the commissioners, having been formally told that he could not engage in official communication with them, would not expect a reply to their letter “beyond the simple acknowledgement of the receipt thereof, which he hereby very cheerfully gives.”

  * * *

  —

  On Monday evening, April 8, Lincoln’s two messengers, Chew and Talbot, arrived in Charleston and made their way to Governor Pickens’s headquarters at the Charleston Hotel bearing Lincoln’s statement of his intent to resupply Sumter. There Chew read it aloud and then handed Pickens the text: “I am directed by the President of the United States to notify you to expect an attempt will be made to supply Fort Sumter with provisions only, and that if such attempt be not resisted no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition will be made without further notice, or in case of an attack upon the fort.”

  Pickens summoned General Beauregard and read the message to him. Captain Talbot then requested permission to proceed to Sumter and rejoin the garrison. Beauregard “peremptorily refused,” Talbot recalled. Talbot asked if he could at least meet with Anderson and afterward return to Charleston, his intent clearly to deliver the copy of Lincoln’s April 4 instructions, which he also carried with him. This request, too, was refused.

  Chew and Talbot then set off for the train station, accompanied by two Confederate escorts, and left the city at eleven p.m. to return to Washington. Anderson himself did not directly receive a copy of Lincoln’s resupply notice but soon learned of it.

  Beauregard immediately sent a telegram to Confederate War Secretary Walker in Montgomery to notify him of the visit. In a masterly bit of editorial compression, Beauregard distilled Lincoln’s message to its essence: “Authorized messenger from Lincoln just informed Governor Pickens and myself that provisions would be sent to Sumter peaceably, otherwise by force.”

  To which Walker immediately replied, “Under no circumstances are you to allow provisions to be sent to Fort Sumter.”

  * * *

  —

  At eight o’clock that night, after receiving Lincoln’s agents, Beauregard sent a brief, stern note to Major Anderson notifying him that all mail service to and from Sumter was now suspended. For unclear reasons, but possibly because high winds and rough water hampered delivery, Anderson did not personally receive this message until 2:15 the next afternoon.

  Alarmed, he wrote to the general asking him, ever so politely, to return all the fort’s outgoing mail, which he presumed to be sitting in the Charleston post office. There was valuable intelligence in those letters, Anderson knew, and one damning confession.

  Beauregard denied his request.

  Charleston and Montgomery

  Suspicion

  April 9

  At daybreak on Tuesday, April 9, Edmund Ruffin checked out of his hotel and walked to the Charleston wharf carrying a small carpet bag and a training musket that he had borrowed from the Citadel Military Academy. He boarded a steamer bound for Morris Island, where he planned to join in the island’s defense. He knew he would be recognized immediately: The old secessionist, armed and somewhat dangerous, had arrived.

  What he wanted was attention, and he got it. “My going on this occasion was made so much of, and I was accosted by so many individuals, mostly unknown to me, with words of high praise and compliment, that I felt ashamed of such exaggerated commendation for my very small effort or sacrifice.” In fact, for Ruffin this was a tonic. He was doubly heartened when he arrived at Morris Island. The captain of a rifle company cried out, “Three cheers for Mr. Ruffin.” A swarm of volunteer soldiers, all members of the Charleston aristocracy, gathered around him hurrahing wildly, “which I acknowledged,” he wrote, “by taking off my hat, and bowing in silence.”

  But his arrival was also greeted with a degree of private mirth. “Mr. Ruffin insisted that he should be an active member and take his share in every duty,” wrote one private, William Gourdin Young, thirty, a member of a prominent Charleston family. “It was arranged that he should do just enough to satisfy him that he was not neglected. The old man managed to keep up with the boys, had a good time, fared sumptuously every day, and set an example of moderation in partaking of the good things furnished by our families and friends, an example not always followed, but we were not a very bad lot.”

  Several officers invited Ruffin to join their artillery militias, but he did not want to be stationed at some remote battery where his musket would be useless, and where, he wrote, “I could see no more of the engagement outside, than if I was in a cellar in Charleston.”

  Eschewing the offer of a bed in an officer’s house, Ruffin made another showy gesture, opting to sleep on a pallet in a tent with other volunteers. He slept well and credited this to the cold air flowing into the tent through its open front entry.

  Ruffin did accept an offer to join the Palmetto Guard, a high honor. The Guard was the state’s premier militia company, staffed with the loftiest of Charleston’s gentry and bearing the name of the state’s revered emblem, the palmetto. “The Palmetto Guard,” he noted, “is composed of very select members—no one being admitted who is not perfectly respectable.”

  He wrote out a formal agreement governing his status. This, too, was mainly for show, to cement his reputation as a heroic figure. He specified that he was only offering to participate in “actual military operations,” ideally as an infantryman, but once the action ended his tenure as a volunteer would expire.