At six-thirty, Major Anderson at last gave the order to fire. Doubleday pulled the lanyard to discharge Sumter’s first shot. It struck the Iron Battery on Cummings Point but bounced off its sloped roof and caused no damage. Ball after ball did likewise, though one appeared to disable an iron shutter that shielded the battery’s embrasure between firings, thereby putting the gun behind it out of action.

  More of Sumter’s guns fired and added fresh bursts of smoke and muzzle flare to the ambient cacophony. “It would be useless for me to attempt to describe the scene for the next four hours,” wrote Private Thompson. “If viewed from a distance it must have been grand.”

  * * *

  —

  The Confederate guns fired briskly. “Showers of balls from ten-inch Columbiads and forty-two-pounders, and shells from thirteen-inch mortars poured into the fort in one incessant stream, causing great flakes of masonry to fall in all directions,” Doubleday wrote. Mortar rounds became embedded in the soft ground of the parade. When these exploded, Doubleday wrote, the blasts “shook the fort like an earthquake.”

  The Confederate gunners seemed particularly intent on bringing down Sumter’s American flag, the Stars and Stripes. Shot after shot rocketed past the flagstaff and landed in the water beyond the fort. On three occasions shells set fire to the officers quarters, but these fires were quickly extinguished. Fire was the great danger, given the three hundred barrels of powder—over thirty thousand pounds—stored in the fort’s main magazine. All day the wind blew at gale force and rain fell heavily as cannonballs hissed overhead and shells exploded seemingly everywhere, launching squalls of iron shrapnel.

  The men at the embrasures were trained to step to the side whenever they saw the burst of smoke and flame that indicated that a Confederate gun across the channel had fired, just in case the ball or shell happened to pass through the opening. Now and then a cannonball clipped the edge of an embrasure and sent a swarm of brick shards into the casemate chamber. Doubleday’s men worked the guns for three hours, which, given the labor involved in preparing and loading them between firings, brought the men to the point of exhaustion. A fresh squad arrived, led by Capt. Truman Seymour, who was known to have a sense of humor.

  “Doubleday,” he said, “what in the world is the matter here, and what is all the uproar about?”

  “There is a trifling difference of opinion between us and our neighbors opposite,” Doubleday said, “and we are trying to settle it.”

  “Very well, do you wish me to take a hand?”

  “Yes,” Doubleday said, “I would like to have you go in.”

  The firing resumed.

  * * *

  —

  On Morris Island, at the Iron Battery, Confederate gunners likewise watched for the muzzle flare of Sumter’s guns. The transit of a ball or shell would take four to six seconds. Lookouts watched for the flare and called out a warning with each discharge. They were able to see the balls and shells as they moved through the air. The lookouts’ warnings gave Ruffin and the men at his battery time to duck behind a thick berm of sand or a reinforced bulwark.

  Ruffin saw a number of men, eight or ten, running “at their utmost speed” away from the beach and at first thought they were running because they were terrified. In fact, they were gleefully chasing the balls that had missed their mark and now were rolling across the terrain. The men were hoping “to secure them as memorials or trophies,” Ruffin realized. This was a dangerous pastime, given that a rolling cannonball could easily break an arm or a leg. “This hunt was eagerly pursued by the men throughout the siege, whenever a ball from the fort stopped near enough to be noticed and recovered.”

  After firing his gun, Ruffin became one of the lookouts. He warned of approaching shells, but mainly monitored the accuracy of his own battery’s fire and called out directions to improve it. Soon other soldiers not engaged in firing guns joined him on the battery’s makeshift parapet “to indulge their curiosity,” Ruffin wrote.

  Meanwhile Confederate balls and explosive shells ripped into Sumter’s walls. The men watching from Morris Island critiqued each shot, as recorded by Asst. Surgeon Parker: “Cries of that’s a good one, hurrah for that one—bad—poor—try it again.”

  This drew the attention of the battery’s commander, Col. Wilmot G. De Saussure, a prominent planter and slaveholder, who ordered Ruffin and his fellow onlookers to get off the parapet, “lest we should attract the notice and fire of Major Anderson,” Ruffin wrote. The colonel replaced him with a private named Henry Buist, himself a member of Charleston’s chivalry. Disappointed and a little hurt, Ruffin found other locations from which to observe the action.

  He was by now drenched. He had not bathed for days; his white hair clung to his scalp and hung over his shoulders in wet daggers. Out of sympathy or pity, Ruffin was invited by various gun crews to fire their cannon, and so the old secessionist, musket in hand, made his way from gun to gun, drawing cheers as cannon boomed and smoke billowed and projectiles of all configurations flew toward Sumter at seventeen hundred feet per second. He was a popular cannoneer; in all he fired guns twenty-seven times.

  Despite the rain and cold, the atmosphere on Morris Island was festive and lighthearted. The men at the Confederate batteries cheered each time Fort Sumter fired a shot, to honor the gallant Major Anderson, whose performance thus far was deemed very much in accord with the chivalry’s code of honor. For the moment, at least, this was not war but rather an elaborate if perilous form of sport.

  The Sumter Expedition

  At seven a.m. on Friday, a second warship arrived off Charleston, the Pawnee, which anchored near the Harriet Lane and Captain Fox’s ship, the Baltic. Although there was still no sign of the tugboats, or of either the Powhatan or the fourth warship, the Pocahontas, with their soldiers and heavy guns, Captain Fox resolved to attempt the first phase of his mission, the peaceful delivery of provisions to Fort Sumter.

  His ship raised steam and, accompanied by the Pawnee and Harriet Lane, sailed toward Charleston. They saw distant smoke and soon heard the faint booming of cannon. “Nearing the bar,” Fox wrote, “it was observed that war had commenced, and, therefore, the peaceful offer of provisions was void.”

  His orders called for him now to force his way into the harbor. He had hoped to enter that night with his full complement of ships and, masked by darkness, get as close as possible to Sumter to launch boats full of men and supplies. But now, with an intense bombardment clearly underway, this did not seem possible. With so many Confederate guns around the harbor, advancing without a full armed escort would be foolhardy. His own ship, the Baltic, a commandeered passenger vessel, had no armor or guns whatsoever. “The heavy sea, and not having the sailors (three hundred) asked for, rendered any attempt from the Baltic absurd,” Fox wrote.

  The ships waited.

  Charleston Harbor

  The Great Darkness

  Friday, April 12

  At midday Friday, Sumter’s Private Thompson saw that a third large steamship had joined the two that had lain off the bar since dawn. “We were certain they were an expedition fitted out to relieve us, and the hopes of speedily getting assistance compensated for the lack of anything in the shape of dinner.”

  The ships remained in place. This did not surprise Thompson. He expected they would wait until nightfall, and then, “it being as dark as pitch and raining,” they would come.

  * * *

  —

  Confederate lookouts spotted the ships as well and alerted their superiors. They counted three large steam vessels and were able to identify them. Two were warships, the Pawnee and Harriet Lane. The third was the Baltic. One of the ships appeared to be carrying row boats large enough to land troops.

  Using a field glass, Ruffin surveyed the damage done thus far to Fort Sumter. Two or three guns on its topmost level were disabled, knocked from their carriages. Half a dozen chimneys on structures within the fort had been destroyed. There was no way to tell what kind of harm the projectiles had done within the fort itself, but myriad holes and gouges in the outside walls bore evidence of accurate fire from the Confederate side. Still, no clear breach of the walls had been achieved.

  The Sumter guns fired back only with hardshot, and at long intervals. Most of these missed the Morris Island emplacements and fell into the marsh beyond, though Ruffin estimated that nine or ten balls had struck his Iron Battery and been deflected harmlessly away by its angled iron roof. The men at the Confederate batteries continued to cheer each new shot fired from Sumter.

  * * *

  —

  To everyone’s surprise, the federal warships stayed where they were, now and then prompting disdainful jeers from the Confederate gunners, who attributed the fleet’s restraint to cowardice. Nightfall, however, brought renewed anxiety. It seemed highly likely that once the bay was fully enveloped in darkness, the warships would launch a flotilla of boats filled with soldiers and provisions.

  The wind and rain persisted; shortly after nightfall a pounding rain hammered the Confederate emplacements for half an hour. The firing from Sumter ceased; the Confederate batteries fired mortar rounds through the night, but at twenty-minute intervals to discomfit Anderson’s men and interrupt their sleep. “After dark,” Ruffin wrote, “I went out of our tent to observe the appearance of the shells, in their luminous course, as seen in the night. A line of light shows along the whole curve of the course, preceded by the brilliant explosion of the discharge of the shell from the mortar, and another made by the final bursting of the shell.”

  The tide reached its peak, but still the federal fleet remained off the bar. The men on Morris Island found it disgraceful that the ships were not now racing to rescue the courageous Major Anderson. “Tide going down,” Asst. Surgeon Parker noted; “no signs of fleet, miserable cowards…the execrations of our men are loud against them.” Parker took note of the weather: “Night black and stormy, rain is falling with lightning and thunder.”

  At seven p.m. Ruffin returned to his tent to try to sleep, but could not, and went outside again hoping to catch a glimpse of the federal ships in the quicksilver glare cast by periodic emanations of sheet lightning.

  At about twelve-thirty a.m., having returned to his tent and finally fallen asleep, he was jarred awake by the sound of small arms fire and shore cannon. “I hastily struck a light,” he wrote. He threw on his clothes, grabbed his musket, and stepped outside, “thinking that the enemy from the ships had certainly landed, or were trying in the great darkness to pass in boats up the channel.”

  As Ruffin approached the beach, a shell hissed into the sky, fired with the apparent goal of providing a burst of illumination over the bay.

  Down the beach from him, out of his visual range, a boat had in fact landed.

  * * *

  —

  The sound of musket fire pocked the darkness; one of the channel guns fired. A small boat with two men went aground on the beach. Confederate soldiers raced to seize it but then hurriedly stepped away as a cry rose behind them: “Clear the beach, we fire.”

  A howitzer boomed. In the next instant, grapeshot meant to be used at close range against advancing infantry peppered the boat and the water around it. By now Asst. Surgeon Parker was on the scene and saw the two occupants of the boat throw themselves into its bottom. “Friends!” the men shouted. “Southern Confederacy, don’t shoot for God’s sake!”

  The boat began to drift down the beach, pushed along by the surf. Soldiers followed and fired their muskets.

  “Don’t shoot,” the men in the boat cried. “We are friends.”

  As the waves pushed the boat back to shore, soldiers again rushed it and seized the two men. They proved to be drunk and lost, surgeon Parker wrote. They had rowed over earlier in the day to ferry two Palmetto guardsmen to Cummings Point and had decided to put ashore for the night. In the storm-wracked darkness, the little boat had caught the Confederate soldiers by surprise, despite sentries stationed on the beach and gunners watching from the channel batteries. As a precaution against another such surprise, two companies of infantry now quickly converged on the point through the wind and drenching rain. Once the confusion subsided and the identity of the two boatmen was made clear, most of the soldiers turned in for the night inside armored shelters known as “rat holes.” But Ruffin returned to his tent, wholly exposed to weather and gunfire, “and,” as he proudly noted in his diary, “was the only lodger therein for that night.”

  Sumter’s guns remained quiet; the fort had stopped firing an hour before nightfall. The Confederate batteries kept up their dirge-like barrage, launching one mortar shell every twenty minutes, a reminder that more would come at dawn.

  * * *

  —

  In this relative lull, Sumter’s chief engineer, Captain Foster, went outside onto the esplanade that surrounded the fort to inspect the walls for damage. He found none that concerned him, only myriad scars that marked where balls had struck the brick face and become embedded there or bounced off.

  A detail of men continued to sew cartridge bags into the night by the scant glow of candles. As before, they cut up extra clothing, but now they also used surplus hospital bed linen and whatever coarse paper they could find. It was slow going: They had six needles. At midnight Anderson ordered them to stop.

  The tide was up, the night black, but still the federal ships did not advance. Now that a battle had actually begun and the fear of starting one was moot, the men at Sumter earnestly hoped to receive the reinforcements those ships seemed likely to offer. It was a matter of pride and honor; also, they were starving, down to a half ration of rice and coffee. They were surrounded by heavy artillery and vastly outnumbered, and Union warships had come to rescue them. So why did they not get on with it?

  Periodic spasms of lightning revealed that the ships had not moved from their positions outside the bar. Explosive shells from the Confederate guns continued to land in and around the fort throughout the night, but at a slower pace. Between these orange eruptions and the intermittent waxy glow of lightning, the swirl of wind and the silvery curtains of rain, the parade ground could have been a set for Faust, the popular Gounod opera that had debuted two years earlier in Paris.

  Exhausted by labor and stress, Anderson’s men went to bed in the casemates while sentries stood watch, listening hard for the sound of oars and the rhythmic splash of approaching steamers. “The enemy kept up a slow but steady fire on us during the entire night, to prevent our getting any rest,” wrote Private Thompson. “I for one slept all night as sound as ever I did in my life.”

  The Sumter Expedition

  Captain Fox felt helpless. He again considered trying to fight his way in but believed that without the Powhatan and its guns and its hundreds of soldiers, the attempt would be folly, especially in such rough seas. Fox still expected the ship to arrive, but in the meantime he hoped to supply Major Anderson with at least a few days’ worth of food, thanks to the improvisational thinking of one of his officers.

  The Pawnee’s captain, Stephen C. Rowan, seized a private schooner waiting off the bar and presented the vessel to Captain Fox with the idea of using it to ferry at least some provisions and a few men to Sumter while the fleet awaited the arrival of the Powhatan. Fox had no problem collecting volunteers and soon raised a full crew of officers, soldiers, and sailors ready to man the schooner. Despite the wind and rolling seas, they were able to fill it with guns and food. They planned to cross the bar late the following night, Saturday, April 13.

  Their prospects were good: A small vessel sailing in absolute night had a solid chance of making it to Sumter’s wharf without detection, and even if spotted, its modest size and the darkness would make it next to impossible to hit with a cannon from shore.

  Charleston Harbor

  The Worst Fear

  Saturday, April 13

  Saturday morning the aim of the Confederate gunners seemed to improve, according to Sumter’s chief engineer, Captain Foster, who noted the change in his engineering journal. In a telling shift in rhetoric, Foster referred to Sumter’s opponents as “the enemy.” The pace of their fire increased. One shot struck the rim of one of Sumter’s ground-level embrasures and sent a cascade of masonry fragments into the casemate, along with the spent ball. The fragments injured four men, none seriously. An explosive shell landed inside the fort and detonated near the casemates, wounding a laborer. It became apparent that the Confederate batteries had begun firing “hot shot,” cannonballs heated in furnaces. One or two balls came to rest inside the fort, where one of them set a man’s bed on fire.

  At about nine o’clock, a shell from a mortar burst through the roof of the officers quarters. Heavy smoke rose from within. The location of the fire was too exposed to allow men to effectively fight it, Foster realized. He alerted Anderson that if the fire continued to burn out of control, it could detonate the fort’s cache of gunpowder, the thirty thousand pounds stored in barrels in Sumter’s main magazine.

  * * *

  —

  Across the channel, on Morris Island, Confederate Asst. Surgeon Parker reveled in the beauty of the morning. “The sun has risen, the lingering clouds are flying across the heavens,” he wrote; “everything looks bright and cheerful, our men are in fine spirits and the firing is steady, continuous and determined. Sumter shows no signs of yielding.”

  When the fort resumed firing, it seemed to Parker to focus its attentions solely on Fort Moultrie and the floating battery. This made Parker sad. There was no heroism in sitting around watching other soldiers engage in battle. “She seems to have forgotten Cummings Point and Morris Island batteries entirely,” Parker wrote.