He and Ruffin and their fellow Guard members converged at the camp mess for breakfast. For the first time in forty hours, Parker sat at an actual table. He observed with satisfaction how readily they all had grown accustomed to being fired at with heavy guns. “Would our friends think we could so casually take our meal while amidst the cannon balls!”

  After breakfast Parker and the men around him began lighting cigars and settled back to smoke. This was interrupted when, at about nine a.m., a loud cheer rose from the direction of the beach. They ran toward it “pell mell,” Parker wrote, and found their fellow soldiers standing on every available promontory cheering wildly. The sound was deafening. “It goes on, from hill to hill till it reaches the farthest end of the Island.”

  Fort Sumter, they saw, was on fire.

  * * *

  —

  This fire persisted and intensified. A succession of mortar shells fell into and around the burning structure, as did salvos of incendiary cannonballs. Walls and woodwork caught fire. Captain Doubleday, like Foster, recognized that this fire now threatened the main powder magazine, which was embedded within the ground floor of the burning structure. Though the magazine was heavily shielded with masonry and a heavy copper door and thus largely bombproof and fireproof, the risk remained that an errant spark might penetrate the chamber through its ventilator and detonate powder stored inside, with catastrophic consequences.

  The men used axes to cut away walls, stairs, posts, and timbers to starve the fire of as much fuel as possible. Anderson decided the powder was still too vulnerable and ordered his men to move the barrels to the casemates at the opposite side of the parade. The task was hazardous beyond calculation. It required the men to open the magazine’s door and leave it open for prolonged periods, which left the powder within exposed. They rolled each barrel across the grounds, then covered them with water-soaked blankets. They did this as mortar shells and superheated cannonballs landed in and around the burning building. The Confederates fired at a faster rate, with the obvious intention of worsening the blaze. At this they succeeded.

  Sumter’s men managed to rescue ninety-six barrels of powder before the fire grew so intense and the shell bursts so frequent that the men had to suspend the work and close the copper door. Soon after this, a shot struck the door itself and damaged its lock, making the door impossible to open. By eleven a.m. about one-fifth of the fort was on fire, by Captain Doubleday’s estimate. Three iron cisterns full of water suspended over hallways were ruptured by shot and flooded the quarters below. This had the effect of briefly suppressing the fire, but the loss of so much water also hampered subsequent attempts to fight it. Smoke rose in a dense, black mass; the wind blew the smoke across the compound and forced it into the casemates where the men sheltered. “It seemed impossible to escape suffocation,” Doubleday wrote. “Some lay down close to the ground, with handkerchiefs over their mouths, and others posted themselves near the embrasures, where the smoke was somewhat lessened by the draught of air.”

  The smoke became so dense, so suffocating, that Doubleday climbed outside the fort through an embrasure and sat on the exterior esplanade, fully exposed to Confederate fire. The opposing gunners had little sympathy and now fired at Doubleday.

  The smoke and flames brought all firing by the Sumter garrison to an end. The cessation appeared to cause an outburst of jubilation among the Confederate forces, which irked Doubleday. “I thought it would be as well to show them that we were not all dead yet, and ordered the gunners to fire a few rounds more.”

  * * *

  —

  In Charleston, the chivalry and their wives gathered by the hundreds on the city’s Battery in the now fine weather to watch the destruction of the fort. Doubleday longed to fire a shell in their direction, but the only weapons at Sumter capable of reaching the city—the improvised mortars on the parade—were too exposed to be used safely amid the rain of shells being lobbed into the fort by Confederate mortars.

  “The scene at this time was really terrific,” Doubleday wrote. “The roaring and crackling of the flames, the dense masses of whirling smoke, the bursting of the enemy’s shells, and our own which were exploding in the burning rooms, the crashing of the shot, and the sound of masonry falling in every direction, made the fort a pandemonium.”

  A tower capped each of the five angles formed by the fort’s walls. One of these held a large store of shells that began to explode from the heat and fire. The tower shattered. The building that housed the officers quarters was a forest of charred timbers. The fire also destroyed the fort’s immense main gate, which had been made of wood studded with large iron nails. Behind this, Sumter’s engineers had built their backup wall with its “manhole” entry. Now this lay shattered as well.

  Had Beauregard decided to launch an infantry assault against Sumter at this moment, his men could simply have walked inside.

  * * *

  —

  On Morris Island, Ruffin had his breakfast—crackers and coffee from a tin cup—at one of the mortar batteries. Afterward, with no task assigned to him, he sat against the inside of a protective wall made of squared logs in front of a mortar, and there fell asleep. The gun crew at the mortar surely saw him there and knew who he was.

  Nonetheless, they fired it.

  The sound and shock wave jolted Ruffin awake. The roar was stupefying and deafening, all the more so because he was seated so near the mortar and more or less in front of it, though the muzzle was pointed skyward. “Thus placed, the sound and concussion were unusually powerful, and I was roused not only by the loud and close report, but by a great shock to my ears and sense of hearing,” he wrote. He feared the damage was permanent, but went on firing guns anyway, all day long. “It was after this,” he wrote, “that I fired off the greater number of the 27 discharges which, in all, I let off, of cannon and mortars, but took care not again to be in front of the mouths of the mortars when fired off.”

  Across the bay, the conflagration intensified. The smoke grew blacker, the flames higher. As Ruffin watched, he experienced a clash of emotions. “I looked on, with my feelings of joy and exultation at our new certain prospect of speedy success mixed with awe and horror at the danger of this terrible calamity, and pity for the men exposed to the consequences—and with high admiration for the indomitable spirit of the brave commander—who seemed determined to hold his position to the last extremity.”

  The Confederates may have appreciated Anderson’s gallantry, but this did not stop them from seeking to take utmost advantage of the moment. They continued to pour shell after shell into the western end of the fort to worsen the conflagration and keep Anderson’s men from putting it out. On Morris Island, the gunners in the Iron Battery filled its three giant columbiads exclusively with exploding shells and fired at will. The island’s three ten-inch mortars dropped shell after shell into the fort as its twin forty-two-pounders also blasted away. The only gun that did not fire was the new Blakely rifle, which had long before run out of what Ruffin called “its peculiar ammunition.”

  Now and then flames appeared above Sumter’s parapets; a geyser of white smoke suggested the fire had ignited a cache of gunpowder. At intervals small bright explosions burst from the smoke as well. “It was manifest that the flames, or heat, had reached a magazine of loaded shells and hand grenades,” Ruffin wrote.

  The fire gained ferocity as it moved eastward with the wind. “The only remaining buildings were consumed, and it seemed, to our outside view and inferences, that the whole area of the fort must have been so hot, and full of suffocating smoke, as to be intolerable to the garrison.”

  * * *

  —

  At 12:48 p.m. Saturday, the Confederate gunners at last succeeded in bringing down the fort’s flag. A ball or shell shattered its staff and the great flag collapsed into the smoke below. “Then arose the loudest and longest shout of joy—as if this downfall of the flag, with its cause, was the representation of our victory,” Edmund Ruffin wrote in his diary.

  The disappearance of the flag was not immediately apparent to all observers, however. Huge rollers of black smoke obscured the view.

  The Sumter Expedition

  Off the Charleston Bar on Saturday morning, April 13, Captain Fox and his crew of volunteers readied themselves for the foray they hoped to execute that night using their captured schooner. It remained windy, but the sun was bright, the sky mostly clear.

  By midmorning, heavy black smoke was rising from the harbor. Fox heard the firing abruptly intensify.

  The Pawnee’s Captain Rowan grew impatient. He proposed an immediate attack. Fox dissuaded him. Without the Powhatan, such a full-on charge would yield only disaster.

  And the Powhatan was nowhere in sight.

  Charleston

  Tea and Angst

  Saturday, April 13

  In Charleston on Saturday, anxiety made routine acts impossible to perform. The weather at least had improved. The heavy rain of the morning gave way to brilliant sun, which suffused the city and lit the face of the Mills House hotel and dropped long black bars of shadow across Meeting Street. The cannon fire and shell bursts from across the bay increased in frequency as if some new battle had begun. It had nothing to do with an attack by the Union fleet. The ships remained quiescent, swaying off the bar, their ineffectual colors rippling in the wind. Cowards, or so the spectators on rooftops deemed them—staying in place even though Fort Sumter, their treasured fort, was on fire.

  The night before there had been a period of jubilant relief when word arrived that no one in the Confederate batteries had been injured. “Nobody hurt after all,” Mary wrote. “How gay we were last night.” Beauregard’s guns also had come through unscathed. “Not even a battery the worse for wear,” Mary wrote. “So the aides—still with swords and red sashes by way of uniform—tell us.” James Chesnut had returned by now after helping deliver Beauregard’s ultimatum, with saber and sash intact—these, Mary confided, having been given to him by another lodger in their boarding house “who rummaged” them, Mary wrote, “from somewhere.”

  But Mary and the other wives at Mrs. Gidiere’s could not relax. Now it was Saturday, and heavy firing had resumed—the heaviest firing yet. Enslaved Blacks served breakfast in the dining room; the cheery scent of coffee and baked goods filtered through the halls. “But the sound of those guns makes regular meals impossible,” Mary wrote. “None of us go to table. But tea trays pervade the corridors, going everywhere.”

  The stress affected each of the women differently. “Some of the anxious hearts lie on their beds and moan in solitary misery,” Mary observed. “Mrs. Wigfall and I solace ourselves with tea in my room.”

  Many prayed. “These women have all a satisfying faith,” Mary wrote. “ ‘God is on our side,’ they cry.” But when Mary and Mrs. Wigfall were alone with their tea, they asked each other why God would be on their side. “We are told, ‘Of course He hates the Yankees.’ ”

  A friend of Mary’s, Louisa Hamilton—“Lou”—came to the boarding house, which had become, as Mary put it, “a sort of news center.” Louisa’s husband, Jack Randolph Hamilton, had designed the floating battery, and she could not stop talking about it. To divert her, Mary asked about her new son, of whom Louisa was equally proud, for her prior marriage had yielded no children. Mary asked if the boy could talk yet.

  “No—” Louisa said, “—not exactly.” But he did imitate one of the especially loud cannon, she said. “When he hears that, he claps his hands and cries ‘Boom boom.’ ”

  Mary marveled at the calm of the Black servants in the house. Some were employees hired out by their owners, each wearing the required badge. Other enslaved servants were brought along by the families lodged within. “Not by one word or look can we detect any change in the demeanor of these negro servants,” Mary wrote. “Laurence”—her husband’s enslaved valet—“sits at our door, as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly indifferent. So are they all. They carry it too far. You could not tell that they hear even the awful row that is going on in the bay, though it is dinning in their ears night and day. And people talk before them as if they were chairs and tables. And they make no sign. Are they solidly stupid or wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?”

  A tray of tea and toast arrived, Mary noted in her diary. “Also came Colonel Manning, A.D.C. [Aide de Camp]—red sash and sword—to announce that he has been under fire and didn’t mind.”

  In fact, Manning was quite proud of his performance and wanted to be sure that Mary, his flirtation, knew of it. “It is one of those things,” he told the women: “A fellow never knows how he will come out of it until he is tried.”

  Fort Sumter

  Doubleday’s Revenge

  Saturday, April 13

  The loss of Sumter’s flag was for Anderson and his men a heartbreaking and humiliating event. The flag was a tactile representation of nationhood. In merely firing on it, the Confederates who claimed so noisily to revere honor had engaged in a singularly dishonorable act. To bring it down by gunfire was heinous beyond measure.

  Sumter’s unofficial infantryman, Peter Hart, the New York City police officer who had accompanied Anderson’s wife on her surprise visit to the fort, set off through the smoke and fire and came back with a long spar to replace the shattered flagstaff. Hart also retrieved the flag and nailed it by its edge to the spar. He then fixed the spar to a gun carriage on the parapet level, all this while fully exposed to Confederate fire. Once again the wind caught the flag. It did not fly as high as it had, but it did fly, and in impossibly dramatic fashion. Its new height was not enough to overtop the smoke billowing from the fort, but at intervals wind gusts created temporary clearings that revealed the flag gamely flying amid striations of smoke. To the onlookers on Charleston’s Battery, the scene had a strange beauty: black smoke, white pillows of cloud, dazzling blue sea and sky, and over the water an indigo shadow cast by pulsing orbs of smoke backlit by the sun.

  For Captain Doubleday, gallantry was fine, but he wanted a more concrete form of redress. Before the bombardment began he had noticed through his spyglass that Moultrie House, the resort hotel on Sullivan’s Island up the beach from Fort Moultrie, was full of what appeared to be Confederate officers and troops using the hotel as a barracks. The hotel was an airy two-story structure with piazzas surrounding each level. Doubleday directed two of his gun crews to take aim at the second story, then ordered them to fire. Two forty-two-pound cannonballs sailed toward the hotel, their passage through the sky visible to a careful watcher.

  “The crashing of the shot, which went through the whole length of the building among the clapboards and interior partitions, must have been something fearful to those who were within,” wrote Doubleday with evident glee. “They came rushing out in furious haste, and tumbled over each other until they reached the bottom of the front steps, in one writhing, tumultuous mass.”

  The shots killed no one.

  * * *

  —

  The bright weather revealed with fresh clarity that the U.S. ships were still off the bar. None showed any sign of advancing. For the men at Sumter this was perplexing and frustrating. Perversely, it also angered many among the ranks of the Confederates, who could not understand why the fleet did not come to rescue Anderson and his garrison. This did not, however, cause their batteries to relent in their bombardment. Mortar rounds fell among Sumter’s barracks and officers quarters, where they started fresh fires.

  As the flames spread, the risk grew that even the barrels of powder rescued from the magazine would explode. Anderson ordered all but five thrown into the sea through the embrasures. He understood that this decision had broader consequences than simply helping preserve the safety of his garrison. The powder in the five remaining barrels would be consumed quickly, leaving the fort unable to fight. Without food and powder, they would need to surrender soon—unless the U.S. ships outside the bar managed to deliver the promised men and supplies.

  At Sumter the effort to fight the inferno and to jettison the endangered powder caused a reduction in the rate of fire from the fort’s guns, “a shot every two or three minutes to let them know we were not giving up yet,” wrote Private Thompson. Sumter became a cauldron of heat, smoke, and lacerating shrapnel. One soldier suffered a severe but not mortal injury, “a large piece of shell tearing some frightful flesh wounds in his legs,” Thompson wrote.

  The wind briefly opened a clearing in the casemate where Thompson was stationed. A group of gunners rushed toward him bearing muskets. Only the much-feared infantry assault could have made these men leave their posts. It took a moment or two for Thompson to grasp what was occurring.

  There was a man outside the fort, standing on the esplanade, waving a sword and white flag and asking to come inside.

  Fort Sumter

  Wigfall

  Saturday, April 13

  From Edmund Ruffin’s vantage point, the Sumter flag appeared to remain down. The officers at Moultrie could see its makeshift replacement; Ruffin and the lookouts on Morris Island could not.

  The apparent absence of the flag and the lack of return fire caused the commander on Morris Island, Brig. Gen. James Simons, to conclude that conditions within Sumter had become so grave that Anderson might be ready to surrender. He ordered his batteries to cease fire. He directed Texas fire-eater and former U.S. senator Col. Louis T. Wigfall to row out to Sumter “for the purpose of ascertaining from Major Anderson whether his intention was to surrender, his flag being down and his quarters in flames,” according to a later report by General Beauregard.