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By Root 1774 0

through for Sumter’s defenders to return fire. To Doubleday fell the honor, if honor it was, of firing the Union’s first shot. After breakfast, Anderson had divided the soldiers into three combat details, whereupon Doubleday marched his squad promptly to the cannons that pointed toward the Iron Battery at Cummings Point, whose heavy columbiad guns had been pelting Sumter steadily with solid shot for three hours. Now the captain would try to lob a thirty-two-pound ball inside one of its narrow embrasures. “In aiming the first gun fired against the rebellion I had no feeling of self-reproach,” he later recalled, “for I fully believed that the contest was inevitable, and was not of our seeking. The United States was called upon not only to defend its sovereignty, but its right to exist as a nation. The only alternative was to submit to a powerful oligarchy who were determined to make freedom forever subordinate to slavery. To me it was simply a contest, politically speaking, as to whether virtue or vice should rule.”86

Perhaps the captain should have been less mindful of these political reflections, apropos as they were, and more attentive to his aim: his cannonball missed its mark by just a few yards, bounced harmlessly off the Iron Battery’s slanting roof, and landed with a splash in the nearby swamp. For the next two hours Doubleday’s men kept up a slow but steady fire, while from the other side of the fort—where the surgeon Crawford, having successfully pestered Anderson to let him join the fray, was commanding one of the gunnery details—they could hear round after round launched in the direction of rebel-held Fort Moultrie.87

Sumter was now clenched within a ring of fire and smoke. From all sides, metal tore through the sky. Solid iron balls smashed against masonry; huge mortar shells buried themselves in the earthen parade ground and then exploded, the entire fort shuddering deep within itself like some wounded beast struggling to keep its footing. Men at their posts reeled as streams of dust and debris poured down onto their heads. Most terrifying of all were the wickedly pointed projectiles that occasionally came hurtling toward them, as straight and accurate as the shots of a dueling pistol, from the direction of Cummings Point, apparently discharged by some diabolical weapon none of the enlisted men had seen before. (This was a rifled cannon known as a Blakely gun, recently developed in England, that had arrived direct from London just three days earlier, a gift from some South Carolina expatriates there.) Its shots tore into the vulnerable gorge wall or sometimes, with ruthless accuracy, pierced the gun embrasures, the narrow openings through which the Union artillerymen fired.88

PRIVATE THOMPSON WAS HELPING man one of Sumter’s cannons from behind one embrasure, inside a narrow brick box known as a casemate. Like almost all the enlisted men, he had never been on the receiving end of an artillery barrage. Thompson was an Irishman, and he would vividly describe the battle later in a letter to his father back in the old country. “The hissing shot came plowing along leaving wreck and ruin in their path,” he said. Soon the cannoneers were black with smoke and soot, and several men’s faces, cut by broken chunks of masonry knocked loose from the casemate walls, were covered with blood.

In contrast to the garrison’s officers, almost nothing is known of its ordinary soldiers. Only a few of their letters survive, and even those may well have been written on their behalf by more literate superiors.89 A recent immigrant who listed his civilian occupation as “laborer,” John Thompson, was not atypical. As many as two-thirds of the men in the U.S. army in the 1850s were foreigners, mostly German and Irish. Officers often complained of soldiers who could not understand commands in English, and a significant share of recruits were unable to sign their own names to the enlistment form, let alone pen a letter. Sumter’s garrison was even more heavily foreign-born than average: of the seventy-three enlisted men whose birthplaces