1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [103]
Even more surreal, though, was the sight of Charleston—an American city, where a few months earlier, the men had strolled with their wives and sweethearts along the Battery or picnicked on the beach at Sullivan’s Island—become enemy territory. Fort Moultrie, where some of the men had lived for years, was now a target of their guns.
As evening fell and the rebel gunfire gradually slackened, Sumter’s defenders faced new worries. Chester later wrote: “The fleet might send reinforcements; the enemy might attempt an assault. Both would come in boats; both would answer in English. It would be horrible to fire upon friends; it would be fatal not to fire upon enemies.” Meanwhile, Sumter’s supply of cartridges was running low. The men cut up extra clothing and bedsheets to sew into bags for the gunpowder, and Major Anderson contributed several dozen pairs of his socks.100
The rain, meanwhile, had become a full-blown storm. Amid the rumble of thunder and the occasional crash of enemy fire, the crews loaded their guns with grapeshot and canister, aimed them toward the most vulnerable points in the outer wall, and at last, after midnight, bedded down next to them as comfortably as they could. “The enemy kept up a slow but steady fire on us during the entire night, to prevent us from getting any rest,” Thompson recalled, “but they failed in their object for I for one slept all night as sound as I ever did in my life.”101
By daybreak the storm lifted, and the morning of April 13 shone bright and clear. No rebels had stormed the fort by night—but no help had come, either. Fox’s three ships lay outside the harbor, exactly where the men had last seen them.
Enemy fire rained down on Sumter more briskly than ever—and, thanks to the better weather, more accurately. As the soldiers struggled to work their guns, several were badly cut up by flying pieces of masonry; a shell bursting just outside one of the casemates sent metal fragments tearing into a man’s legs. Soon the defenders could see the enemy firing red-hot cannonballs, heated in furnaces ashore. The rebel gunners were now truly shooting to kill. A mortar round plowed through the roof of the half-ruined officers’ quarters, and the large building soon became a roaring tower of flame. The iron water tanks inside burst, and a scalding cloud of steam and smoke, acrid from the slow burning of damp pine floorboards and rafters, poured into the casemates as the artillerymen fell, blinded and choking, to the ground, masking their faces with wet handkerchiefs. Most of the garrison would have suffocated to death, Doubleday said later, had not the wind mercifully shifted and begun blowing the smoke in the opposite direction. But the men soon confronted an even more terrifying threat as the blaze that had begun in the officers’ quarters began closing in on the cannoneers’ gunpowder stores. The men heaved barrel after barrel out of the embrasures.102
Doubleday ordered his cannoneers to shoot off a few rounds, just to show the enemy “that we were not all dead yet.” But everyone knew that they could not keep even this going for much longer. Only the casemates’ fifteen-foot-thick walls sheltered the spent fighters from the inferno around them, and it was unclear how long even these could withstand the attack. “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