1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [105]
At last someone called for Major Anderson, who tried to mask his own surprise as he stepped into the casemate and saw the stranger. “To what am I indebted for this visit?” he asked dryly.
“I am Colonel Wigfall, of General Beauregard’s staff,” the ex-senator rasped in as official a voice as he could muster. “For God’s sake, Major, let this thing stop. There has been enough bloodshed already.” He had come, he said, to offer terms of surrender. Under the present circumstances, in fact, the shell-shocked envoy appeared ready to accept any terms whatsoever that would make the shooting go away.
But Wigfall’s little speech, plain enough on its face, was a bit specious at best. For one thing, the “bloodshed” so far consisted of a single Confederate horse. More important, although implying that he came on Beauregard’s authority, Wigfall had not even seen the Confederate commander in several days, much less received any instructions from him. The men at Sumter could not have known this, of course.
Anderson pointed out that there had been no bloodshed, at least on his own side—“and besides, your batteries are still firing at me.”
“I’ll soon stop that,” Wigfall replied briskly. He turned to Thompson, who held the sword and handkerchief under one arm, pointed to the embrasure, and told the astonished private, “Wave that out there.”
“Wave it yourself,” Thompson retorted in his thick brogue, handing the Confederate his sword back.
Wigfall leapt boldly into the opening, somehow believing that the gunners half a mile away would glimpse his handkerchief through the smoke and recognize it as a flag of truce. Presently a shot from Moultrie slammed into the nearby wall, disabusing him swiftly of this notion.
“If you desire that to be seen,” Anderson said gently, “you had better send it to the parapet.”
Several minutes later, Charlestonians on their distant rooftops spotted something waving on a pole above Sumter’s bomb-scarred ramparts, alongside the Stars and Stripes. This was not Senator Wigfall’s handkerchief but a full-size white flag. It signaled a cease-fire while Major Anderson negotiated—“or rather dictated,” as Thompson later said—his terms of surrender.108
“NOTHING OF MILITARY IMPORTANCE has reached me today,” scribbled Winfield Scott in a note to the president that evening, more or less precisely as Fort Sumter was falling into Confederate hands. “Except,” the general added, “thro’ the newspaper.”109
If General Scott had been known for his drolleries, this might have come off as a rather clever one. (He was not, so it didn’t.) For in fact, the headlines of every single paper throughout the Union blazed with the most astonishing military news since Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown. Editors dug deep in their bins of lead type for the largest fonts available, nor did they stint on exclamation points. The Milwaukee Sentinel’s front page was typical: “Hostilities Commenced! FORT SUMTER BOMBARDED! The Rebels Strike the First Blow! MOULTRIE OPENS ON MAJ. ANDERSON! SEVEN OF THEIR BATTERIES FOLLOW! Prompt Response from Sumter!” (And so on, through nine more lines of boldface and italic type and another five exclamation points.)110
It had taken almost an entire day for most Americans to learn about the first shots at Sumter, since telegraphic communication between North and South had been erratic since secession. On the night of Friday the 12th, Walt Whitman went to the opera in New York. The Fourteenth Street Academy of Music was presenting Verdi’s latest, Un ballo in maschera, which had been censored in Europe for its undertones of liberal nationalism but was now touring the United States to great acclaim. After the show, the poet was strolling back toward Brooklyn when he heard the shrill cries of newsboys ahead—a rare sound