1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [110]
A few abolitionists, too, could not bring themselves to join in the war fever. The farthest that Lydia Maria Child could go was to hope that someday the Stars and Stripes might be worthy of the adoration it was receiving. “Meanwhile,” she wrote to a friend, “I wait to see how the United States will deport itself. When it treats the colored people with justice and humanity, I will mount its flag in my great elm-tree, and I will thank you to present me with a flag for a breast-pin; but until then, I would as soon wear the rattlesnake upon my bosom as the eagle.”126
Child was not the only one to speculate on what war might mean for the slaves. On the morning he heard about Sumter’s fall, William Russell, the London Times’ urbane correspondent, was already in Baltimore on his way to catch a steamer bound for Charleston. Stopping for a quick shave, he asked the black barber what he made of the news. “Well, sare,” the man replied, “ ’spose colored men will be as good as white men.”127
Russell later offered this tidbit to his readers in a tone of mildly sympathetic amusement. The poor deluded Negro!
SHORTLY AFTER ANDERSON’S SURRENDER to the intrepid Wigfall, General Beauregard’s authorized aides arrived at the fort. In the end, they decided to honor the agreement that the major and the ex-senator had reached. Only Doubleday seemed irked that the battle was over: he continued to believe that it might have ended differently if his commander had worried less about avoiding bloodshed and more about defeating the enemy, maybe by trying to shell Charleston itself. Anderson, for his part, was quick to assure the Confederate envoys that he had always aimed his cannons at fortifications rather than at men, and when told that none of the secessionists had been wounded by Sumter’s fire, he lifted up his hands and exclaimed, “Thank God for that!” (Doubleday listened, fuming: “As the object of our fighting was to do as much damage as possible, I could see no propriety in thanking Heaven for the small amount of injury we had inflicted.”)128
The only term of surrender at which the Confederates initially balked was Anderson’s request to salute his flag a final time before lowering it. But in the end they allowed him to do so.
On Sunday afternoon—a day of splendid sunshine—the tattered national ensign rose again on its repaired flagpole and unfurled into a strong breeze. Anderson was determined to honor it with no fewer than a hundred cannon blasts. This was not to be. His salute, like the Union, was cloven in half. With the fiftieth shot came disaster and a terrible omen: a gun crew, exhausted by the recent ordeal, reloaded its weapon too hastily, neglecting to cool the muzzle with a thorough sponging before ramming in the powder. In the ensuing explosion, one soldier—a young Irish immigrant named Daniel Hough, well liked among the men of the garrison—was killed almost instantly, his body torn apart. Several others were badly wounded.
But there was no time to mourn the dead or care for the injured. Daniel Hough’s remains were left behind to be buried by the enemy, as so many other men’s would be in the years ahead. Still in shock, his comrades formed ranks behind Captain Doubleday and marched through Sumter’s main gate toward a waiting transport. Behind them they could hear wild cheering as the Stars and Stripes came down and a Confederate banner went up.
Early the next day—Monday, April 15—the U.S. steamer Baltic, with Major Anderson and all his men aboard, cleared the bar of Charleston Harbor and set out into open water.129
CHAPTER FIVE
The Volunteer
Senior wisdom suits not now,
The light is on the youthful brow.
—HERMAN MELVILLE,
“The Conflict of Convictions” (1860–61)