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By Root 1827 0

of the Civil War (New York, 1887), vol. 1, pp. 65–66; Abner Doubleday, Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–’61 (New York, 1876), pp. 141–42; E. Milby Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 1861–1865 (Columbia, S.C., 1970), pp. 42–43; Ron Chepesiuk, ed., “Eye Witness to Fort Sumter: The Letters of Private John Thompson,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 85, no. 4 (Oct. 1984). For the firing of 10-inch mortar shells: The Story of One Regiment: The Eleventh Maine Infantry Volunteers in The War of the Rebellion (New York, 1896), p. 155; also videos of historic artillery fire posted on YouTube.com by Springfield Arsenal, LLC.

2. OR I, vol. 1, p. 211; Samuel Wylie Crawford, The History of the Fall of Fort Sumter, and the Genesis of the Civil War (New York, 1887), pp. 398–99.

3. SWC to A. J. Crawford, Jan. 17, 1861, Samuel Wylie Crawford Papers, LC.

4. Eba Anderson Lawton, Major Robert Anderson and Fort Sumter, 1861 (New York, 1911), p. 9.

5. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 128–29.

6. OR I, vol. 1, pp. 197–202; W. A. Swanberg, First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter (New York, 1957), p. 214; SWC Diary, Feb. 28, 1861, SWC Papers.

7. OR I, vol. 1, pp. 198–200.

8. Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 375–76; Thomas Barthel, Abner Doubleday: A Civil War Biography (Jefferson, N.C., 2010), p. 65; SWC Diary, Apr. 3, 1861, SWC Papers.

9. Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States During the Great Rebellion (Washington, D.C., 1882), pp. 27–28; Bruce Catton, The Coming Fury (New York, 1961), pp. 226–29; Caroline Baldwin Darrow, “Recollections of the Twiggs Surrender,” in BLCW, vol. 1, pp. 33–35; OR I, vol. 1, p. 191.

10. Crawford, History of the Fall, pp. 290–91; David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York, 2001), pp. 206–07. While a young officer during the Mexican War, Beauregard had famously persuaded the senior generals to change their plans for capturing the citadel of Chapultepec, the climactic action of the war.

11. SWC Diary, Mar. 7, 1861, SWC Papers.

12. Detzer, Allegiance, p. 208; Swanberg, First Blood, p. 251; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 131; SWC Diary, Feb. 10, 1861; Anderson to Miss HL, Mar. 28, 1861, copy in SWC Papers.

13. Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 99; Swanberg, First Blood, pp. 139–40; Albany Journal, Apr. 20, 1861.

14. The men did receive many letters from acquaintances and total strangers telling them what ought to be done. A long-lost boyhood friend wrote to Samuel Crawford in early April, expressing himself with a crude play on words: “For Heaven’s sake don’t evacuate! For my sake, for your Country’s sake, don’t evacuate!… The word evacuation should never be mentioned except in connection with the intestinal canal.” (J. B. Dillingham to SWC, April 10, 1861, in SWC Papers.)

15. Doubleday, Reminiscences, pp. 34, 133; Crawford, History of the Fall, p. 295; Doubleday to Mary Doubleday, Mar. 29, 1861 (fragment), in Abraham Lincoln Papers, LC; Barthel, Abner Doubleday, p. 66; SWC Diary, Mar. 1, 1861, SWC Papers.

16. Crawford, History of the Fall, p. 297; Chester, “Inside Sumter in ’61,” pp. 53–55; Doubleday, Reminiscences, p. 122; SWC Diary, Mar. 9, 1861, SWC Papers; OR I, vol. 1, p. 273.

17. Barthel, Abner Doubleday, p. 64; SWC Diary, Feb. 28, 1861, SWC Papers; OR I, vol. 1, pp. 219–21. The previous summer, Sumter had been used as a temporary detention camp for hundreds of Africans captured by a naval patrol aboard an illegal slave ship.

18. See Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of the American Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898 (New York, 1986), esp. chap. 2; also John C. Waugh, Class of 1846: From West Point to Appomattox: Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan, and Their Brothers (New York, 1994); Detzer, Allegiance, p. 21.

19. DAB; Abner Doubleday to Ralph Walso Emerson, Aug. 16, 1845, Ralph Waldo Emerson Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

20. For these and many of Doubleday’s other after-dinner tales, see Joseph E. Chance, ed., My Life in the Old Army: The Reminiscences of Abner Doubleday from the Collections