1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [3]
Charleston was filling up with militiamen who drilled under the state flag—a white banner with a palmetto tree and single red star—and spoke openly of hauling down the Stars and Stripes, which flew above the harbor fortifications.11 On December 1, a rumor reached the garrison that South Carolina was about to place artillery just across Sullivan’s Island, pointing directly at Moultrie.12
In letters and telegrams to their superiors back at the War Department, Anderson and his staff described their increasingly desperate situation in the tones of cool appraisal befitting seasoned officers. If they were to hold on to Charleston Harbor, additional troops, ammunition, and supplies were needed immediately. Fort Moultrie must be reinforced, and the two other federal strongholds in the harbor—Fort Sumter and Castle Pinckney—garrisoned with soldiers loyal to the United States. The sand hills looming just yards from Moultrie’s walls must be leveled, or they could quickly become nests of sharpshooters who could pick off the men inside, one by one, in a matter of hours.13
Replies from Washington were dilatory, vague, and ambivalent. More troops would be sent—at some point. The garrison’s officers must prepare to defend Moultrie as best they could—but not touch the sand hills, which were believed to be private property. (They weren’t, in fact.) Above all, they must not do anything that the hot-tempered South Carolinians might find provocative—a category that seemed to include almost any action whatsoever that the little band of men might take.14
The U.S. forts in Charleston Harbor were ground zero in the exploding secession crisis, yet no one at the War Department seemed to be taking their defense seriously. In fact, the garrison’s only direct communication from the secretary of war lately had been a one-sentence telegram ordering them to return a few dozen muskets that Seymour had managed to extract from the federal arsenal in Charleston.15
Curiously enough, the only measure that the War Department fully supported was an all-out effort to buttress the fortifications themselves. Nearly a quarter of a million dollars was allocated to the building project, and throughout the autumn more than a hundred laborers, many of them Irish and German immigrants brought down from Baltimore, toiled busily at Sumter, rapidly completing the officers’ quarters, raising the height of the walls, and readying the upper tiers of the fort to support cannons. Back at Moultrie, an even larger group dug ditches, built makeshift gun platforms, and cleared sand from the outer walls—discovering, in the process, quite a few cannonballs that had been casually mislaid over the years. Anderson sent a third detachment of the civilian workers over to Castle Pinckney to commence repairs, on the assumption that Washington would soon send enough troops to man all three forts.16 This construction further infuriated many Charlestonians, who assumed that the Yankees were preparing to bombard their city. Bands of secessionists now patrolled day and night outside Moultrie, itching for any pretext to commence hostilities. The little garrison was stretched so thin that officers’ wives were taking shifts on guard duty.17 And still no reinforcements came.
What Anderson and his men didn’t realize is that the secretary of war was playing