• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1838 0

than Moultrie’s. Its armaments included a fearsome array of heavy mortars and columbiads, the bulbous ten-ton cannons that could hurl a heavy projectile as far as three miles—though many of these guns still lay dismounted and inoperable beneath the unfinished gun platforms. Sumter’s location in the port’s tight entrance, with land close by in three directions, might make it vulnerable to shot and shell fired from batteries onshore: the fort’s builders, like Moultrie’s, had never anticipated the need to defend against an attack from “friendly” territory. But that position, however vulnerable, did command the shipping lane. Most critical of all, Fort Sumter lay barely a mile from Moultrie—just close enough that the garrison might, with a bit of luck, slip across under the secessionists’ noses.

The junior officers, Doubleday most of all, pleaded with their commander to make that move. Anderson dug his heels in and refused. The War Department had assigned him to Fort Moultrie, he said, and he would not budge without an official order to do so. The officers pointed out that if the Carolinians themselves occupied Sumter—which they might do at any moment without so much as firing a shot—its columbiads turned against Moultrie could pound the old fort’s walls into rubble. Still the major blandly demurred. His resistance seemed incredible. Any captain or lieutenant in the army was used to dealing with the stubbornness or even stupidity of his superiors, but Anderson’s position defied common sense, as well as basic principles of military science that he had taught at West Point. Worse yet, in the event of forced surrender, the power and prestige of the entire army—perhaps even the entire national government—might be sacrificed to a few thuggish traitors.

In bewilderment, the staff officers returned to overseeing the ceaseless—and, it seemed, pointless—work of digging sand away from the walls, building picket fences, and moving cannons from one place to another.23 Occasionally Captain Doubleday would relieve his frustration by loading a howitzer with double rounds of canister shot, pointing it out to sea, and blasting a furious volley against the insolent Southern waves. It was the only thing he could do.

Just before sundown on December 20, the rooftops and church steeples of Charleston lit up with flashes of red, as the reflected lights of bonfires and Roman candles flared amid the gathering darkness. From across the harbor, the soldiers at Moultrie could hear booming cannons and pealing bells. The city was celebrating. Delegates to the Convention of the People of South Carolina, meeting downtown in St. Andrew’s Hall, had voted unanimously that afternoon to approve a resolution: “The Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of the ‘United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”

Almost immediately afterward, the Convention took up another pressing matter: what should be done about “the property of the United States”—now considered a foreign nation—“in South Carolina.” This referred especially, everyone knew, to the three harbor forts.

One of Moultrie’s officers, Assistant Surgeon Samuel Wylie Crawford, was in the city on the historic day. He even made his way into the Convention itself, where he took note of a gavel on the Speaker’s desk with the word secession cut deep into it in black letters. In the streets he saw almost every hat sporting palmetto leaves or a blue secession cockade, and almost every shop and house flying a palmetto flag. There were also, as he would recall years later, “coarse representations on canvas” crudely allegorizing the politics of the moment: one portrayed the detestable old rail-splitter himself, Abraham Lincoln, wielding his axe ineffectually against a stout palmetto log, while another “showed the anticipated prosperity of Charleston, the wharves crowded with cotton bales and negroes.”24

Still, Crawford discovered, very few of the patricians who had led the charge toward secession actually wanted all-out war. Rabble-rousing newspaper editors, upcountry militiamen,