1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [6]
Yet it was also obvious to Crawford that Charlestonians were doing a collective war dance. The city’s streets were filled with men in militia uniforms, from young recruits performing their first musket drills to old colonels, buttoned laboriously into epauletted tunics they had last worn twenty years before. “Military organizations marched in every direction, the music of their bands lost amid the shouts of the people,” Crawford later wrote.25 There could not have been a greater contrast with the lassitude and bureaucratic foot-dragging of the “loyal” commanders back in Washington.
Across the water on Sullivan’s Island, the noose seemed to be drawing tighter. Word came that the harbor pilots of Charleston were all made to swear an oath that they would not bring any U.S. government vessel into port, lest it be carrying reinforcements. Steamers manned by secessionist militia—each with more men aboard than were in the entire federal garrison—patrolled the harbor every night, their dark silhouettes visible from the parapets of Moultrie.
For each of the fort’s officers, these days of anxiety and frustration were also tinged with melancholy. Trained to defend their nation against its foreign enemies, they now faced siege and possible attack by their own countrymen. Whatever might be the outcome of the present crisis, the nation they had grown up in already seemed irretrievably lost. Not long after the secession vote, an elderly South Carolina statesman, Judge James L. Petigru (born days after George Washington’s inauguration), came across the harbor to bid a sad farewell to the garrison, and, by proxy, to the United States of America. Doubleday went down to the wharf to greet the old man. “The tears rolled down his cheeks,” the Yankee captain later recalled, “as he deplored the folly and the madness of the times.”26*
And all the while, just across the water—so close that you could almost touch it—loomed the commanding citadel of Sumter, seeming to represent all that Doubleday and his comrades longed for: Safety. Honor. Perhaps even, in the end, victory. The junior officers redoubled their pleas. Their commander, as ever, refused to budge.
What the junior officers didn’t know is that beneath his inscrutable gray exterior, the major was as frustrated as any of his men. Since the third day after his arrival, Anderson had been barraging Washington with ever-more-urgent letters and telegrams, pleading with his superiors for orders to make just such a move. It was as obvious to him as to anyone that an attack on Moultrie could end only in a humiliating surrender or the wholesale slaughter of his force. The War Department sent cursory replies, blithely assuring him that no assault on Moul-trie was imminent—this despite the shrill war cries in almost every newspaper of the South—but that if one were, he was, of course, to defend it “to the best of your ability.” On December 23, an adjutant arrived with a two-paragraph letter from the secretary of war himself, the first time that Floyd had deigned to communicate directly with Anderson.
Writing on the morning after secession became official, the secretary wished to clarify—in strictest confidence—Anderson’s previous instructions. While the major ought to defend himself if attacked, he must not take this to mean that he should sacrifice his men’s lives “upon a mere point of honor.” Indeed, it was