1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [7]
Floyd’s meaning was unmistakable. If Anderson were threatened directly by any military force stronger than his own contingent of sixty-four men and a brass band, he was free to surrender all of Charleston Harbor without firing a shot. Perhaps the letter even assumed that Anderson, a good Southerner, would be happy to do so. Between the lines, Floyd could almost be seen winking.
But the secretary of war had misjudged his man.
To the civilian Floyd, Anderson looked like a reliably obedient officer, and he was. But even more, he was a career soldier. The middle-aged bureaucrat had—although he rarely spoke of it—fought against Black Hawk and the Seminoles, and marched on Mexico City under General Scott, in that glorious advance from the shores of the Gulf to the Halls of Montezuma. At Molino del Rey, nearly at the gates of the enemy capital, he had charged the Mexican lines and taken a bullet in the shoulder, leading his outnumbered regiment through another two hours of battle before collapsing from loss of blood.28 Such perils came all in the due course of military life, as they had also done for Anderson’s father, a soldier of the American Revolution who had defended the old palmetto fort right here at Moultrie more than eighty years ago. Anderson had seen secretaries of war come and go—and he must certainly have known a good deal, mostly unflattering, about this particular one—but he also knew that acts of courage or cowardice on the battlefield echoed down through generations.
It would be one thing if President Buchanan had simply announced that he was withdrawing the troops from Charleston Harbor and turning the forts over to South Carolina, a decision that Anderson would certainly have obeyed, perhaps even welcomed. But he would be damned if he was to surrender—even worse, perform a shabby pantomime of surrender—before a rabble of whiskey-soaked militiamen and canting politicians. Still, an officer’s orders were his orders. Anderson felt trapped.
But after poring untold hours over Floyd’s infuriating letter, he suddenly saw a window—a narrow one, but perhaps a way out. One might say it was not Anderson the gallant soldier who noticed it but rather Anderson the meticulous academic and scrupulous translator. Floyd had told Anderson to mount no hopeless defense of the forts, plural. This was possibly just a slip of the pen: the secretary was not known for verbal precision. But it could also be construed to mean that Anderson and his men were responsible for defending all three of the forts, not just Moultrie. In that case, a move from one to another would be no violation of orders, merely a slight tactical shift, like wheeling a cannon to a different side of the battlements. Nowhere in the previous orders had Floyd or his adjutants directly commanded Anderson not to occupy Sumter. They had merely ignored his pleas to do so.
It must have been just after Anderson’s small epiphany that the sharp-eyed Captain Doubleday noticed something odd. He was out on Moultrie’s parapet with his commander, discussing the need to purchase some wire to make an entanglement at the base of the fort’s walls. “Certainly; you shall have a mile of wire, if you require it,” Anderson replied—but in such a peculiar, distracted way that it was clear the major was no longer thinking much about Moultrie at all.29
Anderson now sent his quartermaster over to the city to charter some boats, ostensibly to carry the fort’s women and children out of harm’s way. (Many of the men had their families living with them.) On Christmas Day, all hands at the fort were kept busy loading