1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [83]
Three essential things the boat from Charleston continually failed to bring: reinforcements, provisions, and orders from Washington.14
Back in December, as Doubleday’s boat approached Sumter on its night voyage from Moultrie, he had thought the new fortress resembled a prison. Now it had become one in fact. On bright days, the men played at ball and leapfrog on the parade ground, but sunlight was a rare and fleeting thing. Dusk came early and dawn late within the gloomy walls of encircling brick. During those long hours of darkness, there was no light to read or write by; nothing to do but huddle beneath blankets and wait out the slowly passing hours. The damp, raw cold of late winter penetrated the masonry and the men’s bones. Coal and firewood were running short along with the food and candles, and a guard was placed over the dwindling supply. The soldiers fished out passing driftwood to burn, before they began tearing down some of the fort’s outbuildings for fuel. Still, they could barely keep themselves warm. Doubleday sacrificed a handsome mahogany table that he had carried with him from his well-appointed quarters at Moultrie.15
Amid this gloom and tedium, the men worked to shore up the fort’s defenses. Sumter, created decades before to withstand an attack on Charleston by a foreign fleet, had been designed with its strongest bastions overlooking the main shipping channel and with the weakest flank, known as the gorge wall, directly facing the nearest land, Cummings Point, just twelve hundred yards distant. This rear flank was where, for safety’s sake, the engineers had placed the main gate, hospital, and ordnance room. Now, with the enemy’s guns on Cummings Point, Sumter’s occupants must have wished they could lift up the entire fortress and rotate it 180 degrees. They had to make do instead with walling off the main gate with brick and stone, mounting howitzers above it, and constructing shrapnel-proof barriers in front of the fragile buildings. The Confederates, they expected, would try to storm the fort from this side. Captain Seymour, an inveterate tinkerer, devised makeshift weapons to drop on the attackers’ heads: barrels, charged with gunpowder and loaded with paving stones, that would explode like giant grenades as they hit the ground. Every so often, the harbor echoed with booms as one side or the other tested its heavy guns, and one morning a live round, fired mistakenly by an onshore battery, crashed into the water just off Sumter’s wharf. The Confederates hastily sent an officer over to apologize.16
While Sumter might have seemed at times like an island without a country—neither Northern nor Southern, Union nor Confederate—its occupants were nevertheless constantly reminded that they were situated in the middle of slave territory. The Union officers even had their own slave, a lively and bright teenager named James, whom they had rented from his master in Charleston to serve as their factotum around the fort and to run small errands in the city. James became a cause of contention—and of a rare breach of decorum between besiegers and besieged—when he failed to return from one of these errands. The officers soon learned that his master had seized him and was refusing to give him back, in violation of the rental agreement, because James, who was apparently literate, had exchanged letters with his mother about a possible slave uprising. In a letter to Major Anderson, a South Carolina official rudely suggested that the boy’s “temper and principles” had clearly been corrupted by exposure to the Yankee degenerates at Sumter—an insult that brought Anderson nearly to the point of challenging the man to a duel.17
For the most part, though, quiet reigned. The excitement of December and January—when Anderson’s men had expected a Southern assault at any moment and were ready, even eager, to fight—had given way to a surreal calm, a stasis that seemed as if it