1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [85]
Doubleday may have been the garrison’s champion raconteur, but it was Crawford, the surgeon, who would eventually provide the most detailed account of life inside Sumter. As a medical man, Crawford had attended not West Point but rather the University of Pennsylvania, in his native state. After nearly a decade in the army, he still brought the eye of an outsider, and of a scientist, to bear on things around him. From the beginning of the crisis he had been taking meticulous daily notes—with an eye toward not only history but also the literary marketplace. “It will be a book eagerly sought after, I think, and would certainly pay,” he wrote to his brother more than a month before the Confederate attack. “Two different firms have applied.” An accomplished draftsman, the surgeon (like Captain Seymour) also made sketches of the fort and sold them by mail to Harper’s Weekly for the handsome sum of $25 apiece. Crawford was ambitious, self-assured, and rather vain, sporting a pair of magnificent side-whiskers that hung down over his epaulettes like Spanish moss on a stately oak. Moreover, he craved fame not just as a litterateur, but also as a warrior, making no secret of the fact that he would happily trade his scalpel for a saber.23 Like Doubleday, he was also quite open about his politics—though unlike his fellow officer, his time in the South had made him sympathetic to the slaveholders, and he blamed the Union’s current predicament on the sentimental foolishness of Northern abolitionists.24
Truman Seymour, a Vermont preacher’s son, was a man of a very different stamp. Dark-eyed and ruminative, with thick hair swept back from his forehead in Byronic fashion, he seemed at first more like an artist or poet than a warrior. Indeed, Captain Seymour was a fine watercolorist—a painter of precise, delicately hued landscapes—had taught draftsmanship for several years at West Point, and had recently taken a year’s leave from the army to roam across Europe and commune with the works of Titian, Rubens, and Veronese. During his rare sojourns at home in New England, he loved to hike the Green Mountains with his sketchpad and brushes, fascinated not just by the misty peaks but by the complicated geology beneath them, which he had begun studying seriously as a teenager. Like them, Seymour concealed a stony core beneath a luxuriant exterior: while still a boy lieutenant, he had been brevetted twice for gallantry in Mexico, and later fought in Florida during the army’s ruthless final campaign against the Seminoles. With little of the bellicose swagger affected by Doubleday and even Crawford, he was perhaps a better soldier than either: the kind who viewed the garrison’s predicament at Sumter not as a hopeless cause, nor as a chance at patriotic glory, but as a logistical puzzle to be solved with cool ingenuity.25
Ultimately, however, Sumter’s fate would depend on the man whose inmost thoughts were the most illegible.
For months after Major Anderson’s arrival at Charleston, the skeptical Doubleday had done his best to get inside the new commander’s head. He had observed the pious Kentuckian intently, tried to draw out his opinions, and even baited him on the subject of slavery. Anderson