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By Root 1765 0

for escape, he expressed, paradoxically, an oddly sentimental attachment to the place, as if Sumter itself were the last remaining shred of the nation that he had loved and served: “I cannot tell you how grieved I am at the thought of leaving this fort, where every stone and surrounding is so impressed upon my heart.” By the middle of March, both Northern and Southern newspapers were reporting confidently that evacuation was imminent, with some even announcing that the orders had been signed by the president and were on their way to Anderson. Meanwhile, the surgeon attended to his routine tasks, dutifully dispensing medicines and filing sick reports. As March drew to a close, he was treating one case of asthma, three of bronchitis, one of syphilis. Dysentery was spreading quickly, to no one’s surprise.35

By the first days of April, the men were packing up their belongings for what they assumed was their impending departure. Crawford stowed away most of his medical supplies. Captain John G. Foster, the fort’s chief engineer, even wrote to a friend serving with the Confederate forces across the harbor, telling him (“strictly entre nous”) that he regretted having to leave without saying good-bye, and making arrangements to return a borrowed mustard spoon. Major Anderson had larger concerns. He agonized ceaselessly about the lack of orders from Washington. Within a week, he knew, the last crumbs of food would be utterly exhausted. At any time, he might simply send a polite request to Beauregard, and the officers and men under his command would be escorted to safety, rescued from the pointless siege. Yet he was ever conscious of his honor. In a letter to the War Department on April 5, he pleaded not to be “left without instructions,” adding bitterly: “After thirty odd years of service I do not wish it to be said that I have treasonably abandoned a post and turned over to unauthorized persons public property entrusted to my charge. I am entitled to this act of justice at the hands of my Government.”

In his heart, though, Anderson was no longer certain he could expect even this. Not from the new commander-in-chief, the dangerous fanatic who had brought the country to such a terrible pass. If only the nation had a soldier at its head once more: a General Jackson, a General Harrison, a General Taylor, even a General Pierce! Instead, it had a party hack whose only armed service had been as a militiaman in the Black Hawk War, at the head of one of those bumpkin companies that Anderson had so despised. (Anderson probably did not recall that on May 29, 1832, he had personally mustered the future president into temporary U.S. Army service as a rank private.)36

Spring should have arrived, but still the winter lingered. On April 8, the men awoke to a damp chill. Wind and rain swept the bleak waters of the harbor. Yet on all sides of the fort, things seemed suddenly different. The familiar patrol boats that had passed continuously at a distance now hovered nearby hour after hour. Other vessels were landing men and matériel near the rebels’ newly constructed artillery battery on Cummings Point. Toward midmorning, a sudden boom came from the opposite side of the harbor, at the tip of Sullivan’s Island, near Moultrie, and Sumter’s startled sentries looked through their spyglasses to see a large wooden house explode into splinters. As the cloud of dust drifted into the misty air, they could make out something glinting beyond it, brutal and metallic: the blunt-nosed muzzles of four heavy cannons. The Confederates had unmasked yet another battery, one that they had been constructing in secret. It was brilliantly placed, allowing them to rake the fort’s principal bastions from both sides, to dominate the only spot where a friendly ship might have anchored, and to fire directly into Sumter’s uppermost tier, where Anderson had placed his heaviest artillery, the only weapons that might pose a serious threat to the enemy’s fortifications. Now any men who attempted to work those guns would be cut to pieces by flying metal within minutes. General