1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [97]
Late that afternoon, a small boat came creaking and splashing toward the fort’s wharf, a white flag of truce fluttering at its stern. There were nine men aboard: three white and six black. The three white men were Confederate officers. Two of them, trusted aides to General Beauregard, had come to offer terms of surrender. The third had joined them as a representative of Governor Pickens—and also because, as he later explained, he was fortunate enough to be “the owner of a large six-oared boat and six superior oarsmen,” property that he had brought to Charleston from his family plantation in case it might prove useful during the siege. Those “superior” slaves brought the Confederate envoys to Sumter.74
Beauregard’s offer was a generous one. He would send vessels to carry Anderson and all of his men to safety. They would be allowed to take their personal possessions and any of their companies’ arms and property and be granted passage to any port in the United States that they wished. And before departing, they would be permitted to salute “the flag which you have upheld so long and with so much fortitude, under the most trying circumstances”—before, of course, lowering it.
The rebels clearly wanted the battle to begin before Fox’s arrival. They had no idea what sort of naval force might be accompanying his tugboats, and it made little sense to hold fire until they found out. At this moment, they sought the fort, and nothing more; certainly not a major clash of arms. Anderson courteously asked Beauregard’s aides to wait while he conferred with his staff.75
The eight officers gathered in the major’s quarters, standing around him in expectant silence. They had a decision before them, he said, that involved not only their military position but perhaps also their lives. He did not mention their honor. He did not mention their country. He read Beauregard’s missive to them aloud.
“Shall we accede?” Anderson asked his officers.76
But before they could reply, their commander unfolded another piece of paper, this one dog-eared and creased. It was the letter he had received almost four months earlier and shared with no one until now: his final, secret orders from Secretary Floyd, addressed to him at Fort Moultrie, where they had reached him two days before Christmas:
It is neither expected nor desired that you should expose your own life or that of your men in a hopeless conflict in defense of these forts. If they are invested or attacked by a force so superior that resistance would, in your judgment, be a useless waste of life, it will be your duty to yield to necessity, and make the best terms in your power. This will be the conduct of an honorable, brave, and humane officer.77
The words rang strangely in the small room. They seemed to come from another eon of history. Floyd was long gone now, under congressional investigation in absentia on charges of treason and peculation in office. Buchanan was back on his farm in Pennsylvania, reviled and already half forgotten. Moultrie’s ramparts, manned now by Confederate gunners, seemed more distant and unreachable across the harbor than Sumter had ever been. How strange that Anderson should share those orders at this moment, after so many months—rather than, for that matter, reminding them about the dispatch that had come from Secretary Cameron just three days earlier, and which could be interpreted as giving him similar latitude to capitulate when necessary. And weren’t those orders from December the ones that he had already disobeyed, in spirit if not in letter?
But Floyd’s words burned as if they somehow formed the throbbing center of the anguish that Anderson had barely concealed almost since his arrival in Charleston Harbor. They were the ones he had gone over in his mind