This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [11]
There was no war. As far as the government in Washington was concerned, the men in Sumter had not an enemy in the world. Yet they were in fact besieged, and as they worked to perfect their defenses they knew perfectly well that the besiegers could take the place any time they cared to make the effort. The food the garrison ate, the mail it received, the very orders it got from the War Department, all came to it entirely by sufferance of the southern Confederacy — which clearly was refraining from bombarding the fort into submission only because it seemed possible that Washington could be pressured into giving it away without a fight.
This seemed possible to Winfield Scott, among others — Winfield Scott, commanding general of the United States Army, old and pompous and dropsical but pretty much all soldier just the same. Early in the winter Scott sat at his desk in Washington, proudly wrote “headquarters of the Army” at the top of a sheet of paper, and expressed himself in a memorandum to the Secretary of War. As always, Scott wrote of himself respectfully in the third person:
“Lieutenant General Scott, who has had a bad night, and can scarcely hold up his head this morning, begs to express the hope to the Secretary of War” — that Fort Sumter be held, provisioned, reinforced and given the help of a couple of first-class warships. Two days later the old general wrote a letter to President James Buchanan, who was all but totally immobilized by the twin beliefs that the southern states could not legally secede and that the Federal government could not legally stop them if they tried it. To Buchanan, General Scott wrote:
“It is Sunday; the weather is bad, and General Scott is not well enough to go to church. But matters of the highest national importance seem to forbid a moment’s delay, and if misled by zeal he hopes for the President’s forgiveness” — and, in fine, it was vital to reinforce the Sumter garrison at once, sending in more weapons and stores and calling on the navy for help.3
All of this got nobody anywhere. To be sure, Sumter was not abandoned and a steamer was sent down with stores and men; but it was not convoyed by naval forces, the coastal batteries drove it away, and as spring came Major Anderson and his men were still locked up in their fort. They did what they could to make the place strong, bricking up embrasures that they could not defend and hoisting the heavy barbette guns to their emplacements on top of the fort, and they ate their way through their dwindling supply of provisions. In mid-March there was an odd incident, which went all but unnoticed: a young Negro slave, sensing no doubt that what with one thing and another there might be a new meaning for men like himself in ground held by the United States Army, broke away from his lawful owner in Charleston, stole a canoe, and in the darkness paddled out to Fort Sumter to find refuge. The officers there promptly sent him back to his owner, not realizing that they had in their hands, months before the expression would have any meaning, the first of thousands upon thousands of contrabands.4
On the same day President Abraham Lincoln, newly inaugurated, wrote to his Secretary of War:
“Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort Sumter, under all the circumstances is it wise to attempt it?”
Under all of the circumstances, the Secretary replied, it would not be wise; would not, in fact, even be possible. The best brains in the army held that it would take an expedition of such size and scope that four months would pass before it could even be assembled.5 Major Anderson called for a report on the quantity of food remaining in the fort and learned that there were six barrels of flour, six more of hardtack, three of sugar, two of vinegar, two dozen of salt pork, and various odds and ends, including three boxes of candles. Out in the marshes the sandbag parapets kept on growing, with black metal visible in the apertures, and the ring grew tighter and tighter. Then the garrison was notified that no more supplies