The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War

Book by Eicher David J

Chapter 1: The War Begins at Sumter

Sergeant James Chester could do nothing but walk out onto the parade ground and wait. The air was cool on this early spring evening as he stood and reflected on his current dilemma, surrounded by the massive three-story brick façade of an unfinished fort. Overhead, the stars twinkled and a waxing crescent moon hung low in the sky; Saturn and Jupiter were paired closely in the constellation Leo, suggesting to some an omen. A chilling breeze passed over the harbor every few minutes, adding to the grim anticipation. Chester, a youthful Scot, had emigrated to the United States and joined the army in 1854, just as tensions over the expansion of slavery threatened to tear the country apart. Now he was standing in the hotbed of secession and all was quiet as could be. "Except that the flag was hoisted, and a glimmer of light was visible at the guardhouse," he later wrote, "the fort looked so dark and silent as to seem deserted."

It was not. In less than two hours Chester would live through a fateful moment in American history. Along with Chester, 75 other Federal soldiers, 8 musicians, and 43 workmen anticipated the start of hostilities from local secessionists this evening in Charleston Harbor. The Federal soldiers' temporary home, Fort Sumter, was one of America's coastal forts built following the War of 1812. It was named for Thomas Sumter, a brigadier general of South Carolina militia and hero of the Revolutionary War. Although construction on the fort began in 1829, three years before Sumter's death, the fort remained unfinished in the spring of 1861. Fort Sumter was an imposing structure, placed nearly centrally in the harbor, and the powerhouse of the four forts built to protect the city.

Sumter's handsome brick walls, five feet thick, stood 50 feet above the water. The fort's five-sided plan used four sides that ranged from 170 to 190 feet long and a gorge wall containing officers' quarters that faced southwest. The fort's three stories were designed to hold two primary tiers of casements and a parapet that together would mount 135 guns and hold a garrison of 650. On the evening of April 11, 1861, the men inside the fort were dwarfed by the mammoth size of the structure and chagrined by the fact that only fifteen cannon were fixed in place and ready to fire. To make the garrison even less prepared to face a crisis, its supplies of food were dwindling. On this evening the soldiers had rations to last possibly five days.

Such an unlikely situation was supervised by Maj. Robert Anderson, age fifty-five and a veteran of the regular army. Anderson's Kentucky ancestry and the fact that he favored slavery and married a Georgia girl did not seem to bother his Yankee comrades. He was an expert artillerist and had served gallantly in the Black Hawk, Seminole, and Mexican wars, demonstrating unwavering loyalty toward the United States. Anderson's five principal subordinates would rise to varying degrees of fame and glory in the contest to come. Capt. John Gray Foster of New Hampshire was Anderson's chief engineer, a bearded, balding veteran who had been wounded at Molino del Rey in the Mexican War. Capt. Abner Doubleday, a New Yorker who is erroneously associated with the invention of baseball, was an artillerist from a distinguished family. Capt. Jefferson Columbus Davis was born in Indiana and became a trained artillerist. He would live to kill a fellow officer in cold blood and dodge paying any price for it. Asst. Surg. Samuel Wylie Crawford, the physician at Sumter, was a Pennsylvanian with an elegant mustache and lamb-chop whiskers. First Lt. Truman Seymour, one of the most junior commissioned officers at the fort, was a Vermont-born artillerist with Mexican War experience.

As the evening progressed, Anderson and his men knew that the sparks of war were about to fly and that they were to be the target. As early as the day after Christmas 1860 the storm clouds of war directly threatened Anderson and his companies of the 1st U.S. Artillery. Anderson had arrived at Fort Moultrie on Sullivans Island, the other principal fort guarding the harbor, in November. A fort stood on or near this position, 1,800 yards northeast of Sumter, since guarding against the British in 1776. The present structure, named for Maj. Gen. William Moultrie, who served gallantly during the Revolutionary War, was built in 1809. The other two Federal forts protecting Charleston Harbor were Fort Johnson on the northern tip of James Island, 2,300 yards west of Sumter, and Castle Pinckney on Shute's Folly Island, close to the city and 4,500 yards northwest of Sumter. (The city's wharves themselves lay 5,800 yards northwest of Sumter.) To Southerners, abandonment of these Federal installations seemed a natural implication of the times. The signing of South Carolina's ordinance of secession on December 20 carried with it such an ultimatum. On Christmas Eve, South Carolina Governor Francis Wilkinson Pickens, the grandson of a general in the Revolutionary War, issued a proclamation declaring the state separate, indepen-dent, and sovereign.

Six days after the ordinance was signed, Anderson moved his men from Moultrie to Sumter. "I looked anxiously with my glass on the boats and at a preconcerted signal, two heavy guns were fired," wrote the surgeon Crawford in his diary of the abandonment of Moultrie. "I fired the last one. We spiked the guns, and took down the flagstaff." The abandonment and partial destruction of the fort enraged Southerners. On December 27, Anderson raised the U.S. flag over Sumter. The same day secessionists seized Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney and began to work on refortifying them. On December 30 the U.S. Arsenal at Charleston was seized. The New Year witnessed a continued decline. On January 2, South Carolinians occupied Fort Johnson. Commissioners from the state had gone to Washington to meet U.S. officials but returned without a resolution. President James Buchanan did absolutely nothing. In the War Department, Secretary Joseph Holt replaced pro-Southern John Buchanan Floyd, who had ordered arsenals in the North to shift weapons into Southern arsenals. During the period November 1859 to February 1860, arsenals in Northern states witnessed a decrease of 115,000 muskets and rifles, while Southern arsenals had their supplies increased by 114,990 muskets and rifles. This shift occurred out of a total pool of 610,292 arms under Federal control. Supplies inside Sumter were scant. On January 5 the Star of the West, a merchant vessel, was ordered south from New York to restock the fort.

The pace of secession activity quickened. On January 6 the arsenal at Apalachicola, Florida, was occupied by locals. The following day Fort Marion at St. Augustine was seized by state troops. On the morning of January 9 the Star of the West approached Sumter, with 200 infantrymen under 34-year-old 1st Lt. Charles Robert Woods, along with several months' provisions. The ship's captain, John McGowan, steered toward the fort only to receive a sudden bombardment from a masked battery on the northern end of Morris Island, south of the fort, and from Moultrie. Though the ship was only lightly struck, McGowan withdrew his ship. The supply mission had failed. Soldiers on the parapets at Sumter asked Anderson to return fire; he declined but protested the action to Governor Pickens, who proclaimed the supply mission an act of war. Not only did Pickens refuse to let the soldiers replenish their foodstuffs, but in fact two days later demanded the surrender of the fort, which Anderson refused. The next day secessionists demanded the surrender of Fort Pickens in Pensacola Harbor, Florida, which was also refused. In February arsenals were overrun by secessionists at Little Rock and Napoleon, Arkansas, and in March the fledgling government of the Confederate States of America sent a commanding officer to supervise the activities at Charleston.

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, the first brigadier general in the Provisional Army of the Confederate States, was one of the most colorful military men of the day. Short and slight, he bristled with energy and was expertly trained in a wide variety of subjects. Not only was he a superb engineer, but he had been trained in artillery under none other than Robert Anderson. Beauregard was so liked within the War Department that he had been appointed superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in January 1861, an assignment he was relieved of a few days later when his Southern sympathies became starkly clear. With his widespread experience and general popularity -- with nearly everyone except the new Confederate President Jefferson Davis -- Beauregard was destined to become the first great Southern hero of the conflict.

In Washington, the new president, Abraham Lincoln, ordered another relief expedition, this one departing on April 4. By no means did all Northerners feel at ease with Lincoln's action. "In a great crisis like this, there is no policy so fatal as that of having no policy at all," editorialized the New York Times on April 3. Lincoln notified Governor Pickens of the impending arrival of the ships. After debate, the infant Confederate government ordered Beauregard to stop any such supply mission, even if it meant firing on the fort. Beauregard received the news on April 10. By this time the tension among Charlestonians, among Anderson and his men in the fort, and among patriotic Southerners and Northerners had reached a fever pitch. During the first week of April a large crowd gathered at Charleston's waterfront battery. Anderson and his little garrison sat inside the fort and waited. Surrounding them, scattered about the city and the various forts and batteries in the harbor, were more than 6,000 secessionists itching for a fight. Not all Charlestonians agreed with the action. James Louis Petigru, the prominent attorney and statesman, said that South Carolina was too small to be a nation and too large to be an insane asylum. But the majority felt wronged by the North and saw no other way to react to Lincoln and the rest of the Yankees than to fight a war. Roger Atkinson Pryor, the young lawyer, editor, politician, and Virginian, gave a rousing speech in Charleston on April 10. "I thank you especially that you have annihilated this accursed Union, reeking with corruption and insolent with excess of tyranny," he said. "Thank God! It is blasted with the lightning wrath of an outraged and indignant people."

The next day Asst. Surg. Crawford described the dreary condition of the garrison's rations. He recorded the diet as "rice but no bread...broken pieces of crackers...today we came down to pork and a little rice." The engineer Foster added, "[the rice was] filled with pieces of glass from the window-panes shattered by the concussion of guns fired in practice." Crawford described how at 4 P.M. on this day a boat bearing a flag of truce approached the fort, carrying three staff officers. The three men walked up Sumter's esplanade, through its sally port, and asked to see Maj. Anderson. They were Col. James Chesnut, Jr., Capt. Stephen Dill Lee, and Lt. Col. Alexander Robert Chisholm. Chesnut was a Princeton-educated lawyer and former U.S. senator who had three days before been appointed an aide-de-camp to Gen. Beauregard. Lee was a young but skilled artillerist whose influence would rise and fall during the war. Chisholm was a South Carolinian who had been educated in New York and now assisted in building the fortifications on Morris Island. The three emissaries met with Anderson in the fort's guard room, where they presented a message from the Confederate commander. "I am ordered by the Government of the Confederate States to demand the evacuation of Fort Sumter," wrote Beauregard. "The flag which you have upheld so long and with so much fortitude, under the most trying circumstances, may be saluted by you on taking it down."

Anderson would not budge. Instead he drew up a formal reply. "I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication demanding the evacuation of this fort," he wrote, "and to say, in reply thereto, that it is a demand with which that I regret that my sense of honor, and of my obligations to my Government, prevent my compliance." Informally, Anderson told his potential enemies that he was running low on supplies and that he would probably be starved out in a few days if the Southern guns didn't "batter us to pieces." After three hours in the fort, Chesnut, Lee, and Chisholm removed thir white flag of truce and took the boat back out into the harbor with the reply.

Men inside the fort rolled out powder kegs, worked on the guns, and watched the various positions of Confederate guns facing them. The men received orders not to expose themselves on the parapets. Night fell over the fort with the stars overhead and the gleam of lights on the horizon in Charleston. Inside the fort, Anderson had no oil for lamps, and so the three-story brick fortress stood in near total darkness. On the morning of April 12 the fort's officers were awakened by another boat bearing a white flag. This time four emissaries came; Chesnut, Lee, Chisholm, and Roger A. Pryor. It was about 1:30 A.M. when these aides brought another letter suggesting that if Anderson agreed to evacuate the fort at a stated time without firing on Confederate forces, the transfer of the fort could be accomplished bloodlessly. Anderson stated that he would abandon Sumter by noon on April 15 but only if his command and flag would not be fired on and unless otherwise instructed by the Lincoln government. By 3:20 A.M. Chesnut and Lee concluded that the terms were not acceptable and that the fort would be fired on beginning in one hour. "By authority of Brigadier-General Beauregard, commanding the Provisional Forces of the Confederate States," wrote Chesnut and Lee, "we have the honor to notify you that he will open the fire of his batteries on Fort Sumter in one hour from this time." If they never again met in this world, God grant that they may meet in the next, Anderson told the Confederates. The emissaries then withdrew. Sleep within the fort was out of the question. "We arose and dressed," wrote Crawford, "and before our arrangements were completed, the firing began."

It was almost exactly 4:30 A.M. on April 12 when the fighting began. "A flash as of distant lightning in the direction of Mount Pleasant, followed by the dull roar of a mortar, told us that the bombardment had begun," James Chester wrote. The mortars at Fort Johnson had the first crack at the Yankees, lobbing shells over and about the fort. Firing also commenced at Fort Moultrie, which was sending cannonballs and shells; from the floating battery near Sullivans Island, which opened up with rifled artillery; from Cummings's Point and elsewhere. In a few minutes' time, the sudden flashes and reports of a surprising number of projectiles, along with the acrid, sulfurous smell of gunpowder and the sight of wafting smoke, cascaded over the fort. After several hours, particularly after daylight, most of the batteries gained an effective range and started throwing some shells and balls into the fort with frightening accuracy. Bricks were smashed, and splinters of wood, brick dust, and mortar chunks cascaded into the air. The soldiers scattered and took cover. "A ball from Cummings's Point lodged in the magazine wall," wrote Doubleday of the first moments of the war, "and by the sound seemed to bury itself in the masonry about a foot from my head, in very unpleasant proximity to my right ear." Suddenly, Fort Sumter had turned into an untenable wreck. What began the day as one of the most magnificent fortifications in North America was disintegrating into a pile of rubble.

The great honor of f...