Coming Fury, Volume 1 (24 page)

Unhappiest man in America just now was almost certainly President James Buchanan. On that portentous twentieth of December, the President had attended a wedding in the home of friends, in Washington, and early in the evening he had blandly assured his hostess that his health and spirits were of the best. “I have never enjoyed better health nor a more tranquil spirit,” he said. “I have not lost an hour’s sleep nor a single meal.” A little later that evening, with Buchanan sitting in the drawing room while most of the other guests were strolling about looking at the wedding presents, there were noises and bustlings at the front door. Buchanan glanced over his shoulder, and then (strangely echoing old Mr. Petigru’s remark, made that same evening) he asked his hostess: “Madam, do you suppose the house is on fire? I hear an unusual commotion in the hall.” The hostess went to the door and encountered Congressman Lawrence Keitt, of South Carolina, who bore a telegram and an air of great excitement; the telegram informed him that his state had just voted to secede, and he was shaking it in the air and crying “Thank God! Thank God!”

The hostess bore this news to the President. Later on, she remembered the response she got. “He looked at me, stunned, for a moment. Falling back and grasping the arms of his chair, he whispered: ‘Madam, might I beg you to have my carriage called?’ ”
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The carriage came, and Buchanan rode off to the White House. The crisis he had hoped to avoid was at last upon him … and upon the country.

The forts at Charleston had begun to draw attention to themselves early in November. They drew attention, or attention was thrust upon them; it can be said either way, and it makes no difference, since it was the mere fact that the forts existed at all that was so stirring and so perilous. They were wholly inert little plots of ground surrounded by masonry, either obsolescent or unfinished, made to drowse under the Southern sun, looking seaward. Yet time had moved over them, transforming everything, so that the most prosaic of objects or actions—even the fact that little pyramids of freshly tarred cannon balls were stacked in the rear of the gun carriages, even the matter of having a sentry walking post atop a parapet, or of hoisting a familiar flag every morning and hauling it down at sunset—these had suddenly started to cast fearful shadows. They symbolized an unbearable aggression against the safety of a state which, trying to become a nation, bristled with immense pride and a certain unsure arrogance.

Commanding these forts when November began was Colonel John L. Gardner, Massachusetts-born, old and near the end of his career; he was a veteran of the War of 1812 and he felt that the Charleston garrison ought to be increased. The War Department had suggested that the arms might be issued to the civilians who were employed on the completion of Fort Sumter so that they could be used as a species of militia, but Colonel Gardner felt that these men were bad security risks. Some of them were foreign-born and many of them were Southerners, possibly not to be trusted on Federal property with guns in their hands. Still, it would be comforting to have the weapons, and Colonel Gardner undertook to get them—and, in the process, set off a minor storm that blew him all the way out of the army.

The weapons were stored in a Federal arsenal that occupied a neatly kept four acres of grounds within the Charleston city limits. An officer bearing the cumbersome title of Military Storekeeper of Ordnance, F. C. Humphreys, with fourteen enlisted men, had charge
of this place and its contents, which included 22,000 stands of arms, a good deal of heavy ordnance, and substantial quantities of ammunition and other military stores. Colonel Gardner wanted the small-arms ammunition and certain of the weapons moved to Fort Moultrie, where he could quickly lay his hands on them in case of need, but when he sent an officer ashore with a boat to make the transfer, on November 7, an angry crowd collected on the wharf and refused to let anything be shipped.
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Storekeeper Humphreys was not molested, and the arsenal remained intact, but six weeks before secession Charleston was refusing to let the Federal garrison increase its supply of arms, and it was complaining bitterly to Washington because the attempt had been made.

Captain Fitz John Porter, of the adjutant general’s office, went to Charleston a day or so after this to inspect and report. He found Fort Moultrie, the only active military post in the harbor, manned by Companies E and H of the First Artillery, along with the regimental band, for a total strength of ten officers and sixty-four men. Of the men, deducting musicians, sick men, and those under arrest for various military misdemeanors, there were thirty-six available for regular duty. Enlisted men and non-coms seemed intelligent and industrious, as such things went in the army in those days, and the officers appeared to be sober and on their toes. But Fort Moultrie itself was in rather poor shape.

Its walls enclosed less than two acres of ground. Its barracks, officers’ quarters, hospital, storehouses, everything indeed except the actual fortifications, were of wood, easily burned; along the sea front the winds had drifted sand nearly up to the top of the walls, so that any venturesome child could wander into the place without difficulty. A little farther away there were sandhills covered with scrubby undergrowth, so situated that a regiment of riflemen could sweep the fort’s parapets with fire from protected positions. Fort Moultrie was old-fashioned, even in 1860. It had no casemates to give guns and gunners proper protection, and all of its armament was mounted “en barbette”—out in the open, with nothing but a low parapet to provide shelter from hostile fire. In addition, there were a good many houses and summer cottages to interfere with defensive fire, and on top of everything else Fort Moultrie had been laid out so that most of its guns would bear on a single point in the
channel leading from the open sea to the harbor. The fort had no guns controlling the approach from the rear, which was precisely the point from which an attack now was most likely to come. The place contained fifty-five guns of all calibers, including ten 8-inch Columbiads, and there were altogether too many of these guns for two under-strength companies of artillery to handle.

All in all, Captain Porter felt that the garrison ought to be increased, if that could be done without stirring up trouble. He mentioned “the inflammable and impulsive state of the public mind” in Charleston, and indicated that the commanding officer at the fort would need to show much prudence and good judgment “in all transactions which may bear upon the relations of the Federal Government to the State of South Carolina and of the Army to our citizens.”
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The administration in Washington already knew that the public mind in Charleston was inflammable and impulsive, and the row stirred up by Colonel Gardner’s attempt to get small arms and ammunition did not make him look like a man of prudence and good judgment; and, besides, he was Yankee-born, and the people of Charleston were vexed with him; so on November 15 Major Robert Anderson was named as his replacement, and Colonel Gardner was transferred away to stand by for orders that never came.

Anderson was a lean, graying veteran, clean-shaven, noted both for an excellent combat record (he had won brevets for gallantry in the Black Hawk and Mexican wars and had been wounded at Molino Del Rey) and for a mildly bookish quality, which was somewhat rare among army officers at that time. He had translated French texts on artillery and these were used as manuals of instruction, he had served with credit on various War Department boards, and he was known as an industrious and energetic officer. It seemed important, too, that he was a Southerner. Of Virginian ancestry, he had been born in Kentucky, and was married to a woman from Georgia. His principles were considered pro-slavery, and some of the officers at Fort Sumter told each other that this was why Secretary Floyd had chosen him.

Floyd seems, at his interview with Anderson, to have given the man little more than a quick fill-in on the background of the
situation, along with orders to send back a report as soon as possible. Anderson went to Charleston, Colonel Gardner departed, and Anderson got down to business. He had no way of knowing it, but the Charleston forts were to be the effective bounds for all the remainder of his career. He would live until 1871, but everything of importance that he had to do, everything of real meaning to himself and to the nation, would be done here, at Moultrie and at Sumter, in the next five months.
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Anderson quickly realized that Fort Moultrie could be taken at any time. There were, indeed, funds available to put it in better condition; acting long before anyone had thought it would make any particular difference, Congress had voted money for repairs here, as well as for the slow completion of Fort Sumter, and it would be possible at least to get the sand shoveled away from the walls so that (as Captain Abner Doubleday, of the garrison, remarked) stray cattle would be kept from blundering into the place. But even when all had been done that could be done, there just were not enough soldiers present to make a good defense. In anything like a siege, the skeleton force would be spread so thin that the simple job of manning the works would quickly exhaust it.
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Fort Sumter was different. It was unfinished, and its guns were not yet mounted—although those in the lower tier would be, within three weeks, and the accommodations for the men were finished—but it had been built on a shoal out in the harbor, with deep water all around it, and even a small garrison there could hold out against any sudden rush by state militia. Fort Sumter, wrote Major Anderson on November 23, ought to be occupied. Castle Pinckney also should be manned, and there should be more men in Fort Moultrie; “the clouds are threatening and the storm may break upon us at any moment,” and there was no time to spare. Yet it would be risky. “I firmly believe,” the major wrote, “that as soon as the people of South Carolina learn that I have demanded reinforcements, and that they have been ordered, they will occupy Castle Pinckney and attack this fort.” If the reinforcements were sent, they had best reach the harbor before anyone in Charleston knew that they were on the way. If this could be done, Major Anderson felt that South Carolina would not try to take the forts by force but would rely on diplomacy; but if the forts remained weak, “she will,
unless these works are surrendered on their first demand, most assuredly immediately attack us.”
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It was dangerous to be weak, and dangerous to be strong, and a few days later Anderson sent another dispatch from his quarters in Fort Moultrie. “There appears,” he wrote, “to be a romantic desire urging the South Carolinians to
have possession
of this work … I am inclined to think that if I had been here before the commencement of expenditures on this work, and supposed that the garrison would not be increased, I should have advised its withdrawal, with the exception of small guard, and its removal to Fort Sumter, which so perfectly commands the harbor and this fort.”
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The major’s next report, written on December I, was even gloomier. Officers who had visited the city reported that the people were determined to allow neither reinforcements nor extra supplies to be landed. It was clear that “anything which indicates a determination on the part of the General Government to act with an unusual degree of vigor in putting these works in a better state of defense will be regarded as an act of aggression” and would undoubtedly cause an attack on Fort Moultrie. The government, Major Anderson warned, must decide very quickly what it proposed to do about the forts once South Carolina had seceded. If it was going to surrender the forts on demand, Major Anderson needed to be informed and told what course to pursue; if it was not going to give up the forts, it had better send reinforcements at once, or at least station some men of war in the harbor. Either course, the major admitted, might cause some of the other Southern states to join South Carolina in secession. Meanwhile, for his own part, “I shall go steadily on, preparing for the worst, trusting hopefully in the God of Battles to guard and guide me in my course.”
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Major Anderson’s advice was pointed but unwelcome. The President was under intense pressure, and nearly a fortnight before the South Carolina convention voted to secede he had agreed to an informal truce, concerning which there would be hard words and bad feeling a little later. By the beginning of December, the people of South Carolina had persuaded themselves that the forts were destined to come into their possession as soon as secession was voted; this being the case, it was only fair to preserve the status quo, by agreement, until secession should become effective, and on
December 8 most of the state’s Congressional delegation went to see Buchanan about it. They worked out with him a slightly vague agreement that at least for the present Major Anderson would neither be attacked nor reinforced, and Buchanan was given a letter dated December 9 setting forth this agreement as the South Carolina Congressmen understood it. The letter read as follows:

“In compliance with our statement to you yesterday, we now express to you our strong convictions that neither the constituted authorities nor any body of the people of the State of South Carolina will either attack or molest the U. S. Forts in the harbor of Charleston previously to the action of the convention, and we hope & believe not until an offer has been made through an accredited Representative to negotiate for an amicable arrangement of all matters between the State and the Federal government, provided that no reinforcements shall be sent into those Forts & their relative military status remains as at present.”

The letter was signed by J. W. McQueen, William Porcher Miles, M. L. Bonham, W. W. Boyce, and Lawrence M. Keitt.

Buchanan said afterward that he objected to the word “provided,” since it might imply an agreement which he would never make; and this, he said, was understood by everyone present. A member of the delegation, however, had a different version. Someone, he said, asked Buchanan: “Suppose you should hereafter change your policy for any reason, what then? That would put us, who are willing to use our personal interest to prevent any attack upon the forts before commissioners are sent on to Washington, in rather an embarrassing position.” To this, Buchanan was said to have replied: “Then I would first return you this paper.” The delegation left the White House feeling that the President was wavering but that he was bound in honor not to make any change in the situation then existing in Charleston harbor. The President, for his part, considered himself actually pledged to nothing once a vote to secede had been taken.
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