The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

by Erik Larson

The gun in question was a “Parrott rifle” that fired one-hundred-pound shot and had by this time gained a reputation for bursting despite the innovative barrel reinforcement developed by its designer, Robert Parker Parrott. The guns, Porter concluded, were “calculated to kill more of our men than those of the enemy.”

On Tuesday, March 12, the guns at Fort Moultrie alone fired off one hundred blank cartridges. Sumter’s Captain Foster monitored their progress, and saw great improvement. During one practice session Confederate gunners using live shot fired repeatedly and accurately toward a buoy five-eighths of a mile from Sumter. “The practice was excellent, all the shot striking the water nearly in the same spot,” Foster reported, “so it will be seen that the ranges are well understood now, and any vessel coming in must not expect to fare as well as the Star of the West.” The Confederates also began practicing with heavy mortars installed on Morris Island, these capable of launching shells high into the air so that they would drop within Sumter’s walls and then explode.

Anderson complained, too, that South Carolina authorities had detained the fort’s only hired servant, a free Black named Thomas Moore Lynch, after he had ventured into Charleston bearing a permit signed by the U.S. secretary of war. The boy’s return, Anderson told Pickens, “was undoubtedly called for in this case by common civility and courtesy, as the officers have no opportunity of replacing him.” Civility and courtesy thus invoked, the incident now became a matter of honor. David Jamison, South Carolina’s secretary of war, replied on the governor’s behalf and told Anderson that in fact Thomas Lynch was a slave, and that it was “the unquestionable privilege of a slave owner to permit or not, at his own pleasure, the return of his slave to a hostile fort.” But there was more to the story, Jamison wrote. Charleston police had discovered that Lynch was carrying on “a very improper correspondence” with his mother. They found a letter in his possession in which the boy told her that if a battle broke out in Charleston between Sumter’s men and the state, “the negroes would rise” and assist the federal forces. This of course raised the specter of the kind of insurrection slaveholders had always feared. Moreover, Jamison wrote, the police investigation had turned up letters written by Lynch’s mother in which she described “operations in this city which were not proper to be communicated to anyone in your garrison.” But now Jamison managed, perhaps unknowingly, to impugn Anderson...

Seward had already prepared a formal answer to the commissioners’ demands but did not give it to them. Rather, he wrote it in the form of a for-the-record memorandum to be deposited in the State Department’s archive, accessible to anyone who chose to retrieve it. He did not sign it. He filed it that Friday. This was a curious form of political brinksmanship, very much in line with Seward’s penchant for quiet manipulation, or “line-pulling,” as backroom dealings were known. He could not send this memo directly to the commissioners, because doing so would constitute a form of official recognition. He understood the quandary the commissioners now confronted: If they truly wanted the government’s response, they could retrieve the memorandum from the archive. By this point they knew of its existence. But its contents would shatter any hope they had of receiving formal recognition and, Seward believed, would likely trigger an attack on Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens. If they did not ask for it, the memo would simply reside in the archive, unopened and unread. Seward believed that the longer the commissioners waited, the more likely it was that the Sumter crisis would be resolved peacefully; that absent an incendiary event, the South’s commitment to secession must eventually wane.

Despite being far north of the Mason-Dixon Line, the city was an island of pro-South sentiment. Its banks, merchants, and shipping companies maintained close commercial ties with Southern planters and routinely issued credit secured by the planters’ holdings of enslaved Blacks. At a dinner hosted by a city banker, Russell heard the persistent view that the federal government had no authority to suppress secession; a former New York governor, Horatio Seymour, unabashedly declared that secession was a right. The proslavery New York Herald openly mocked Lincoln, Russell noted in his diary. “The Herald keeps up the courage and spirit of its Southern friends by giving the most florid accounts of their prospects and making continual attacks on Mr. Lincoln and his Government.”

Russell wrote in his diary. He quoted Seward as saying, “Why, I myself, my brothers, and sisters, have been all secessionists—we seceded from home when we were young, but we all went back to it sooner or later. These States will all come back in the same way.”

Interesting analogy.

Russell understood, however, that the true cause of the conflict, no matter how hard anyone tried to disguise it, was slavery. He called it a “curse” and likened it to a cancer whose inner damage was masked by the victim’s outward appearance of health.

Anderson disagreed. The next day, March 22, he reported Fox’s assessment to the War Department and sought to refute his conclusion. “I have examined the point alluded to by Mr. Fox last night,” he wrote. “A vessel lying there will be under the fire of thirteen guns from Fort Moultrie.” He added that Sumter’s chief engineer, Captain Foster, had told him that even at high tide a vessel with a ten-foot draft seeking to land at the optimal point adjacent to the fort would have to anchor forty feet out in the passage.

What Lincoln needed was a better sense of just how much pro-Union sentiment really did exist in South Carolina. Like Seward, Lincoln believed, on basically no evidence, that loyalty to the Union was pervasive, but unlike Seward, he now wanted proof. Soon after Captain Fox’s return from Sumter, Lincoln dispatched two more emissaries to Charleston, both friends of his, with instructions to talk with residents and gauge the local mood. They took the train together and reached the city early on Sunday morning, March 24. One of these friends was Stephen A. Hurlbut, traveling ostensibly as a private citizen on his way to visit his sister in Charleston. Hurlbut had grown up in the city; he had also been run out of town in 1845 for forgery and embezzlement. He moved to Illinois, where he and Lincoln became friends, though Lincoln apparently had no knowledge of his past financial wrongdoing. On the train south Hurlbut noticed energetic preparations for war and reported these to Lincoln. In Richmond men readied shipments of projectiles and other materials. His train passed two open flatcars loaded with shells. At Charleston’s rail depot he counted eight newly arrived mortars awaiting placement.

On March 27 he sent a sixteen-page report to Lincoln. One paragraph stood out: “From these sources,” Hurlbut wrote, “I have no hesitation in reporting as unquestionable—that Separate Nationality is a fixed fact, that there is an unanimity of sentiment which is to my mind astonishing—that there is no attachment to the Union.” He added, “The Sentiment of National Patriotism always feeble in Carolina, has been Extinguished and overridden by the acknowledged doctrine of the paramount allegiance to the State.” Hurlbut quoted none of his sources, not even Petigru, but did offer his own opinion on a wide range of associated points, as well as his conclusion “that this whole matter of Secession could have been stopped in the bud, by prompt and gallant action on the part of the late administration.” But now, he warned, any action by Lincoln to enforce federal law in the seceded states would result in war. “I cannot close without repeating to the President, that this is a time to expect and be prepared for the worst.”

When Justice Campbell returned to the State Department on Monday, April 1—All Fools’ Day, as it was known then—to discuss Governor Pickens’s telegram about the promised evacuation of Fort Sumter, Secretary Seward wrote out a brief statement for Campbell to bring to the commissioners. “The President,” he wrote, “may desire to supply Fort Sumter, but will not undertake to do so without first giving notice to Governor Pickens.” The note startled Campbell. “What does this mean?” he asked. “Does the President design to supply Sumter?” “No, I think not,” Seward replied, despite knowing that concrete plans for a Sumter rescue were underway. “It is a very irksome thing to him to evacuate it. His ears are open to everyone, and they fill his head with schemes for its supply. I do not think that he will adopt any of them. There is no design to reinforce it.”

Lincoln reiterated his inaugural pledge to hold and possess property belonging to the government and reminded Seward that he, too, had endorsed that policy. Nothing had changed, Lincoln wrote, with the exception that now Seward proposed to abandon Fort Sumter. Lincoln ignored Seward’s idea of starting a war.

Two days later he met with the commissioners again, this time all three, the third being André Roman of Louisiana. A number of other secession-minded men were present as well, including Col. George E. Pickett, destined one day to lead an ill-fated charge at Gettysburg.

This was hard for the commissioners. They were accustomed to mastery and command and proficient in the art of taking offense; they needed the unalloyed respect of all around them. Alexis de Tocqueville had observed this aspect of the planter class two decades earlier in his Democracy in America and attributed it to slavery. “The citizen of the Southern states becomes a sort of domestic dictator from infancy,” he wrote. “The first notion he acquires in life is, that he was born to command, and the first habit he contracts is that of ruling without resistance. His education tends, then, to give him the character of a haughty and hasty man,—irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, impatient of obstacles but easily discouraged if he cannot succeed upon his first attempt.”

here was Secretary of State Seward, via Campbell, treating them as if they were house servants demanding a day off. Seward’s continued refusal to meet with them was a blow to their self-esteem, to their honor; in another context it might have required the dispatch of “a friend” to deliver a note of offense, in accord with the Code Duello.

a naval expedition of an indeterminate character was on its way to Charleston, ostensibly to provide food to a starving garrison. On the one hand the expedition appealed to the Southern sense of chivalry: No true gentleman could oppose so humanitarian an undertaking.

They now leaned toward demanding that Anderson surrender the fort, and if he refused, then ordering Beauregard to destroy it. As this debate was underway, Confederate Secretary of State Toombs joined the meeting. Once he grasped that his fellow cabinet members were discussing whether to attack Sumter, he objected. “Mr. President,” he said, “at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest which extends from mountain to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal.”

“The Major counsels economy and will not permit any crumbs to be left on the plates,” Asst. Surgeon Crawford wrote in his journal. “At our meals some officers haul out of their pockets crumbs and pieces of crackers—Major reproved D[oubleday] today and called him back to eat a piece of cracker that was left. One cracker to a man morning and night—none at dinner.” For supper, “rice and coffee.” Doubleday found a potato and squirreled it away, Crawford noted. “He said somebody had tramped on it, but had not hurt it much.”

Montgomery, April 10, 1861 To General Beauregard, Charleston If you have no doubt of the authorized character of the agent who communicated to you the intention of the Washington Government to supply Fort Sumter by force you will at once demand its evacuation, and if this is refused proceed, in such manner as you may determine, to reduce it. Answer. —L. P. WALKER [Confederate Secretary of War]

New companies of such troops arrived each day from all over the state; three thousand were expected to arrive that Wednesday alone. The soldiers on Morris Island “are not in as complete a state of organization as I desire,” Beauregard told War Secretary Walker in Montgomery, “but I hope, in the event of an attempt to land by the enemy, that I will be able to give you a satisfactory account of them.”

Beauregard assigned the honor of firing the first actual combat shot to the Palmetto Guard, which in turn offered it to Ruffin. This was to be fired immediately after the signal round. Ruffin was thrilled. “Of course I was highly gratified by the compliment, and delighted to perform the service,” Ruffin wrote.

Dark and evil.

Seward acknowledged that the capital was vulnerable, “almost defenseless,” but added that the South was no more ready for armed conflict than the North; both sides, he said, were “equally unprepared for active measures of aggression.”

To Capt. Samuel Ferguson, the Beauregard aide-de-camp, it seemed as though everyone in the city were converging on the Battery esplanade and the wharves along the eastern flank of the city to await the start of the firing. Many others, he saw, watched from windows and rooftops. As the moment approached, the crowd went quiet. “The silence became oppressive,” Ferguson wrote; “it was weird, unnatural in so dense a throng, and seemed almost as though the Angel of Death had already passed over.”

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At four-thirty—ten minutes later than Beauregard’s promised start of four-twenty, a delay that irked the general—the mortar at Fort Johnson fired the signal round. The shell rose in a high luminous arc, “the lit fuze trailing behind, showing a glimmering light, like the wings of a fire fly,” one witness reported. On Charleston’s Battery, anticipation grew. There was joy, and dread. People prayed. Captain Ferguson heard an occasional long “deep drawn sigh.”

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This was Ruffin’s cue. He yanked the lanyard on his gun. The resulting blast launched a sixty-four-pound exploding shell that soared off into the darkness and struck the fort’s parapet at its northeast corner. Hitting an immense fortress roughly a mile away was still considered an act of remarkable accuracy, especially for an initial firing. Ruffin could take no credit, however. The big gun had been aimed by its more experienced attendants.

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“The thrill that ran through our veins at this time was indescribable,” wrote Private Thompson at Sumter. He saw no fear among his fellow soldiers, “but something like an expression of awe crept over the features of everyone, as battery after battery opened fire and the hissing shot came plowing along leaving wreck and ruin in their path.”

“Almost every second shot would come in through the embrasure,” Thompson wrote, “and those who failed to come in had struck all around the embrasure knocking it completely out of shape and endangering the men’s lives inside from the showers of broken brick, knocked loose at every shot.”

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The most dangerous rounds were those fired by mortars, which lobbed explosive shells that soared in high arcs over Sumter’s walls, then descended along an almost vertical trajectory to land on the parade within the fort. Brick and mortar seemed to erupt everywhere; plumes of pulverized masonry rolled through the fort propelled by gale-force winds. Rain fell.

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“Prayers from the women and imprecations from the men, and then a shell would light up the scene.” Mary grew tired. “Up on the housetop I was so weak and weary I sat down on something that looked like a black stool,” she wrote. A man shouted, “Get up, you foolish woman—your dress is on fire.” She stood. “And he put me out,” she wrote. “It was a chimney, and the sparks caught my clothes.” Another man and a woman came to help. “But my fire had been extinguished before it broke out into a regular blaze.”

the officers divided the garrison force into gunnery squads so that once a squad grew weary, another could step in and resume firing. Doubleday led the first group to the guns in the casemates that faced the Iron Battery at Cummings Point on Morris Island, due south. “In aiming the first gun fired against the rebellion I had no feeling of self-reproach,” he wrote, “for I fully believed that the contest was inevitable, and was not of our seeking.” As Doubleday saw it, he was fighting for the survival of the United States. “The only alternative was to submit to a powerful oligarchy who were determined to make freedom forever subordinate to slavery.”

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the fort’s biggest and most effective guns, those on the parapet, were by Anderson’s order not to be used. These stood in the open, protected only by the top of the wall in front of them, which would have provided ample protection if the opposing force were a fleet of ships in the shipping channel. But with Confederate guns firing from all directions, the parapet guns were too exposed and their use would put the men at grave risk. The casemates on the lowest level, however, were virtually bombproof. At six-thirty, Major Anderson at last gave the order to fire. Doubleday pulled the lanyard to discharge Sumter’s first shot. It struck the Iron Battery on Cummings Point but bounced off its sloped roof and caused no damage. Ball after ball did likewise, though one appeared to disable an iron shutter that shielded the battery’s embrasure between firings, thereby putting the gun behind it out of action. More of Sumter’s guns fired and added fresh bursts of smoke and muzzle flare to the ambient cacophony. “It would be useless for me to attempt to describe the scene for the next four hours,” wrote Private Thompson. “If viewed from a distance it must have been grand.”

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“Showers of balls from ten-inch Columbiads and forty-two-pounders, and shells from thirteen-inch mortars poured into the fort in one incessant stream, causing great flakes of masonry to fall in all directions,” Doubleday wrote. Mortar rounds became embedded in the soft ground of the parade. When these exploded, Doubleday wrote, the blasts “shook the fort like an earthquake.”

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The Confederate gunners seemed particularly intent on bringing down Sumter’s American flag, the Stars and Stripes. Shot after shot rocketed past the flagstaff and landed in the water beyond the fort. On three occasions shells set fire to the officers quarters, but these fires were quickly extinguished. Fire was the great danger, given the three hundred barrels of powder—over thirty thousand pounds—stored in the fort’s main magazine. All day the wind blew at gale force and rain fell heavily as cannonballs hissed overhead and shells exploded seemingly everywhere, launching squalls of iron shrapnel.

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Doubleday’s men worked the guns for three hours, which, given the labor involved in preparing and loading them between firings, brought the men to the point of exhaustion.

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Ruffin saw a number of men, eight or ten, running “at their utmost speed” away from the beach and at first thought they were running because they were terrified. In fact, they were gleefully chasing the balls that had missed their mark and now were rolling across the terrain. The men were hoping “to secure them as memorials or trophies,” Ruffin realized.

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Meanwhile Confederate balls and explosive shells ripped into Sumter’s walls. The men watching from Morris Island critiqued each shot, as recorded by Asst. Surgeon Parker: “Cries of that’s a good one, hurrah for that one—bad—poor—try it again.”

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Despite the rain and cold, the atmosphere on Morris Island was festive and lighthearted. The men at the Confederate batteries cheered each time Fort Sumter fired a shot, to honor the gallant Major Anderson, whose performance thus far was deemed very much in accord with the chivalry’s code of honor. For the moment, at least, this was not war but rather an elaborate if perilous form of sport.

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Ruffin surveyed the damage done thus far to Fort Sumter. Two or three guns on its topmost level were disabled, knocked from their carriages. Half a dozen chimneys on structures within the fort had been destroyed.

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The wind and rain persisted; shortly after nightfall a pounding rain hammered the Confederate emplacements for half an hour. The firing from Sumter ceased; the Confederate batteries fired mortar rounds through the night, but at twenty-minute intervals to discomfit Anderson’s men and interrupt their sleep. “After dark,” Ruffin wrote, “I went out of our tent to observe the appearance of the shells, in their luminous course, as seen in the night. A line of light shows along the whole curve of the course, preceded by the brilliant explosion of the discharge of the shell from the mortar, and another made by the final bursting of the shell.”

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“Night black and stormy, rain is falling with lightning and thunder.”

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“The enemy kept up a slow but steady fire on us during the entire night, to prevent our getting any rest,” wrote Private Thompson. “I for one slept all night as sound as ever I did in my life.”

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An explosive shell landed inside the fort and detonated near the casemates, wounding a laborer. It became apparent that the Confederate batteries had begun firing “hot shot,” cannonballs heated in furnaces. One or two balls came to rest inside the fort, where one of them set a man’s bed on fire. At about nine o’clock, a shell from a mortar burst through the roof of the officers quarters. Heavy smoke rose from within. The location of the fire was too exposed to allow men to effectively fight it, Foster realized. He alerted Anderson that if the fire continued to burn out of control, it could detonate the fort’s cache of gunpowder, the thirty thousand pounds stored in barrels in Sumter’s main magazine.

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When the fort resumed firing, it seemed to Parker to focus its attentions solely on Fort Moultrie and the floating battery. This made Parker sad. There was no heroism in sitting around watching other soldiers engage in battle. “She seems to have forgotten Cummings Point and Morris Island batteries entirely,” Parker wrote. He and Ruffin and their fellow Guard members converged at the camp mess for breakfast. For the first time in forty hours, Parker sat at an actual table. He observed with satisfaction how readily they all had grown accustomed to being fired at with heavy guns. “Would our friends think we could so casually take our meal while amidst the cannon balls!”

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After breakfast Parker and the men around him began lighting cigars and settled back to smoke. This was interrupted when, at about nine a.m., a loud cheer rose from the direction of the beach. They ran toward it “pell mell,” Parker wrote, and found their fellow soldiers standing on every available promontory cheering wildly. The sound was deafening. “It goes on, from hill to hill till it reaches the farthest end of the Island.” Fort Sumter, they saw, was on fire. — This fire persisted and intensified. A succession of mortar shells fell into and around the burning structure, as did salvos of incendiary cannonballs. Walls and woodwork caught fire. Captain Doubleday, like Foster, recognized that this fire now threatened the main powder magazine, which was embedded within the ground floor of the burning structure. Though the magazine was heavily shielded with masonry and a heavy copper door and thus largely bombproof and fireproof, the risk remained that an errant spark might penetrate the chamber through its ventilator and detonate powder stored inside, with catastrophic consequences. The men used axes to cut away walls, stairs, posts, and timbers to starve the fire of as much fuel as possible. Anderson decided the powder was still too vulnerable and ordered his men to move the barrels to the casemates at the opposite side of the parade. The task was hazardous beyond calculation. It required the men to open the magazine’s door and leave it open for prolonged periods, which le...

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Doubleday longed to fire a shell in their direction, but the only weapons at Sumter capable of reaching the city—the improvised mortars on the parade—were too exposed to be used safely amid the rain of shells being lobbed into the fort by Confederate mortars. “The scene at this time was really terrific,” Doubleday wrote. “The roaring and crackling of the flames, the dense masses of whirling smoke, the bursting of the enemy’s shells, and our own which were exploding in the burning rooms, the crashing of the shot, and the sound of masonry falling in every direction, made the fort a pandemonium.”

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The Confederates may have appreciated Anderson’s gallantry, but this did not stop them from seeking to take utmost advantage of the moment. They continued to pour shell after shell into the western end of the fort to worsen the conflagration and keep Anderson’s men from putting it out.

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Now and then flames appeared above Sumter’s parapets; a geyser of white smoke suggested the fire had ignited a cache of gunpowder. At intervals small bright explosions burst from the smoke as well. “It was manifest that the flames, or heat, had reached a magazine of loaded shells and hand grenades,” Ruffin wrote. The fire gained ferocity as it moved eastward with the wind. “The only remaining buildings were consumed, and it seemed, to our outside view and inferences, that the whole area of the fort must have been so hot, and full of suffocating smoke, as to be intolerable to the garrison.”

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Enslaved Blacks served breakfast in the dining room; the cheery scent of coffee and baked goods filtered through the halls. “But the sound of those guns makes regular meals impossible,” Mary wrote. “None of us go to table. But tea trays pervade the corridors, going everywhere.”

Mary marveled at the calm of the Black servants in the house. Some were employees hired out by their owners, each wearing the required badge. Other enslaved servants were brought along by the families lodged within. “Not by one word or look can we detect any change in the demeanor of these negro servants,” Mary wrote. “Laurence”—her husband’s enslaved valet—“sits at our door, as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly indifferent. So are they all. They carry it too far. You could not tell that they hear even the awful row that is going on in the bay, though it is dinning in their ears night and day. And people talk before them as if they were chairs and tables. And they make no sign. Are they solidly stupid or wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?”

The loss of Sumter’s flag was for Anderson and his men a heartbreaking and humiliating event. The flag was a tactile representation of nationhood. In merely firing on it, the Confederates who claimed so noisily to revere honor had engaged in a singularly dishonorable act. To bring it down by gunfire was heinous beyond measure.