Across the bay, in Charleston, word spread quickly as to the time when the bombardment would begin. 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.”
