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

by Erik Larson

Seward, too, was growing frustrated. He still hoped to evacuate Sumter to buy time for the realization of his dream of Union restoration despite the Cabinet’s decision to resupply the fortress. He remained convinced that a deep reservoir of pro-Union sentiment existed in the South and that a period of calm would bring it to the surface. Lincoln, meanwhile, seemed overwhelmed and distracted by the petty responsibilities of establishing his government.

All this sotto voce communication between Seward, Justice Campbell, and the Southern commissioners eventually caught the attention of Seward’s fellow cabinet members and prompted Navy Sec. Gideon Welles to remark, “A strange state of things, when the first officer of the cabinet and one of the judges of the highest court were in communication with rebels discussing measures having in view a disruption of the union.”

When the conversation turned to slavery, it seemed to Russell to slip all tethers to reality. “The gentlemen at table asserted that the white men in the slave States are physically superior to the men in the free States; and indulged in curious theories in morals and physics to which I was a stranger.”

The evening reinforced Russell’s growing conviction that Northerners had little understanding of their brethren below the Mason-Dixon Line. Southerners, he noted, routinely traveled North, but Northerners were far less likely to go South, in part out of a concern, he realized, for safety. William Seward’s ignorance was particularly striking to Russell. The secretary dismissed Southerners as being “in every respect behind the age, with fashions, habits, level of thought, and modes of life, belonging to the worst part of the last century. But still he never has been there himself!”

April 4, in Richmond, the still-seated Virginia Convention held a vote on a proposed ordinance of secession. The delegates rejected it 88 to 45.

1861.

April 9, at Pickens’s office at the Charleston Hotel around a table on which lay a bag of mail just delivered from the Charleston post office by one of his aides. This was Sumter’s outbound mail that had been in the post office when Beauregard issued his order halting mail service to and from the fort.

“Go ahead, Governor, open it,” Judge Magrath said. Then, like a man steeling himself to jump into freezing water, Pickens ripped into the letter “so nervously as almost to destroy it.” The men agreed that they would only open official mail and send all clearly private letters on to their destinations. Inadvertently, while opening an official-looking envelope, they intercepted a letter from Anderson to his wife, but promptly resealed it.

“You see that the present scheme for supplying the fort is Mr. Fox’s,” Pickens wrote. “It is thought that the attempt will be made tonight, and we have doubled our steamboats on the harbor and bar.” Charleston was prepared, he assured Davis. Over two thousand troops had been deployed to Morris Island alone, where Union forces were deemed most likely to attempt a landing. Another eight hundred more were due to arrive by train that night. He expected to have over six thousand men in all positioned throughout the harbor. “I trust we are ready, and if they come we will give them a cordial reception, such as will ring through the country, I think.”

The bombardment was to begin with the firing of a signal round from a mortar at Fort Johnson, the hitherto abandoned colonial fort. Early orders issued before the final ultimatum had indicated this would be done at eight p.m. 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. His designated cannon was one of the big sixty-four-pounders loaded with an exploding shell.

When they went back inside they learned the contents of the message: The South Carolina batteries arrayed around Charleston Harbor had been ordered to fire on Sumter if Anderson did not surrender.

Beauregard’s final ultimatum, which three Confederate officers, including James Chesnut, had just delivered. The Confederate batteries would begin firing at four-twenty a.m., Anderson said; he told Doubleday that he would not return fire until after sunrise. “As we had no lights,” Doubleday wrote, “we could in fact do nothing before that time, except to wander around in the darkness, and fire without an accurate view of the enemy’s works.”

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.

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.

Sumter’s guns remained quiet; the fort had stopped firing an hour before nightfall. The Confederate batteries kept up their dirge-like barrage, launching one mortar shell every twenty minutes, a reminder that more would come at dawn.

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.

the U.S. ships were still off the bar. None showed any sign of advancing. For the men at Sumter this was perplexing and frustrating. Perversely, it also angered many among the ranks of the Confederates, who could not understand why the fleet did not come to rescue Anderson and his garrison.

“We now first heard from all the remote batteries, and learned that they, like ours, had not had a man killed or wounded,” Ruffin wrote. “It was more remarkable that the garrison had been almost equally exempt, there having been only a few slight wounds from flying splinters or fragments.” Ruffin observed that Sumter had withstood the barrage without significant damage. “The walls outside were thickly sprinkled with marks of cannon balls, which had not penetrated more than from 6 to 18 inches, and had nowhere made a breach.”

At the forty-seventh shot, a private named Daniel Hough—“an excellent soldier,” Doubleday said—loaded a cartridge into one of the guns. Apparently the barrel had not been thoroughly sponged after the preceding shot. The cartridge exploded and tore the private’s arm off; the blast killed him in an instant. Sparks then detonated other cartridges hidden under nearby debris and caused a second blast that blew the adjacent gunners into the air. One of these, Pvt. Edward Galloway, would later die in a Charleston hospital. Four others were injured but survived. The salute was suspended to give the garrison time to dig a grave in the parade for Private Hough.

As far as Governor Pickens, General Beauregard, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis were concerned, it was the moment when at last the Union took the South seriously.

That no one had been killed in the bombardment itself was remarkable given that the Confederate batteries had fired 3,341 shells and balls, and Fort Sumter about a thousand.

Here lay the greatest of ironies: In thirty-four hours of some of the fiercest bombardment the world had ever seen, no one was killed or even seriously injured, yet this bloodless attack would trigger a war that killed more Americans than any other conflict in the country’s history.

The closer he got to Charleston, the wilder the celebrations became, the more visceral the declamations of hatred for the North and of the willingness to kill to sustain some inchoate standard of Southern life, foremost of which was the right to enslave Blacks.

The [London] Times reporter William Howard Russell.

Lincoln offered Lee command of all Union land forces. That same day Lee learned that Virginia had seceded. For Lee this was a wrenching moment. He considered slavery “a moral and political evil” and looked upon secession “as anarchy.” Writing to Blair, he said, “If I owned the four million slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”

he talked with a number of the city’s chivalry, including James Chesnut and John Manning. The conversation grew heated. Russell found the men full of confident menace not just toward Yankees, but also any potential British interference. They were convinced that Britain, once confronted with the loss of Southern cotton, would ally itself with the Confederacy—the “cotton is king” thesis famously articulated in the U.S. Senate by James Henry Hammond. Russell tried to persuade them otherwise, with no success. “I found this was the fixed idea everywhere. The doctrine of ‘cotton is king,’ to them is a lively all powerful faith without distracting heresies or schisms.”

Maryland stayed in the Union, but secessionists in the state burned railway bridges and shut down all telegraphic communication between Washington and the North, leaving the city isolated.

Sumter had fallen on April 14, 1861; now, four years later, President Lincoln wanted the American flag to again fly over the fort and wanted its former commander, Robert Anderson, to raise it.

Two months earlier, Charleston’s mayor, Charles Macbeth, had surrendered the city to a force of Black soldiers, the 21st Regiment U.S. Colored Infantry.

At first only small military engagements occurred. The “real war,” as Walt Whitman put it, did not begin until July 21, 1861, a lovely but hot Sunday when Union and Confederate forces clashed at Bull Run.

Richmond, which in May 1861 had been designated the new capital of the Confederacy.

Montgomery, Alabama was the original capital.

On August 17, a Sunday, Ruffin and his son Edmund, Jr., rode to the plantation after receiving word that it had recently been evacuated by its Yankee occupiers.

The occupiers saved their worst for the interior walls. Soldiers used these as a target for spitting wads of chewed tobacco and appeared to have taken particular effort to do so. They signed their names—Ruffin counted thirty-one—and scrawled obscenities. It was here that the soldiers’ enmity toward him, personally, bore clearest expression. One soldier cut to the heart of it: “You did fire the first gun on Sumter, you traitor son of a bitch.”