Bruce Chadwick - The Cannons Roar: Fort Sumter and the Start of the Civil War―An Oral History

The Cannons Roar

Fort Sumter and the Start of the Civil War

An Oral History

Bruce Chadwick

For my late wife Marjorie and for all the veterans of Americas wars

Political: North

Abraham Lincoln, President

James Buchanan, former President

William Seward, Secretary of State

Joseph Holt, Secretary of War, then Judge Advocate General

Simon Cameron, Secretary of War

Edward Bates, Attorney General

Montgomery Blair, Postmaster General

Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy

Salmon Chase, Secretary of the Treasury

Lyman Trumbull, Illinois Senator, longtime Lincoln friend

Ward Lamon, Lincoln envoy

Stephen Hurlbut, Lincoln envoy

Political: South

Jefferson Davis, President

Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis

Alexander Stephens, Vice President

L. P. Walker, Secretary of War

Robert Toombs, Secretary of State

Francis Pickens, South Carolina Governor

William Gist, former South Carolina Governor

John Manning, former South Carolina Governor

Judge Campbell, Peace Commissioner

Martin Crawford, Peace Commissioner

Samuel Nelson, Peace Commissioner

Laurence Keitt, South Carolina Congressman

Louis Wigfall, Texas Senator

Robert Bunch, Great Britain Consul to Charleston

Edmund Ruffin, Virginia State Senator

Military: North

General Winfield Scott

Major Robert Anderson

Captain Abner Doubleday

Mary Doubleday, Abner Doubledays wife

Wylie Crawford, Fort Sumter surgeon

Captain John Foster, at Fort Sumter

Sergeant James Chester, at Fort Sumter

Military: South

General P. G. T. Beauregard

David Jamison, South Carolina Secretary of War

Colonel Charles Simonton

Press: North

Horace Greeley, New York Tribune

Murat Halstead, diarist and author

Henry Villard, New York Herald

Press: South

Edward Pollard, Richmond Examiner

Robert Rhett Jr., Charleston Mercury

Foreign Press

William Russell, London Times

Civilians: North

Billy Herndon, Lincolns former law partner

George Templeton Strong, New York lawyer and diarist

Charles Francis Adams Jr., grandson of President John Quincy Adams

Fanny Seward, daughter of Secretary of State William Seward

Helen Nicolay, daughter of Lincolns secretary, John Nicolay

Wendell Phillips, abolitionist

Ralph Waldo Emerson, philosopher

Carl Schurz, Lincoln friend

Edmund and Joseph Halsey, New Jersey brothers who would later fight on opposite sides

Samuel Halsey, Edmund and Joseph Halseys father

Katie Skillen, daughter of officer at Fort Sumter, age sixteen

Joshua Speed, Lincoln friend from Springfield

Civilians: South

Mary Chestnut, South Carolina socialite

Henry Ravenel, planter and botanist

Sarah Lowndes, wife of Charles Lowndes

Elizabeth Van Lew, Richmond

Reverend John Bachman

Robert E. Lee, Virginia planter and later head of the Army of Northern Virginia

Catherine Edmondson, wife of North Carolina planter

William Porcher Miles, Charleston politician and later Confederate general

Robert Gourdin, Charleston merchant

James Pettigrew, Charleston, Union sympathizer

Eliza Browne, Montgomery socialite

Catherine Thompson, wife of Jacob Thompson, US Secretary of the Interior, who resigned to join the Confederacy

Evelyn Ward, teenager from Tappahannock, Virginia

Emma Holmes, Charleston socialite

Mrs. A. M. Vanderhorst, Charleston socialite

Senator James Chestnut, husband of Mary Chestnut

William Haskell, one of the South Carolina Haskell brothers who wanted to enlist in the Confederate Army

Major Robert Anderson stood on the top of one of the walls at Fort Sumter, the unfinished federal military installation in Charleston Harbor, on the morning of March 4, 1861, and adjusted his spyglass. Once in focus, he found the moving figure of General P. G. T. Beauregard, his old student and close friend at West Point (Beauregard graduated second in his class in 1838), directing hundreds of Confederate troops. They were hauling heavy black cannons over roadways and winding dirt paths that cut through groves of palmetto trees to sites on the two islands across the harbor on either side of the island on which Sumter sat. Every day there were more troops. The dashing, well-dressed, handsome General Beauregard, with his neatly trimmed moustache and elegant goatee, the scion of a wealthy New Orleans French Creole family, had made a good impression on Charlestonians as soon as he had arrived in the city earlier that week. Beauregard had seen action in the Mexican War, serving as an engineer, and was a former superintendent of West Point. He was a colorful figure and adored by Charlestonians. He is the hero of the hour, gushed one woman.

Beauregard commanded six thousand busy Confederate and South Carolina state soldiers, and more of all shapes and sizes walked into his camp each day from all over the South. Anderson, from his elevated perch over the calm blue waters of the harbor, watched Beauregards every movement as he prepared his army for a possible bombardment of Fort Sumter. The Union major and his rival believed they soon might face off in the very first battle of the Civil War.

The road to Fort Sumter began with the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln as the nations sixteenth president in November 1860. Southerners were certain that Lincoln, who took office with a Republican-controlled Senate and House of Representatives, would eradicate slavery, and wanted no part of him and his government. South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860, and six more states soon followed. South Carolina demanded that the federal government turn over Fort Sumter. Negotiations to do so had failed with President James Buchanan and had started anew with Lincoln, who took office nine weeks after South Carolina seceded. The South threatened to take the fort by force and had begun to surround it with troops from the new Confederate governments hastily formed army. In Washington, D.C., Lincoln and his Cabinet would soon debate what to do about the fort. Tensions grew.

Unlike the flamboyant Beauregard, Anderson was conservative. He was a by-the-book officer and did little without guidance from Washington. He was highly conflicted, too, because he was from Kentucky, a slave state, and believed in slavery, and was here at Fort Sumter supporting a new anti-slavery presidents army. Torn between North and South, Anderson, father of five (and great-grandfather of actor Montgomery Clift), admitted that my heart was never in this war. He brought his spyglass down to his waist but kept staring. He knew from the number and size of the cannons, including a substantial number of large, powerful Columbiads nestled into thick green groves of palmetto trees, that the fort could be taken in a day or two of heavy bombardment. He scoffed at Northern newspaper reports that said it would take six months to level the fort (the New York Herald even called Sumter the strongest fort of its size in the world). Anderson shivered in the chilly early morning March air.