“IHAVE SENT MY WIFE AND child into the country for the month of April, not to avoid the shells from Fort Sumter, but to eat strawberries,” Robert Bunch wrote to Lord Lyons. He was either joking or sending a guarded message or both. His situation in Charleston had, in fact, grown increasingly precarious. The omnipresent atmosphere of conspiracy and suspicion meant that people were more likely than before to look behind his “smile of indifference.” Was he with them, or was he against them? And if he was with them, how could he prove it?
For some time, one of Bunch’s tactics to shore up support among influential locals was to help Charleston’s merchants and planters get their letters out to England. He preferred to use messengers with British backgrounds, even those like “Ramsay,” the problematic newspaper correspondent (or spy). Importantly—indeed, vitally—each informal courier, even if he had been naturalized as an American citizen, would be given a British passport to help him travel between the Secession states and the Union states. But it was a risky strategy: the passports Bunch signed might suck him into the intrigues of those who carried them, and he might also find himself incriminated by the contents of the letters if they were opened. On the other hand, encrypted letters or telegraphs compounded the suspicions directed at the consul. At the height of tensions about Fort Sumter, Bunch had asked Lyons to send him a coded telegraph message to let him know what the hell was going on in Washington, but Lyons had decided not to, because he thought it would draw too much attention to the recipient.
Bunch not only worried about the risks to Emma and little Helen if war erupted, he worried about the risks to himself and his work if they stayed in the city. Now more than ever a wrong word uttered by his impassioned wife or even his six-year-old daughter could prove disastrous. If they went to stay with Emma’s sister at Board House or The Meadows, whether they picked strawberries or not, they would be out of harm’s way.
“Fort Sumter hangs in the balance, but we are promised action of some sort in a few days,” Bunch wrote the afternoon of April 5, 1861. The Southern gunners were getting trigger-happy. Two nights before, they’d fired at a schooner full of nothing but ice that was bound from Boston to Savannah when it tried to pull into the harbor to escape bad weather. Their cannons had taken fifteen shots at her, Bunch noted, but only one of them scored, ripping through her mainsail.
“We are in the most frightful commotion imaginable,” Bunch wrote on April 9. “It is fully believed that the U.S. government intends to reinforce Fort Sumter, and every man is under arms. If the news from Washington be true that reinforcements are on their way, there will be a desperate fight here before we are many days, perhaps hours, older.” Bunch worried, half in jest, about the possibility that the “attached peasantry”—that is, the slaves—“may take advantage of everybody being away fighting the fort to start a little private war on their own account in the city.” Bunch said he planned to be flying the Union Jack outside the consulate en permanence.
“Fort Sumter is perfectly surrounded by men—there are certainly between 6 and 7000 on the various islands,” Bunch reported two days later. “My fear is that even if the U.S. supplies and reinforcement do not arrive, an attack will be made by the Southern troops. As the Irishman says, ‘Everyone is spoiling for a fight.’
“I shall do my best to keep Your Lordship informed respecting the movements of the U.S. ships of war, but the information will not be easy to procure unless they fight their way into the harbor.
“Everything is upside now and cannot continue long in this state.”
—
FEDERAL SHIPS WERE, indeed, on their way to resupply Fort Sumter. They arrived outside the harbor that same afternoon, and one of them was the same U.S. revenue cutter, the Harriet Lane, that had borne Crown Prince Bertie and Bunch and assorted dignitaries into New York City only a few months before. One of the sailors, Bradley Sillick Osbon, was an adventurer who’d also signed up as a correspondent for the New York World. He climbed up next to the coast pilot and looked at the harbor through his spyglass. There in the distance was Sumter with Old Glory still flying high above it. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard had delivered an ultimatum to Maj. Anderson that very afternoon, demanding he surrender the fort. Anderson had refused.
—
ABNER DOUBLEDAY, ANDERSON’S second-in-command, was determined to get as much sleep as possible before the fighting began. He and the other officers had moved from their exposed quarters overlooking Fort Moultrie down into the powder magazines behind the thickest part of Sumter’s walls. Then, around four in the morning on April 12, Doubleday heard someone groping around in the dark in his makeshift room and calling his name. It was Anderson. “I’ve just received a dispatch from Beauregard dated 3:20 a.m.,” said the major. “They’re going to open fire on us in an hour.” Anderson, knowing his supply of ammunition was low, determined to hold his fire until after breakfast. So Doubleday stayed in bed. “We had no lights,” he wrote later. “We could, in fact, do nothing before that time, except to wander around in darkness, and fire without an accurate view of the enemy’s works.”
As soon as the Confederate batteries could distinguish the outline of Sumter’s walls in the first dim light before dawn, a little after 4:30 a.m., the firing began. Historical lore has it that the white-haired old secessionist Edmund Ruffin had the honor of firing the first shot from the batteries at Cummings Point on Morris Island. Seconds later, at Fort Sumter, a round of shot buried itself in the wall just on the other side of Captain Doubleday’s head, as he recalled, “in very unpleasant proximity to my right ear.” Then “the firing burst forth in one continuous roar, and large patches of both the exterior and interior masonry began to crumble and fall in all directions.”
Shortly after sunrise the soldiers in the Sumter garrison breakfasted on pork and water, then opened up with their own guns. But the fleet that had been sent to relieve them stayed outside the harbor.
—
BUNCH WATCHED THE fireworks from the roof of his house. All morning long the cannons continued to roar. Bunch reported that “the attacking batteries are eight in number, five at least of them firing shell,” by which he meant exploding ordnance rather than solid cannonballs. “Major Anderson has no shell and from the small numbers of his men can only work four guns. Consequently not a single man has been hurt on the South Carolina side.” The battle seemed very strange to Bunch, and, caught up in the moment, he was eager to get at least a little closer to the action.
In the early afternoon, a little skiff could be seen bobbing along the edge of the harbor with a slight, balding man, the British consul, aboard. For four and a half hours he and a South Carolina state senator visited the Confederate batteries. He said afterward that the Almighty must have deprived him of “all sense and intelligence” to make him do such a thing. “Of course, I really ran no risk except that of a shell falling short or taking a twist the wrong way,” he said, and he “had a capital view of the firing on both sides but do not think that what I saw was sufficient to repay me for my trouble.”
The shelling went on into the night, although Anderson’s troops quit firing once it was dark. On the morning of April 13 they had more pork and water and then went back to their big guns. A sudden rainstorm brought a brief lull in the shelling, but at about eight o’clock Ripley began a concerted attack on the vulnerable officers’ quarters using incendiary shells and cannonballs heated in Fort Moultrie’s furnace. By a little after ten o’clock the whole wooden structure was ablaze, and a nearby magazine holding three hundred barrels of powder was in danger of exploding. The officers set to work with axes trying to tear away the wooden structures that might send sparks into the ventilators. The soldiers rolled the barrels out of the magazine to more sheltered locations. Maj. Ripley, when he saw the fire well under way, only increased the pace of his bombardment.
“By 11 a.m. the conflagration was terrible and disastrous,” Captain Doubleday reported. “One-fifth of the fort was on fire, and the wind drove the smoke in dense masses into the angle where we had all taken refuge. It seemed impossible to escape suffocation. Some lay down close to the ground, with handkerchiefs over their mouths, and others posted themselves near the embrasures, where the smoke was somewhat lessened by the draught of air. Everyone suffered severely. I crawled out of one of these openings and sat on the outer edge; but Ripley made it lively for me there with his case-shot, which spattered all around. Had not a slight change of wind taken place, the result might have been fatal to most of us.”
—
BUNCH REPORTED FORT SUMTER “badly on fire, blazing merrily” that morning. “In about 45 minutes, the conflagration abated. Subsequently, however, there have been two explosions in the Fort, one of which I saw. It looked very badly, but it is impossible to say what the damage has been. Anderson is evidently suffering today. There are vessels outside the Bar, which are believed to be U.S. Ships, but it is impossible to say….I do not think that Anderson can hold out much longer unless he be reinforced. The odds are too great against him.”
Bunch enclosed, for Lyons, a clipping from one of the Charleston papers describing the previous day’s fighting. He appended a note in cipher. When decoded, it read, “A pack of horrid lies.”
—
DOUBLEDAY ORDERED a few more rounds fired, to show the garrison wasn’t dead yet. But “the scene at this time was really terrific,” he wrote afterward. “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.”
Suddenly a face appeared, looking in through one of the embrasures, or viewing slits, in the fortress wall. It was none other than Louis Wigfall, the former U.S. senator from Texas—he of the murderous reputation and the tiger eyes—who’d come over from Morris Island in a rowboat. Black oarsmen waited in the background, the water lapping against the gunwales of their little vessel as Wigfall, a bit out of breath and probably a trifle drunk, said he was speaking on behalf of Gen. Beauregard. He offered to let Anderson evacuate the fort with permission to salute the Federal flag—that is, to march out with the honors of war. They were the same terms offered by Beauregard three days before, when not a shot had been fired.
—
AT 2:30 P.M., Bunch wrote in his running account of the battle that “about an hour ago Fort Sumter’s flagstaff was shot away. It remained down some time, but at last the flag appeared, seemingly hoisted on a chimney. After about 20 minutes, however, it came down, and a white flag was run up in its place. So we suppose Anderson has surrendered, but no particulars are known as yet.” Then he could not help adding, “Of course, there is frightful excitement, and equally, of course, it is now quite evident that the Almighty is on our side, also that our cause is a just and holy one.”
At 6:30 p.m., Bunch finished his last dispatch of the day to Lyons. “The fort has surrendered unconditionally, I believe. So far as I can learn, not one soul has been hurt on either side, which after 33 hours bombarding is a little curious. But we live in curious times.”
The war had begun.