The Coming Fury by Bruce Catton

Author:Bruce Catton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Military, Non Fiction
ISBN: 9781842122921
Publisher: Phoenix Press
Published: 1981-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

4. The Circle of Fire

THE SIEGE had been carried on in earnest, but it had been like a formalized ritual carried on between friends. The Federal soldiers in the fort and the South Carolina soldiers who encircled it maintained polite relations while they got ready to kill each other, and when the big guns they were lining up went off by accident, or were fired in the wrong direction, letters of apology were quickly sent and gracefully acknowledged.

The guns had been doing a good deal of firing all winter long. Fort Sumter and South Carolina were still at peace, but their gun crews had to be exercised and there was need for target practice. Delegates to the South Carolina convention cruised about in the harbor by steamboat at the end of March, watching the discharge of guns in the different batteries, noting the way heavy shell could be exploded squarely over the deep-water channel—and, after the firing had ended, enjoying "a very handsome collation" of chicken

salad, sandwiches, and cake and wine. Passing Fort Sumter on the way home, the delegates could see Federal officers on the parapet, and believed Anderson himself was surveying them with a telescope.1

Now and then there were accidents. Anderson's men mounted a ten-inch Columbiad as a mortar in the parade ground, pointing it at Charleston's fabled park, The Battery; to see if the alignment was correct, they got Major Anderson's permission to fire one shot with a greatly reduced charge. The reduction in the charge was insufficient; the gun threw its projectile in a soaring parabola that almost landed it in downtown Charleston, and there was a flurry of intense excitement, with officers coming out under flag of truce to ask the major if he was really starting the war. Explanations and an apology followed, and the excitement died down. Similarly, a few days later, some inexpert gun layer in Beauregard's gun crews fired a shot that actually nicked a corner of Fort Sumter itself. Again there were flags of truce, inquiries, and apologies. On April 3, when the tension had appreciably risen, the little schooner Rhoda B. Shannon, carrying ice down from Boston to Savannah, came blundering up the channel toward Charleston harbor and was promptly fired on, one ball splitting her mainsail. Anderson's drums beat his men to quarters, and at least five of his officers demanded that he open fire on the nearest Confederate battery; Anderson temporized, sent an inquiry ashore under a flag, learned that the schooner's captain had simply lost his way and that he carried nothing the Sumter garrison wanted in any case, and the incident was closed.2

Once, early in the spring, Mrs. Anderson came down from New York for a visit, bringing with her Peter Hart, who had been a sergeant in Anderson's company in the Mexican War. Mrs. Anderson felt that with so much disaffection everywhere her husband ought to have one man on whom he could rely implicitly, so she was bringing him this former sergeant. Reaching

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