The Civil War: Abner Doubleday: from Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-’61

There had been talk that, if a civil war began, it would begin at Fort Sumter. Sat in the harbor near Charleston, South Carolina, it was a fort that the United States held. Indeed, it was here that the first shots of the war would be fired. It was one thing to read about the events reported in the newspaper—focusing on the result: its surrender—but something else altogether to read an account from someone in the fort. Years later, Abner Doubleday wrote of his experience, in Fort Sumter, from the bombardment to its surrender on April 14, 1861.

All had been quiet in Charleston’s harbor until “the venerable Edmund Ruffin, who might almost be called the father of secession,” fired the first shot from a battery, initiating the rebels’ bombardment of Fort Sumter. The shells came flying at and into the fort with some coming very close to taking the lives of its occupants. Doubleday heard one ball “lodged in the magazine wall, and by the sound seemed to bury itself in the masonry about a foot from [his] head, in very unpleasant proximity to [his] right ear.”

Those were the shots that caused “large patches of both the exterior and interior masonry . . . to crumble and fall in all directions.” And hitting the masonry was preferred to hitting other targets: the room that Doubleday found himself in “had been used for the manufacture of cartridges, and there was still a good deal of powder there, some packed and some loose.” One shell “soon struck near the ventilator, and a puff of dense smoke entered the room, giving [him] a strong impression that there would be an immediate explosion.” “Fortunately,” he wrote, “no sparks had penetrated inside.” And thus Doubleday made it through the first day of the bombardment.

When the next morning dawned, Doubleday went to breakfast—of mostly pork and water—and the men “were calm, and even somewhat merry.” This was despite the nineteen batteries “hammering at [them], and the balls and shells from the ten-inch columbiads, accompanied by shells from the thirteen-inch mortars which constantly bombarded [them, making them] feel as if the war had commenced in earnest.”

After breakfast, Doubleday took a detachment of men to the guns trained on the rebels’ “powerful iron-clad battery of Cummings Point.” He aimed the gun and fired it, but the “shot bounced off from the sloping roof of the battery opposite without producing any apparent effect.” It seemed that the ammunition was “not heavy enough” to cause damage, although one shell did hit and “twist the iron shutter, so as to stop the firing of that particular gun.” He then watched as “a group of the enemy had ventured out from their intrenchments [sic] to watch the effect of their fire, but [he] sent them flying back to their shelter by the aid of a forty-two-pounder ball, which appeared to strike right in among them.”

Shells struck Fort Sumter all day, even causing the officers’ quarters to catch fire three times, and even overnight—at a regular interval. The next day, the 13th, the men in the fort had their pork and water breakfast and then went to the guns. By the end of the morning, a rain storm had come and gone, but the artillery shells kept falling and in more precarious places: one shell went through the fort’s roof and exploded on the second story. And on it went until fires spread throughout the fort and even menacingly close to three hundred barrels of powder. Seeing the risk of those barrels combusting, officers took axes to the wooden structure housing those barrels, and soldiers began rolling away the barrels and covering them with wet blankets.

Conditions did not permit the soldiers time to remove all the barrels: they realized they had to move away from the area—smoke and fire was filling the fort. But two hundred barrels remained in the room. The men closed the copper door and had no choice but to hope that it would not serve as a giant bomb. Then, a shell struck the door, bending the lock and guaranteeing the room could no longer be accessed—the room in which much of the fort’s ammunition sat.

With fire spreading throughout the fort, and the wind howling, smoke caused the men to take refuge: “[i]t seemed impossible to escape suffocation.” Men “lay down close to the ground, with handkerchiefs over their mouths,” and others gathered near air drafts to minimize their smoke intake. Only a change in the wind’s direction relieved the men of the condition. And to show that they were still alive—for their enemy must have questioned this fact—the gunners fired a few rounds on the rebels. Doubleday “heard afterward that the enemy loudly cheered . . . for [the] persistency under such adverse circumstances.”

By this time, it was pandemonium in the fort: “[t]he 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.” One of the fort’s towers “was almost completely shattered,” and its wooden gates were burned with the wall behind them a “heap of débris”—opening the main entrance for the enemy. When the flag fell due to its staff being shot down at around 12:48pm, one man, Peter Hart, erected a temporary flag-staff and “raised it triumphantly by nailing and tying the pole firmly to a pile of gun-carriages on the parapet.”

The rebels had seen the flag go down but not up again and assumed that the men inside had surrendered. Native South Carolinian, Senator Louis Wigfall, came to the fort and offered its leader, Major Robert Anderson, to evacuate the fort, to salute the American flag, and to march out with the honors of war—with arms and private baggage in tow—leaving all other materials behind. It was all set to happen the following morning, and the surrounding area’s population “poured into Charleston in vast multitudes, to witness the humiliation of the United States flag.” Meanwhile, for the first time in two nights, “after all the fatigue and excitement,” the men in the fort “slept soundly.”

The next morning, those men prepared to fire a national salute on their way out of the fort, and it was because of a fire not having been extinguished that Daniel Hough became the first man to lose his life on either side of the conflict that was now a civil war. When a cartridge got loaded, “it went off prematurely, and blew off the right arm of the gunner,” and his “death was almost instantaneous.” Others were near the explosion and “were blown into the air”—one of whom the rebels cared for after the evacuation, returning him to the North after he healed.

With a battle—of sorts—finished, and the first casualties of the nascent war inflicted, the Union men marched out of the fort “with the flag flying, and the drums beating Yankee Doodle.” The rebels then ran up their “silken banner made by the ladies of Charleston,” and the harbor filled with “tremendous shouts of applause.” And a fractured country—as well as the wider world—took in the news that war had broken out amongst the states.