Chapter 1: The War Begins at Sumter

Sergeant James Chester could do nothing but walk out onto the parade ground and wait. The air was cool on this early spring evening as he stood and reflected on his current dilemma, surrounded by the massive three-story brick faade of an unfinished fort. Overhead, the stars twinkled and a waxing crescent moon hung low in the sky, Saturn and Jupiter were paired closely in the constellation Leo, suggesting to some an omen. A chilling breeze passed over the harbor every few minutes, adding to the grim anticipation. Chester, a youthful Scot, had emigrated to the United States and joined the army in 1854, just as tensions over the expansion of slavery threatened to tear the country apart. Now he was standing in the hotbed of secession and all was quiet as could be. 'Except that the flag was hoisted, and a glimmer of light was visible at the guardhouse,' he later wrote, 'the fort looked so dark and silent as to seem deserted.'

It was not. In less than two hours Chester would live through a fateful moment in American history. Along with Chester, 75 other Federal soldiers, 8 musicians, and 43 workmen anticipated the start of hostilities from local secessionists this evening in Charleston Harbor. The Federal soldiers' temporary home, Fort Sumter, was one of America's coastal forts built following the War of 1812. It was named for Thomas Sumter, a brigadier general of South Carolina militia and hero of the Revolutionary War. Although construction on the fort began in 1829, three years before Sumter's death, the fort remained unfinished in the spring of 1861. Fort Sumter was an imposing structure, placed nearly centrally in the harbor, and the powerhouse of the four forts built to protect the city.

Sumter's handsome brick walls, five feet thick, stood 50 feet above the water. The fort's five-sided plan used four sides that ranged from 170 to 190 feet long and a gorge wall containing officers' quarters that faced southwest. The fort's three stories were designed to hold two primary tiers of casements and a parapet that together would mount 135 guns and hold a garrison of 650. On the evening of April 11, 1861, the men inside the fort were dwarfed by the mammoth size of the structure and chagrined by the fact that only fifteen cannon were fixed in place and ready to fire. To make the garrison even less prepared to face a crisis, its supplies of food were dwindling. On this evening the soldiers had rations to last possibly five days.

Such an unlikely situation was supervised by Maj. Robert Anderson, age fifty-five and a veteran of the regular army. Anderson's Kentucky ancestry and the fact that he favored slavery and married a Georgia girl did not seem to bother his Yankee comrades. He was an expert artillerist and had served gallantly in the Black Hawk, Seminole, and Mexican wars, demonstrating unwavering loyalty toward the United States. Anderson's five principal subordinates would rise to varying degrees of fame and glory in the contest to come. Capt. John Gray Foster of New Hampshire was Anderson's chief engineer, a bearded, balding veteran who had been wounded at Molino del Rey in the Mexican War. Capt. Abner Doubleday, a New Yorker who is erroneously associated with the invention of baseball, was an artillerist from a distinguished family. Capt. Jefferson Columbus Davis was born in Indiana and became a trained artillerist. He would live to kill a fellow officer in cold blood and dodge paying any price for it. Asst. Surg. Samuel Wylie Crawford, the physician at Sumter, was a Pennsylvanian with an elegant mustache and lamb-chop whiskers. First Lt. Truman Seymour, one of the most junior commissioned...