Way back in another century, when I was a kid, my uncle from South Carolina and my dad took me to Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. I’ve been hooked on the Civil War ever since. Before the game this morning, I just finished Erik Larson’s excellent new book The Demon of Unrest about the six month lead up to the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the start of the Civil War. Larson is not a Civil War expert or historian, but he is a tremendous storyteller, painting vivid portraits of a variety of historical characters, and he builds the tension well, even though you know the ultimate outcome.
Some samples from the book, first one about the famous British journalist William Russell, who was en route to Fort Sumter when he learned of the attack:
And this:
Some samples from the book, first one about the famous British journalist William Russell, who was en route to Fort Sumter when he learned of the attack:
It was only on Sunday, April 14, that the Times’ [of London’s] Russell at last realized that Fort Sumter had indeed been bombarded, and had fallen, and that something larger and more tragic had begun to unfold.
He had spent the previous night aboard the steamer Georgiana, which took him from Baltimore to Norfolk. It was a hard night, during which he was kept awake by noise and the predations of mosquitoes, which made their way into his room despite the rough gauze curtains that were supposed to protect against them. Unable to sleep, with little blood left to give and breakfast not yet available, he dressed and walked the ship. He found its barroom full despite the early hour, with passengers having cocktails, especially mint juleps. “In the matter of drinks, how hospitable the Americans are!” Russell wrote. “I was asked to take as many as would have rendered me incapable of drinking again; my excuse on the plea of inability to grapple with cocktails and the like before breakfast was heard with surprise, and I was urgently entreated to abandon so bad a habit.”
And this:
Something had begun, though exactly what was not yet clear. Was this the start of a war, or the beginning of a new relationship between the Confederacy and the Union?
As far as Governor Pickens, General Beauregard, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis were concerned, it was the moment when at last the Union took the South seriously. The Confederacy had reduced and seized one of the most powerful forts in the land, the symbol of Northern tyranny, as three of the Union’s warships stood by.
That no one had been killed in the bombardment itself was remarkable given that the Confederate batteries had fired 3,341 shells and balls, and Fort Sumter about a thousand. To the religiously inclined, it was a miracle and seemed a harbinger of peace ahead. Few among South Carolina’s chivalry expected that a real war would result; and even if war did come, they believed it would be short and unremarkable. A common expression often attributed to Col. James Chesnut forecast that the total amount of blood likely to be shed in a war over secession would fill “a lady’s thimble.” Chesnut also made the vivid pledge to drink whatever blood actually did get shed.
Here lay the greatest of ironies: In thirty-four hours of some of the fiercest bombardment the world had ever seen, no one was killed or even seriously injured, yet this bloodless attack would trigger a war that killed more Americans than any other conflict in the country’s history.
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