How It Began

FIRST BLOOD, THE STORY OF FORT SUMTER (373 pp.)--W. A. Swanberg--Scrib-ner ($5.95).

White-maned, Yankee-hating Edmund Ruffin watched the signal shot burst over Charleston harbor, seeming to trace in its flame the palmetto emblem of South Carolina. He had left his Virginia plantation, carrying with him a pike appropriated from John Brown's abolitionist band (its Ruffin-inscribed label: "Sample of the favors designed for us by our Northern brethren"), to see his dream of disunion come true. This--4:30 a.m.. April 12, 1861--was his great moment. Edmund Ruffin stepped proudly forward, pulled the lanyard of a columbiad and sent the first of some 600 rebel shells crashing into Fort Sumter; thus began the Civil War.

Author W. A. (Sickles the Incredible) Swanberg magnifies Sumter's importance for dramatic effect, tending to cast it as an actual cause of the Civil War instead of the incident that set off a conflict long inevitable. Nonetheless, in the policies of drift and duplicity that led to Edmund Ruffin's pulling the lanyard, and in the strains it placed on the minds and loyalties of the men involved, Sumter can serve as a microcosm for the Civil War.

Sorry Mess. No sooner had Major Robert Anderson, U.S.A., arrived to take command at Fort Moultrie, one of the four federal forts in and around Charleston harbor, late in November 1860, than he saw that it could be successfully invaded by a herd of cows; indeed, a wandering Guernsey now and again did enter the fort by crossing the sand dunes heaped wall-high at several points. Anderson recognized Fort Sumter, then unoccupied, as stronger than Moultrie. He urged that it be garrisoned--in a message to the War Department that is as meaningful to 1958 as to 1860: "Nothing will be better calculated to prevent bloodshed than our being found in such an attitude that it would be madness and folly to attack us."

Reinforcements were the last things Anderson could expect from the Administration in Washington. The Secretary of War was John B. Floyd, a Virginian who at that moment was busy arranging to sell 10,000 U.S. muskets to seceding South Carolina for $2 apiece. Floyd later performed yeoman service for the Union by becoming one of the Confederacy's most inept generals, but now he was interested only in making sure that U.S. forces in Charleston were not strengthened by so much as a spitball. That fitted in perfectly with the policy of President James Buchanan, the "Old Public Functionary" (known to his critics as the "Old Pennsylvania Fogy"), who only wanted to delay war until the day when he could turn the whole sorry mess over to the incoming Lincoln Administration.

Cast adrift by the Government, Major Anderson stretched his orders beyond the snapping point, moved his men from Moultrie to Fort Sumter by night. When Southerners in Washington got the word, they rushed to the Old Public Functionary, who crushed out his cigar in the palm of his hand. "My God!" cried James Buchanan. "Are calamities never to come singly! I call God to witness . . . that this is not only without but against my orders."

But it had been done--and South Carolina considered the occupation of a federal fort by federal troops to be an act of war. It remained only for South Carolina to ring Sumter with guns (and that took long enough for James Buchanan to toss the Civil War into Lincoln's lap) before Edmund Ruffin yanked at the lanyard.

Bitter Draught. The men at Fort Sumter had no chance. It was 7,000 Carolinians against Anderson's garrison of nine officers (six of them, including Anderson and Captain Abner Doubleday, the father of baseball, became Union generals) plus 68 soldiers, eight musicians and 43 noncombatant workmen. But Fort Sumter held out for 33 hours, and before it was through, it was using Major Anderson's woolen socks as cartridge bags. Typical of the futility of the battle of Sumter was the fact that one of the few casualties was a Southern leader, come to the fort to negotiate its surrender, who spied an interesting brown bottle and, deciding to celebrate the occasion, gulped down a few draughts. It turned out to be medicine containing iodine of potassium.

In the huge field of Civil War literature, First Blood stands out as the most readable, most cohesive account of Sumter. The book ends in the poignant description of how, four years after Sumter's fall, Major General Robert Anderson, his health broken, returned to Fort Sumter for a peace observance. That same night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln was shot in Ford's Theater. Edmund Ruffin would have liked that, but he was no longer around. A few months before he had written: "I here repeat . . . my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule . . . and the perfidious, malignant and vile Yankee race.'' Then he blew out his brains.

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