Siege of Fort Sumter
PRESIDENT BUCHANAN lingered on in the White House towards the end of 1860, a Baldwinesque figure, inert, undignified, hopeful that by pre- varication he would delay the secession of the Southern States till after Lincoln took office the following March. Floyd, his Secretary of War, was secretly dealing in arms with South Caro- lina, and was soon to be directing all his energies to covering up his embezzlement of bonds held in trust for various Indian tribes. General Win- field Scott, commander of the Union forces, seventy-four years old, the mists of dotage parted by the occasional blast of insight, had
perversely set up his headquarters in New York, safe from bothersome daily contact with Washington. And while the leaders of the nation ducked their responsibilities, Major Robert Anderson, in charge of a string of Union for- tresses around the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina, was left to provoke the first passage of arms in the American Civil War by doing no more than his duty. •
Knowing that Fort Moultrie, where his troops were garrisoned, couldn't even keep out stray cattle, and that the Carolinians were becoming daily more bellicose, and receiving equivocal in- structions from Floyd, Anderson secretly trans- ferred to Fort Sumter, a tiny island in the bay. There, kept without supplies, reinforcements or word of the government's true intentions, he held out from Boxing Day until mid-April, when starvation and bombardment forced him to an honourable surrender. The irony of Anderson's position as a Kentuckian slave-owner whose sympathies were with the South, the stature of the officers under his command (five of whom rose to general in the war, as did Anderson himself) and the appalling consequences of his textbook decision lend themselves to the detailed treatment they get in First Blood. Although he draws a pretty thin line between fact and reasonable conjecture in places, and becomes slightly repetitive in small matters, Mr. Swan- berg, writes with generosity and ease. Anderson suffered a•breakdown after a few months of the war and was retired to Washington, where he re- mained, a kind of resident hero, till the armistice.
GEOFFREY NICHOLSON
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