Chapter 4

The Charleston Mercury

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BOMBARDMENT OF FORT

SUMTER!

Splendid Pyrotechnic Exhibition

Fort Moultrie Impregnable

The Floating Battery And Stevens’ Battery a Success,

“Nobody Hurt” on Our Side. Etc., etc., etc.

We stated yesterday, that on Thursday, at three o’clock p.m., General Beauregard had made a demand upon Major Anderson for the evacuation of Fort Sumter through his aides, Colonel Chesnut, Captain Lee and Colonel Chisholm…

Bowater read the newspaper account, but he did not witness the final act.

Even as General Pierre G.T. Beauregard was issuing the conditions for the surrender of Fort Sumter, Samuel stood on the platform above the tracks at the central depot of the Charleston railroad. He stood with carpet bag in one hand, the folded Charleston Mercury in the other, trying to read as the swarming crowd jostled him, knocked into him, excused itself as it brushed past.

All of Charleston was in a hurry. For no rational reason that Samuel could divine, the tempo of the whole city had changed. It was like the sensation of a ship building momentum, the massive vessel gaining speed, becoming more unstoppable, after one has called down to the engine room for more steam. Did the firing on Sumter mean for all these people what it meant for him? He could not imagine.

…and that Major Anderson had regretfully declined, under the circumstances of his position, Samuel read, and then a handsome gentleman in the gray coat of a Confederate officer, stripes and swirls of gold on his cuffs, slammed into him so hard that he dropped the paper.

“My apologies, sir,” the officer said, stooped, retrieved the paper, handed it to Samuel, and disappeared into the crowd.

Samuel sighed, muttered under his breath. He looked down at the paper.

The right-hand side of the front page consisted of three columns of

advertisements for Haviland’s Compound Fluid Extract of Buchu, Compound Fluid Extract of Sarsaparilla, Hembold’s Genuine Preparation for the Bladder, Moffat’s Life Pills. Here, the most momentous event in half a century, and the quackery and charlatanism went on and on. It shared the headlines with the first shots of civil war, as many thought they might prove to be.

Samuel shook his head, smoothed his black frock coat, resettled the tall silk hat.

He had considered wearing his uniform, wondered at the appropriateness, even the common sense, of appearing in public in the uniform of a lieutenant of the United States Navy. Probably not a very good idea, but still he was torn. It did not seem right to go on this official business in civilian dress.

He had laid the blue uniform coat out on his bed and spent some long time looking at it; running his eyes over the gold stripes and star on the cuff, the double row of brass buttons with their eagle design. For all the moral certainty he felt about joining with the Confederacy, he could not deny the sadness as he hung the blue broadcloth up in his wardrobe and removed the black frock coat he wore now.

There was something clean and precise about the navy, stolid and predictable. Going aboard a strange vessel, you knew beforehand exactly what your greeting would be, because the protocol was written in hundreds of years of naval tradition and spelled out plain in the Articles of War. You knew that the ship would be in perfect order, clean and tidy, the men respectful. There was an orderliness to the navy that any other life could not hope to achieve, and Samuel Bowater liked it.

He called to Jacob to have the frock coat pressed, then sat down and addressed a letter of resignation to Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy.

The distant chugging of the steam locomotive grew louder, and the platform beneath his feet began to vibrate and the train appeared down the track. Four hundred miles to Montgomery over the rough and unreliable rails of the South, and Samuel Bowater was not looking forward to the trip.

The train came to a huffing stop at the platform. The cars were nearly empty. Charleston was the point of origin for the westbound train, which would call in at Atlanta, where Samuel would change to another bound for the Confederate capital. He doubted he would enjoy the luxury of near-

empty cars for long. They would be half filled by the people on that platform alone.

He pushed his way through the crowd, bag in hand, made his way, step by step, aboard the nearest car. He stowed the bag and pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and deftly wiped the seat before sitting.

There was little he hated more than idle talk foisted on him by some cretinous stranger, so he tried to make himself look as inhospitable as he could, to discourage anyone from sitting beside him. He was successful, and twenty minutes later the train lurched away from the station with Samuel Bowater happily alone on the nearly straight-backed benchlike seat.

The miles passed by. Samuel rattled and shook and stared out the window as the train rolled through the western country of South Carolina.

They rumbled through the tidewater region, wheezed and hissed up into the Piedmont, screeched and lurched across the state line into Georgia. With each stop the car grew more crowded as the train picked up more and more people, like a snowball rolling toward Atlanta.

It was a mixed crowd; workingmen and men in frock coats and silk hats, women in sensible traveling attire, people whose wealth was obvious, and people who tried to make their wealth obvious, rough-looking men in fine clothing, who had made their fortunes in the slave trade or supplying the western regions.

There were pious-looking men and men who drank and cursed and spit tobacco and played cards at the small tables scattered around the car. There were women who looked to their men to protect their virtue and women who looked to offer their virtue for sale.

And there were soldiers. Most of the military men still wore the uniform of their local militia, and since there had never been any sort of standard, the car looked like a convention of armed forces from the world over. The air was thick with opinions.

Samuel listened in silence and stared out the window and later tried to lose himself in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, until he decided that the man was insufferable in the way that only the French can be. He tossed the book back into his carpet bag.

It was late evening when he arrived at Atlanta and carried his bag across the depot to the train bound for Montgomery.

He was not greeted by a near-empty car this time. Montgomery was the seat of Southern government, and every office-seeker and aspirant to

military command and every other Southron who felt he had something of importance to add to the Southern cause was descending on that formerly inauspicious town. Their name was legion and they were, by Samuel’s estimate, all jammed onto the train that he was trying to board.

He managed at last to push his way onto the penultimate car. He was bumped hard as he pulled his handkerchief but still managed to wipe a seat and settle himself, and soon the train was underway. The smell of close-packed men, all in low conversation, the sound of chewing and spitting tobacco, the rhythmic motion of the car, the smell of coal smoke drifting in through the windows-it was all like being back aboard a man-of-war, though considerably less pleasant.

Samuel slept and woke and stood and stretched and sat and fumed all through the rocking, jerking, loud, uncomfortable night. It was well past dawn when the train came to a ragged halt at the main depot in Montgomery and Bowater secured a black porter with ragged trousers and an old wide-awake on his head to carry his bag in a barrow.

They walked down the wide, sandy main street. Samuel had been to Montgomery only once before, a decade ago, and it was more built-up and crowded than he recalled. Trees and buildings of various height and description lined the street, and in the distance the Alabama River moved slowly between its brown banks. The huge capitol building loomed over all, like a magnificent Greek temple on a hill, Alabama’s own Parthenon.

Bowater arrived at last at the Exchange Hotel, where he intended to stay, on his father’s recommendation, and with the use of his father’s name he was able to secure a room, despite the mass of people crowding the place, and, indeed, crowding all of Montgomery.

Once in his room, Samuel unpacked, then washed up in the basin standing in a corner. The water was tepid but it felt utterly refreshing, splashed on his face and run through his hair. He was exhausted from the trip, but far too excited to sleep. He stepped out into the hot, dusty late morning, made his way to the capitol building.

It was an enormous edifice, three stories tall and fronted with six grand columns that rose forty feet to support a heavy portico over the grand entrance, and a clock, itself fifteen feet high, on top of that. Rising up behind the clock, a magnificent dome capped the building proper.

Beside the clock, standing straight and bold, as if being purposely defiant, a flagpole, and hanging listlessly from the pole the flag of the

Confederate States of America: a blue field in the canton with a circle of white stars, reminiscent of the flag of the Revolutionary forefathers, a wide red stripe, a white stripe, and a red stripe.

It was not as original as Samuel might have wished, and he wondered how well it would be distinguished from the United States flag at a distance.

Bowater made his way into the grand foyer and found the offices of the Navy Department, shunted away in a far corner of the building. It was Sunday, but the building was still crowded with men. Things were happening too fast, and there was too much to do, for officials of the Confederate government to enjoy the luxury of keeping the Sabbath holy.

He left his name, determined the hours that Secretary Mallory would be seeing people on the morrow, then returned to the hotel, where he dined on an excellent wild duck and rice and then retired to his room.

Samuel pulled a chair over to the window, sat with stocking feet up on the sill, sketched the scene laid out before him with pencil and charcoal; Montgomery, Alabama, capital of a new nation.

He thought of all the hard lessons learned by the founding fathers-three different capitals, the faltering start with the Articles of Confederation, the long uncertainty regarding strength and place of the military. The Confederacy had already benefited from those lessons, taken the best, discarded the mistakes, set up fresh and decades ahead of where the United States had been at its birth.

He sketched and pondered and soon he could hear snoring coming through the wall from his neighbor’s room and he was reminded of how tired he was. He packed the sketch pad and pencil and charcoal away and crawled wearily into bed.

Samuel Bowater woke the next morning and dressed with care. He was surprised by the nervous agitation in his stomach, the slight tremor of his fingers as he anticipated the morning’s interview. I have been too damned comfortable for too damned long, he thought as he looked himself in the mirror and brushed his hair and mustache and goatee. He relished the fear.

It meant he was not dead.

He arrived at the capitol building well before the naval office opened.

When at last the clerk opened the door, Bowater found a seat, addressed it with his handkerchief, and waited for his appointment to be called in the order it was made.

He sat, undisturbed, for six hours.

His eyelids were growing heavy with the stuffy heat of the office when the clerk called, “Samuel Bowater?”

Samuel stood, smoothed out his frock coat, took up his bundle of papers, and stepped through the door.

The first he saw of Stephen Mallory was the top of the Secretary’s head and his unruly mop of hair. Mallory was seated, his elbows planted on his desktop, his head, which he was slowly shaking, sunk in his hands.

Bowater stood for a moment at something near parade rest, waiting for Mallory to recover.

At last the Secretary gave a loud sigh. He straightened, leaned back in his chair, eyed Samuel with an expression that seemed to say, Now what?

Apparently he was not having a good day.

Samuel Bowater had a preconceived idea of what a navy man should look like, and Stephen Mallory was not it. His hair, which looked unruly from the top, looked worse from the front. It seemed as if no amount of brushing or cutting would contain it.

Mallory’s face was round and fleshy. He wore a beard that skirted the perimeter of his face like a chin strap and made him look like a Quaker or Amish or some member of one of those severe Northern sects. But his eyes were dark and penetrating and he did not look like a low-level, lick-spittle pencil-pusher.

“I am here to request a commission in the Confederate States Navy, sir.”

“Indeed?” Mallory’s enthusiasm was not excessive. “What is your naval experience?”

“I am a graduate of the Naval School in ’47. Saw some action in the Mexican War. I have been commissioned lieutenant in the United States Navy since. I last sailed as second officer aboard USS Pensacola.”

At that Mallory smiled and shook his head, and Bowater bristled. “The Pensacola was a good and fine ship, sir. Just because I find myself in opposition now to the United States does not change that fact.”

“No, no, Lieutenant. It’s not that. I am well aware of how fine a ship the Pensacola is. She was one of mine.”

“Sir?”

“I was the one who shepherded her construction, back when I was chairman of the Committee of Naval Affairs in the United States Senate. A

fine ship, and now my handiwork comes back to bite me in the ass. Do you see the irony of that, Lieutenant?”

Samuel nodded. “I do, sir.”

“So tell me, you are just resigned from the United States Navy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I have had officers coming south for half a year now. You are a bit tardy, sir, in deciding where your loyalties lie.”

Bowater stiffened. Mallory’s remarks were coming very close to insinuation, and he would not stand for it.

“Mr. Secretary,” he began, and his voice carried an enforced calm, “I swore an oath to the government of the United States, and I take my oaths seriously. A man of honor could do no less, nor would I expect you to look for less in your own officers. Now that I have seen where my duty lies, you can expect me to display the same loyalty to the Confederate States.”

Samuel waited for a reply, wondered if his words sounded as pompous to Mallory as they did to himself. Still, he would stand for only so much where his honor was concerned. It was a hanging offense to challenge a superior officer to a duel. What about a cabinet member? Of course, Samuel realized, he was not an officer in the Confederate Navy. He was still a civilian. And after that exchange likely to remain one.

“From what state do you hail, Mr. Bowater?”

“South Carolina. Charleston.”

Mallory’s eyebrows went up. “Indeed? Such reticence from a Charleston man. I had thought you were all a bunch of fire-eaters. Well, no matter. I think men of sense do not rush into these things. I myself have been accused of being too lukewarm to the cause, even treasonous, if you can believe it. My own state of Florida did not support my nomination to this post, did you know that?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“‘Bowater’…are you by any chance related to William Bowater, the attorney?”

“Yes, sir. He is my father.”

“Ah!” Mallory’s expression brightened.

“If I may, sir, my father has given me a letter of introduction.” Samuel flipped through the papers neatly arranged in his folder and handed his father’s letter to the Secretary.

Mallory took it, ran his eyes over it, smiled. “I see he speaks highly of your character but no more. He does not go so far as to ask I favor you with a commission. That is the William Bowater I know.”

Mallory set the letter aside, looked up at Samuel. “You are holding out on me, sir. Now I recall. You were responsible for some great feat during the Mexican War. I recall reading some small account of it in the papers.

And your father wrote about it in great detail to me. He was very proud.”

This was news to Samuel. His father had never said a word to him in that regard, beyond a single “Well done, Samuel.”

“It was no more than luck, sir. I foolishly risked my life and those of my men in my youthful exuberance.”

Mallory smiled. “You are your father’s son, I see. That does much to recommend you. In any event, I hope the years and the United States Navy have not worn all of the exuberance out of you. We will need it. Let us hope it can take the place of ships. What sort of position were you seeking?”

“I should be happy to take up at my former rank in the U.S. Navy.”

Bowater handed Mallory his commission and sundry other relevant papers.

“Wherever I might be of use.”

Mallory leafed through the papers. “Our cause has much in common with the War for Independence fought by our forefathers,” Mallory said without looking up. He finished with Samuel’s papers, set them aside, met Samuel’s eyes. “One of the similarities I find, in the naval line, is that we have plenty of men who wish to be officers and damned few who wish to sail before the mast. What if I were to tell you that the only position I can offer you is able-bodied seaman?”

Samuel pressed his lips together, waded through this unexpected development. The thought of living in the uncouth, half-civilized world of the lower deck was abhorrent to him. But honor demanded that he serve where he was needed, and honor would be satisfied before any concern for his personal comfort.

“If that is the only position available to me, then I would be grateful to accept it, sir.”

Mallory nodded his head, and Samuel had the idea that his declaration had not come out as sincere as he had hoped.

“Well, sir, as it happens, I believe I can offer you something better. Not in terms of rank, I’m afraid. You’ll have to remain a lieutenant. But I can

offer you a command of your own. Then you would be a captain by courtesy. How would you like that?”

“There is nothing I should like better, sir.” Samuel felt a bit dizzy, and the room took on a vaguely dreamlike air. It was hard to keep his mental footing as Mallory jerked his thoughts first one way and then another.

Could he have heard right? A command of his own? After a dozen years as a lieutenant he had resigned himself to never having his own ship.

Did he say a command of my own?

Mallory was shuffling around his desk, flipping through piles of documents, some preprinted forms, some letters, some official-looking reports. “Here she is…” he said, pulling a couple papers free from a stack.

“She is the CSS Cape Fear. Eighty feet in length, eighteen feet on the beam, draws seven feet aft. Screw propulsion. She is, in fact, a tugboat.

Current armament…none. What say you, sir?”

Bowater could not help but smile. He was aware that there were plenty of very senior captains from the old navy who were commanding vessels not much better than this. Men who had owned the quarterdeck of some of the most powerful steam warships in the world were now scrambling to command converted riverboats and steam packets.

“I would be honored, sir, to command this vessel.”

“Well, you are in luck. She was already given to another, but he seems to have come down with some sort of fever, no doubt brought on by the terrific reduction in the size of his command. I haven’t time to root out another captain.”

“However it comes about, I am pleased to have her, Mr. Secretary.”

Samuel Bowater had found even the midshipman’s berth on his first ship to be a nearly intolerable den of barbarous behavior. For one who just a moment before was facing the possibility of life on the lower deck, the thought of command, any command, was welcome indeed.

“Good, good…” Mallory was hunting around for yet another document.

His tone suggested that the interview was over, but Samuel did not know if he should take his leave.

“The Cape Fear is in Wilmington, North Carolina, as you might have guessed. Crew is all in place…” Mallory looked up. “Where are you staying, sir?”

“The Exchange,” Bowater said.

“Very well. I’ll have your commission and orders drawn up. Come by here tomorrow afternoon to fetch them and then you must make the best of your way to Wilmington. No time to lose.”

Mallory stood for the first time since the interview began and stuck out his hand. “I congratulate you, Lieu…Captain Bowater. I have faith that you will do honor to our nation.”

“Thank you, sir.” The genuine sentiment of the moment took Samuel aback, and he did not know what to say. “Thank you, sir,” he said again, then he turned and left.

Samuel wandered through the high halls, through the crowds of harried men, through the big doors under the portico. My own command… He was having a hard time coming to grips with the idea. My own command…

He stepped out from under the portico and the sun seemed very bright and he was not sure of which way to go.

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