Doubleday walked us to the gate and shook hands. “Drop by again on your way out, if you have the time. There’s a tavern up the beach that you might enjoy.”
We spent an hour with Colonel Gardner, who was an old man in every sense. The talk quickly became political, and Gardner’s sympathies overrode his Northern upbringing, coming down much too solidly with the Southerners for my liking. “You’ve got to understand their anger,” he said. “They are being treated very badly on the question of the territories. If Lincoln somehow gets elected and slavery is outlawed in the new territories, their way of life will soon be suffocated through the legislative process.”
Burton was polite as always, expressing an understanding of the Southern viewpoint without stating his own. But as we took our leave and trudged back to the fort, he said, “It’s not his age that makes him unfit for this command, it’s his attitude. Look at the position this puts his men in. It’s not bad enough to be surrounded by enemies and have the walls of their fort covered with dunes that any five-year-old could climb over; now for a leader they’ve got an old man who lives among the enemy and spouts the enemy’s dogma.” He stopped in the middle of the road and beheld the sorry fort. Loudly, with no attempt to hide his anger, he said, “So, Charlie, how’d you like to be stationed here with your life in the balance?” Then, under his breath, he said, “God damn such authority! God damn such arrogance! God damn politics and politicians!”
Captain Doubleday seemed happy to see us again, as if we represented some fading semblance of sanity in a world going quickly mad. The three of us walked up the beach, chatting pleasantly in the warm May sunshine. He needs our outside voices, I thought, even though he can’t admit that or commit himself to strangers. He’s a soldier; he can’t criticize the politicians who have put him here, or the seditious old man to whom they’ve entrusted his life. All he can honorably do is hope to die well when the time comes.
We stood for a while and watched the sea, looking at incoming ships gliding past Fort Sumter and around the point to the city. Then Doubleday said, “Come, I’ll buy you something to drink.”
The tavern was just a short trek across the dunes: a cool, dark haven with a pair of cool, dark wenches as barmaids. The ladies were so closely matched that they had to be sisters, and Doubleday introduced them to us as Florence and Frances. I thought of Marion, the girl in the little upstate town that now seemed so far behind us: the town of Florence, I remembered with a shudder. I looked across the table and wondered if Burton was having the same supernatural thoughts.
Doubleday ordered ale for us and tea for himself.
I offered a toast. “To the Union.”
Instinctively Doubleday raised his cup. Richard was tardy by just a couple of heartbeats.
We talked into the afternoon. Doubleday and Burton spoke of general military strategies, captain to captain. It all came down to the one thought, without ever getting more specific than they had already been: how to defend the defenseless.
It was after three o’clock when Doubleday said, “I should get back to my post and you have a boat to catch.”
At the very last, he said to Burton, “I’ve been thinking about that question we left unanswered this morning. You said it would depend on your authority and how you interpreted it. I’m not sure what you meant.”
“I meant that in your colonel’s position, lacking specific orders to the contrary, I would move my men under cover of night to that new brick fort out yonder in the harbor.”
If Doubleday had expected some theoretical, wishy-washy answer, this was a surprise. He stiffened, clearly shocked by what he’d heard. “You can’t be serious.”
“I wouldn’t make jokes about something this grave, Captain.”
“That would surely be taken as an act of war by the people who live here.”
“Such a viewpoint has no logic. The fort is Union property, not the state’s.”
“Captain, you are speaking of logic in a land that does not know its meaning.”
“Then the problem must inevitably become critical, no matter what you do to prevent it. You can’t talk logic to madmen and you can’t prevent a war if only one side is interested in doing that.”
Nothing was said until Burton spoke again. “So in that situation my most immediate loyalty would be to my men. Assuming, as I said, no orders to the contrary.”
“And you would move them,” Doubleday said, still in disbelief.
“I would move them now—tonight if it were mine to do.”
“Interesting thought,” Doubleday said. “Depressing but interesting.”
We walked down the beach and took our leave in a hazy afternoon sunlight. At the fort we wished Captain Doubleday and his garrison good luck. As we put it some distance behind us, Burton said, “Those men are going to need a hell of a lot more than luck,” and this reality followed us over the marsh to the steamer and back across the harbor to the city.
That to me was the climax of our journey. All these years later I can still see Burton’s dark face in the candlelight; I can feel Double-day’s surprise, as palpable as a slap in that dark, flickering corner, and I would bet my life that he had never given such a bold move a serious thought before that moment. The act that started our civil war may seem obvious now in its dusty historical context. But what seems obvious to historians might not have been quite so clear to the men who were living it. Yes, those Southerners were mad, hot-blooded and irrational, determined to have their war. If there had been no Fort Sumter they would have found another time and place to begin it. But the fact that it did start at Sumter makes the provocative act, first posed by Richard Burton on a quiet afternoon a year before the shooting started, of considerable historical significance.
* * *
The time was now coming for us to part. Nothing had been said, but I had already gone well past the days I had begged from my wife. Richard planned to go on to New Orleans and then catch the river-boat north to his jumping-off point into the Western territories. Over dinner he launched a spirited campaign for me to join him. “Come at least as far as New Orleans.”
“Richard, I can’t. I’m a family man who has indulged himself long enough.”
We had carefully avoided the subject of his disappearance, but he alluded to it now. “I hope things are right between us.”
“Of course they are. I wouldn’t have missed this trip for anything.” “Good. I’m glad to hear that.”
He lit a smoke. Impulsively he reached through the smoke to grip my hand. “I’m not a sentimental man, Charlie. But in all likelihood we shall never see each other again, and I must say this. I’ve had damned few friendships that I value as much as yours.”
“That’s very mutual, Richard,” I said over the lump in my throat. “Then come with me to St. Joe. I wouldn’t insist on anything beyond that, my word of honor. I don’t want your scalp on my conscience if I run into Indians on west.”
I resisted, he insisted, and at last we compromised on New Orleans. The next morning I sent a telegram to Baltimore, stealing another two weeks from my wife and young daughter, and we left Charleston that afternoon. Down the coast we went to Savannah, then west on a rugged overland trip that took us through the growing towns of Columbus, Montgomery, and Mobile. We spent five days drinking and laughing in New Orleans. My two weeks ran into a third, and as the time drew to its inevitable close, I felt a cutting sadness like nothing I’ve known before or since. When my wife died in ‘eighty-three, my grief was crushing; this was different, but in its own way almost as overwhelming. I felt the loss of Richard as sharply as the slice of a knife.