This war will not last, Robley thought, not for the first time. Be over before those boys reach the lines. Going to war is not the same as being sentenced to death. Odds are they’ll come back without a scratch. That thought had brought him comfort once, but it did little for him now.
His boys were going where he could not protect them anymore. It made him sad and filled him with dread, and he felt the tears coming too.
4
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…
— The Charleston Mercury
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.