Their [ordnance sergeants in the US Army, circa mid-19th century] duties involved caring for a post’s arms, ammunition, and other military stores. This assignment often involved isolated posts where they served as the only military presence. Each morning, in solitude and quiet, they would raise the American flag; each evening they’d lower it again. In between these two rituals they would take care of the government’s ordnance. They cleaned and polished the artillery, they coated the piled cannonballs with protective grease. In seacoast forts like Sumter, they also maintained the harbor light, which shone above the walls each night. The life of these sergeants – lonely, tethered to mundane routine – was comparable to that of lighthouse keepers. The army took this factor into account, paying these men a monthly bonus of five dollars, almost half the base salary of a U.S. Army private. The army also tried to choose only married men, who could then have some company at their windswept posts.
In 1858, according to Abner Doubleday, the only regular occupants of Fort Sumter was one of these sergeants, his wife, and two children. Their only method of contacting the outside world was a small rowboat. “One wild and stormy day,” Doubleday writes, “when the wind was blowing a gale, the sergeant was suddenly struck down with yellow fever.” His poor wife tried to signal the garrison of Fort Moultrie, a mile across the harbor, or anyone else on Sullivan’s Island. She stood at Sumter’s parapet and waved a sheet back and forth. No one noticed. She felt she could not leave her feverish husband, and she grew desperate. She placed her two small children in the rowboat, faced it toward Sullivan’s Island, and pushed it off. Despite the shrieking winds and high, churning waves, she prayed they might make it. The tide was surging westward past Sumter, and she felt it might carry them safely to land.
Before the children left, she handed them a letter that pleaded for medical assistance, and told them to give it to the first person they encountered. In good weather it normally took six men, pressing hard on their oars, fifteen minutes or so to get from Sumter to Moultrie; how long the two children were in that rowboat is impossible to guess. Somehow their vulnerable, tiny craft made the journey safety to Sullivan’s Island.
A doctor eventually was able to cross back, but, according to Doubleday, it was “too late to be of any service.” This story highlights the isolation of Fort Sumter.
Author’s Note:
This story has some holes. Doubleday provides no specifics about the name of the sergeant or the exact date. An examination of the present archives at Fort Moultrie’s museum reveals no match for Doubleday’s tale.
Source:
Detzer, David. “Slim Pickens, Stout Fort.” Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War. New York: Harcourt, 2002. 102-3. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Morrison, ”the Best School in the World,” p. 10.
MIL, p. 444.
REM, pp. 35-36.
Further reading:
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