Charleston (35 page)

Alex came home to South Battery on the morning of August 12, 1863. The cannon she heard were rifled guns dug into the sand of Morris Island, lobbing shells at Fort Sumter to set the range. She had more immediate worries: the condition of the house, meals for the family, care of Cassandra. She began sitting with her mother for at least an hour every day.

Ham introduced her to Rolfe, a light brown man with dark brown freckles and a grumbly disposition. Ham had warned her of Rolfe's fondness for a tipple. Alex advised him to stay sober or Letty Porcher-Jones would be hiring him out to someone else. “Do we understand each other?” Rolfe muttered that they did.

Alex and Rolfe set to work in a fury of sweeping and dusting, scouring and waxing. Rolfe scythed down weeds while Alex scrubbed floors on hands and knees. By the following Monday, August 17, the place looked reasonably habitable again.

That same day Union batteries began steady bombardment of Fort Sumter. More than nine hundred rounds flew over the harbor to smash the fort's brick walls. The cannonading made Alex edgy. Would they train their great marsh gun on the city? People lived in dread of “the Swamp Angel,” Ham said.

 

Dr. Nigel Baltus called to see his patient late that day. The Bell family physician resembled an ancient gnome. His eyes had long ago lost their sparkle, and his mouth was
a cave filled with gold nuggets. Alex immediately confronted him:

“No more sweating or purging my mother.”

“Do you want her to die?”

“Frankly, I think the treatment is hastening it.”

“Then I leave the case in your hands, madam. This was once a respectable and revered family. No longer. Everything they say about you is true. Good day and be damned to you.”

 

The barrage continued Tuesday, when Alex set out for a shop in an alley above City Market. She wore a plain gingham skirt and the straw hat whose broad brim helped hide her face. She'd put away her bloomers so as not to draw attention to herself.

She showed one of Edward's pistols to Omar Lorenzo, proprietor of the gun shop. He curled his hand around the barrel; a finger nicked the spring release and the bayonet leapt out. He sucked a thin stripe of blood on his fingertip. “Wicked piece of work. English. Around 1760, I would say. You wish to sell it?”

“I wish to fire it. I need powder and ball, and instruction.”

“The latter can be had readily enough. Powder and lead are impossible to get.”

“I'm told you can buy almost anything in Charleston if you pay enough.”

The shopkeeper smiled as though they shared a secret. He turned a key in a wall cabinet, brought out two sets of lead knuckles. In a melee outside an Indianapolis meeting hall she'd been hit with similar knuckles made of brass.

“These came my way from a brawl down in Fernandina. I can melt them down. Come back Friday and I'll be ready to give you a lesson. Leave the piece with me till then.”

“It had better be here Friday.”

“Oh, it will be. I know who you are. I can't afford to have your brother hail me into court for larceny. I have mouths to feed.”

He wanted a hundred dollars Confederate. She bargained him down to sixty. She borrowed the money from Ham. His younger partner, Argyll Buckles's nephew Cedric, grudgingly agreed to the loan. Ham took the money from the cashbox of Buckles & Bell, replacing it with a promissory note.

 

Cassandra showed more animation every day. She encouraged her daughter to keep the windows open for fresh air. She said that when she felt a bit stronger, she'd like to attempt the stairs and visit the garden.

Friday, in a secluded yard behind the gun shop, Lorenzo set up a straw bale. He displayed a lead ball in his palm. He'd molded a dozen.

She watched attentively as he loaded and primed the pistol. Then he stood behind her, reaching around to position her arms. “Take aim, but it's well to avert your head in case of a misfire. A slow and careful shot is better than one that's too fast and off the mark.” She disliked having Lorenzo thrust his hips against her but endured it until she fired the round.

The recoil rocked her. The ball buried harmlessly in the bale. “One more?” he suggested.

“Yes, but I prefer to try it alone.” He stepped away, visibly disappointed.

She paid him, stowed everything in her reticule, and set out for home along Church Street. She wasn't confident that she could be an expert marksman, but she felt she could load the old pistols and use them at close range in an emergency.

 

The Union barrage continued; a gun boomed every ten minutes or so. Mortars and Parrott rifles, coehorns and British Whitworths poured out their fire, abetted by the guns of ironclads and monitors. They hammered Sumter and also Battery Wagner, to keep the defenders crouching in bombproofs, unable to get to their artillery and return fire. The noise gave Alex fierce headaches.

General Gillmore sent a note into the city demanding surrender of Fort Sumter and Confederate positions on Morris Island. He threatened to fire on Charleston if refused. Beauregard didn't receive the note immediately. Around half past one on Saturday morning Alex was jolted from sleep by a stupendous explosion. She ran into the hall. Cassandra cried out. Alex called back to say all was well, though clearly it wasn't.

Ham stumbled out of his room in his nightshirt, candle in hand. “They must have fired the Swamp Angel.”

“They're attacking civilians.”

“Under the rules of war they have the right. The city's fortified and garrisoned. The docks are points of entry for munitions. And this is the most hated place in the Confederacy.”

They sat downstairs for the next hour. Alex asked about an eerie white glow in the south. “Calcium lights,” Ham said. “Illuminating the Confederate batteries so the guns can find them. Union engineers work under the lights to advance the trenches.”

Two more shells detonated in the city, the last no more than a few blocks away. They heard the whistles and bells of a fire company. Ham pulled on trousers and boots and ran to Meeting Street. He returned to say buildings were burning in Price's Alley. “Incendiary shells. They explode and scatter Greek Fire.”

The sixteen rounds that struck Charleston before dawn brought uneasy quiet. General Beauregard replied to General Gillmore's note with a scathing refusal. The city braced for more shelling.

 

Alex wrote a short list of items for Rolfe to look for at the City Market. Some farmers still brought produce into town. She wanted to buy dates or, as a substitute, dried persimmons. She wanted an Irish potato; barring that, a sweet potato. She wanted milk if it wasn't too heavily watered, and any green vegetables available. They were scarce; Cedric Buckles's wife grew flowers and herbs to cook as substitutes.

Rolfe held out the list. “Can't read this here. Mistress never taught us. Agin' the law.”

“Rolfe, you'll be a free man when the North wins the war. Abraham Lincoln promised it in his proclamation last winter.”

“Yes'm, we heard what Linkum done.”

“To survive you'll need to read and write and know your numbers.”

“Who going to hire a teacher for this nigger? What I do with old Linkum's freedom anyway? I can't eat it. I can't carry it in a sack. Ain't no good to me at all. You want to tell me that list out loud?”

The exchange haunted Alex. How many thousands lived in dread of emancipation because they weren't prepared for it and didn't even know how to begin?

 

Ham visited the city jail to interview prisoners with Nelson Mitchell. The lead defense counsel was a thoughtful, slow-spoken man, well regarded in the community. A few naysayers whispered that he was a secret Unionist, but there was no evidence.

Of the captured soldiers, two dozen had suffered no wounds. They insisted they had never been slaves, though of course this was to be expected, and they could offer no proof. At the end of the long day, Ham came home with a doleful report:

“They're a dispirited lot, and not solely because of the danger they're in. They believe the army betrayed them. Promised them the same pay and enlistment bounties given to white men, then reneged. At Battery Wagner they believe they were thrown in the front ranks to spare the white soldiers. One man said his captain warned him that if he objected or balked, he'd be shot in the back. Others verified the story.”

“But the state is going ahead with the prosecution?”

“Yes, though now it's a two-edged sword. Lincoln has issued an order saying that if any Negro soldier is killed in violation of the rules of war, one of our soldiers will be executed.”

“Can you and Mr. Mitchell save the lives of those men?”

“A moot question. Mitchell is adamant on one point. He insists the situation is too highly charged for us to risk mounting a defense based on the main issue—whether the men are soldiers or insurrectionists. We need another strategy.”

“Which is?”

“Unknown. We're still searching.”

 

Saturday the attack on the city resumed. In late afternoon Folsey Lark held court in the Mills House bar. He'd lately returned from Richmond, where he'd solidified new contracts by plying army purchasing agents with smuggled champagne and Virginia whores. Certain Charlestonians called Folsey a codfish aristocrat—a man of no breeding who made his money from trade. He didn't give a damn. His critics were pretentious bluebloods living in poverty.

A new round came screaming in every few minutes. The hotel lobby was full of guests running about in panic. In the bar liquor and fine cigars promoted a cheerful complacence. Folsey struck up a conversation with a German military observer, Count von Ravenstein. As soon as they heard the next shell arriving, Folsey exclaimed, “I'll wager fifty that it won't hit us.”

“
Ja,
done, but if you lose, how will you collect?”

They watched the ceiling. The shell passed over, exploding somewhere to the north. Von Ravenstein produced a wad of Confederate notes, counted the bluebacks onto the bar. Folsey saluted the officer with his glass.

Applause greeted a surprising arrival, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard. He was a stocky man, with brilliant dark eyes and elegant mustaches. His headquarters was just down Meeting Street in the James Simmons house. He marched in with his aide, Col. Tom Jordan,
6

⁶
Jordan, Beauregard's longtime right hand, helped establish the Rose Greenhow spy ring in Washington in 1861. See Part Two of
On Secret Service.

close behind. The two officers sat at a corner table with a white-whiskered gentleman Folsey recognized as a prominent cotton broker. They seemed to be arguing over a sheet of figures, Beauregard puffing his cheeks and shaking his head repeatedly until
the broker pulled out a pencil and wrote another figure that produced smiles and handshakes all around the table.

Beauregard was a Creole, the privileged child of a Louisiana sugarcane plantation. He'd gone to West Point, served in Mexico, and resigned his army commission when war broke out. He was beloved in Charleston because he commanded when Sumter fell. People called him the first Confederate hero.

He wasn't so favored in Richmond. His reputation had suffered after the Union victory at Shiloh Church in '62. When Gen. Albert Sidney Johnson fell on the first day, Beauregard assumed command of the army and that evening failed to press the attack. He was condemned for bad judgment, cowardice, and worse. Richmond whispered of Beauregard hiding in his tent, paralyzed by a temporary insanity.

The army retreated to Corinth, Mississippi. An infected throat and general debilitation sent Beauregard home on sick leave, ostensibly on the advice of doctors. He left Braxton Bragg in charge. He thought he carried out the transfer of command properly, but Davis construed his unauthorized departure as dereliction of duty and took the Army of the West away from him.

More than fifty of Beauregard's friends in the Confederate Congress petitioned Davis to restore him to command, on an equal footing with Lee. Davis would not. He sent Beauregard back to Charleston as commandant of the Department of South Carolina and Georgia. Beauregard's dislike of the President became something close to hatred.

 

Beauregard said good-bye to his civilian guest and worked his way down the bar, shaking hands. Folsey bowed to him. “General. This is indeed a pleasure.”

“Mr. Lark, sir,” Beauregard said, returning the bow.

“I hardly expected to encounter you in a hotel.”

“A business matter to be settled. I'll not skulk at headquarters. I prefer to move about, show the citizens that we aren't intimidated by Gillmore's cowardly attacks.”

“Allow me the honor of offering you and Colonel Jor
dan a whiskey.” Beauregard nodded agreeably. Because Folsey liked to drink at the Mills House, he supplied the bar with contraband bottles at reduced prices.

“I hear you have a relative newly arrived from Yankee country,” the general said. “An interesting creature, I'm told.” Although married, Beauregard openly admired and flirted with women. In Charleston he could do it without hindrance; his second wife, Caroline, was ailing in New Orleans.