The Story

Samuel Bowater, on extended leave from the United States navy, witnesses the firing on Fort Sumter from the shore of his native Charleston,  South Carolina, and he realized he can waver no longer. Torn between the oath he took, and the loyalty he feels, for the United States navy and his love of his native city and state, Samuel at last decides that his allegiance must be for state and the new-formed Confederate Government.

Traveling to Montgomery, Alabama, the new capitol of the Confederacy, Bowater meets with Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory. To Bowater's delight, he is given his first command, an unarmed tug named C.S.S. Cape Fear. Along with the tug comes Hieronymus Taylor, the difficult (to say the least) chief engineer. Facing the overwhelming strength of the Union Navy, Bowater and crew fight to defend Norfolk and Albemarle Sound from the Yankee threat. The circumstances of war take them at last to the Mississippi River, where David Farragut's Gulf Fleet threatens to take New Orleans And cut the Western Rivers off from the sea.

Author's Note

I am a Yankee, born and bred, and it took some serious research to get into the Confederate mindset. One of the most helpful books was James McPherson's For Cause and Comrades, which explores through primary sources just why men on both sides of the Civil War took up arms.

Confederate Naval officers, I found, were often a different breed from their brethren in the army. Many of them had spent long years on foreign stations, where their only loyalty was to the United States flag that flew from the gaff, and their attention was far from the conflicts within the United States. The decision to go South was a hard one for many, but hardest of all for the navy men. What's more, the army officers who joined the Confederacy could expect to command troops who were a match for the Union in both numbers and fighting prowess. But there was no navy in the south, and naval officers who had commanded some of the most powerful men-of-war in the world while in the United States navy now found themselves commanding armed paddle wheelers and tug boats. But they did so bravely and to some effect.

It is always a pleasure to bring to light through fiction a part of maritime history that might not be so well known. I hope I have been able to do this, and to present with fairness and accuracy the circumstanced faced by the navy men who fought for the Confederate States.

Chapter One

...[A]t twenty-five minutes past four o'clock. A.M., the circle of batteries with which the grim fortress of Fort Sumter is beleaguered opened fire.

Report of the Charleston Press

Oil on canvas, in his signature fine brush stroke, Samuel Bowater painted the opening shot of the War for Southern Independence.

He stood on a small, grassy rise at White Point Gardens at the very tip of Charleston, where the Cooper and Ashley Rivers met. From there he looked out over the dark water of Charleston Harbor, six miles to the open ocean and the weak, gray band of light in the East.

It was a cool morning, early April, and the damp found its way through his frock coat and the white linen shirt he wore under it. Civilian clothing, not nearly as warm as the uniform he was used to. A cloak coat was draped over his shoulders. He pulled it snug, rubbed his arms together, hunched his shoulders as he waited for the light to come up. The air smelled heavily of salt marsh and the smoke from early morning fires wafting from chimneys. What sounds there were were muted and distant - birds and crickets, the lap of waves, the creaking of ships at the wharves.

Charleston was holding its breath. It had been for some time, since Anderson left Fort Moultrie for Sumter, and it could not continue to do so much longer.

In front of him, still lost in the pre-dawn dark, the 20" x 24" canvas on which he had been working for the past five mornings.

Samuel stared out past the black humps of land which just becoming visible in the morning light, out toward the sea where the growing dawn was beginning to bleach out the stars and the night sky.

He wanted to be ready for that moment when night yielded to dawn, when the daylight asserted itself and the tenor of everything changed. It was a moment he had witnessed a thousand times at sea, and now he wanted to recreate it on the canvas.

And then, right in front of him and four miles off, a sharp muzzle flash of red and orange, and lifting up from that flash, a long, hair-thin arc of light where the burning fuse of the shell tracked against the dark sky. Samuel Bowater swallowed, closed his eyes as the familiar flat pow of the distant artillery caught up with him.

It was followed immediately by another, and then the twin explosion of the shells.

So it shall be war...

It was a resolution, at least. For months Bowater had been knocked about by the cross-current of speculation and rumor; the likelihood of peace, then the near certainty of war, then back again. Now, with the single jerk of a cannon's lanyard, the question was decided.

Morris' Island, he thought. The shot had come from Morris' Island. Stevens' Iron Battery.

Samuel Bowater, thirty-three years of age, Lieutenant, United States Navy, on extended leave, had been kicking around his home town of Charleston for months with little to do. He had come to know the harbor defenses well.

It would be days before he learned that the honor of firing that first shot had been offered to Virginia Congressman Roger Pryor. That Pryor, understanding as Bowater did the enormity of the act, could not bring himself to pull the lanyard.

It would be a long four years before he read that the man who did finally discharge that shot, Edmund Ruffin, put a gun to his head rather than suffer the unbearable burden of a lost cause.

But that was in the future.

Samuel opened his eyes.

From all around Charleston Harbor, from Fort Moultrie and Steven's Iron Battery, the Floating Battery and the Dahlgren Battery, the Enfilade Battery and Major Trapier's Battery and Fort Johnson, the guns opened up on the sixty-eight Union troops huddled in Fort Sumter. The dark harbor was ringed with flashes of light, the bombardment so insistent that in some places it looked as if the shore had taken fire, and the bright trails criss-crossed the sky.

It was an awesome sight, beautiful and terrible at the same time. But in his mind Samuel Bowater saw only that first flash, that first arch of light.

The sky was growing rapidly brighter and Samuel picked up his thinnest brush. He angled his paint kit toward the east, found the tube of cadmium yellow, squeezed a pea-sized drop on his palette. He stood back, but it was not yet light enough for him to see the canvas. He picked up the easel, turned it so the gray dawn light fell on the painting.

He took one last look at the harbor, the flames from the guns' muzzles, the streaks through the air like a hundred falling stars, and now the bright flash and deep rumble of shells that found Fort Sumter and exploded against its twelve-foot thick walls.

Samuel turned back to the canvas. He dabbed the brush in the yellow paint, sighed, touched the sharp pointed bristles to the canvas right at Morris' Island, and made a little slash of light, up and off to the left.

He squeezed yellow ocher onto the palette, augmented the yellow on the canvas and then added red, blending the colors until he had the subtle multi-hues of a muzzle flash, as he himself had seen it that morning and so many times before.

He stood back, dabbed the cadmium yellow again, took a deep breath. One stroke to paint the trail of the shell's fuse, but it had to be perfect. He moved his hand over the canvas, the brush less than an inch from the surface, practicing the trajectory.

The dull sounds of the ceaseless bombardment surrounded him like a soft gray blanket of noise. And below that sound he heard another - cheering, shouting from the rooftops and along the harbor walls and from the ships tied up to their docks - but like the gunfire he was hardly aware of it. He was no longer in that scene, he was completely in his canvas. The painting was his world and he was aware of no other.

Slash, slash, and then the tip of the brush came down on the canvas and a long, arching yellow streak cut across the oil sky, reaching its apex and dropping toward the small hump that was Fort Sumter.

Samuel Bowater stepped back, let out his breath, took in the canvas as a whole.

Perfect. It was just as he had seen it. Now, regardless of what happened next, of what he saw in the years to come, of how his memory of that morning was polluted by the dubious influences to which memory is susceptible, regardless, that moment was captured forever in oil.

He pulled his eyes at last from his canvas. A dozen people had joined him on his grassy rise, pointing toward the batteries and whooping and shouting and carrying on without the least shred of dignity, and more were hurrying toward them.

They had come to gawk, while Bowater had come to paint. He frowned at the intrusion, disapproved of the sentiment that made those civilians come running as if this act of war was a burlesque. Under his own strict code, he would not consider indulging his curiosity in so crass a way.

Samuel turned back to the action on the harbor.

The sun was up, dull yellow behind the veil of thin clouds, and the muzzle flashes and the streaks from the flying shells were not nearly so bright. But the sound was a continuous rumble now, and the grey clouds of smoke hung like morning mist over the batteries.

The smell of gun smoke reached the city at last. Samuel took a deep breath and with that smell a thousand memories came back. Until he had taken leave of the navy five months before, there was rarely a day that passed that he did not smell it.

He shook his head as he watched the barrage that was being released on Fort Sumter. Those walls might well have collapsed by now, he thought, if they had been built by anyone other than the government of the United States. Bowater had not seen anything like it, not for fourteen years, not since the Mexican War when, as an ensign fresh out of the Naval School at Annapolis, he had participated in the shelling of Veracruz.

For some long time he watched in silence and tried to fathom what this meant for him, but it was so very complicated and the gunfire was so murderous and the shouts of the people on the rise so distracting that he could not think.

Sumter has not fired back. He wondered if they had surrendered. The rumor was that they were nearly out of provisions, that bombardment or no they could not remain long on that little island.

Samuel picked up his haversack and stuck his hand inside, felt the cool brass of his telescope. He pulled it out, let the haversack fall. He snapped it out full length, brought it up to his eye, fixed Fort Sumter in the lens.

There it was, undulating in the light, off-shore breeze. The Stars and Stripes.

Oh, say can you see..., Samuel thought of the words to that popular song. A circumstance just like this, when it was written, but then at least the flag stood against a foreign enemy, all of the United States battling their common foe.

He took the glass from his eye, snapped it shut. Always hated that song, mawkish, overwrought sentimentality...

The bombardment had settled into a steady monotony. Samuel stared at his canvas, crossed his arms, rested his chin in one hand, stroked his perfectly groomed moustache and goatee and considered what he had done.

Over the past five days he had worked on the sky and the distant land, filling the canvas with rich purples and greens and oranges, creating a lush early morning scene.

Talk about mawkish, overwrought sentimentality...

He had been trying to eschew the silly romanticism of the Hudson River School, of Washington Allston - revered in South Carolina - of Thomas Cole and that lot. He had failed.

Samuel scowled at the canvas, squeezed a bit of blue and black on his palette, swirled it together. Get rid of some of this purple... he thought.

With delicate strokes, like fingers on a lover's cheek, he applied the paint to the top of the canvas, recreating the dark fringes of the western morning sky. He lost himself in the work, and the morning hours and the drama before him faded away as he got inside the painting, becoming part of its reality and dabbing away in an effort to make it reflect the reality he saw and felt.

After some time he heard footsteps behind him, on the soft grass. He felt his stiletto-sharp concentration waver and he cursed under his breath. He waited for the stranger to come up, look over his shoulder, make some comment. Every passing philistine felt welcome, almost obligated, to look and comment.

Sometimes they would make a non-committal grunt, sometimes a word or two. Sometimes they would praise his work, which was the worst. Bowater could not tolerate praise coming from someone unqualified to give it, which was just about everybody.

The footsteps stopped. Samuel could feel the presence of someone behind. He braced. A woman’s hand reached past his arm, pointed to the American flag, a tiny spot of red white and blue he had painted over Sumpter.

"May as well paint that right out," his sister said.

"Are you a secessionist, now, Elizabeth?"

"I always have been, brother. Sitting on a fence is unladylike. But more to the point, has this gunfire knocked you off? And if so, on which side have you fallen?"

Samuel had joined the navy, entered as midshipman at the Naval School - now the Academy - at seventeen, driven by his father’s urging and a love for the sea with which he was born, as much as he was born with brown eyes and arms and legs.

With the one exception of the Mexican War at the very beginning of his career, Samuel Bowater's time in the navy had been largely uneventful. For the past decade everyone’s career in the somnambulant United States Navy had been largely uneventful. But that was over. And service in the United States navy was over for him.

"In any event, Colonel Chesnut says not a thimble-full of blood will be shed in this war," Elizabeth said.

"Indeed."

The garrison at Fort Sumter was firing back now, stabs of flame just visible as they shot out from the gray walls of the fort. Heroic, futile defiance. Not the sort of action that would lead to a bloodless revolution.

Samuel Bowater had not thought much about any of the questions that were tearing the nation apart, questions of sovereignty and the permanence of Union, questions of slavery. He was of the navy, half of the past fourteen years he had spent on foreign service, where his only connection to his home was his fellow officers, most of whom were Yankees, and the Stars and Stripes flying at the gaff.

Samuel Bowater was a man of the sea and he did not give a damn what happened in Kansas or Nebraska or Missouri. It was all very abstract to him, very theoretical, like a discussion of the latest elections in England or the uprisings in Germany. The United States Navy was what he knew and loved. And now he would have to reject it, and fight against it.

Samuel had joined the navy, but he had been born to South Carolina, and in the end he knew where his loyalty lay. He knew that he did not care for the Yankees deciding any question that related to his beloved state. But he could not hate the Yankees as so many of his fellow southerners did. He had messed with too many of them.

The gunfire continued without let up. It was nearing noon and the barrage had not slackened in the least since that first shot at 4:30. Bowater was terribly hungry.

"I think perhaps it is time to go home," Samuel said. He cleaned his brushes and carefully packed his paint kit. He treated it with such care that it looked exactly as it had the day he bought it. Other painters wore special smocks to protect their clothes, which always seemed foolish to Samuel. If you were careful, you did not need a smock. There was no excuse for splattering paint on your clothes.

He took the canvas off the easel and leaned it against his haversack and folded the easel up.

He looked up and his eye caught a cluster of dark shapes on the horizon. Ships, though a less experienced eye might not have recognized them as such, or might not have seen them at all.

Samuel fished his telescope out again, trained it on the distant vessels. Men-of-war, Union ships. They were just outside the harbor entrance, a good five miles off, but he thought that he recognized the profile of the twin-screw steamer U.S.S. Pawnee. She was less than a year old, but he had seen her often enough for her profile to be familiar.

In company with her he recognized the Harriet Lane and a steamer that he did not know. An expeditionary force, no doubt sent for the relief of Fort Sumter. He shook his head. "Too damned late," he said. "The war has started without you."