The Cannons Roar, Fort Sumter and the Start of the Civil War: An Oral History, by Bruce Chadwick

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'The Cannons Roar' by Bruce Chadwick

The opening shots of the Civil War were fired against Fort Sumter, but casual students of that conflict might not realize that Confederate guns ringed the island fortress overlooking Charleston, SC, for a month before the first shot was fired. Weeks of indecision and negotiation passed for both sides until the fighting began.

Bruce Chadwick’s “Oral History” is composed from fragments of letters, editorials and conversations gleaned from books. The Cannons Roar is choppy and digressive, perhaps confusing to casual readers, but illuminates the uncertain process toward the Civil War with Sumter as its flashpoint. Chadwick unearths many ironies. Major Robert Anderson, Fort Sumter’s commander, was pro-slavery but by the book. He remembered his oath to the Constitution and stuck to it. He was prepared to follow orders, but for weeks, as Confederate guns remained silent, orders never came.

Anderson had been a West Point instructor and the Confederate commander, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, had been his student. Beauregard offered his old professor generous terms if he surrendered. “It is a demand with which I regret that my sense of honor, and my obligations to my government, prevent my compliance,” Anderson replied.

The snippets from Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet meetings gathered by Chadwick reveal clashing opinions and uncertainties over the beleaguered fort and the secession of the Southern states. Ever the wily politician, Lincoln hoped to convince Virginia politicians to keep their state in the Union if he evacuated Sumter as a good will gesture to the South. Chadwick’s excerpts from Southern newspapers are fascinating, their outrage and conspiratorial mindset remarkably similar in tone and them to today’s far-right media.