Burton had made no attempt to conceal his identity, but if his name meant anything to Doubleday, that wasn’t immediately apparent. Doubleday had just returned to the army after a long leave of absence and was in the earliest days at his new post. I wondered what he thought of this place in these times. He held his own curiosity with perfect military propriety, but when Burton asked who was running the day-to-day affairs of the fort, he said, with a touch of malicious irony, “The officer of the day. Today that seems to be myself.”
We ate the simple fare and talked about small things—the weather, the potential danger of Burton’s proposed trip across the continent, the Indians in the West, and the prospect of yellow fever in Charleston again this summer.
“Come, I’ll show you the fort,” Doubleday said when we were finished.
We walked around the walls, all of us carefully avoiding what was so painfully obvious even to me. The fort could not be defended. Burton finally ventured a gentle opinion. “Those dunes do make it difficult, don’t they?”
“Yes, sir, they do do that.”
“Why can’t they be removed?” I asked.
“There’s a worry that the locals might be provoked by it,” Doubleday said. “They don’t need much to provoke them.”
“Even if the dunes were removed, defense would not be easy,” Burton said.
“No. We are like a leaky raft, surrounded by sharks.”
He was a bit easier now, with the two of us obviously kindred, at least in spirit.
We had come full circle. Doubleday looked out to sea and then at Richard. “So what would you do in this place, Captain Burton?”
Burton smiled, pleased to be recognized and acknowledged by his most recent rank. He looked off to sea and said, “I suppose that would depend on my authority and how I interpreted it.”
A soldier came along then and said that the colonel would see us.
Doubleday walked us to the gate and shook hands. “Drop by again on your way out, if you have the time. There’s a tavern up the beach that you might enjoy.”
We spent an hour with Colonel Gardner, who was an old man in every sense. The talk quickly became political, and Gardner’s sympathies overrode his Northern upbringing, coming down much too solidly with the Southerners for my liking. “You’ve got to understand their anger,” he said. “They are being treated very badly on the question of the territories. If Lincoln somehow gets elected and slavery is outlawed in the new territories, their way of life will soon be suffocated through the legislative process.”
Burton was polite as always, expressing an understanding of the Southern viewpoint without stating his own. But as we took our leave and trudged back to the fort, he said, “It’s not his age that makes him unfit for this command, it’s his attitude. Look at the position this puts his men in. It’s not bad enough to be surrounded by enemies and have the walls of their fort covered with dunes that any five-year-old could climb over; now for a leader they’ve got an old man who lives among the enemy and spouts the enemy’s dogma.” He stopped in the middle of the road and beheld the sorry fort. Loudly, with no attempt to hide his anger, he said, “So, Charlie, how’d you like to be stationed here with your life in the balance?” Then, under his breath, he said, “God
Captain Doubleday seemed happy to see us again, as if we represented some fading semblance of sanity in a world going quickly mad. The three of us walked up the beach, chatting pleasantly in the warm May sunshine. He needs our outside voices, I thought, even though he can’t admit that or commit himself to strangers. He’s a soldier; he can’t criticize the politicians who have put him here, or the seditious old man to whom they’ve entrusted his life. All he can honorably do is hope to die well when the time comes.
We stood for a while and watched the sea, looking at incoming ships gliding past Fort Sumter and around the point to the city. Then Doubleday said, “Come, I’ll buy you something to drink.”
The tavern was just a short trek across the dunes: a cool, dark haven with a pair of cool, dark wenches as barmaids. The ladies were so closely matched that they had to be sisters, and Doubleday introduced them to us as Florence and Frances. I thought of Marion, the girl in the little upstate town that now seemed so far behind us: the town of Florence, I remembered with a shudder. I looked across the table and wondered if Burton was having the same supernatural thoughts.
Doubleday ordered ale for us and tea for himself.
I offered a toast. “To the Union.”
Instinctively Doubleday raised his cup. Richard was tardy by just a couple of heartbeats.
We talked into the afternoon. Doubleday and Burton spoke of general military strategies, captain to captain. It all came down to the one thought, without ever getting more specific than they had already been: how to defend the defenseless.
It was after three o’clock when Doubleday said, “I should get back to my post and you have a boat to catch.”
