Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

[320] thing necessary to meet the demands of suffering caused by battle was made ready. At midnight, seven discharges from heavy cannon aroused all sleepers. They were signals for the assembling of all the reserves immediately. The people rushed to the streets in alarm. The roll of the drum, the tramp of horses, and the rumbling of wagons were heard in every direction, while from the southwestern horizon a heavy thunder-storm was approaching. The streets were soon crowded with people, who hurried to East Bay Battery and other places, and watched eagerly for an attack on Fort Sumter.

In the town-through every street,
     Tramp, tramp, went the feet,
For they said the Federal fleet
     Hove in sight;
And down the wharves they ran,
     Every woman, child, and man,
To the fight.

Hours passed on, and all was quiet. The disappointed inhabitants made their way slowly back toward their homes, and very soon the gathering thunder-storm burst over the city.

Patiently, firmly, almost silently, the little band in Fort Sumter awaited the passage of that pregnant hour. Each man could hear his own heart beat as the expiring moments brought him nearer to inevitable but unknown perils. Suddenly the dull booming of a gun at a signal-battery on James Island, near Fort Johnson, was heard,¹ and a fiery shell, sent from its broad throat, went flying through the black night and exploded immediately over Fort Sumter. It was a malignant “shooting star,” coursing through the heavens like those, in appearance, which in the olden time affrighted the nations. It was one of fearful portent, and was the “forerunner” of terrible calamities. Then, no man was wise enough to interpret its full augury.

The sound of that mortar on James Island was the signal for battle. It awakened the slumberers in Charleston. The streets of the city were again thronged with an excited populace. After a brief pause, the heavy cannon on Cummings's Point, comprising Battery Stevens (so named in honor of the inventor), opened fire upon Fort Sumter. To the late Edmund Ruffin,² of Virginia, belongs the infamy of firing its first shot, and the first hurled against that fort, the mute representative of the nationality under whose benign overshadowing he had reposed in peace and security for more than seventy years. He had hastened to Morris Island when hostilities seemed near, and when asked there to what company he belonged, he replied, “To that in which there is a vacancy.” ³ He was assigned to duty in the Palmetto Guard, and implored the privilege of firing the first gun on Fort Sumter. It was granted, and he at once acquired Ephesian fame. That wretched old man appears in history only as a traitor and a suicide⁴--a victim to the wicked teachings of stronger and wiser men.

That first shot from Cummings's Point was followed quickly by others from the Floating Battery, which lay beached on Sullivan's Island, under the