Pocahontas finally arrived off Charleston at 2 p.m. that afternoon, and with the arrival of the Northern warship, all was ready for Fox’s plan to proceed. “I had everything ready,” Fox later reported, “boats, muffled oars, small packages of provisions, in fact everything but the 300 sailors promised to me by the [department].”

Pocahontas, however, had arrived too late. At the same time the warship was arriving, the defenders inside the fort decided that they could hold out no longer. The fort had withstood 34 hours of bombardment, and Major Anderson felt that it was in no condition to withstand any more. “The quarters were entirely burned, the main gates destroyed by fire, the gorge walls seriously injured, the magazine surrounded by flames, and its door closed from the effects of heat,” he reported. When a Confederate cannonball shot away the Federal flag flying high above Fort Sumter, it was not replaced. The time had come for Anderson to surrender his command.

Fox and his expedition had come very close to accomplishing their rescue mission. If the men and supplies aboard Baltic had been able to land, Anderson and his men might have held out much longer. “Had the Powhatan arrived [on] the 12th, we should have had the men and provisions into Fort Sumpter [sic],” Fox later lamented. In the end, however, it was not to be.

With the surrender of Anderson and his men, there was nothing else for Fox and his men to do. He entered the harbor under a flag of truce and offered passage north for Anderson and his command when their Southern captors chose to release them.

On Sunday, April 14, Anderson and his 60 men formally turned Fort Sumter over to the Confederates. During the surrender ceremonies, Anderson attempted to fire a 100-gun salute to the flag. A premature explosion of one of the cannons killed two of his men and wounded three others. Ironically, they were the only Northern casualties during the entire battle.

The Southern victors did not hold Anderson and his men captive for long. At noon the following day, the Northern prisoners were transported out into Charleston Harbor aboard the Southern steamer Isabel. There, Anderson and his men were transferred to Baltic for the voyage north with Fox and his expedition.

Fox’s failure to rescue Fort Sumter was a bitter disappointment to the Northern officer. Watching the surrender of Fort Sumter from aboard Baltic, Fox found the scene galling. “I had the mortification of witnessing the surrender of the Fort with no part of my proposed plan arrived,” Fox laterreported. The failure made the Northern sailor resentful. “As for our expedition, somebody’s influence has made it ridiculous,” he later wrote.

Nonetheless, Fox’s efforts in planning and commanding the expedition to relieve Fort Sumter won him the admiration of Lincoln and Secretary of the Navy Welles. “I most cheerfully and truly declare that the failure of the undertaking has not lowered you a particle while the qualities you developed in the effort have greatly heightened you in my estimation,” Lincoln wrote to Fox. “For a daring and dangerous enterprise of a similar character you would to-day be the man, of all acquaintances, whom I would select.”

Despite such praise from high places, the secrecy surrounding the mission to relieve Fort Sumter kept Fox’s part in the plan from becoming widely known. “Under no circumstances is any mention of it whatever to get into the papers,” Fox wrote to his wife. “The whole affair is in able hands and in due time will appear.”

Lack of public recognition did not keep Fox from having a distinguished wartime career, however. On May 9, he was appointed chief clerk of the Navy, and on August 1, Lincoln appointed him assistant secretary of the Navy, a position he held for the remainder of the war. As assistant secretary, Fox proved to be a superb planner and administrator.

Few Northerners would ever know of Fox’s daring–if unsuccessful–plan to reinforce and supply the Northern garrison at Fort Sumter. Like much of the action in the first chaotic days of the war, it would soon be overshadowed by the inexorable march of even more dramatic and bloody events. In some ways, Gustavus Fox was the hero that never was. *

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Delaware native John D. Pelzer writes frequently on the subject of naval warfare in the Civil War. For further reading, see: The Civil War at Sea, by Virgil Carrington Jones; or Sumter: The First Day of the Civil War, by Robert Hendrickson.

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