CWL --- Words from the Well-Known: Major Robert Anderson, December 1860 and April 1861

To Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, December 27, 1860:
"I abandoned Fort Moultrie because I was certain that if attacked by men must have been sacrificed . . . . If attacked, the garrison would never surrendered without a fight." Anderson was holding Fort Moultrie until he moved his command to Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. John B. Floyd, in a few months would become a Confederate general, but in December 1860 is was ordering the U.S. arsenal in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to ship the contents of its warehouses to the forts located in the deep South.

To Colonel Samuel Cooper, U.S. War Department's adjutant general and later CSA adjutant general, January 1, 1861.
"[The governor of South Carolina] knows not how entirely the city of Charleston is in my power. I can cut his communications off from the sea, . . . prevent the reception of supplies, close the harbor even at night, by destroying the lighthouses. . . . I would never do [these things] unless compelled to do so in self-defense."

To P.G.T. Beauregard in relpy to Beauregard's first demand for the surrender of Fort Sumter.
" . . . in reply thereto that it is a demand with which I regret that my sense of honor and of my obligation s to my government prevent my compliance."

The Oxford Dictionary of Civil War Quotations, John D. Wright, ed., Oxford University Press, 2006