Fort Sumter

• 1. Introduction

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  Fort Sumter is an unfinished sea fort on a man-made island at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. In April 1861, residents along the waterfront promenade called The Battery sat on their balconies and drank toasts as shells flew toward it. Mary Chesnut, whose diary became famous, recorded the scene of a city celebrating the start of hostilities.

  The fort under fire had never been finished, and it never would be. Its interior was bare, and fewer than half of its intended guns were in place. Its walls had been planned for an enemy arriving by sea, not for a quarrel among Americans.

  So how did a half-built fortress, designed in answer to an older war, become the place where a new one began? Who chose to hold it, who really fired first, and what became of the battered shell afterward?

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• 2. Sand, Granite and Brick

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  In 1827, a group of engineers took depth soundings in the channel off Charleston and judged a sand bar there suitable for a fort. Construction began in 1829. The project answered the War of 1812, which had shown how poorly American coastal defenses could resist a naval attack.

  The fort belonged to the third system of American fortifications, a program meant to shield harbors from invasion by sea. It was named for Thomas Sumter, an officer of the Continental Army. Planners meant it to dominate the harbor and to back up the shore batteries at Fort Moultrie, Fort Wagner, and Fort Gregg.

  Seventy thousand tons of granite traveled south from New England to raise the sand bar into an island. By 1834, a timber foundation lay several feet beneath the water. Then the plan changed, and the builders chose a stronger design in brick.

  The finished walls would form five sides, each between 170 and 190 feet long. They were 5 feet thick and rose 50 feet above the low tide mark. The design called for three tiers of gun emplacements, holding 135 guns and 650 men.

  None of that was ever fully realized. Disputes over title to the land slowed work, and then the money ran short for so large and technically demanding a project. Bad weather and disease made things worse. The outside was eventually completed, but the interior and the armaments never were.

  Earlier, in 1805, South Carolina had ceded Fort Moultrie, Castle Pinckney, and Fort Johnson to the United States, along with sites for future forts. The state saw the forts as costly to maintain and of doubtful military value. On the 17th of December 1836, it gave up all "right, title and, claim" to the site of Fort Sumter.

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• 3. Anderson's Gamble

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  Only six days after South Carolina left the Union, Major Robert Anderson of the U.S. Army made a move that no one had ordered. On the 26th of December 1860, he abandoned Fort Moultrie as indefensible. He spiked its large guns, burned the gun carriages, and took the smaller cannon with him.

  In secret, Anderson shifted companies E and H of the 1st U.S. Artillery to Fort Sumter. That meant 127 men, 13 of them musicians. He acted on his own initiative, believing a stronger position might hold off an attack by South Carolina militia. The fort was incomplete, and military cuts under President James Buchanan had left it with less than half the cannon it should have had.

  On the 9th of January 1861, cadets from the Citadel fired on the steamer Star of the West. The ship had been hired to carry troops and supplies to the fort, and the shots kept it from finishing the job. Governor Pickens then put his demand to President Buchanan in a letter delivered on the 31st of January 1861. He wrote, "I regard that possession is not consistent with the dignity or safety of the State of South Carolina."

  Repeated calls to evacuate followed, first from the state government and later from Confederate Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard. All were ignored.

  By April, President Lincoln learned that Anderson's food would run out by the 15th of April 1861. He ordered a relief fleet under Gustavus V. Fox. It included the steam sloops-of-war USS Pawnee and USS Powhatan, carrying motorized launches and about 300 sailors. The armed screw steamer USS Pocahontas and the Revenue Cutter USRC Harriet Lane sailed with them.

  The steamer Baltic carried about 200 troops from companies C and D of the 2nd U.S. Artillery. Three hired tugboats, fitted with extra protection against small arms fire, were to tow barges of men and supplies directly to the fort. The first ships set sail on the 6th of April 1861, and Harriet Lane reached the rendezvous off the Charleston Bar first, on the evening of the 11th of April.

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• 4. Thirty-Four Hours

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  On Thursday the 11th of April 1861, Beauregard sent three aides to Fort Sumter: Colonel James Chesnut Jr., Captain Stephen D. Lee, and Lieutenant A. R. Chisolm. They demanded surrender, and Anderson declined. Beauregard then consulted the Confederate Secretary of War, Leroy Walker. He sent the aides back and let Chesnut decide whether to take the fort by force.

  The aides waited for hours while Anderson weighed his options and played for time. Anderson finally announced his terms at about 3:00 a.m. Chesnut conferred with the other aides. He judged the terms "manifestly futile and not within the scope of the instructions verbally given to us." The aides went to nearby Fort Johnson, and Chesnut ordered it to open fire on Sumter.

  At 4:30 a.m. on Friday the 12th of April, Confederate batteries began a bombardment that lasted 34 straight hours. Edmund Ruffin, a Virginia agronomist and secessionist, claimed the first shot as his own, and many people believed him. In fact, Lieutenant Henry S. Farley fired it at 4:30 a.m. He commanded a battery of two 10-inch siege mortars on James Island.

  For more than two hours, the fort did not answer. Its ammunition was poorly suited to the job, and it had no fuses for its explosive shells. Those shells could not burst, so only solid iron balls could be fired back.

  At about 7:00 a.m., Captain Abner Doubleday, the fort's second in command, was given the honor of the Union's first shot. He missed. Part of the reason was that Anderson kept the guns off the highest tier, the barbette. Those guns could reach the Confederate batteries better, but their crews would have stood exposed. The Union fired slowly to save ammunition, and at night its fire stopped, while the Confederates still tossed in an occasional shell.

  The fort was surrendered and evacuated on Saturday the 13th of April. Lieutenant Norman J. Hall risked his life to raise the fallen Union colors again and burned off his eyebrows permanently. A Confederate soldier bled to death after a cannon misfired and wounded him.

  The Confederacy allowed a 100-shot salute to the flag. At the 47th shot, one Union soldier was killed and another mortally wounded, and the salute was cut to 50 shots. The Star of the West then carried the garrison to New York City. There, Broadway held a parade in their honor, and the Fort Sumter flag became a popular patriotic symbol.

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• 5. The Siege of 1863

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  On the 7th of April 1863, Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont led nine ironclads against Charleston's defenses. He commanded the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, and his force included New Ironsides, the tower ironclad Keokuk, and seven monitors. It was the largest deployment of monitors in action up to that time. The attack failed. New Ironsides, the Union's best ship, never engaged effectively, and the ironclads fired only 154 rounds while taking 2,209.

  Keokuk sank the next day, 1400 yards off the southern tip of Morris Island. Working at night to avoid the Federal squadron, the Confederates spent the following month salvaging its two eleven-inch Dahlgren guns. One was soon mounted in Fort Sumter.

  Meanwhile, a workforce of just under 500 enslaved Africans labored under Confederate army engineers. They filled casemates with sand, piled sandbags against the gorge wall, and built new traverses, blindages, and bombproofs. Some artillery had been removed, but 40 pieces remained mounted. The heaviest sat on the barbette, where wide angles of fire let them shoot down on approaching ships. That level was also more exposed to enemy fire than the casemates in the two lower tiers.

  After a devastating bombardment, Major General Quincy A. Gillmore and Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren decided on a boat assault for the night of the 8th-the 9th of September 1863. Dahlgren now commanded the squadron. Cooperation between army and navy was poor. Dahlgren would not place his sailors and Marines under an army officer, so two flotillas set out. Low tide held the army's flotilla off Morris Island. By the time it could move, the navy's assault had already been beaten, and the army boats turned back.

  The navy force numbered 400 sailors and Marines in 25 boats. Commander Thomas H. Stevens Jr., of the monitor Patapsco, was put in charge. He protested that he "knew nothing of the assault's organization." Dahlgren replied, "There is nothing but a corporal's guard in the fort, and all we have to do is go and take possession." A corporal's guard meant about 6-10 men. The underestimate may explain why Dahlgren resisted a joint operation, since he wanted the navy to have the credit.

  Poor reconnaissance, planning, and communication marked the operation from start to finish. Fewer than half the boats landed. Most came ashore at the right flank or right gorge angle instead of at the gorge, where a passable breach existed. The men who landed could not scale the wall. Confederates fired on them and threw hand grenades and loose bricks.

  Men still in the boats fired muskets and revolvers blindly, and they endangered the landing party more than the garrison. The landing party sheltered in shell holes in the wall. The garrison then fired a signal rocket, and Fort Johnson and the Confederate warship CSS Chicora opened fire on the boats. Some withdrew, and the landing party surrendered. The Union lost 8 killed and 19 wounded, and 105 were captured, including 15 of the wounded. The Confederates suffered no casualties.

  The bombardment resumed and went on with varying intensity until the war ended, doing steady damage. The garrison kept taking casualties. The Confederates salvaged guns and materials from the ruins and harassed Union batteries on Morris Island with sharpshooters. In the bottom-tier casemates of the left face, they mounted four 10-inch columbiads, one rifled 8-inch columbiad, and two rifled 42-pounders. Union service members who served at the fort under Gillmore would later receive a special decoration, the Gillmore Medal.

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• 6. The Flag Returns

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  On the 17th of February 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman's advance through South Carolina forced the Confederates out of Charleston. They abandoned Fort Sumter too. Its last Confederate commander, Major Thomas A. Huguenin, a graduate of The Citadel, never surrendered it. The Federal government formally took possession on the 22nd of February 1865.

  On the 14th of April 1865, a widely announced "End of the War" celebration took place at the ruined fort. Anderson, by then a major general, was ill and retired, but he came anyway. He brought the flag he had been forced to lower four years earlier and raised it in triumph. Henry Ward Beecher was present, and he afterward spoke at length about the occasion.

  That same evening, President Lincoln was assassinated. The news almost immediately overshadowed the festivities at Fort Sumter.

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• 7. From Ruin to Monument

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  When the war ended, the U.S. Army set out to make a ruin useful again. The damaged walls were re-leveled to a lower height and partly rebuilt. The third tier of gun emplacements was removed. Eleven of the original first-tier gun rooms were restored, each with a 100-pounder Parrott rifle.

  From 1876 to 1897, the fort served only as an unmanned lighthouse station. The Spanish-American War revived interest in its military use, and reconstruction began on facilities that had decayed. In 1898, a massive concrete blockhouse-style installation rose inside the original walls. It carried two 12-inch M1888 guns, one on a disappearing carriage. It was named Battery Huger, after Revolutionary War General Isaac Huger, and it never saw combat.

  The battery was deactivated in 1947. In 1948, the fort became Fort Sumter National Monument under the National Park Service. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. The Civil War Trust, a division of the American Battlefield Trust, and its partners have acquired and preserved 0.23 acres of historic land tied to the battles.

  One hundred and forty-seven years after it was sent, a rolled-up telegram turned up in a trunk belonging to Colonel Alexander Ramsay Thompson of New York. It eventually went to a museum in Charleston. Dated the 14th of April 1861, it was addressed to Gazaway Bugg Lamar in New York by the Governor of South Carolina. It read in part, "Fort Sumter surrendered yesterday after we had set all on fire... F.W. Pickens."

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• 8. Visiting the Fort Today

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  The Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park covers three sites in Charleston. They are the original fort, the Fort Sumter Visitor Education Center, and Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island. Visitors reach the fort by a 30-minute ferry from the Visitor Education Center or from Patriots Point. Private boats are no longer allowed.

  The museum at the Visitor Education Center covers the disagreements between North and South that led to the confrontation. The museum at the fort focuses on its construction and its role in the war. On the 12th of April 2011, the 150th anniversary of the war's start, thousands of reenactors set up encampments nearby. The United States issued a Fort Sumter stamp and a first-day cover that day.

  On the 28th of June 2015, after the mass shooting of the 17th of June at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, five small flags at the fort were lowered. They stood in a semi-circle around the large flagpole flying the 50-star United States flag. They were a 33-star United States flag, a Confederate First National Flag, a South Carolina state flag, a Confederate Second National Flag, and a 35-star United States flag. Lowering them let the South Carolina flag fly at half staff. The display had been added in the 1970s. In August 2015, the flagpoles were removed to make way for a new exhibit, and the four historic national flags now fly on the lower parade ground.

  By December 2019, rising seas had led the Park Service to move some large rocks, originally set to protect the fort from the sea, farther from its walls. The new placement is meant to form a protective breakwater and wetland.

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