FORT SUMTER

Flash Point

Long silent now, these big cannons fired some of the first shots of the Civil War. The irony is that they were defensive shots. Charleston was a stronghold of the secessionist movement but the fort was still in Union hands. On April 12, 1861 the newly organized Confederate army pulled the trigger on an artillery attack on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter. Less than 36 hours later the Union surrendered the partially completed fort and the war was on. 

Begun after the War of 1812 as a coastal fortification against foreign invaders, Sumter sits on 70,000 tons of imported New England granite piled atop a sandbar. Construction of the fort was slow. Even by 1861 the fort was only partial armed and some walls not finished. 

During a succession of failed Union invasions and bombardments in an attempt to retake the fort, much of the structure was turned to rubble but still occupied and actively defended by the Rebs. Only with Sheridan's march through South Carolina on the way to Atlanta in early 1865 was Charleston evacuated and the fort abandoned.

This is tabby with some brick added. Tabby was an early form of low grade concrete with oyster shells taking the place of lime. The material was a common building material in the coastal South but very labor intensive to make. Tabby was commonly faced with brick or stucco to hide its uneven appearance and we saw quite a bit of it on our travels along the old towns served by the Intracoastal Waterway. 

Interestingly enough tabby made for a good fort wall as cannon balls would only sink into the material and not shatter it. In many cases after a day's shelling, soldiers at night would go out and pry out the cannon balls embedded in the tabby. They then fired the very same shot back at their enemy the next day.

After the Civil War the fort was in ruins. Partial reconstruction took place to ready the fort for some functionality during the Spanish American War. This fortification, called Battery Huger, was added in 1910 and sits entirely inside the old fort. During WW I & II most all the weaponry was stripped for use in Europe. Today Fort Sumter National Monument receives over 800,000 visitors and most all of them come by concession-operated ferry.

Almost as an emphasis on how warfare has changed over the intervening 150 years, the USS Yorktown sits not far away. Retired from service in 1975, it is also a popular tourist attraction.