Where It All Began

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The highlight of this trip was a return visit to Fort Sumter. I went there as a kid, but I certainly didn’t understand the gist of the importance of its place in history then. With the notion that we might come to blows again in this country (Texas Republicans want secession put on the ballot for the state to vote on ), the place where it all began — our first and prayerfully ONLY Civil War — seemed to be calling me back. I mentioned this when I did the “famous Louisvillians” countdown: Fort Sumter was commanded by Major Robert Anderson (yes, a native of Louisville….looks like they’re building a Starbucks on the site where he was born [ah, but fear not, they did put one of those historical markers there ) in late 1860 and early 1861. I couldn’t help but see the irony: the ranger mentioned that you can literally see fingerprints of the slaves who built the fort in some of the bricks. Yes, the fort was built by SLAVES for the federal government in the early 1840s, and less than 20 years later it became the flashpoint for the war over slavery, with the federal (Union) government seeking to free the people they’d had build their fort a generation earlier. The story is told by a ranger in an entertaining fashion: the fort, on a man-made island, was originally planned and constructed as a means of protecting the American coastlines from foreign invasion, necessitated after the War of 1812. Instead, it was the central point of a homegrown squabble that cost over 620,000 lives. Located in Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter was relatively quiet until December 1860. On Christmas Eve South Carolina seceded. Major Anderson, feeling he was now in “hostile territory,” took his garrison out of Charleston (where the secession was drafted and announced) and moved them to Fort Sumter, where he felt he’d be safer. For four months, he was correct. As more states joined South Carolina in forming the Confederate States of America, though, things became more and more tense. South Carolina militiamen decided in April 1861 that they wanted “their” fort cleared of “Yankees,” so on April 12 they began firing on the fort. If you look at the flagpole in the first picture in the collage you’ll see a red line. THAT, the ranger told us, is how high the fort’s walls were before the war started. After two days Anderson decided he was going to get his garrison out of there. He lowered the 33-star flag (a replica of which was flying above the fort, then lowered and folded because we were the final tour of the day, in a ceremony after the ranger’s talk) and evacuated the fort, leaving it in the hands of the Confederacy. In one of those strange oddities of war and life, there were no casualties during the two-day bombardment; however, during a ceremonial salute closing the fort a cannon misfired and killed two Union soldiers. The ranger explained the four years that the war raged pretty much everywhere except South Carolina, the only state with no pockets of Union sympathies in the Confederacy. After Sherman marched to the coastline across Georgia, he and his troops turned toward South Carolina. The ranger said the Union troops had a vendetta to unleash against the state that started the war. Anderson, by the end of the war retired on disability from the Army at the rank of major general, returned to Fort Sumter four days after General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, carrying that flag he had lowered four years previously to the day. In a ceremony lost to history because of what happened later on April 14, 1865, Anderson restored the flag to its position atop the pole, signifying the Union had been preserved. South Carolina, one of the original thirteen colonies, was re-admitted to the Union on July 9, 1868. May that be the last time our nation sees something like that. COLLAGE: *The flagpole at Fort Sumter. Tourists pose with the flag they had help lower and fold a few minutes before. The red mark on the pole shows the original height of the fort’s walls. *Fort Sumter as we approached by ferry. *The bruised and battered bricks of the fort. *A cannon on display, and yes it is an original cannon from the fort.