In February 1865 the long stalemate came to an end as Gen. William T. Sherman marched north from Savannah through the interior of South Carolina, slicing between the remnants of Gen. John B. Hood’s Confederate army on the west and the small Confederate force remaining along the coast. On the 17th, with Sherman in Columbia, Fort Sumter and the other Confederate fortifications in Charleston harbor were quietly evacuated. At 9 o’clock on the morning of the 18th, the United States flag was once more raised over Fort Sumter. The fortunes of war had accomplished what 3,500 tons of metal, a fleet of ironclads, and thousands of men had failed to do.
The 1865 Flag Raising
On April 14, 1865, Robert Anderson, now a retired brigadier general, returned to Fort Sumter to raise again the flag he had pulled down four years before. If he was surprised at the shattered appearance of the fort (shown in Seth Eastman’s companion painting to the one reproduced on pages [4]-5), he said nothing, speaking only of the “act of duty” he had come there to perform. “I thank God that I have lived to see this day,” he told the throng of spectators and distinguished guests. Then, amid loud applause, he hoisted “to its proper place this flag which floated here during peace, before the first act of this cruel Rebellion.”
As the flag rose to the top of the staff and was caught by the breeze from the ocean, “there was one tumultuous shout.” The guns of the harbor then thundered in salute. “We raise our fathers’ banner, that it may bring back better blessings than those of old,” Henry Ward Beecher told the crowd, “that it may cast out the devil of discord; that it may restore lawful government and a prosperity purer and more enduring than that which it protected before; that it may win parted friends from their alienation; that it may inspire hope and inaugurate universal liberty; ... that it may heal all jealousies, unite all policies, inspire a new national life, compact our strength, purify our principles, ennoble our national ambitions, and make this people great and strong ... for the peace of the world.”
That night, there were fireworks and a full-dress dinner at the Charleston Hotel hosted by General Gillmore. Speeches and toasts followed one another in quick succession. One of the most moderate and, as events proved, ironic toasts, was given by General Anderson. “I beg you, now,” he began, “that you will join me in drinking the health of ... the man who, when elected President of the United States, was compelled to reach the seat of government without an escort, but a man who now could travel all over our country with millions of hands and hearts to sustain him. I give you the good, the great, the honest man, Abraham Lincoln.” Less than an hour later, Abraham Lincoln lay dying on the floor of a Washington theater, an assassin’s bullet in his brain.
Part 3 The Fort Today
From Wartime Ruin to National Monument
The task of clearing the rubble and ruin of war from the interior of Fort Sumter began in the 1870s. In the forefront of the project was Quincy A. Gillmore, whose Union gunners were responsible for most of the destruction in the first place. The outer walls of the gorge and right flank, largely demolished by the shellfire, were partially rebuilt. The other walls of the fort, left jagged and torn 30 to 40 feet above the water, were leveled to approximately half their original height. Through a left flank casemate, where a barracks once stood, a new sally port was constructed. Within the fort itself, earth and concrete supports for 10 rifled and smoothbore guns mounted en barbette (guns placed on an open parapet) began to take shape.
Construction was well advanced by June 1876, when a shortage of funds forced suspension of activity. By that time, only three permanent barbette platforms had been built; the other seven remained temporary (wooden) platforms upon which were mounted four 8-inch Parrott rifles and two 15-inch Rodman smoothbores. In a modification of the original plan, 11 lower-tier gunrooms of the original fort along the right face and about the salient had been repaired and armed with 6.4-inch Parrotts. These 17 guns, in a gradually deteriorating state, constituted Fort Sumter’s armament for the next 23 years.
From 1876 to 1898, the fort stood largely neglected, important mainly as a lighthouse station. Most of that time it was also ungarrisoned and in the charge of a “fortkeeper” or an ordnance sergeant. Lacking maintenance funds, Sumter, even then visited by thousands each year, fell into a state of dilapidation. By 1887 the wooden barbette platforms had rotted away so that “not one gun could be safely fired”; the neat earth slopes had eroded into “irregular mounds”; and quantities of sand had drifted onto the parade ground. At casemate level, salt water dashed freely through the open embrasures, the shutters of which were no longer in working order, and the guns rusted so badly that they could not be moved on their tracks.