Fort Sumter on the Eve of War
When Federal troops occupied Fort Sumter in late December 1860, they found the place “filled with building materials, guns, carriages, shot, shell, derricks, timbers, blocks and tackle, and coils of rope in great confusion.” The soldiers spent many weeks clearing away debris, moving and mounting guns, distributing shot, and bricking up embrasures against a threatened Confederate attack. By April 1861 the fort looked much as it does below.
The principal parts of the 1861 fort are identified in the following list. Each is keyed by number to the illustration. The cutaway section of the illustration shows the arched first- and second-tier casemates behind the brick exterior. The second-tier casemates were unfinished and no cannon were mounted there.
1/Left Face 2/Left Flank, facing Charleston and Fort Johnson. 3/Right Face, fronting Fort Moultrie across the main ship channel. 4/Right Flank, facing the Atlantic Ocean. 5/Gorge Wall, facing Confederate batteries on Morris Island. 6/Left Gorge Angle 7/Right Gorge Angle, where Capt. Abner Doubleday commanded a Federal gun crew in one of the lower casemates. 8/Officers’ Quarters, consisting of several three-story apartments for officers and their families. Ordnance storerooms and a hospital were also located here. 9/Enlisted Men’s Barracks, each designed to accommodate two companies. 10/Stair Tower, providing access to the barbette tier. 11/Hot Shot Furnace 12/Second Tier Embrasures 13/Fort Lantern 14/Bins containing oyster shells probably used in the fort’s construction. 15/Sand and Brick-bat Traverses, erected by Federal engineers as protection against Confederate cannon fire. 16/Sandbag Traverse, built to protect Federal gunners against enfilading fire from Fort Moultrie. 17/Machicoulis Gallery, a wooden outcropping atop the parapet in which soldiers could stand to fire into or drop grenades onto an attacking force. 18/Sally Port 19/Granite Wharf
Plans for Fort Sumter were drawn up in 1827 and adopted on December 5, 1828. In the course of that winter Lt. Henry Brewerton, Corps of Engineers, assumed charge of the project and commenced active operations. But progress was slow, and as late as 1834 the new fort was no more than a hollow pentagonal rock “mole” two feet above low water and open at one side to permit supply ships to pass to the interior. Meanwhile, the fort had been named Sumter in honor of Thomas Sumter, brigadier general commanding South Carolina militia during the Revolution.
Operations were suspended late in the autumn of 1834 when ownership of the site came into question. The previous May, one William Laval, a resident of Charleston, had secured from the State a rather vague grant to 870 acres of “land” in Charleston Harbor. In November, acting under this grant, Laval notified the representative of the U.S. Engineers at Fort Johnson of his claim to the site of Fort Sumter. In the meantime, the South Carolina Legislature had become curious about the operations in Charleston Harbor and began to question “whether the creation of an Island on a shoal in the Channel, may not injuriously affect the navigation and commerce of the Harbor.” The following month, the Committee on Federal Relations reported that it could not “ascertain by what authority the Government had assumed to erect the works alluded to.” Acting apparently under the impression that a formal deed of cession to “land” ordinarily covered with water had not been necessary, the Federal Government had commenced operations at the mouth of Charleston Harbor without seeking or receiving State approval to do so.
Laval’s claim was invalidated by the State’s attorney general in 1837, but the harbor issue remained unresolved. It was November 1841 before the Federal Government received clear title to the 125 acres of harbor “land,” although construction of Fort Sumter had resumed the previous January under the skillful guidance of Capt. A. H. Bowman, who pushed the work forward.
Bowman changed the original plans in several respects, the most important involving the composition of the foundation. Instead of a “grillage of continuous square timbers” upon the rock mass, he proposed laying several courses of granite blocks because he feared worms would completely destroy the wood; and palmetto, which might have resisted such attacks, did not have the compactness of fiber or the necessary strength to support the weight of the superstructure.
Work was difficult. The granite foundation had to be laid between periods of high and low tide, and there were times when the water level permitted no work to be done at all. The excessive heat of the Charleston summers was a recurrent problem; so was yellow fever. Much of the building material had to be brought in from the North. The magnitude of the task is indicated by the quantities involved: about 10,000 tons of granite (some of it from as far away as the Penobscot River region of Maine) and well over 60,000 tons of other rock. Bricks, shells, and sand could be obtained locally, but even here there were problems. Local brickyard capacities were small and millions of bricks were required. Similarly, hundreds of thousands of bushels of shells were needed—for concrete, for the foundation of the first-tier casemate floors, and for use in the parade fill next to the enrockment. Even the actual delivery of supplies, however local in origin, was a problem, for then, as now, the fort was a difficult spot at which to land.
By 1860 Fort Sumter outwardly possessed a commanding and formidable appearance. Its five-foot-thick pentagonal-shaped brick masonry walls towered nearly 50 feet above low water and enclosed a parade ground of roughly one acre. Along four of the walls extended two tiers of arched gunrooms. Officers’ quarters lined the fifth side—the 316.7-foot gorge. (This wall was to be armed only along the parapet.) Three-story brick barracks for the enlisted garrison paralleled the gunrooms on each flank. The sally port at the center of the gorge opened on a 171-foot wharf and a 25½-foot-wide stone esplanade that extended the length of that wall.