The Battle of Fort Sumter with (Walt Young)

The Battle of Fort Sumter with (Walt Young) 

In this episode of American Civil War & UK History, host Daz is joined by historian Walt Young to discuss the Battle of Fort Sumter and the first shots of the American Civil War.

The Battle of Fort Sumter began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces opened fire on a Union-held fort in Charleston. After 34 hours of bombardment, Union commander Robert Anderson surrendered. The attack marked the start of the American Civil War.

ACW & UK History's Website.
https://www.acwandukhistory.com/

ACW & UK History's Pages.
https://linktr.ee/ACWandUKHISTORY

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

To keep up to date with everything American Civil War and UK history, head over to our website ACW and UKhistory.com. And remember, this podcast has a PowerPoint presentation that goes along with the show. So if you would like to see the PowerPoint presentation, then head over to our YouTube channel at American Civil War and UK History. Cheers. Hello everyone, I'm Daz and welcome to American Civil War and UK History Podcast. This podcast is available as a video on our YouTube channel or as a podcast from wherever you get your podcasts from. And if you're watching on YouTube, remember to hit the subscribe button and give us a big thumbs up. And check out our website at www.acwandukhistory.com where you'll find podcasts, blog posts, and links to all of our social media pages. The link is also available in the podcast description. And joining me today is historian Walt Young. Welcome, Walt.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Hi Dad. Hi Days. Nice to talk to you. And it's been good to see you through emerging civil war-related stuff, and I'm happy to be on for the first time.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Thank you. Absolutely. Okay, in today's discussion, we're going to be discussing the firing upon Fort Sumter, which of course is ultimately going to lead to the American Civil War. But before we get into that, Walt, what I would love to know, and it's the first time for you to uh appear on my podcast, I'd like to know how you first became interested in history.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Sure. So I've been a voracious reader since I was very uh since I was very young. Uh some about uh some about Civil War-related topics, but about all sorts of general not nonfiction history and and other books. I took a childhood trip with my family to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, site of John Brown's raid when I was about, I would say 12, uh, that really let me know that maybe I would want to be doing history-related work or public history. Uh, I didn't know that word back then, but uh I figured out what it was eventually uh over the long term. Um, and I'm excited to be uh doing it now and uh researching uh in my current home base of South Carolina. Uh excited to talk to you about one of the most important events, I think, in in the United States' history. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

Okay, let's uh discuss the Battle of Fort Sumter then. Okay, Walt, would you like to start with telling us a little bit about its location and its original history, please?

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Sure. So Fort Sumter is located at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. Um, so if a ship is trying to get into Charleston Harbor, I know I see a very helpful map here. Um so on your map, if you see where it says main shipping channel down below Fort Sumter and to its right, uh for those of you who are watching on video, uh, this is southeast of the fort. Uh, ships had to start to go into the main shipping channel through uh basically a pretty curvy path down south of Fort Sumter near a place called Morris Island, which is just outside of Charleston Harbor. So the ship wanted to get into the harbor. It had to go in between basically Morris Island and Sullivan's Island, uh, home to a spot called Fort Moultrie. As a result of that, over the years, you're going to see numerous generations of both British-American colonists and then the new United States building a team of forts here in Charleston Harbor. First, you get Fort Johnson in the early 1700s, then you get Fort Moultrie, uh first built in 1776, uh, when the uh American colonists are going to uh turn back an attack by the British Royal Navy, which I had to throw in there for our UK listeners. Thanks, mate. Yeah. Um now you'll you'll appreciate this one a little bit better. Uh later in the revolution, it's what we don't love to talk about as much in Charleston. The British were able to come back and take over the city from the colonists, and they held the city for the last couple years of the revolution. So the colonists are going to realize okay, just having Fort Moultrie and kind of Fort Johnson as a backstop in Charleston Harbor isn't going to be good enough. We need more forts. Uh, they build more like Castle Pinckney, right just east of the city of Charleston. And eventually starting in the year 1829, they'll start having Fort Sumter built on basically an island, uh a natural sandbar in the middle of Charleston Harbor. Um, when I say an island, just picture maybe just a little bit below the water, very shallow sands. So it wasn't enough for you to like put buildings on on its own, um, but it was a spot where you could dump rocks for a big foundation. Uh, and that's what ultimately became the site of Fort Sumter.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Nice. Okay, so talk tell us a little bit about its design, if you wouldn't mind.

SPEAKER_01 4:46

Yeah. The fort was designed as a Pentagon. Uh, for anyone who's a baseball or softball fan, um, the fort is basically a shape like home plate on a baseball or softball field. And the intent of this is that if a ship wants to come into the harbor, it has to go effectively around four of the five sides, all but the longest wall, uh, the S-point, uh, the uh the gorge wall of the fort. Uh otherwise, the ship has to start near Morris Island and basically at the back right corner, come up and around. The fort is pointing towards Sullivan's Island. So the ship, as the ship goes by there, it's taking crossfire from ideally fortster and moultry, along with any other earthworks that the Americans have built up. And then the ship even has to come basically back down to the back left of the fort uh before moving toward Fort Johnson and the city. Uh, and later on in the Civil War, when the fort in at that point in Confederate hands does end up facing up against ships, it turns out that the fort is pretty good at defending the harbor in this way. Um, but as we'll see in the firing on Fort Sumter that we talk about, uh the most famous battle uh is not going to see the fort getting help from its other forts, but instead having to face up against them in battle. So maybe not the intended purpose.

SPEAKER_00 6:06

Excellent. Now, obviously, there's a series of events that are gonna lead to the fire in the Fort Sumter, and of course, probably one of the most important ones is the election of 1860. So just give us a little brief overview of the election of 1860 and what the outcome is gonna be.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

So the defining issue of United States politics throughout the 1850s is going to be the growing divide over slavery and specifically the expansion of slavery. And these four candidates are gonna have very different ideas about the expansion of slavery. Um, now we'll go through them from left for anyone on video. We have, of course, Abraham Lincoln, he's uh representing the new Republican Party. President Lincoln is basically representing the furthest anti-slavery flank that is going to be viable in American politics at that time. So he's not going to be a full-throated abolitionist like some people are in the North, but he's going to be what we call a free soiler, which means that he wants to stop the spread of slavery into new Western states. And he is running on that platform. Nobody has ever gotten elected president on that platform before. The only president who came to really believe that before Lincoln was John Quincy Adams. But he ended up basically coming to that conclusion after he had left the presidency. So this would be something new if Lincoln gets elected. We've got the next two guys in the middle. They're uh Stephen Douglas and John Breckenridge. They both are representing some portion of the Democratic Party, which is an older party than the Republicans. Um, it has been in power for throughout the 1850s, but it is very quickly being divided over the slavery issue. So Douglass has always wanted, he's based, he would be what we might call this, uh what they would have thought of as the center back then. Uh he is going to be basically saying any new state should be just able to vote on whether or not they want to allow slavery. Uh and this put him in decent on decent terms with many of the Southerners from much of the 1850s. Um, but by the 1860 convention that they hold in Charleston, uh it's not good enough. Uh and the Southerners are going to walk out of the Democratic Convention and ultimately split the party and nominate John Breckinridge, who's the current vice president of the United States. Um Breckenridge is going to be the hardest-line pro-slavery candidate in the election. Douglas is going to be somewhere in the middle. Lastly, we have a guy named John Bell. He's representing the Constitutional Union Party, which is a third party that basically doesn't really want to give a firm answer on the slavery debate. It just wants everyone to stop fighting. Um and we'll obviously know how that turned out. So the election is basically going to end up being mostly Lincoln versus Douglas in the northern states, uh, with Lincoln again representing no expansion of slavery, and Douglas representing the kind of in the middle position that had for the last several years won out. In the South, it's mostly going to be Breckenridge versus Bell. Uh and ultimately, Lincoln wins the election with about 40% of the popular vote, so less than half of the popular vote, but with a majority of the electoral college. He wins almost every state in the northern free states of the US.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Absolutely. And yeah, so that is gonna cause a problem, isn't it? And so, of course, the first place to uh secede from the union is gonna be South Carolina, and of course, we're all stumped. So tell us about the secession of uh South Carolina and what what their beef was with Abraham Lincoln.

SPEAKER_01 10:01

So within about a month and a half of President Lincoln's election, South Carolina is going to declare that they're the first state to secede. Uh now, a couple interesting things on this front. First, you'll notice from the uh you'll notice from their uh the map that for any of the video watchers that we have here, um, that while other states uh have basically county by county uh results, south uh South Carolina does not. South Carolina has every delegate who goes to their convention voting for secession, 169 to zero. Uh that I wouldn't say that that represents uh the full span of South Carolina public opinion, given that more than half of the population is enslaved. Um but the among the people who really have a voice in South Carolina politics, it's gonna be very, very heavy on the pro-secession side. Uh now they make very clear why they want to leave. They end up holding their convention in Charleston. Their capital was Columbia, but Columbia had a smallpox outbreak, so they moved down to Charleston. And Charleston is going to be really the heartbeat of secessionist politics over the last several years. And now they have their opportunity to secede. They write in their Declaration of the Causes of Secession, which I would encourage anyone to think as basically an analog to our Declaration of Independence in terms of its purpose, trying to lay out why they want to secede. They will, the first half of the document, they will write why they think they have the right to secede, and the second half they will write why. And their reasons are very thoroughly about slavery. They are going to say throughout that things like, for example, a geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the states north of that line have elected a man whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. They say in the next breath that if Lincoln can is allowed to govern the country, then the public mind must rest on the thought that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. They have a laundry list of complaints trying to back this up about ways in which northerners have tried to undermine the institution. So lots of people end up arguing after the war about why they were leaving. At the time, they were pretty clear that they wanted to defend their system of slavery, even if it meant leaving the country.

SPEAKER_00 12:19

Excellent. Great explanation. Thank you, Walt. Okay, let's talk about the so this is obviously going to cause a problem. As I said, Fort Sumter is in the middle of Charleston Harbor, but it is a US fort, isn't it? So when they succeed, do you have a force within is it within the fort at this point?

SPEAKER_01 12:38

It's not quite within the fort yet. So uh the the US soldiers in the harbor usually, up to this point, have lived at Fort Moultrie, which is again that slight somewhat older position over on Sullivan's Island. Uh Fort Sumter, by contrast, has until now been basically the long-running construction project that everybody loves. It's been worked on for about 30 plus years, since 1829. They first had to build the foundation and then build up the bricks. Uh and the in while the fort's as tall as it's supposed to be, some of the inside elements, like their second level of cannons and their barracks buildings, are not yet quite finished. That leaves the U.S. soldiers in the harbor, which number just over 80, which I would say is not a large force compared to what's going to be coming at them from the secessionists. That's going to leave them in a pretty difficult position. And their commander is a guy named Major Robert Anderson. He's a career military man in his 50s, who was just assigned to Fort Moultrie in November by President Buchanan. Um, so he is going to arrive at Fort Moultrie in December when South Carolina secedes. He's going to look around and he's going to decide that Fort Moultrie is no longer a defendable position. It has low-to-the-ground walls on an island surrounded by people's summer houses. He can read the local newspaper reports that get uh that are going to say basically say, hey, here's a map of Fort Moultrie. Here are its strong points and weak points. Uh basically inviting any secessionist militias who want to try and attack it to do so. So he is ultimately going to make the decision that he's going to move his forces over to Fort Sumter with its much taller walls, surrounded by water, potentially better in any infantry or artillery battle that they may have to face. So they make the move over to uh Major Anderson's troops make the move over to Fort Sumter the day after Christmas, December 26th, uh basically during the evening into night. Uh they are going to know that they're going to have to move clandestinely if they're going to get around the secessionists who are patrolling the harbor. The secessionists don't get the patrol boat out at the prompt time. And Major Anderson and his men are able to move over to Fort Sumter just under a week after that secession declaration has been signed. So now they are at Fort Sumter in the middle of the harbor, and shockingly, the secessionists are not very happy and are going to move to take over basically all the other forts that I described earlier. So Fort Johnson, Fort Moultrie, Castle Pinckney, and ultimately positions for earthworks that they'll build up as well.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

So what's Anderson's faults at this point? Is he feeling isolated? And does he communicate back to Washington the current situation? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

Yes, he he does send a telegram back to Washington saying what he's done. Anderson is in an interesting position. He has basically been given orders that leave some leeway. And that's going to be a point of controversy after he moves over. Anderson's orders, and I've read them, say a couple things. One, they say that he is not to make a futile defense, but he it also says that he is responsible for the forts plural of the harbor. So Anderson's way of looking at it is that he has he is not made he is not making a futile defense if he moves his troops to the more defensible position. And he's been given responsibility over those forts plural. Now, that is not going to sit well with the Secretary of War. His name is John Floyd, who actually resigns over this action. Um, however, it should be noted that John Floyd would, within the next year or so, end up going to join the Confederacy. And he had already been sending some uh basically sending stuff, military supplies, but not soldiers, to some further deep southern forts in the months before this. So it has been uh argued and theorized that Floyd may not have been arguing uh may not have been arguing completely in good faith, uh, and it may have not had the interests of the United States as opposed to his future employer completely in mind when he got angry at Anderson's defense of his fort against the secessionists.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Okay. So technically they sort of um they're pinned in there and it's technically sort of like a bit of a siege. Now they start running out of supplies, don't they? So there's an attempt to resupply the fort. So tell us about what happens there, please. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

So in the uh in January, President Buchanan remembers still in office. You're gonna get a visit to Charleston by a boat named the Star of the West. So the Star of the West is not a military boat, it is a civilian boat carrying military men and supplies. But Buchanan wants to make sure that Anderson and his men can potentially get resupplied. So he sends down the Star of the West, uh, although he doesn't send a military ship. What ends up happening is the Confederate positions, batteries on Morris Island and at Fort Moultrie and on Sullivan's Island see the ship coming. Anderson really doesn't have advanced preparation for the ship coming, whereas the Confederates have been informed of it from basic uh one of their cabinet, former cabinet officials in Washington. And they are going to shoot at the Star of the West. It has no cannons on it, so it just turns around and goes home. Uh, you m uh if you ever visit South Carolina, you may end up running uh seeing a military college called the Citadel. Among the people firing at the Star of the West were cadets from the Citadel Military College. Um they play a part in the lead up to and start of the war. So the status quo will continue after the Star of the West, uh, but each day that no resupply gets to Anderson successfully means that Anderson's still running out of food. And on the other hand, the Confederates are able to build up their possessions. So that leads us to April when President Lincoln, now inaugurated, is gonna have to try and make his own decision on how to resupply the fort.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Okay, and so let's bring in um the Confederates again now. So again, as you said, they're surrounded on all sides. Now um PGT Beauregard is gonna play a big um uh he's gonna play a big role in this this, isn't he? So what what sort of role does he play? And what so is he at this time, is he part of the Confederate Army or is he just sort of like um, you know, just somebody of importance? Right.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

At this point, he is becoming the beginning basically of the Confederate Army. He's effectively gonna be the first general in the Confederacy who see who has a role of any importance. The Confederates are going to have for the first couple of months, basically at South Carolina militia uh at the forts of Charleston Harbor surrounding Fort Sumter. And until February, they would say, if you asked one of them, they would say that they're just operating for their state of South Carolina, but there's no such thing as the Confederacy yet, particularly since they are the first one to try and leave. But by February, the Confederates are with more states joining the Confederacy, um, they're up to seven by the end of February. Um, basically everything on the coastline from South Carolina through Texas on the Atlantic and Gulf coastline, um, they are going to band together in Montgomery, Alabama, to form the first Confederate government. And that Confederate government is going to start raising an army and is going to PGT Borgard, therefore, is going to be basically a Confederate regular, not a militiaman, when he is commanding ultimately the bombardment of the fort in April.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

Okay. And so what series of events are going to lead up to him and and this um army deciding to fire upon Fort Sometimes? And tell us about the first shot and who fired it, if you could. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

So the the lead up ultimately is going to be the Confederates who fired the first shot of the war. And the lead up to it is going to help explain why. So President Lincoln has just been inaugurated. He's now got a pretty difficult decision on his hands. Um, whereas the Confederates at this point are more than happy to just point cannons at the fort and let Anderson's food dwindle away. So the more Anderson's food gets lower, the clearer it becomes that he is going to run out of food by about mid-April. And he tells the United States government in Washington that. Now I'm going to lay out a couple bad options for you that Lincoln has on his hands. Bad option number one is to say, well, I guess we're Anderson's going to have to leave the fort when he runs out of food because we're not going to be able to resupply him. Our first attempt didn't work. If he does that, he's basically going to be sending the message to the eight remaining slave states that haven't decided to leave the Union yet that the United States isn't really doing that much about secession, that they're not willing to defend even the small amounts of federal property they have in the South. So that would be one option that he doesn't want to do. Bad option number two, from his perspective, would be to send the more than 10,000. Soldiers that Anderson at one point says would be necessary if he was to get back the other forts. If he does that, then he's potentially sending an invasion force and he's changing the status quo against the Confederates and letting people like those Northern Democrats, like Stephen Douglas, and letting other European countries like the UK and like France know that the United States has basically invaded South Carolina before South Carolina really did anything other than write words down on a paper. So he doesn't really want to do that either. So he is going to say, okay, well, let's send Major Anderson some food. That way, we're not giving up on the point of this being a U.S. fort. This is kind of where the rubber meets the road. Is the United States this is a United States fort or is this a secessionist fort? And Lincoln wants to continue to say that it's a U.S. fort. But it's also not sending any invasion force to South Carolina. Ultimately, the Confederates now have to make their own decision. Lincoln basically just goes right out and tells the governor of South Carolina, along with Anderson, that a food resupply is going to be on its way and it's going to arrive sometime around April 12th or 13th. The Confederates now have to make their own decision. And they do not want Anderson and his men to be resupplied and get to sit there at Fort Sumter for another several months with the new food they have. So they ultimately run it up the chain all the way up to even the Confederate government in Montgomery, Jefferson Davis, the president, and his Secretary of War, a guy named Leroy Walker. And those guys will ultimately send a telegram to Beaugaard that says, if Anderson hasn't left the fort by a certain time, then you are to fire on the position. So ultimately, on April 11th, they will send envoys out to Fort Sumter to demand that Anderson leave the fort. Anderson will tell them that he will leave the fort only if he runs out of food. So look, if I'm out of if I am out of food in three days, then I'll leave. But otherwise, he considers it his job to hold on to the position. He hasn't been forced to leave and he hasn't been ordered to leave by his government. So the Confederates go back and they say, that's not acceptable. Ultimately, we are going to fire on the position. And so on April 12th, 1861, the first shot of the Civil War rises over Charleston Harbor, fired from a Confederate cannon at Fort Johnson, in the uh basically west of the fort. It explodes overhead like a big American Fourth of July firework, and it tells all the rest of the Confederate positions to start shooting at the U.S. flag in the middle. So it starts the day and a half of battle that will follow, but of course, it also starts the four years of very deadly war ahead of us.

SPEAKER_00 25:01

Wow. How interesting. Absolutely fantastic. Okay, yes. So um again, um, they know that this pending situation is getting worse. So how prepared was the Union garrison when the bombardment started? Did they make you know some makeshift sort of places to hunker down or anything like that?

SPEAKER_01 25:24

So they they did have uh defenses that will ultimately help them get out of the battle with nobody having been killed, but the fort is ultimately not going to be in an advantageous position to win the battle. So, like you said, three and a half months, they've had time to, for example, mount their cannons on the walls, um which they have. They had about 60 cannons in the fort, um, and they mounted them mostly on the bottom level and on the top level. Now, they did have play uh they did have places to hunker down because the way the fort was built, I laid out the kind of like shape of the fort and the design in that way. But I should have mentioned earlier, the fort is a pretty classic fort of this era in that it has what we call casemate windows, which from its outside, like in the picture that any of your video listeners can see, uh, it's it basically looks like little rectangular windows on the edges of the walls. Um, but inside, these are basically arched rooms. They've got each arched room has one cannon inside it on the bottom level, and ideally on the second level too. Although the second level they didn't have the cannons ready yet because the they didn't hadn't hadn't laid their tracks, hadn't opened the windows, stuff like that, which they wouldn't have had time to do in the three and a half months. So they fired from the bottom level. They did not ultimately fire from the top level. They remember with only about 80 men, they had their 60 cannons, but they couldn't fire most of their 60 cannons. So Anderson ended up having them fire from the bottom level. They do stay pretty well protected, even as the fort gets set on fire by Confederate cannons, which set on fire the wooden barracks building roofs inside the fort, but they don't do that much damage from that bottom level to the Confederates in return. And that is why some of your listeners may have already heard of well, the first battle of the Civil War actually didn't kill anyone on either side. And within the battle itself, that is true. But the big reason for that is because the US soldiers were firing from that bottom level because of basically their lack of manpower and needing to preserve that manpower in the stronger position.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

Now, I can't imagine what this is like for the soldiers inside that fort for 34 hours of bombardment. So is there any accounts that you could um bring up that you know brings that situation up for them?

SPEAKER_01 27:59

There are several, there are several accounts. Um I uh among them is a uh a sergeant, uh he later rose higher, but he was a sergeant then called named James Chester, um, who basically in his in his account looking back, and this is a pretty common theme with the U.S. accounts from the battle that I've read, ends up having somewhat of a bravado about it that he says they were like stiff upper lip, more than determined to do their duty. Um there are U.S. soldiers who will write later claiming credit, for example, for pulling the lanyard on the first shot of the war back at the Confederates, which happened two and a half hours into the battle. Um, so you do definitely see from the people who remembered it, uh, again, since they're a small force, uh uh some level of pride in having been there. Um sometimes as opposed to the like horrifying accounts from your very deadly battles later on in the war. Um but as your question indicated, it definitely did take its toll. Uh Major Anderson writes a has basically ghost-written for him a telegram back to Washington, D.C. to explain ultimately why they're leaving the fort. And he will write that after 34 hours of constant bombardment, uh, with no food left but salt pork, for example, he even includes that in the telegram, uh, and uh having to having to put out a fire in their gunpowder magazine, um, that he agreed to evacuate the fort. Um and per uh basically eyewitness accounts of what Anderson looked like afterwards, basically say that he was a man who was very deeply stressed by this event and the responsibility of having this huge war start on his watch. So I think in the moment it certainly took it, it would have taken its toll on uh at least Anderson and probably many of the other people there, even if over the long run, people look back at it uh and were proud to have defended their fort.

SPEAKER_00 30:01

And I know you mentioned there's not any casualties or anything like that, but how effective do you think the uh bombardment was uh in general?

SPEAKER_01 30:12

Well, I uh I would say it achieved its tactical objectives. Um so it damaged, as you as you can see in some of the pictures here, it mostly damaged the barracks buildings. It didn't uh didn't really tear down the walls of the fort. Um that would occur in a bombardment by the United States later in the war. Um, but it so the walls were able to stand up to the cannonballs at the distance and strength they had at the beginning. Um, but the barracks buildings, which again had that had those wooden roofs, caught on fire, and the the fire spread dangerously close to their main gunpowder magazines. They had to end up walling themselves off their own gunpowder, and that ultimately helped lead to the end of the battle. I would say this is very clearly a tactical victory for the Confederates. They achieved their objective of forcing the United States soldiers out of Fort Sumter. They'll leave uh on April 14th, 1861, the day after the bombardment ends. However, I would ultimately argue that it was a strategic miscalculation by the Confederates. Uh, they Anderson and his men had not really done anything to, for example, hinder Confederate commerce in the harbor. So the United States flag being there, I don't think was having that great an impact on their war effort. Um, and I think it did dip into symbolic reasons a little bit why they wanted the U.S. flag out of the fort. I think they ultimately underestimated how long the war would take, as everybody did, uh, and ultimately thought that it was more important to get the U.S. flag out of this harbor they cared about so much than it was to be potentially seen by other countries and by much of the northern public as having started the war directly by have by firing on a U.S. fort. And that is indeed pretty directly how the northern public sees it. New York City is throughout the war often has mixed feelings about certain elements of the war. But when the U.S. soldiers return after the battle, they are greeted with a hero's welcome marching through the streets of New York. So I think that the Confederates ultimately won the battle, but put themselves in a weaker position to get support for their war because of what they did.

SPEAKER_00 32:32

And talk us through that evacuation process. Do they get away all of the people from the fort, then so no one's captured or anything like that?

SPEAKER_01 32:40

No, so no one ends up getting held as prisoner of war. The Confederates really don't have a prisoner of war system set up quite yet, although by the time you get to the battle of First Bullrun or Manassas, uh, you do have U.S. soldiers being held after that battle here in Charleston Harbor. So it happens pretty quickly. But in this case, uh to paraphrase basically, the conversation goes something like, Okay, Major Anderson, you want to leave the harbor. We want you to leave the harbor, go uh go ahead and leave the harbor. So Anderson and this men basically have an evacuation ceremony effectively on April 14th of 1861. Uh, and they will depart the harbor that afternoon. Somewhat sadly and ironically, you actually do get uh what I consider the first two deaths of the Civil War, not during the battle itself, but during that evacuation, when uh the Major Anderson has ordered a 100-gun salute to be fired to honor the U.S. flag and honor the soldiers who've served under it. However, unfortunately, on shot number 47 out of the potential 100, there's an accident. We think that a loose spark gets where it shouldn't uh and explodes a bag of gunpowder. Um, and that will ultimately kill two men, Privates Daniel Howe and Edward Galway. These are both Irish immigrants who are fighting for the United States Army. Um, and they're part of the majority of uh the Anderson's garrison uh who were who were immigrants from either Ireland or present-day Germany. Uh and ultimately they'll be the first two out of more than 700,000 people who will die in this uh pretty horrific war.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

Oh wow. Absolutely. Yeah, I never knew that. That's really fascinating. How how awful and unlucky at the same time, you know. Right. You survived the battle and then yeah. And also you fled uh a country for a better life, and um okay, let's talk about the flags because they're important, you know. So there's this famous picture of that Confederate flag flying, and of course, you know, you've got the guys there, the Confederate Army with inside the fault. Um now there's a story behind the US flag, isn't there? Because from what I understand, when the war is won by the United States, that flag gets put back up, doesn't it? Is that right? That is correct.

SPEAKER_01 34:57

Um, so this is called the storm flag. This was the smaller of the ordinarily two flags that they would have had uh with their uh with their garrison. Uh the bigger one was usually called a garrison flag, um which would have been a lot larger, but was not really supposed to fly during storms, for example. Um however, it had undergone some damage before the first battle, so it was the storm flag that flew. The storm flag is 10 feet tall and 20 feet long, um, and you can see the star pattern is a little bit different than what you might be used to. It has 33 stars on it for 33 states in the United States before 1861. Um we had just gotten our 34th state of Kansas when uh the battle happened, uh, and it would get its star in several months on the 4th of July. So the U.S. flag flew during the battle. It was damaged during the battle. A shot uh hit the flagpole and toppled it, and some U.S. soldiers went to a very great effort to try and get it back up, which they did, but not for long before the end of the battle. Um, it was taken back to New York City with the with the garrison, um, and it was kept uh kept with Major Anderson and his family for the next much pretty much the next four years almost exactly. When the war is coming to an end, the United States is going to invite Major Anderson back to Fort Sumter for a flag raising ceremony. This is gonna be held on April 14th, 1865, which is four years to the day since the U.S. flag came down over the fort. In the meantime, the United States has spent much of the last four years trying to get the harbor back and during the basically the last year and a half has bombarded the fort into pretty much ruins. Um Anderson's gonna be raising the flag again, not over a fort that looks like um what you see in the pictures after the first battle, but in a fort that is basically rubble. Um and I think there's some symbolism in he's coming back to the first place, the place that he had seen the first deaths of the civil war happen. He's coming back to a place that has been destroyed, like a lot of places across the country. But he's also coming back to this place alongside both white and black Americans uh who can now look up at a flag like this and celebrate it as free people of the United States. And because of the civil war that started here, uh more than four million people are just now getting to celebrate as free people under that flag and take in what it's supposed to mean, I think really for the first time in their lives.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

Absolutely fantastic. And of course, this is gonna reverberate around the world, not just the United States, and of course, this is gonna influence a response from Abraham Lincoln, and I'd like you to explain, please.

SPEAKER_01 37:42

So President Lincoln, you know, the beginning of the war, he is going to react to the firing on Fort Sumter by saying, Okay, well, a United States force has been attacked. We need an army to go put down this rebellion, and he is going to request 75,000 troops to put down the rebellion from all the remaining states that haven't yet left. Um, and in fact, rather than raise the seven parts of those 75,000 troops, there will be four more states that end up joining the Confederacy: Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Um, but the remaining U.S. uh the remaining U.S. states uh will, which are basically 23 to the 11 uh Confederate states, uh, will raise regiments uh and they will go off and fight. And as we all know, many will give their lives so that the country can be won again and so that by the end of the war people can have their freedom. Um but yeah, I think the the regiments here on on uh on or that are pictured here uh in these recruiting posters, the ab up on the video portion, uh they are really going to be representative of really the war fever uh that'll go around both sides. That okay, Fort Sumter has been attacked, all the young men in your town are joining the army at the same time, you should go too. Uh there's a lot, there's there's people peer pressure that goes into this on both the US and the Confederate sides.

SPEAKER_00 39:10

Absolutely. And again, like you said, it's gonna be four years of absolute hell. So, okay, well, thanks for telling us the story of the firing on Fort Sumter and of course the start of the American Civil War. But um, if people want to visit South Carolina, in particular Fort Sumter, how accessible is it? And tell us about you know that.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Sure. Uh so Fort Sumter is still around. Um, it's at the mouth of Charleston Harbor even today. And both Fort Sumter and nearby Fort Moultrie are run by the National Park Service. So uh to get to Fort Moultrie, you can just drive on to Sullivan's Island uh to get to Fort Sumter uh and go to the park. Uh but to get to Fort Sumter, you do need to take a private company's boat ride to get out there. Um, if you uh the other sites in the harbor that were firing, Castle Pinckney is not really accessible anymore. It's still there, um, but it's in pretty severe disrepair. Fort Johnson is run by the state of South Carolina, and there's some office buildings uh there today, but there is a monument saying that this is where the first shot was actually fired. Um and Morris Island has been slowly falling into the water for many years. Uh so there are no roads on that island right nearby Fort Sumter. Um, but yes, the hundreds of thousands of people still do uh take the trip to Fort Sumter every year, and you can be one.

SPEAKER_00 40:31

Yeah, and I bet it's a pretty spectacular sight as you come up to that fault, isn't it? Yeah, I I would say so.

SPEAKER_01 40:38

Uh you like you get out there if it's in the middle of the day, you see the US flag still flying over the fort. Um, you get to look around and get a ranger talk and learn where history happened.

SPEAKER_00 40:52

Yeah. And Charleston itself has got a great rich history itself, hasn't it? So you've got the both uh aspects of that there. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:02

People go to the city. I tell people that yeah. Sorry, I tell people that if if they're trying to understand an aspect of American history before 1865, whether it be the revolution or the really center of American slavery, uh, or even elements of the Industrial Revolution. We get early trains here, um, or of course, secession and the civil war. I would say that you should visit Charleston.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Absolutely. Well, well, thank you so much, my friend, for giving up your time to come and tell us about the firing of Fort Sumter. And at this point, all that is left to say is cheers. Cheers to you too, Des. Thank you for having me on. I really, really enjoyed it.

unknown 41:46

Uh