Fort Sumter National Monument South Carolina Produced by the Division of Publications National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Washington, D.C. 1984...

Early on the morning of April 12, 1861, a mortar shell fired from Fort Johnson in Charleston Harbor burst almost directly over Fort Sumter, inaugurating the tragic American Civil War. Two years later, Fort Sumter, now in Confederate hands, became the focus of a gallant defense in which determined Confederate soldiers kept Federal land and naval forces at bay for 587 days. The “first shot” of 1861 and the Confederate defense of 1863-65 are the subjects of the following pages. The narrative is bas

“... the character of the times particularly inculcates the lesson that, whether to prevent or repel danger, we ought not to be unprepared for it. This consideration will sufficiently recommend to Congress a liberal provision for the immediate extension and gradual completion of the works of defense, both fixed and floating, on our maritime frontier....” —President James Madison to Congress, December 15, 1815. Anyone visiting Fort Sumter today will find it difficult to believe that it could ever

The headline in the Charleston Mercury summed it up aptly. After decades of sectional conflict, South Carolinians responded to the election of the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, by voting unanimously in convention on December 20, 1860, to secede from the Union. Within six weeks five other States—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana—followed her example. Early in February 1861 they met in Montgomery, Alabama, adopted a constitution, set up a provisional government—t

With Fort Sumter in Confederate hands, the port of Charleston became an irritating loophole in the Federal naval blockade of the Atlantic coast—doubly so because at Charleston “rebellion first lighted the flame of civil war.” As late as January 1863, vessels plied to and from Charleston and the Bahamas “with the certainty and promptness of a regular line,” bringing needed war supplies in exchange for cotton. Capture of Port Royal Harbor on November 7, 1861, by a Federal fleet under Capt. Samuel

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 le

This present-day entrance to Fort Sumter, runs through the center of the fort’s left flank wall. It was built after the Civil War and replaced a gun embrasure. A marker on the left flank near the sally port honors Sumter’s Confederate defenders. The original sally port entered through the gorge at the head of a 171-foot stone wharf which once jutted out from the center of the esplanade. The esplanade, a 25½-foot-wide promenade and landing space, extended the full length of the gorge exterior at

Three different Fort Moultries have occupied this site. The first, a hastily constructed palmetto-log fort, was built in 1776 to protect Charleston against British attack; the second, a five-sided earth and timber fort, was completed in 1798 as part of the new Nation’s first organized system of coastal defense; and the third, a more formidable masonry structure begun after the second fort was destroyed by a hurricane in 1804, has remained structurally intact and modified only by the replacement

As the Nation’s principal conservation agency, the Department of the Interior has responsibility for most of our nationally owned public lands and natural resources. This includes fostering the wisest use of our land and water resources, protecting our fish and wildlife, preserving the environmental and cultural values of our national parks and historical places, and providing for the enjoyment of life through outdoor recreation. The Department assesses our energy and mineral resources and works