Twentieth-century fortifications—modern and enlarged from the shelled and destroyed original brick structure of Fort Sumter—look toward Charleston, South Carolina. On April 12, 1861, “shot and shell went screaming over Sumter as if an army of devils were swooping around it,” recalled a member of the Union Garrison. The fort, under the leadership of Major Robert Anderson, held out for 36 hours against the heavy bombardment of Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard—Anderson’s assistant at West Point. Remarkably, none of the 68 defenders were killed. On April 14th a battered Stars and Stripes was lowered and replaced by the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy, with seven stars representing the Southern states that had seceded from the Union. Within two months of Sumter’s fall, four other states would secede.
1861