Fort Sumter from the Sand-Bar

This is the view that explains the whole siege: Fort Sumter, low and dark, seen across the sand-bar at the mouth of Charleston Harbor.

The fort was built on a shoal — not on an island, but on a man-made platform of granite and rubble dumped onto a sandbank, begun in 1829 and still not finished when South Carolina left the Union. Its position is the point. It sat in the channel every ship entering Charleston had to use, which is why the guns of April 1861 were trained on it and why the Federals spent two years trying to knock it down.

They very nearly did. What is standing here in 1865 is not the fort Robert Anderson surrendered. Sustained bombardment from Morris Island had collapsed the masonry, and the Confederates had answered by packing the ruin with sand, gabions and palmetto logs until it was less a fort than an earthwork built inside a broken one. It absorbed everything thrown at it and was never taken by storm.

The figures on the bar in the foreground give the scale, and they are standing where nobody could have stood safely at any point in the previous eighteen months.