Moultrie Looks at Sumter

From Fort Moultrie's parapet, past a gun sheeted under canvas and a man sitting on the crest, the water opens out — and on the horizon, low and worn, lies Fort Sumter. The title is the Library of Congress's, and the geography is the point: these two forts spent the whole war in each other's sight.

The war between them began as a house move. On the night after Christmas 1860 Major Robert Anderson took his little garrison out of this fort and across the harbor to Sumter, on his own authority, and the empty Moultrie passed into the state's hands. Four months later Moultrie's hot shot set Sumter's officers' quarters burning over the heads of the men who had left. Four years after that, a photographer stood on Moultrie's parapet and found both forts in ruins, facing each other across the same water.