This day in Charleston

January 10

2 entries · 1864

1864The siege

Eighteen shells in the night, twenty-eight in the afternoon

The shelling that began at eleven the previous night went on at half-hour intervals until six in the morning — eighteen shells, one short, nine of them duds. At 3.25 in the afternoon three guns on Cumming’s Point opened again, sometimes together, sometimes a minute apart, and threw twenty-eight more. Fifteen did not explode.

Journal of Operations in Charleston Harbor, OR I, 35, Pt. 1

1864Fort Sumter

The relief boat drifts

Captain Allston with six officers and a hundred men of the 27th South Carolina relieved Captain Hammond and the same number of the 25th. The steamer left the wharf without a proper head of steam and began to drift. Everything the fort needed came out on that boat, in the dark, past the Federal picket monitors.

Fort Sumter post returns, OR I, 35, Pt. 1

Entries are dated from the War of the Rebellion official records, the naval official records and contemporary Charleston sources. Browse the whole year.