Fort Sumter National Monument

Fort Sumter, the site of the opening shots of the Civil War, is a pretty unique place to visit.  First off, you need a boat to reach the island the fort is on.  If you don't have your own boat, concessionaire is happy to provide a ride for a fee.  Along the way they will subject you to a prerecorded tour that talks about harbor defenses and so on.  Nothing unexpected there except the look at Castle Pinckney, which, to me, was as alluring as anything else we saw, but no stops there.

 Approaching Fort Sumter

So the NPS Volunteer on the boat "strongly recommended" the history talk with the park staff once we reached the island.  I listened to that talk for about a minute before deciding to venture out on my own. 

There are no crowds on the smug self-guided tour.

 Those people are still at the opposite side of the fort hearing about the sectional crisis while we have the whole thing to ourselves.

And now for the drunk history of Fort Sumter:  Federal troops holed up there when doo-doo was about to hit the fan in 1861, then the Rebs were like "Get out of our harbor!" and started shooting at them, eventually forcing a surrender.  Rebs held the fort even though Federal troops bombarded it nearly to rubble later on.  Only 1/3 of the height of the original wall is still there.  Then in response to the Spanish-American War, a modern battery was placed on the island, which is the huge black thing you see to the left of the above photograph.  There is a museum inside the big battery.

So it's pretty neat to go out there and be in that spot so important to American History.  But there is a time limit, and you have to get back on the boat before you get left behind.

Many Southerners sympathize with the "Lost Cause" mentality.  When I visit a place like Fort Sumter, I wonder what could have been if they never started shooting.  And, truthfully, it makes me kind of angry.  The ceremonial opening of an artillery barrage on Federal troops at Sumter precipitated a long war that would cost 600,000 lives.  But without that war, slaves might not have been freed.  That's Abraham Lincoln's doing, and of course the reason why he is so great a man.  So in a way, the firing on Fort Sumter to protect the institution of slavery opened a series of events that would lead to its very extinction.