Birthplace of the Civil War

The Civil War ended a long time ago, but White Point Gardens, the park on the Battery in Charleston, still bristles with mid-19th-century weaponry. A 7-inch banded Brooke rifle, one of the guns that bombarded Fort Sumter when the war started on 12 April 1861, aims out across the harbor. The four mortars guarding the sidewalk's edge hurled Union projectiles at Sumter after the fort fell into Southern hands. An 11-inch Dahlgren appears to be aimed at Castle Pinckney, a small fort just offshore. In 1863, resourceful Confederates salvaged this huge gun from the sunken Union ironclad Keokuk.

The Largest Relic

Charleston's largest Civil War relic, of course, lies in the harbor. Fort Sumter became a flashpoint after South Carolina, convinced Abraham Lincoln's election as president would lead to the eradication of slavery, left the Union in December 1860, and the newly formed Confederate States of America claimed the fort. Later that month, Major Robert Anderson, commander of a small Federal force on the opposite side of the harbor mouth at Fort Moultrie, realized he couldn't defend himself from a land attack, so he surreptitiously moved his command across to Sumter.

Today, Fort Sumter is a national monument administered by the National Park Service. Regularly scheduled boats ferry travelers out to it each day. The fort they see, though, bears little resemblance to the two-level fortress Anderson and his men reached on the night of 26 December 1860. Union guns eventually pounded that imposing structure into rubble, and only the lower brickwork remains. The fort's interior is dominated by the black presence of Battery Huger, added in 1898. Still, standing on the battery's windswept surface and watching commercial vessels inch slowly into Charleston Harbor provide a sense of Fort Sumter's importance in 1861. Ships in the harbor's main channel had to make a sharp turn in front of the fort, leaving them easy targets for Sumter's guns.

At 0430 the morning of 12 April 1861 a Confederate mortar shot a flare over the fort, signaling Southern batteries to open fire. After enduring an intense bombardment, Anderson surrendered two days later. He received permission to fire a 100-gun salute when he lowered the U.S. flag, but one cannon fired prematurely and killed Private Daniel Hough-the battle's only fatality.

Second Attack on the Fort

With Charleston firmly in their hands, the Confederates began strengthening its defenses until, in the words of Union Rear Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont, the harbor was "like a porcupine hide with the quills turned outside in and sewed up at one end." In the spring of 1863 Du Pont prepared to attack Sumter with a fleet of ten ironclads-his flagship New Ironsides, the double-gunned Keokuk, and eight monitors. (The original Monitor was supposed to join the attack, but was lost off Cape Hatteras on her way south.) Du Pont had doubts about his chances, but under pressure from Washington he ordered the attack to begin on 7 April.

The defenders were ready. They had removed all harbor markers, added rope barricades, and sighted their guns on the channel the Union ships had to use. One thing they had not been able to do, according to former Confederate engineer John Johnson in his 1889 work, The Defense of Charleston Harbor, Including Fort Sumter and Adjacent Islands, 1863-1865, was place any "torpedoes," or mines, in the water between Sumter and Moultrie. The Union forces didn't know this, and the Navy had saddled the monitor Weehawken with an "alligator," a clumsy bow-mounted device to explode torpedoes, invented by the original Monitor's father, John Ericsson.

Commanding the garrison at Sumter was Colonel Alfred Rhett. "He and his officers were eating a late noonday meal when word came that the Union gunboats were coming up the channel," says Richard Hatcher III, the National Park Service historian for Forts Moultrie and Sumter. "The story is, he left the mess table, went up on the parapet and saw how far away the Union gunboats were, went back to the officers' mess about 20 or so minutes later, completed his meal, and came up on the parapet again. . . . He calls up the regimental band and, as they played the 'national air,' which is either 'Dixie' or 'The Bonnie Blue Flag,' raises up the colors and fires a 13-gun salute."

The Weehawken led the advance, but either her antitorpedo device gave her trouble or her alligator exploded a mine that had been placed in the water, despite Johnson's account. She wandered off course, and the rest of the ironclads reacted in confusion. The New Ironsides had trouble maneuvering in the narrow channel and swift current, so Du Pont had her anchored off Morris Island, unaware that he had placed his flagship directly over a Confederate mine. The explosive was supposed to be set off electrically, but the men on shore could not get the device to fire.

The Confederates had better luck with the rifled shells from Sumter's guns. The Keokuk came closest to the fort and was hit 90 times, with 19 shots piercing her armor. She retired to Morris Island, where she sank just offshore. Five monitors had been damaged by the time Du Pont called for a withdrawal. Du Pont had been right that the attack was doomed from the start. "Charleston was approached by tortuous channels filled with obstructions that would have been formidable to the squadron that went to attack it," wrote Admiral David Porter in his history of Civil War naval operations. "The position of the squadron was simply that of being in a trap, and having to bear the cross-fire of all the forts within a circle of two miles."

Du Pont decided not to renew the attack. His standing with Washington did not improve when the Rebels salvaged the Keokuk's two guns and used them against the Union. The task required removing the tops of the gun towers and raising the heavy Dahlgrens with a winch mounted on a barge, a tortuous process that had to be done under cover of night and at low tide. "It was something entirely of its own kind, involving mechanical skill and ingenuity, besides secrecy, cool judgment, and unflinching resolution," wrote John Johnson. An examination of the massive, cast-iron Dahlgren on display in White Point Gardens shows how difficult it must have been to lift the gun from its tower.

Du Pont Relinquishes Command

Du Pont realized which way the winds were blowing and asked to be removed from command. His replacement was Rear Admiral John Dahlgren, the man who had developed the naval gun that bore his name. Dahlgren began working with Brigadier General Quincy Gillmore on joint Army-Navy operations to bring Charleston to heel.

In July the Union Army tried to capture Battery Wagner on Morris Island, a good position from which to bombard Sumter. On the 18th a fierce assault spearheaded by the African-American soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment failed, so Gillmore began a long, grueling siege, with support from Navy guns. The siege turned into a hellish stalemate, with Union soldiers often uncovering the rotting bodies of the dead from earlier attacks as they dug trenches closer and closer to the battery. The Confederates finally abandoned Wagner on 6 September 1863.

The sea long ago washed away the remains of Battery Wagner, and that can be attributed in part to its old nemesis, General Gillmore. After the war, Gillmore returned to Charleston as the engineer responsible for the construction of huge underwater jetties to transform Charleston's tangled approaches into lanes suitable for a large, deepwater port. The jetties changed the currents, which wiped away much of Morris Island. The fighting there, though, left other, non-physical traces. "Many of the techniques of amphibious warfare against enemy-held beaches and ship-to-shore bombardments found their beginnings on Morris Island," wrote Stephen R. Wise in Gateway to Hell: Campaign for Charleston Harbor, 1863. Once Wagner had fallen, Sumter appeared doomed, and the Navy hoped to strike the fatal blow. Dahlgren ordered an amphibious attack on the night of 8 September. "You have only to go in and take possession," Dahlgren told the assault's leader, Commander Thomas Stevens. "You will find nothing but a corporal's guard." He was wrong. Several boatloads of Marines landed below the fort's high walls, but the defenders easily repulsed them, with a total loss to the Navy of 124 killed, wounded, and captured out of the 440 men involved. The Confederate defenders suffered not a single casualty.

Rather than support the Navy in the attack, Gillmore revealed that the Army planned its own assault for that night, but called it off at the last minute. It was a sign of a breakdown in the relationship between Gillmore and Dahlgren that would turn into a feud that lasted well beyond the war.

Union guns on Morris Island added their shells to an arsenal that pounded Fort Sumter, yet its defenders stubbornly resisted. "Fort Sumter was heavily bombarded by the United States Army and Navy," says historian Hatcher. "Approximately 7 million pounds of ordnance were fired at it over the course of the siege, which makes it the most heavily bombarded two-and-a-half acres on the continent." The base of one Union shell fired from Morris Island, its nose buried in the brick, still protrudes from one of Sumter's walls. Another, a 100-pound Parrott shell, lay undiscovered until it was dug up during restoration work in 1997. It then had to be disarmed before going on display in the fort's museum.

Despite the relentless punishment that turned Sumter to ruins, the Confederates held on stubbornly until Major General William T. Sherman indirectly forced Charleston's evacuation. Sherman's army was moving north through South Carolina after its March to the Sea. When Sherman cut off Charleston, General P. G. T. Beauregard evacuated the city. The last Confederate defenders left Fort Sumter on 17 February 1865, ending the war's longest siege. Major Anderson, the officer who had occupied Fort Sumter in 1860 and who lowered the flag on his retreat in 1861, had kept the banner the entire war. On 14 April 1865, he raised it again over Fort Sumter, and that flag is now on display in the fort's museum.

Harassing Ships from Fort Moultrie

Across the harbor mouth, Fort Moultrie didn't compare to Sumter in symbolic importance, but it had a longer history of harassing warships. It dated back to 1776, when Americans beat back a British fleet from fortifications on Sullivan's Island they had hastily constructed and named after their commander, William Moultrie. The basis of the current fort dates from 1809.

Visitors to Fort Moultrie today will get a lesson in how coastal defense evolved from 1776 until the fort closed in 1947. "Essentially, we're army," says historian Hatcher. "Army shoots navy. Our purpose here is to keep the enemy navy out." The fort's newest section is the World War II-era Harbor Entrance Control Post that rears up like a control tower on the fort's highest ground and provides grand views across the harbor to Fort Sumter. Buried below the control post is the command base, looking today as though the Army and Navy men on duty during World War II just stepped out for a smoke.

Early in World War II, U-boats laid mines outside the harbor, and vessels going in and out of Charleston had to first contact the control post to have antisubmarine nets opened. The irony of that is, of course, that the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel in combat lay in the mud just offshore.

Remembering the Hunley

At the back of White Point Gardens on Charleston's Battery lies a small fountain dedicated to the "first in marine warfare to employ torpedo boats." The Daughters of the Confederacy erected the memorial in May 1899 to salute the crews of the submarine H. L. Hunley.

The Hunley was a vessel born of necessity, a desperate attempt to break the Union blockade that was strangling Charleston. The submarine sank the USS Housatonic on the night of 17 February 1864, but her eight-man crew never had a chance to celebrate their victory. The submarine vanished without a trace, and over the next 131 years she remained in a murky realm of rumor, legend, and speculation.

The historic submarine began emerging from the shadows in 1995, when a search team from novelist Clive Cussler's National Underwater and Marine Agency discovered her in 27 feet of water outside the harbor. The boat was raised from the sea-her final crew still entombed inside-on 8 August 2000 and transported by barge to a research facility in the old navy yard in North Charleston.

Visitors today can see the Hunley on weekends. Standing on a catwalk above the 90,000-gallon tank that holds her, they peer through the water, past spaces where some of the hull plates have been removed, and into the interior. Somehow, eight men squeezed themselves through the sub's narrow hatches into this cramped space, where two crews had died before them. And somehow those last eight died as well, but why their vessel sank remains a mystery. "There are still some things that we need to look at," says archeologist James Hunter, "one of those being, of course, the hull itself, which is encased in concretion." The process of removing those layers of marine growth and corrosion will begin later this year.

Visitors can find a second Hunley in a street-side plaza outside the Charleston Museum on Meeting Street. This full-size model, exhibited in a special Hunley Museum from 1967 until 1979, portrays the submarine as filtered through memory and legend. It has the original's general outlines, but the hull is studded with bulbous rivets. The cutwaters in front of the conning towers are boxy, not knife-sharp, and the dive planes are crude rectangles, not graceful curves. The spar torpedo is crudely clamped to the top of the bow, not the bottom. This is the Hunley as historians pictured her when conventional wisdom said the submarine had been hastily cobbled together from a steam boiler.

"It's such a contrast to what we found," says State Senator Glenn McConnell, the first and so far only chairman of the Hunley Commission. After Cussler's team discovered the Hunley, McConnell used his political savvy to forge a partnership between the United States and South Carolina that gave ownership of the sub to the Federals, but kept the vessel in North Charleston at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, a special lab outfitted at the old navy yard. "There were thousands and thousands of people on the beaches of Sullivan's Island looking out," remembers McConnell of the day the sub emerged from the water. "Hundreds of boats were going by the watercade as it sailed past Fort Sumter and up into Charleston's harbor. There were people on rooftops, all over the Battery, buildings, and everywhere. Work and life came to a halt as people were looking to watch the world's first successful submarine returning from battle."

The Hunley lifted from the mud outside Charleston proved much more sophisticated than people had believed. "The guys who designed Hunley and constructed it were practical engineers," says archeologist James Hunter. "In other words, they were machinists. That's what they did for a living-and they put a lot of thought into it."

The sub's builders also had a chance to practice. The Hunley was actually the third submarine in a series. New Orleans engineers James McClintock and Baxter Watson had built the Pioneer in 1862. Propelled by a crank turned by a crew of three, Pioneer was slow and clumsy, but she did destroy a barge with a towed torpedo in a test. When the Union captured New Orleans in April 1862, the Pioneer's inventors scuttled the submarine to keep her from falling into enemy hands.

Hunley's Initial Operations

Horace Lawton Hunley, a lawyer and politician with plenty of money, joined McClintock and Watson in their submarine ventures. The three men relocated to Mobile, Alabama, where they recruited an English engineer named William Alexander and built a second submarine. This one sank in Mobile Bay during trials.

The team launched the H. L. Hunley in Mobile in July 1863. The submarine was 40 feet long and had a crew of eight. The commander and first mate stood with their heads in fore and aft conning towers. The rest of the crew sat on a bench and turned a crank connected to a gearing system that rotated the propeller. The commander operated the dive planes with what today would be equated to a joy stick. Hand pumps filled and emptied ballast tanks fore and aft. A bellows system attached outside brought in fresh air. Attached to the bow was a spar packed with explosives at its tip.

The submarine was not a Confederate vessel. It had been designed as a privateer, financed by shareholders who hoped to split reward money offered for sinking Union ships. The Hunley traveled by rail to Charleston in August 1863, but when the civilian crew under McClintock didn't act aggressively against the enemy, General Beauregard replaced them with a military crew. That proved a mistake. During training, the submarine swamped and sank to the bottom of Charleston Harbor, drowning five of the eight crew members.

The sub returned to civilian control, this time with Hunley himself in command. This second crew died when the ballast tanks overflowed and the submarine plunged nose-first into the harbor bottom. Hunley and his first officer kept their heads in air pockets in the conning towers and were asphyxiated. The rest of the crew drowned.

The Sub's Final Mission

Beauregard had had enough, but Lieutenant George Dixon, the salvaged submarine's new commander, persuaded him to give the Hunley one last chance. Dixon recruited a new crew, and on the night of February 17, 1864, the eight men left Breach Inlet on Sullivan's Island to attack the USS Housatonic. Acting Master J. K. Crosby noted something approaching the Deserters had warned the Union of a secret "fish boat," and the ship's boilers had been kept fired for just such an event, but it was still too late. The Hunley rammed her spar torpedo into the Union ship and backed away. On board, Dixon may have tugged on his lanyard to set off the charge, although the torpedo may have been fired electrically. The Housatonic was on the bottom within minutes. At some point, the Hunley was, too.

When the submarine surfaced 136 years later, the interior was packed full of sediment, and much remained preserved. Not only did the Hunley team find the crew members' skeletal remains, they also found tools, wallets, pipes, and other personal effects. The most famous personal effect-and one visitors can see on the weekend tours-was a $20 gold coin Dixon carried in his pocket. His sweetheart had given it to him, and at the Battle of Shiloh it had deflected a bullet, saving his life. Dixon had the words "my life preserver" engraved on the dented coin. (For more about the crew, see "The Hunley Eight.")

On 17 April 2004, Dixon and his crew were laid to rest north of town in Magnolia Cemetery, a Southern gothic atmosphere of columns, obelisks, and urns, with Spanish moss draped from the trees. They arrived there after a funeral procession that started at White Point Gardens and wound its way 4.5 miles up Meeting Street to the cemetery. Tens of thousands of spectators turned out to watch, and crew-member descendents attended the ceremony. At Magnolia, the Hunley's third crew joined the two others in a plot that faces a marsh in the direction of the Cooper River. Members of the Hunley team participated in the ceremony, with James Hunter acting as pallbearer for crewman Becker. "For me it was bringing it full circle," he says. "I got to recover him, and I got to bury him with honor."

Future plans for the Hunley call for the construction of a new museum and the transformation of the laboratory into a leading center for restoration technology. McConnell hints that the lab has found a way to greatly increase the pace of hull preservation. "I'll go so far as to say I believe we are on the verge of a major technological breakthrough that will allow us to move at speeds never before moved by man in removing the salts from the metal and stabilizing the vessel for future generations to see," he says. It's another way for the story to come full circle. "Her recovery and her conservation now become stories of science and technology," McConnell says, "and she was the story of science and technology in her time."

The Hunley Eight

Visitors on the Hunley tour come face to face with the eight men who served as the submarine's final crew-or at least their heads. Two wood-and-glass cases display the crew members' noggins, as reconstructed by Doug Owsley, a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution. In addition, the Hunley team has learned much about the men through their personal effects and historical and genealogical research. "We have gotten to know them and their little quirks," says archeologist James Hunter.

The crew was an interesting mix. Only three hailed from the South; four were European. Not much has been learned about two of the Europeans, Lumpkin and Miller, but the Hunley team hopes to rectify that. "Their story is nowhere near close to being finished," Hunter says.

Dixon

Lieutenant George E. Dixon was a former riverboat engineer, probably from the Midwest, who had served in the 21st Alabama Infantry and was wounded at the Battle of Shiloh. He was wearing cashmere clothing and was carrying, not just the $20 gold piece, but also a brooch, a ring, and a gold pocket watch with a fob and chain. "Dixon is blond haired, he's blue eyed, he's athletic," Hunter says. "He's obviously very concerned with his appearance." Eyewitness accounts said Dixon was six feet tall, yet his skeleton was of a man several inches shorter. "That didn't quite jibe with the historical record, until we recovered his boots," says Hunter. "Stacked heels. He had lifts in his heels."

Ridgaway

Second Mate Joseph Ridgaway was from Talbot County, Maryland, and had been serving on the CSS Indian Chief when Dixon went aboard looking for volunteers. Ridgaway was just over 30 and had been a seaman for much of his life, having received his seaman's certificate at age 16. He had an identification disk around his neck that belonged to a Union soldier named Ezra Chamberlin, who had died on Morris Island. The exact meaning of that remains a mystery. "We haven't found any archival evidence that Ridgaway was on Morris Island and participated in the battle in which Chamberlin lost his life," says Hunter, who adds that it's possible Ridgaway obtained the tag in a trade.

Wicks

James A. Wicks was from North Carolina and had a wife and children in Florida. He had served in the U.S. Navy and was aboard the USS Congress in Hampton Roads when the ship was attacked by the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia. Wicks swam from the doomed ship and went to Richmond to join the Confederate Navy. He was serving on board the Indian Chief when he volunteered for the Hunley. Just before the Hunley's final mission, Wicks participated in a commando raid in New Bern, North Carolina, and helped set fire to the Union ship Underwriter. Seven rubber buttons associated with his remains indicate that Wicks still had his Navy peacoat. One of the buttons bore a number of mysterious notches, the meaning of which remains obscure. A silk bandana that probably belonged to Wicks also survived, still rolled up and knotted.

Lumpkin

Little has been discovered about crewman Lumpkin, but he was apparently a man who enjoyed a fight and a pipe. "Lumpkin's the scrapper," says Hunter. His bones show that at some points during his life he had broken his cheek and his nose and had some injury above his left eyebrow. Lumpkin also smoked constantly. His teeth were stained, and he had worn teeth on the left side of his mouth down to the pulp by chewing on his pipe stem. At the time of his death, Lumpkin had switched his pipe to the right side of his mouth and was wearing those teeth down too.

Collins

Frank Collins was the tallest man in the crew, which was perhaps why Dixon felt he had to stack his heels. He was born in Virginia, and his family, or at least his grandfather, were cobblers. Like Lumpkin, Collins had worn grooves in his teeth, but evidently with something smaller than a pipe stem, perhaps a sewing needle.

Miller

Miller remains a mystery man. "All we have is a last name," Hunter says. "He's the big enigma." There's a chance that the name was actually Mueller. He was born in Europe, was in his late 40s or early 50s, and apparently he lived a hard life based on evidence from his skeleton.

Carlsen

Corporal C. F. Carlsen was born in Europe, possibly Scandinavia, and had served on board a privateer called the Jefferson Davis. In 1861 seamen captured by the Davis revolted and tried to take over the ship. The vessel ran aground, and the captives were put on trial for mutiny. Carlsen was in Charleston to testify at the trial. There he joined a unit called Wagener's German Artillery-some artillery buttons were found in the sub near his remains. Red stains on his bones may have come from the red piping of an artilleryman's uniform.

Becker

Arnold Becker appears to be the youngest crew member, somewhere between 19 and 22 years old. He was born in Europe. He appeared to hold an important position in the crew, because he sat just behind Dixon, which meant he would have taken Dixon's position if anything had happened to the commander. "He's responsible for the forward ballast tank pump and he's also responsible for the bellows connected to the ventilator box, which pulls air in," says Hunter. "So he's got some responsibility, despite his age." Previously, Becker had served on board the Confederate ironclad gunboat Chicora in Charleston and had been serving on board the CSS Indian Chief when Dixon recruited him for the Hunley.

Plan Your Visit

Charleston occupies a peninsula formed by the junction of the Cooper and Ashley rivers. It's a tourist-friendly city with a walkable historic district and a wide variety of lodging and dining choices. Charleston International Airport is in North Charleston. You can find plenty of information at the Charleston Area Convention & Visitors Bureau Web site at www.charlestoncvb.com.

The Charleston Visitor Center at 375 Meeting Street is a good place to start your visit. The center is open daily 0830 to 1730, except November through March when it closes at 1700. Other visitor centers are at Mt. Pleasant/Isle of Palms, Kiawah Island, and North Charleston.

Hunley and her victim, the Housatonic, and the Federal ironclad Keokuk. There's also a brass oarlock from one of the Housatonic's lifeboats, which was excavated in 1923. In another room is a full-size model of the Pioneer, the Hunley team's first attempt at a submarine. The museum is open daily Monday through Saturday from 0900 to 1700, and Sunday from 1300 to 1700. Call (843) 722-2996 or visit www.charlestonmuseum.org.