Fort Sumter and Charleston's Take on the Civil War

Mary woke up feeling better today (Thursday). I had purchased online tickets for a tour to Fort Sumter in Charleston bay. So, we went straight there with no coffee, and no breakfast.

The National Park Service and Charleston Aquarium share a plaza called Liberty Square right in the midst of a working wharf and ship port. The building is a common southern design with about a million stes up to the main floor (I may have exaggerated). I picked up the tour tickets that I had purchased online and perused the “museum.” Boy, those South Carolinians sure did love slavery and are still nostalgic for it. And they still hate abolitionists.

The “museum” had a quote from Alabama Congressman David Hubbard displayed below a metal Charleston slave’s neck tag: “…the assumed power to put an end to slavery, being a higher power than the Constitution has given Congress, is a violation of its provisions and a destruction of liberty itself. It was Constitutional liberty which our fathers fought to establish and not union! They had union with the mother country when they rebelled.” Kind of scary that this “info” is going unchecked in 2016.

We boarded the triple decker boat (there were a LOT of people going to Fort Sumter including one large school group), and set out across the bay. I saw some small sharks in the water as we waited to board. Mary & I stood in the bow for the trip.

We docked at Fort Sumter and were given one hour to explore the fort. First up, Sgt. Antoine gave us a black powder shooting demonstration. Note: it was great to see that Sgt. Antoine was Black and wearing a blue Union uniform. He showed us all the individual steps it took to load and fire a musket during the Civil War. He then promised that he could fire 3 times in one minute if the crowd counted to 60 real slowly. We were slow and he made it. He showed us his “forager” hat and explained that it was used by the Union army to forage for food along their marches since it could double as a bucket. Remember that part of the reason Sherman’s March to the Sea was so successful was that he required his troops to forage for local food rather than wait for his supply wagons to catch up. This helped him move much faster than the Confederate Army. This fact BTW, was not mentioned.

Mary & I walked around, looked at the display of Union and Confederate flags (the popular notion of the Confederate flag is inaccurate and we could see why the flag was called the "stars and bars"), the cannons lined up to fire out of the holes in the fort walls, the rubble lying below the fort which forms a rip rap for the tiny island (created when Fort Sumter was barraged with cannon fire from Union ships), and the view from the top of the fort. They have a huge bunker-like building – concrete and covered in black tar – right in the middle of the fort called Huger that was built in the 1890s.

Then the call came to reboard. Some fellow travelers took a photo of me at the sign, and I bought the photo the tour people were selling. Also got my National Park passport book stamped. We headed back to dry land.

We saw some more either sharks or dolphins playing in the wake created by the front of the boat. You be the judge.

Since neither of us had breakfast, we were really hungry by this time – 2:30 pm – so headed to City Market for Queology. Mary was still looking for some South Carolina mustard and vinegar BBQ. I had pulled pork and she had chicken – fabulous sandwiches. The sauce is not cooked on the meat in the South, but rather added by the diner later. We both really liked the mustard and vinegar sauce – and the BBQ. The sandwich was well portioned. On the way back to the car, we walked thru City Market and I bought a gift for Trudie.

Back at the camper, we packed up for our departure the next day, and tried to catch up on blog posts.