Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter: Sock Powder Bags and a 34-Hour Barrage

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In December 1860, after South Carolina seceded, Major Robert Anderson, a Kentuckian, commanded 85 men at Fort Moultrie, a coastal fort with sand dunes piled against its landward walls. On December 26 he spiked its guns, burned the gun carriages and rowed his garrison to Fort Sumter without orders, angering South Carolina's governor while James Buchanan stayed passive. By March 1861 the Confederacy had sent P.G.T. Beauregard, Anderson's former artillery student and assistant at West Point, to ring the harbor with batteries.

With six weeks of rations left, Lincoln announced a provisions-only relief expedition, and despite Robert Toombs' warning, Jefferson Davis ordered the fort reduced. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, a mortar shell opened a 34-hour bombardment of about 3,000 rounds. Anderson kept his men in the casemates, they sewed powder bags from socks, and heated shot set the barracks ablaze. Louis Wigfall rowed out and offered terms on his own authority before Beauregard confirmed them, and no one was killed by enemy fire.

The supply ship Star of the West had already been turned back by fire from Citadel cadets.
Beauregard paced his guns about two minutes apart to stretch roughly 48 hours of powder and shot.
Men rolled powder barrels into the sea, but the incoming tide washed them back against the walls.
During a 100-gun salute an explosion killed Private Daniel Hough and mortally wounded Private Edward Galloway, and the salute stopped at 50.
On April 14, 1865, Anderson raised the same flag over the ruins of Fort Sumter.

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