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- Sep 2, 2019
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- Raleigh, North Carolina
Here's another good one:
That's a nice map. That's another one that's not oriented north-to-south, so you have to keep that in mind when comparing it to a modern sat map.
Roy B.
Here's another good one:
Interesting period map, it was certainly a very heavily defended harbour. I'm sure every battery or fort or was placed in a very specific location to cover various fields of fire.
I'm amazed at how extensive the Charleston fortifications were. I've been reading Earl Hess's book Field Armies and Fortifications in the Civil War. He includes a fascinating and detailed discussion of how the Union forces finally reduced Fort Wagner on Morris Island -- not by storming it with frontal attacks, but by the slow, meticulous, and arduous construction of trenches.
Meanwhile, the earthwork fortifications that ringed Charleston Harbor held out nearly the entire war.
Why do you think that is? I wonder whether the problem might have been partly that the third-system forts were kind of a standard top-down central government effort, whereas the Charleston Harbor works you're talking about were meticulously developed based on intimate knowledge of the terrain.
I've always been intrigued at the fact the United States spent a great deal of time and money building up third system fortifications prior to the war but when it came down to it, they really didn't stand up to the artillery of the time. Time and time again they were battered into submission (Fort Pulaski, Fort Morgan, Fort Jackson, etc) or virtually destroyed (Fort McRee, Fort Sumter) in short periods of time.
Meanwhile, the earthwork fortifications that ringed Charleston Harbor held out nearly the entire war.
Being a Roman history buff, it looks like a Roman army or auxiliary fortlet, but I don't think their empire extended that far to the west.
From what area did the first shots come from by the Rebels?@KianGaf and @Rusk County Avengers -- I compared this structure with the 1891 US War Dept map of the Charleston defenses, and, as I thought, this location on the north of James Island seems to have been submerged at the time of the Civil War. I think the coastline around the harbor has changed considerably over the years -- for example, Morris Island has eroded quite a bit, threatening the sites of Batteries Wagner and Gregg.
Here's a Google sat map showing that structure close to the center of the triangle of Forts Johnson and Sumter and Battery Simkins:
View attachment 367020
And here's a detail from the 1891 War Dept map, which indicates that that location was under water at the time of the war. (By the way, the War Dept map was not oriented north-to-south in the customary manner, so I rotated it to orient to the Google map.)
View attachment 367021
That square also seems like an unlikely shape for a fort, but I don't know everything about fortifications. I'm wondering whether there are some Charleston experts here at CivilWarTalk that might be able to chime in.
@NFB22 might have an opinion also, or know someone familiar with the area. He put together a nice thread on Fort Johnson a while back:
Roy B.
From what area did the first shots come from by the Rebels?
The opening shot was from a 10-inch mortar located at Fort Johnson which exploded above Fort Sumter and served as the signal to begin firing to all other batteries around the harbor.
Being a Roman history buff, it looks like a Roman army or auxiliary fortlet, but I don't think their empire extended that far to the west.
Unless a fleet of triremes got way off course...
Was it Edmund Ruffin that fired the mortar.
Pretty sure this is a spoil area from past dredging operations. Berms are often constructed. Look at the area east and west of the Ben Sawyer bridge between Mt Pleasant and Sullivan's Island. There are several created from dredging the Inter-coastal waterway.
Sorry for the late reply, but I agree that it's a dredge spoil site. I duck hunt in one down here on the Texas coast. Last season was ruined because they put one of those sluice gates in a corner, and drained all the water.
Though it's already been established that the site didn't exist during the ACW, I agree that it's way too big and improperly shaped to be an ACW work. It's even bigger than Sumter!
Thoughts on this idea of engineering, @jrweaver ?I would say look at Fort Moultrie. The defenders basically just surrounded it with sand to absorb the constant bombardment from Federal guns and then rolled sod over the top to keep it in place. I'm not quite sure why this type of method wasn't used more extensively by military engineers prior to the war, at least when the ground allowed for such works to be constructed. Naturally one would think properly constructed earthwork fortifications would absorb bombardment better than masonry structures alone.
In Charleston's case, this method was used long before the 1860s when British warships attacked early during the American Revolution and a fort on Sullivan's Island constructed of wood and earth held off the fleet. Probably why when the city was attacked later in the war the British forces didn't try that approach again.