Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie NHP

Indigenous peoples

Fort Moultrie holds the grave of Osceola, leader of resistance in the Second Seminole War, who was captured when he went to negotiate under what he believed was a flag of truce and was imprisoned at the fort until his death in January 1838. He was buried without his head. After a man broke into the grave in 1966 meaning to carry the bones to Florida, Park Service historians exhumed it before a crowd of two hundred, found a headless body and the bones of an unidentified infant, displayed the remains for the newspaper and reinterred them in a concrete vault. The park’s 2020 administrative history judges that the publicity surrounding the exhumation suggested a lack of sensitivity to Seminole history. [3]

Black history

When Major Anderson returned to raise the U.S. flag over Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865, three thousand African Americans watched, according to the park’s 2020 administrative history. Among them were the son of Denmark Vesey, executed in 1822 after being accused of trying to lead a slave rebellion in Charleston, and Robert Smalls, with the former Confederate ship he had commandeered and sailed past the fort in 1862, taking his family and other slaves to freedom. [3]

John Tucker, writing in 2002 and quoting historian Thomas J. Pressly, recounts that at the April 1961 centennial in Charleston a Black woman on New Jersey’s centennial commission was denied a room at the headquarters hotel; at the President’s insistence the national assembly moved to the non-segregated naval base, and South Carolina’s commission seceded from the national body and met separately. The fort museum added a section in 1995 on African Americans in the war, highlighting the 54th Massachusetts on nearby Morris Island. [4]

Slavery

Charleston was one of North America’s largest slave ports. The park’s Liberty Square visitor center stands on the site of Gadsden’s Wharf, where thousands of enslaved Africans were brought ashore; others landed at quarantine stations on Sullivan’s Island. The 2016 foundation document says roughly 40 percent of all enslaved Africans transported to America disembarked at these sites; the 2020 administrative history reports Charleston historian Nic Butler’s view that the figure is too high for Sullivan’s Island alone, though it may hold for Charleston Harbor as a whole. Arrivals were quarantined in the island’s “pest house,” an average of twelve days, until sold at Charleston’s market. [1] [3]

In 1863 Confederate laborers and slaves inside Fort Sumter worked day and night with cotton bales and sand to buttress the walls facing Federal guns. Fort Moultrie opened its African Passages exhibit on the Middle Passage and slavery in 2009, the year after the Toni Morrison Society placed its first “Bench by the Road” there. [2] [3]

Climate & environment

A 2016 Park Service assessment of the park’s 21 structures and 10 roads, parking lots and docks, looking ahead to 2050, found 90 percent of them highly exposed to coastal hazards and sea-level rise. Every asset at Fort Sumter and Liberty Square lies in FEMA’s VE flood zone. Almost two-thirds rated highly vulnerable and only two low; the highly vulnerable assets, Fort Sumter itself among them, carry a replacement value of over $1.1 billion. Three Fort Moultrie assets set on artificial hills received more favorable exposure scores. [5]