 |
| Internal appearance of Fort Sumter after the bombardment.1 |
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[325]
on Friday the buildings in the fort had been set on fire, and each time the flames were extinguished.
Now the barracks and officers' quarters were again and again ignited.
They could not be saved, and no attempt to do so was made, for precious lives would have been imperiled by the act. Means for that purpose had been diminished.
On the previous day, three of the iron cisterns over the hall-ways had been destroyed by the shots of the insurgents, by which the quarters below had been deluged and the flames checked, Now there was no resource of the kind.
The garrison must be starved out within three days, and shelter would be no longer needed, so the buildings were abandoned to the flames.
The safety of the magazine, and the salvation of sufficient powder to last until the 15th, became the absorbing care of the commander.
Blankets and flannel shirts were used for making cartridges; and every hand within the fort was fully employed.
On that morning the
last parcel of rice had been cooked, and nothing was left for the garrison to eat but salt pork.
The flames spread, and the situation of the garrison became extremely distressing.
The heat was almost intolerable.
The fire approached the magazine, when its doors were closed and locked.
In fearful eddies the glowing embers were scattered about the fort.
The main gate took fire, and very soon the blackened sally-port was open to the besiegers.
The powder brought out into the service magazine was so exposed to the flames, that ninety barrels of it were thrown into the sea by Lieutenant Snyder and Surgeon Crawford.
Out of Sumter immense volumes of smoke rose sluggishly on the still air.
1 this is from a photograph taken immediately after the evacuation of Fort Sumter. It is a view of that portion of the officers' quarters to the left of the gateway, and of that of the men's quarters nearest the powder-magazine, the entrance to which was at the junction of these two buildings. In front of this entrance are seen the ruins of a traverse. The gateway or sally-port is also seen, the doors of which were burned. In the foreground is seen the great lantern that was taken down from the top of the Fort, where it was used as a beacon.
Scanned printed text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.