Approaching Fort Sumter by water, I found it almost alien. Its dark, angular walls rose from Charleston Harbor like a black spacecraft squatting on the water, out of place against the easy pace of modern Charleston. The closer we came, the more the fort seemed to shut itself off from the world around it. The island fortress in the middle of the harbor seemed full of mystery and secrets.
The National Park Service ferry was crowded with enthusiastic tourists eager to see where the Civil War began.
This much about Fort Sumter is well known:
Construction on Fort Sumter began in 1829, but the fort was still unfinished when the war began. It was built on a man-made island at the entrance to Charleston Harbor as part of the nation’s coastal defenses.
On April 12, 1861, Confederate guns opened fire on the United States garrison inside the fort. South Carolina had seceded on December 20, 1860, the first state to leave the Union. After a bombardment lasting about 34 hours, the U.S garrison surrendered. United States troops evacuated on April 14. Confederate forces occupied the fort, and it quickly became the emblem of Southern defiance. If it held, the Confederacy held, at least symbolically.
In 1863, United States Army artillery and naval forces began a sustained bombardment of Fort Sumter and a siege of Charleston. Union assaults failed. Battered into rubble, Sumter remained in Confederate hands until Confederate forces evacuated Charleston in February 1865.
This part of Fort Sumter’s story is rarely told:
In 1864, enslaved teenagers were sent into the bombardment to rebuild the fort’s defenses. One of them was Jacob Stroyer. He later wrote that he was fourteen when he was taken from his plantation for a second tour of forced labor on Charleston Harbor’s defenses. He and hundreds of other Black teenagers and young men were taken by rowboat to Fort Sumter.
The fort Stroyer entered was already a ruin. Confederate soldiers sheltered in bombproofs away from fire while enslaved workers were ordered to repair the ramparts under heavy artillery fire. They carried sand in baskets, passing them hand to hand up to the broken walls. The work was done at night, though U.S. Army guns fired day and night. Calcium lights sometimes illuminated the fort, and Yankee sharpshooters watched for anyone exposed.
Sentinels shouted warnings: “Look out, mortar.” The men scattered for cover. Stroyer recalled that after an explosion, survivors gathered pieces of fellow workers’ bodies, some mutilated beyond recognition.
One night, he ran to a large pine timber and dropped down. Others piled on top of him, crushing him badly. When the next shell burst, he ran toward a small lime-storage building where he and another worker reached its doorway. A mortar shell struck the building moments later, killing those inside. Stroyer and his companion survived, but the other man’s leg was broken. A piece of shell cut Stroyer above the right eye and split his lower lip.
The bombardment was not the only danger. Stroyer said a Rebel overseer, whose name he remembered as Deburgh, struck workers with a piece of iron when they were slow to return to their tasks. He recalled DeBurgh hitting workers on the head and ordering others to put a fallen man “in his box”—his coffin. According to Stroyer, workers whose bodies could be recovered were buried in Charleston; those badly mutilated were put in boxes with pieces of iron and thrown into the water.
Stroyer described being locked during daylight in a cramped, hot place called the “rat hole.” He said they were glad to get outside, despite the shells. He wrote that only forty of the original 360 workers in his group survived. That figure is Stroyer’s estimate. Official data are incomplete and meager. The National Park Service, citing official casualty lists, reports that more than twenty enslaved workers died at the fort. In his official reports, Confederate engineer John Johnson acknowledged that the men were more exposed to danger than the garrison.
Stroyer wrote that he was freed in the spring of 1865, after the United States Army captured Columbia, South Carolina. General William T. Sherman’s campaigns through Georgia and South Carolina are remembered for their destruction, but the advance also freed thousands of enslaved people. After emancipation, Stroyer became an educator, preacher, and public speaker in Massachusetts. He published his memoir, My Life in the South, in 1879.
I remembered Stroyer’s story as I walked through what remains of Fort Sumter. A year earlier, I had felt a similar horror while walking through Verdun with my late French friend, Etienne Petit. The thousands of soldiers who died in that infamous World War I killing zone were not enslaved, but many were conscripts fighting a war of staggering losses. At the Douaumont Ossuary, bones gathered from the battlefield are visible through windows.
Verdun captures the tragedy of what happened there. The official story of the enslaved workers at Fort Sumter still needs to be told more directly and fully.
The full Fort Sumter story is told in the book titled SIEGE, Civil War South Carolina.
“The survivors of us, expecting that it would be our turn next, would be picking up, here and there, parts of the severed bodies of our fellow negroes; many of those bodies so mutilated as not to be recognizable.”
-Jacob Stroyer, enslaved teenaged laborer at Fort Sumter in 1864
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