{"id":939,"date":"2015-03-28T15:33:01","date_gmt":"2015-03-28T15:33:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/?p=939"},"modified":"2016-06-07T14:11:39","modified_gmt":"2016-06-07T14:11:39","slug":"fort-sumter-in-1865","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/2015\/03\/28\/fort-sumter-in-1865\/","title":{"rendered":"Fort Sumter in 1865"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

US flag flying again over Fort Sumter, April 14, 1865<\/p><\/div>\n

Exactly four years after he had surrendered Fort Sumter to the Confederates, Union officer\u00a0Robert Anderson returned to\u00a0Charleston<\/a> to help once again raise the U.S. flag over the now-ruined harbor fortifications. \u00a0Following an\u00a0emotional\u00a0mid-day ceremony, hundreds of men and women, included dozens of notable figures like abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, gathered on Friday afternoon, April 14, 1865 to hear the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher deliver a commemorative speech from what he memorably called, “this pulpit of broken stone.” \u00a0Beecher spoke at length<\/a> about the meaning of the war, offering President Lincoln in particular his “solemn congratulations” for his “disinterested wisdom” during the long conflict and for having maintained “his life and health under the unparalleled burdens and sufferings of four bloody years.” \u00a0 Yet that very night, of course, the president was shot at Ford’s Theatre. \u00a0Lincoln died the next morning at\u00a0almost exactly the same time that Garrison had gone with several of the other leading abolitionists to visit\u00a0the gravesite of the late secessionist John C. Calhoun. \u00a0The day before Beecher had vowed that “Slavery cannot come back.” Now, standing over Calhoun’s imposing tombstone, Garrison sternly echoed that sentiment by telling his\u00a0friends:\u00a0\u201cDown into a deeper grave than this, slavery has gone, and for it there is no resurrection.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was yet another one of those unforgettable moments from the American Civil War, and what makes it even more compelling is that we have some amazing photographic evidence of that astonishing trip. \u00a0The War Department had sent several photographers to help\u00a0capture scenes from the Sumter events and then from across the devastated\u00a0city\u00a0of Charleston. \u00a0These are all now in the collection of the Library of Congress. Some of these images are famous, and widely reproduced, like the ones of the four black children (in Union military garb) seated by the pillars of the city’s well known circular church:<\/p>\n

\"1865-04<\/a><\/p>\n

Other images from that period\u00a0are less familiar, but still vital for understanding the narrative details of this critical episode. \u00a0In particular, there is one heavily damaged image, not usually reproduced, but which shows a level of crowd detail from around Beecher’s speech unprecedented in the other images from the series.<\/p>\n

\"1865-04-14<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet that heavily stained image (above), yields this wonderful detail (below), which clearly shows Major General Anderson<\/a>, seated on the crowded platform itself, casually holding a walking stick, just to the right (our left) of the standing\u00a0Rev. Beecher<\/a>, who is tightly clutching the pages of his windblown speech.<\/p>\n

\"1865-04-14<\/a><\/p>\n

Relying on this image and others from the series, we here at the House Divided Project have been busy trying to identify the rest of the\u00a0notables at the event. \u00a0Most important, we are trying to figure out exactly where editor William Lloyd Garrison<\/a> was seated. \u00a0His best modern biographer, the late Henry Mayer, used a detail from one of the blurrier\u00a0versions of this image\u00a0to claim that Garrison was probably the man in the big hat seated a few feet to Beecher’s left (our right), but the quality of this particular detail\u00a0shows how unlikely that was.<\/p>\n

\"Slide1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"1865-04-14<\/a>We think it is far more\u00a0likely that Garrison was\u00a0this lean, spectacled man, standing here (right) in reflective pose after the ceremony. \u00a0In part, we believe\u00a0this\u00a0man was\u00a0Garrison, because other images from the event suggest that\u00a0he was\u00a0seated behind Gen. Anderson, among other leading abolitionists, such as George Thompson<\/a>, from Britain (and Garrison’s\u00a0close friend), and also New York antislavery editor Theodore Tilton<\/a>. \u00a0White House aide John G. Nicolay<\/a>, who was serving as the president’s personal emissary to the event, was also in that section of the platform. Details from some\u00a0of these images are provided below. \u00a0We also have some zoomable versions at the House Divided research engine, showing preparations<\/a>, and two slightly different versions of\u00a0Beecher’s speech,\u00a0here<\/a> and here<\/a>. \u00a0The bulk of the images from that journey have been digitized by the Library of Congress,\u00a0more than two dozen of them<\/a>\u00a0are now available online. \u00a0Check them all out and decide for yourself. \u00a0If you come across anything important, please offer your insights in the comments section below. \u00a0If you can, please help us identify any other notables in the audience. \u00a0We are especially eager to find Robert Smalls<\/a>, the ex-slave and wartime hero. \u00a0Newspaper accounts claimed<\/a> that the ceremony was attended by a mixed race crowd and that Smalls was present and widely celebrated –but we cannot find him, nor actually much evidence of any black presence near the speaker.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a>

Larger version of the image with Garrison standing by pole, center<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Slide1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This post originally appeared at Blog Divided<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Exactly four years after he had surrendered Fort Sumter to the Confederates, Union officer\u00a0Robert Anderson returned to\u00a0Charleston to help once again raise the U.S. flag over the now-ruined harbor fortifications. \u00a0Following an\u00a0emotional\u00a0mid-day ceremony, hundreds of men and women, included dozens of notable figures like abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, gathered on Friday afternoon, April 14, 1865 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":373,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/939\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/hist-288pinsker\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}