The Sun.
London, England, 1865-03-07 00:00:00

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7

1865.

until, at last, invigorated by the storm of iron throw,ll
into its cleft and gaping breaches, the fort seclude'
ducere opes animumque ferro. Situated not more than
1,150 yards from the huge mortars and Parrott guns
otßattery Gregg, Fort Sumter has swallowed iron
as Sahara sucJs in water. It were vain for me to
attempt to describe the vast fabrics of sand, in many
places 40ft. in thickness, piled up over its casemates
and arches of brickwork, and affording shelter in
new-fashioned bombproof chambers, entered by
man-holes from above, to the harassed and exposed
garrison.

PRICE 4 d.
STAMPED sd.

thrown across the street in the immediate neighbour-
hood of the residence which Mr. Bunch occupied
when British consul here—a residence of which the
sight awakens pleasant recollections in the minds of
an Englishman who visited Charleston in happier
days. But as you ascend from the Battery, passing
along East Bay into Broad-street, the handwriting
of Yankee shells upon many a perforated wall and
many a shattered roof forces itself more and more
upon the view. There are houses externally to all
appearance uninjured, but throtigh the roof of which
a shell has passed, bursting in the interior, tearing
division walls, lath and plaster, floors and ceilings,
into splinters, and leaving little more than the exte-
rior crust standing. Occasionally a shell has set fire
to the woodwork of a house, and has lapped its two
two or three neighbours in a flame, which seems to
have burnt out of its own accord, 'without wrapping
Charleston in one of those vast conflagrations by
which the city has so often been desolated. Often
the street pavement or the side walk betrays the
deep round hole into which, after describing a para-
bola of four miles or more through the air, a 200-
pounder shell has descended without bursting, giv-
ing to the spectator an impression of greater and
more irresistible might than he gathers even from
the pierced walls and mutilated roofs around him.
The office of the British Consulate reveals the pas-
sage through its walls of a couple of shells ; that of
the Spanish Consulate, hard by, has three similar
orifices to boast without the Consul of that nation
being uprooted from Charleston. I am told that
in the height of summer, when the grass in the
streets afforded shelter to :many wandering cows,
and the wild fennel shot up 8 or 10 feet high, turning
the city into the semblance of a jungle, the scene of
desolation and ruin was far more painfully felt.
Already the hen partridge has been found nestling
with her brood among the crumbling ruins. Already
the owl has heen heard to hoot by night from the
spires of the demolished churches. But the devas-
tation produced by Federal shells is nothing when
compared with the broad belt of ruin which marks
the track of the great fire which swept across the
city from river to river in December, 1861. I have
seen other cities, such as Vicksburg, Fredericksburg,
and Petersburg, which had suffered more from the
artillery fire of their assailants than Charleston, but
never have I been more impressed with the transi-
toriness of human handiwork than while standing
in the midst of the wreck produced by the awful
conflagration of 1861, and nothing to what three
years of unrepaired damage and unresisted decay
can bring one of the most flourishing of modern
cities. Other sights there are in these silent streets
pregnant with suggestions to a contemplative mind.
Huge signs still hang suspended in the air, inviting
the wayfarer to take his passage by the " New
York Line of Packets," while upon another the
rival attractions of the " Boston and Baltimore
Steamships" are temptingly paraded. It is difficult
to conceive the possibility of a resurrected Union,
such as the New York Herald dreams of, after the
lapse of four such years as have nearly flown since
Fort Sumter became historical ; but on all sides I
am warned in Charleston that American is not to
be judged by the same rules as European human
nature. Still, with the recollection of the senti-
ment which prevailed one short month ago in Rich-
mond fresh in my mind, I, for one, shall refuse to
believe that the time is near at hand when Boston
and Baltimore steamships will communicate as of
yore with Charleston. Let this war end as it may,
the resurrection of the Union, or the spontaneous
aggregation of 33 or 34 equal, co-ordinate, consent-
ing, self-governing States in a common pact of go-
vernment is as impracticable as the restoration to
Tyre and Sidon of their commerce, or to Babylon
and Nineveh of the sceptre which has departed.
Yesterday evening, immediately after sunset, I
visited the irregularly-outlined mass of dark red-
gray ruin, which, crumbling bit by bit and inch by
inch under such a storm as fort never yet sustained
upon earth, remains as unsubducd as on the days
when Dupont and Dahlgren recoiled before its guns,
and Gillmore and a host of his brother engineers
exhausted their illimitable resources against it in
vain.

" Cold, indeed, must be the nature of that
man" who can at this moment approach Fort Sum-
ter without that swelling of the heart which is felt
when one looks on such scenes as the Plain of
Marathon, -or the Rock of Gibraltar for the first
time. Famous passages of history, such as Sale's
heroic defence of Jellalabad against the Affghans,
or Havelock standing at bay in the Residency of
Lucknow, pale their ineffectual fires when matched
with the resistance at Fort Sumter. Neither to
Havelock nor to Sale was retreat or submission a
possibility ; whereas the garrison of Fort Sumter
has never been cut off from communication with
the mainland, and has always been fighting a
civilised enemy and not a savage brood of human
wolves. The artillery brought against Sale was
insignificant, and Havelock there was employed
no gun larger than the 42-pounder smooth-bore.
The visitor to Fort Sumter this day sees lying
unexploded in the centre of its old parade-ground
300-pounder Parrott and 15-inch spherical
shells, a few dozen of which are equal in
weight to the whole amount of metal which was
rained upon Jellalabad or Lucknow. Such has been
the mass of these gigantic globes and barrel-like pro-
jectiles of iron which have been thrown into Fort
Sumter that the mind shrinks from the effort to com-
pute the tons upon tons of metal launched from
mortars, smooth-bore or rifled guns, into a space
not exceeding 3/ acres in area, and hithertolaunched
in vain.

Fort Sumter seems originally to have been a pet
fort of the United States, and was commenced about
the year 1845, and finished (so far as it was ever
finished at all) about ten years later. Upon a low-
lying island of sand, always two feet below water,
even at low tide, was constructed a platform or en-
tablature of masonry four acres in area, made of
Massachusetts granite. Upon this platform were
reared the brick walls of the fort. The stone plat-
form emerged ahove the water at high tide, and the
brick outline of the fort did not cover the whole
surface of the stone substratum, but left a berm
running round between the brick masonry and the
water's edge. The brick walls were in some places
six, and in others eight feet thick, the interval be-
tween them being filled in with concrete. The fort
was in shape a pentagon, with the angles " pan-
coupeed" (the English corruption of point coupe),
and with a very weak and unfinished spot along its
gorge front, which faces Morris Island. The walls
were designed to resist 68-pounder smooth-bores,
which were, 20 years ago, considered the heaviest
guns likely to be brought against it either by water
or upon land. In the sea attack of April 7, 1863,
conducted by the Ironsides, Keokuk, and six or
seven other Monitors, it was plainly established
that the walls could not long resist the impact of
the 15-inch mortar shells, but, as the attack was
beaten off in less than two hours, the vulnerability
of the fort was, perhaps, still unrevealed to the
enemy. It was not until, in July,
1863, Morris
Island was occupied at its lower end by the Fe-
derals, and not until they opened fire against Fort
300-pounder rifled Parrott guns
Sumter with 100-pounder, 200-pounder, and per-
hapsthat the
walls melted away in long patches, and the fort be-
came a shapeless heap of ruins. It was about this
time that Colonel Harris (chief engineer to General
Beauregard, and who has since fallen a victim to
yellow fever) remarked to Major Stephen Elliot,
There is a Brigadier-Generalship in these old walls
yet, if you know how to do justice to them." How
Major Elliot secured this brigadier-generalship, and
how his gallant predecessors and successors, Yates,
Rhett, Mitchell, Hugenian, and a host of others
have imprinted Fort Sumter's name upon the page
of history is known whenever the English tongue is
spoken. Shattered, lacerated, rent, mutilated by
day, the fort accommodated itself to a new attitude
of defence by night. With gabions and bags of sand
its defenders repaired the havoc and ruin of the day,

It is impossible at this moment to visit Fort
Sumter—perhaps the most interesting historical
ruin in the world—or to inspect other forts in its
neighbourhood, such as Castle Pinckney and Fort
Moultrie, once built of naked masonry, but now
girt with a thick cushion or periphery of sand, with-
out coming to the conclusion that the days of water
castles, built of uncovered brick or stone, are at an
end, and that even famous old land fortresses
like Quebec or Ehrenbreitstein will, in spite of
their lofty elevation, have to be coated with simi-
lar cushions before they can hope to withstand
rifled artillery. The old maxim of Vaban " Ex-
Pose to a cannon-ball no masonry which it is
possible to cushion with earth," is now ten times
more valuable than when he uttered it, and the
scientific engineer even now might study the forti&
cations of Lille and Valenciennes with advantage,
and expand Vauban's system into dimensions com-
mensurate with the march of modern improvements
competentartery. to Tette
isl
r unpootn,thaeplace for, neither am
tifications; but I cannot forbear disquisition. upon for-
saying that it has
always appeared to me lamentable that, inasmuch
as England refuses to send to this country a Com-
missioner qualified to glean some of the lessons of
the American War, there has been found in the
British army no young military engineer with suffi-
cient enterprise to run the blockade and learn his
business from such authorities as Beauregard,
Whiting, and Ripley. It is doubtful whether even
Sebastopol afforded such lessons to the military engi-
neer and scientific artillerist as Fort Sumter and the
works of the two belligerents upon James, Sullivan's,
and Morris Islands afford this day. But, as it is with
our young military engineers, so it also seems ;to
be with our young surgeons. lam assured on all
sides, upon Federal as well as Confederate autho-
rity, that the surgery of war is entirely metamor-
phosed by the experience gained during these last
four bloody years. It is not likely that another
such opportunity for men of these two scientific
professions will recur in a lifetime, and the Ameri-
cans who, with little love for England, filled the
English no less than the French and Russian camps
before Sebastopol with young surgeons seeking em-
ployment and professional experience as volunteers,
taught us a lesson which, if we ever gave heed to
anybody, might be learnt with advantage.

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