The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-06-07
FORT SUMTER TO-DAY.


A correspondent of the Boston Advertiser
writes from Charleston:-
But no Northern man pauses to look long
at anything else in Charleston until he has
been down the harbor and clambered over
the walls of Fort Sumter. The experience
will never be so valuable again as now, be-
cause the Government has at last begun to
attempt to restore the historical old ruin to
up and down lines and a condition of useful
ness. There are several ways of making the
excursion; but the pleasantest of all is by a
yacht which goes down twice day, not
the least attractive feature of this method
being that the captain and cicerone is
Greek, and so able to explain matters to
mixed company with freedom from embar-
rassment which neither Yankee nor ex-Rebel
could command. The ruined aspect of the
once trim brick walls, as viewed from the sea
and given in many pictures, prepares one to
see the destruction wrought by the heavy
projectiles of the monitors and the Morris
Island batteries but not for the tremendous
work done by the Confederate tenants under
fire, after the bombardment was begun and
its sure effect shown, to make it possible to
hold the spot with which so much pride was
mingled and on the possession of which de-
pended the safety of the city. In plain terms,
they buried the fort All trace of the original
form of its interior is lost under the immense
uldSS VI Shllu NlllC1 IuSy pllGu uDOu IL, DuT-
rowing underneath in the old casemates like
ants in a hill, and passing completely around
the fort in dark galleries buried FAR from the
light of day. Bringing the dirt down in
barges by night from the city, they kept
gangs of negroes at work shoveling it into
place. Gilmore pouring in his shells all the
time to warn them to hasten. ''Shell strike
inside the fort" says the vivacious, plain
spoken skipper and guide, fifty niggers get
killed-no matter fifty more brought down
from the country next day. Hundred killed,
hundred more sent down from the country.
Nothing so plenty in South Carolina as mig
gers in those days" AS the result of this
well-directed labor, taught by necessity,
General Beauregard made this fort absolutely
impregnable under the heaviest fire ever
poured into any one spot in modern warfare.
To the sea it presented a crumbled line of
fallen bricks and dirt, seemingly the most
insignificant obstacle in the world; yet the
garrison burrowed here in absolute security
under the fire of monitor fleet and superb
combination of batteries, able to call in, in
case of an assault, the concentrated fire
of fifty surrounding batteries of their
own with entire safety to themselves. So
immense was the quantity of dirt
which they piled up here over their own
heads that they accomplished what the Ma.
tional Government, with its much be-scolded
stone fleet, did not do-they changed the
face of the harbor, and altered the course of
the channel; for the sand blowing off Sum-
ter in the winds of the last seven years has
created bar and a beach where before was
the deepest current of the river. The work
of digging out which corps of Government
laborers under direction of an engineer officer
has just begun, is like that of disinterring
another Pompeii the smooth carved granite
arch of the sally port has just been brought
to light after its long burial and at every
thrust of the pickaxe come out the great shells
of the Union cannonade, some exploded and
some yet bearing their perilous charge, every
one of which as it ploughed its way into the
sapd only added to the strength of the fort.