anding off and on the while merely to keep up our
fires. A pilot came under our quarter in his little schooner, and told
us that the steamer Nashville had got out the day before with only a
hard bumping. No other news had he: Fort Sumter had not been taken, nor
assaulted; the independence of South Carolina had not been recognized;
various desirable events had not happened. In short, the political world
had remained during our voyage in that chaotic _status quo_ so loved by
President Buchanan. At twelve we stood for the bar, sounding our way
with extreme caution. Without accident we passed over the treacherous
bottom, although in places it could not have been more than eighteen
inches below our keel. The shores closed in on both sides as we passed
onward. To the south was the long, low, gray Morris Island, with its
extinguished lighthouse, its tuft or two of pines, its few dwellings,
and its invisible batteries. To the north was the long, low, gray
Sullivan's Island, a repetition of the other, with the distinctions of
higher sand-rolls, a village, a regular fort, and palmettos. We passed
the huge brown Moultrie House, in summer a gay resort, at present a
barrack; passed the hundred scattered cottages of the island, mostly
untenanted now, and looking among the sand-drifts as if they had been
washed ashore at random; passed the low walls of Fort Moultrie,
once visibly yellow, but now almost hidden by the new _glacis_, and
surmounted by piles of barrels and bags of sand, with here and there
palmetto stockades as a casing for the improvised embrasures; passed its
black guns, its solidly built, but rusty barracks, and its weather-worn
palmetto flag waving from a temporary flag-staff. On the opposite side
of the harbor was Fort Johnstone, a low point, exhibiting a barrack, a
few houses, and a sand redoubt, with three forty-two pounders. And
here, in the midst of all things, apparent master of all things, at the
entrance of the harbor proper, and nearly equidistant from either shore,
though nearest the southern, frowned Fort Sumter, a huge and lofty
and solid mass of brickwork with stone embrasures, all rising from
a foundation of ragged granite boulders washed by the tides. The
port-holes were closed; a dozen or so of monstrous cannon peeped from
the summit; two or three sentinels paced slowly along the parapet; the
stars and stripes blew out from the lofty flag-staff. The plan of Fort
Sumter may be briefly described as five-sid