overwhelming numbers down upon them at any hour of the day or night.

The special study of this danger, or rather of the means to meet and
counteract it, fell to Captain J.G. Foster, of the engineer corps, who
had been assigned to the charge of these fortifications on the 1st of
September. But his services were also in demand elsewhere, and for more
than two months afterwards the works at Baltimore appear to have
claimed the larger part of his time. On the day after the Presidential
election he was directed to give the Charleston forts his personal
supervision, and he arrived there on the 11th of November, remaining
thenceforward till the surrender of Sumter.

[Sidenote] Lieut. Breck to Major Deas, June 18, 1860.

In time of peace, the administration of military affairs in the United
States is somewhat spasmodic, resulting directly and unavoidably from
the fact of our maintaining only the merest skeleton of a standing army
compared to the vast territorial extent of the Union. As an incident of
this system, Fort Moultrie had been allowed to become defenseless. "A
child ten years old can easily come into the fort over the sand-banks,"
wrote an officer June 18, 1860, "and the wall offers little or no
obstacle." "The ease with which the walls can now be got over without
any assistance renders the place more of a trap, in which the garrison
may be shot down from the parapet, than a means of defense. To persons
looking on it appears strange, not to say ridiculous, that the only
garrisoned fort in the harbor should be so much banked in with sand,
that the walls in some places are not one foot above the tops of the
banks."

[Sidenote] Foster to De Russy, Nov. 14, 1860, W.R. Vol. I., p. 73.

By the 14th of November Captain Foster had removed the sand which had
drifted against the walls, repaired the latter, and supplied certain
expedients in the way of temporary obstructions and defenses which were
suggested by his professional skill, and available within his
resources. "I have made these temporary defenses as inexpensive as
possible," he writes, "and they consist simply of a stout board fence
ten feet high, surmounted by strips filled with nail-points, with a dry
brick wall two bricks thick on the inside, raised to the height of a
man's head, and pierced with embrasures and a sufficient number of
loop-holes. Their immediate construction has satisfied and gratified
the commanding officer, Colonel Gardiner, and they are,