Tag: Ft. Sumter

General Assembly Failing Citizens Again

Great Confederate Flag Debate – Update

The SC General Assembly is expected to at least begin its great confederate flag debate tomorrow.

I have stayed out of the great confederate flag debate discussion until now.

I frankly don’t care whether the flag flying on the statehouse grounds stays up, comes down or blows away.

My heritage is a little different from the sides engaged in this controversy. My great-grandfather being from Pennsylvania fought with the Union army from 1861-3 and 1864-5. For those of you stuck in revisionist history, the Union was the winning side – you know Grant, Sherman and all that.

It’s this revisionist history that has caused South Carolina to keep its head in the sand for so many decades.

The “War of Northern Aggression” was started right here in the Low Country when the newly formed Confederate States Army, under the command of Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, bombarded the Union position at Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor.

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Events Celebrate Little Known Civil War Incident

On a foggy spring night 150 years ago, slave Robert Smalls commandeered a Confederate ammunition ship, steamed upriver to pick up family and friends, and then slipped past five Southern batteries on Charleston Harbor to reach Union blockade ships.

Smalls would return to Charleston a year later to pilot a Union ironclad in an attack on Fort Sumter, while after the war he served in the South Carolina General Assembly, the U.S. Congress and later as a federal customs inspector.

“His story, I think, is lost in the larger picture of the Civil War – Grant and Lee; Appomattox and Gettysburg. It’s important locally, but I would say it’s a story often overlooked,” said Carl Borick, the assistant director of the Charleston Museum.

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