The weekend started off with our first successful two-way video call from me to home. Eric was the genius that rebooted the computer and suggested I reboot mine, then Voila, it all came together. Very nice.
A Lieutenant Colonel and I drove into Charleston on Saturday. Initially, we had understood that there would not be time off, but we're keeping up with everything, and the government doesn't like to work on Columbus Day. So we visited many of the historical sites like Fort Sumter-- Dale manages our
materials database website, MatWeb, and challanged me to devise a defensive plan for Ft. Sumter! We also saw
the first submarine to sink a ship in combat, the Hunley (did you know she sank twice before her final, successful voyage where she sunk the Housatonic, but sank mysteriously just after that?). The events wrapped up with a thorough walk over the grounds of historic Charles Towne Landing,
the first South Carolina settlement dating to 1670. They certainly had defensive issues as well. Fortunately, the local indians befriended them, partly because this local tribe needed the new settlers guns to ward off another tribe that had allied itself with the Spanish. It's all who you know, right? Those original settlers weren't religious pilgrims so much as profiteers: they journeyed 6 weeks from England to Barbados, and stopped there to study the slave-intensive sugar farming process for a couple of months. Then, off to South Carolina...except they had heavy storms enroute, lost a ship, broke a ship, and took something like 3 months to just get from Barbados to South Carolina. But they brought a culture of slave-intensive profiteering and were mighty disappointed to find that sugar didn't grow well here. So this ties together with Fort Sumter because the slave-focused labor practices led SC to be one of the loudest advocates of slavery. Abraham Lincoln's election sealed the deal, SC seceded, other states followed suit, and Colonel Anderson moved his forces from a weak nearby fort to Sumter. Beauregard, a West Point student of Anderson, was sent to negotiate the return of Sumter but was forced to deliver an ultimatum. Which he backed up with 30 hours of artillery until SC forces captured Sumter. The Confederates held Sumter amidst the Union siege and blockades longer than any other siege. And when the Union did finally get it back, they invited Lincoln to come to the official ceremony. But he had tickets to the Ford theater and couldn't make it! Really!
So anyway, my conclusion to this tour was that South Carolina, from its roots in 1670, had a culture of greedy exploitation of slave labor, with two very separate classes of society. I also learned that Charleston is a beautiful city, with lots to do and see. And
some delicious seafood!
