The April Meeting of the Rufus Barringer Civil War Round Table will be held at 7:00PM on Thursday, April 16th, at the Civic Club on the corner of Pennsylvania and Ashe St. in Southern Pines. Socializing begins at 6:30PM. The guest speaker will be historian Richard Hatcher, and the title of his presentation is “The Second Flag Raising at Fort Sumter.”

On April 14, 1861, Fort Sumter surrendered after 34 hours of bombardment. Major Robert Anderson lowered the thirty-three-star American flag and took it with him to New York City, where he took part in an enormous patriotic rally. Southern troops immediately occupied and improved Sumter’s defenses. The U.S. blockaded Charleston Harbor and for two years the fort, with its 84 heavy guns and a 500-man garrison, remained mostly untested. That changed in July 1863 when a powerful combined operation set its sights on the fort, Charleston, and its outer defenses. The result was a grueling 22-month land and sea siege—the longest of the Civil War. The complex effort included ironclad attacks, land assaults, raiding parties, and siege operations.

Despite repeated concentrated bombardments of the fort and the city, Sumter never fell. The defiant fort, Charleston, and its defensive lines were evacuated in February 1865 once word arrived that Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman approached Columbia, South Carolina. A week after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865, Anderson returned to a battered Ft. Sumter to raise the same flag he had removed four years to the day earlier. It was a victorious ceremony with bands, bunting and invited guests but it was also shockingly bittersweet, for that night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Ford’s Theater in Washington.

This is part of the story that Rick Hatcher tells in his recently published book, Thunder in the Harbor: Fort Sumter ad the Civil War. He is a native of Richmond, Virginia and he graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1973 with a BA in History. Rick began working permanently with the National Park Service in 1976 and he retired as Historian from Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park in 2015. Rick is the author or co-author of numerous articles and books including the award-winning Wilson’s Creek, The Second Major Battle of the Civil War and the Men Who Fought It. Rick Has been a regular speaker at our round table.

Meetings are open to the public. For more details contact Matt Farina at 910.246.0452 or mafarina@aol.com.  The Rufus Barringer Civil War Round Table is a 501(c)(3), incorporated, non-profit, educational organization. The purpose of the organization is to promote, educate, and further stimulate interest in, and discussion of, all aspects of the Civil War period.