John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion

[22] raised to an artificial island; the walls were eight feet thick and forty feet high, with two tiers of casemates; it was fivesided, enclosing a space of about 300 by 350 feet, and in its casemates and on its rampart it was designed for 140 guns; its proper war-garrison was 650 men. In addition to these forts in the harbor, there were two government buildings in the city of Charleston: the Custom-House and the United States Arsenal, the latter containing a total of 22,430 arms.

To guard and hold possession of this property, there were in the arsenal a military storekeeper and fourteen enlisted men. Castle Pinckney was occupied only by an ordnance sergeant and his family; Fort Sumter by one or two engineer officers, employing one hundred and ten workmen in repairs; Fort Moultrie alone, in addition to another party of fifty workmen employed by the engineer officer in charge, had a garrison of sixty-nine soldiers and nine officers under Major Robert Anderson, who had command of the whole harbor and all the forts. The walls of Moultrie were low, and at one place almost submerged in the drifting sandbanks of Sullivan's Island; a storming party, the commandant reported, could run like rats over the ramparts. Parties of Charlestonians frequently visited it to spy out its weak points; volunteer companies were organized in the city for the expedition of capture; scaling-ladders were prepared to make the attempt a certainty; the talk of the streetrabble and the newspapers made no concealment of their exulting confidence that they held Moultrie in the hollow of their hand. Hospitable fire-eaters went even so far as to invite Major Anderson to comfortable dinners, and to tell him, in confidential frankness over their wine, that they respected him as an officer and loved him as a Southerner, but that they “must have the fort.”