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| Ruins of Fort Sumter in 1864. |
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Edmund Ruffin as color-bearer, entered the fort when the salute was ended and the garrison had departed, and buried the dead soldier with military honors.
Two private soldiers of the company erected a board at the head of his grave.1
When the flag was lowered, at the close of the salute, the garrison, in full dress, left the fort, and embarked on the Isabel, the band playing “Yankee Doodle.”
When Major Anderson and his officers left the sallyport, it struck up “Hail to the Chief.”
The last one who retired was Surgeon Crawford, who attended poor Gallway until the latest moment possible.
Soon afterward a party from Charleston, composed of Governor Pickens and suite, the Executive Council, General Beauregard and his aids, and several distinguished citizens, went to Fort Sumter in a steamer, took formal possession
of the abandoned stronghold, and raised the Confederate and Palmetto flags over it.2 It had been evacuated, not surrendered. The sovereignty of the Republic, symbolized in the flag, had not been yielded to the insurgents.
That flag had been lowered, but not given up — dishonored, but not captured.
It was borne away by the gallant commander, with a resolution to raise it
1 Charleston Mercury, May 2, 1861.
2 The editor of the Charleston Mercury, who was one of the party who first entered Sumter after the evacuation, described the appearance of the interior. “Every point and every object,” he said, “to which the eye was turned, except the outer walls and casemates, which are still strong, bore the impress of ruin. Brooded over by the desolation of ages, it could scarcely have been developed to a more full maturity of ruin. It were as if the Genius of Destruction had tasked its energies to make the thing complete. The walls of the internal structures, roofless, bare, blackened, and perforated by shot and shell, hung in fragments, and seemed in instant readiness to totter down. Near the center of the parade-ground was the hurried grave of one who had fallen from the recent casualty. To the left of the entrance was a man who seemed to be at the verge of death. In the ruins to the right there was another. The shattered flag-staff, pierced by four balls, lay sprawling on the ground. The parade-ground was strewn with fragments of shell and dilapidated buildings. At least four guns were dismounted on the ramparts; and at every step the way was impeded by portions of the broken structure.” See sketch of the interior of Fort Sumter on page 325.
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