The Flag Replaced on Sumter: A Personal NarrativeSpicer, William A.
History
The Flag Replaced on Sumter: A Personal Narrative
Spicer, William A.
Fort Sumter (Charleston, S.C.)
There was great rejoicing in Charleston. Thousands had assembled at
the Battery, excited spectators of the scene. They exultingly beheld
the banner of the Republic lowered, and the flags of South Carolina
and the Southern Confederacy raised defiantly over the ramparts of
Fort Sumter.
Governor Pickens, the bustling and blustering State executive, thus
addressed the populace:
"We are now one of the Confederate States, and they have
sent us a brave and scientific officer, to whom the credit
of this day's triumph is due. We have defeated their twenty
millions. We have humbled the flag of the United States
before the Palmetto and Confederate, and so long as I have
the honor to preside as your chief magistrate, so help me
God, there is no power on this earth shall ever lower from
that fortress those flags, unless they be lowered and
trailed in a sea of blood. I can here say to you it is the
first time in the history of this country that the stars and
stripes have been humbled. That flag has never before been
lowered before any nation on this earth. But to-day it has
been humbled, and humbled before the glorious little State
of South Carolina."
But Governor Pickens little dreamed that the discharge of his guns
upon the United States flag at Fort Sumter would awaken such an
outburst of patriotism as immediately followed all over the North,
uniting the people of all classes in a determination to maintain the
majesty of the Union, and vindicate the honor of the flag. How little
he foresaw the mighty sweep and terrible devastation of the pitiless
storm of civil war which now burst over the land, and which never
departed from the soil of South Carolina till every rebel ensign was
"lowered and trailed in a sea of blood;" till slavery, the cause of
the conflict, was forever abolished, and the power of the United
States firmly re-established on land and sea.
Four years had scarcely passed ere he heard the tramp of Sherman's
army sweeping victoriously across the State, and beheld the once proud
and haughty Charleston in possession of the Union legions. As he saw
the starry flag again waving aloft in triumph, he hastened, with
reluctant footsteps, to place himself once more under its protecting
folds, thus renewing, in 1865, his oath of allegiance to the
government whose authority he had defied in 1861!
A few months later, at the State Convention at Columbia, assembled
under the direction of the President of the United States, it is none
other than our _reconstructed_ friend, Ex-Governor Pickens, who rises
amid the ashes of his once beautiful Capital, and offers the following
ordinance:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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