COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) -
"Poor Fort Sumter."
That's how SC State Museum Curator of History JoAnn Zeise described its destruction during the Civil War.
"When you see the ruins, it was pretty bad," she said. "Fort Sumter was bombarded at the beginning of the war and starting in the fall of 1863, it was just being turned into rubble. The Union Army was just unleashing a terrible barrage on it."
The destruction of Fort Sumter and the attempt by the Union Army to control Charleston is part of a new Civil War exhibit at the SC State Museum in Columbia.
"It's a wonderful chance to get that close to something that was really there," said Zeise. "There's something about being next to that object that was there –that piece of Fort Sumter there."
Naval Warfare on the Coast is the newest of six exhibits covering the four-year observation of the war's 150th anniversary. Each new exhibit will be added to the current space so that in 2015, the museum will have 2200 square feet of new, permanent exhibit space dedicated to the Civil War. 2015 is the sesquicentennial of the end of the war.
"A lot of innovations were going on," said Zeise. "A lot of new technologies and a lot of fierce battles were happening as well."
The Union invasion of Port Royal in 1861 includes the story of a brother who fought against his own brother.
"Captain Percival Drayton, who was in charge of the Union ship USS Pocahontas, was actually firing against his brother, General Thomas Drayton, who was in the Confederate Army," said Zeise.
"Very early in the war, November 1861, the Union invaded Port Royal and Hilton Head and they were successful," said Zeise. "They had possession of Port Royal and they had it through the entire war. It was their base of operations in their attempts to take Charleston."
The exhibit also features the importance of blockade runners who brought desperately-needed supplies as well as luxury goods into the Confederacy.
"One of the things about blockade running is it pushed the design of ships," said Zeise. "They became these sleek, blockade running ships built just for that purpose or modified from older ships for that purpose to get in and out of the blockade."
"They were pretty successful. They got a lot of things in."
The exhibit also includes the stories of war from the home front.
"The South Carolina ladies heard that the ladies of New Orleans had raised money to build a fleet of ironclads," said Zeise. "So the South Carolina ladies got together and they did balls and all these wonderful things to raise money and they got four ironclad ships: the CSS Palmetto State, the Chicora, the Columbia, and the CSS Charleston."
As visitors work their way through the exhibit, the last artifact they see reminds them of the personal sacrifice of the war: a violin belonging to a young confederate soldier.
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SC State Museum Curator of History JoAnn Zeise describes new Civil War exhibit
