FLOATING FIRE
AT 4:30 A.M. April 12, 1861, on James Island in Charleston Harbor, Confederate Lieutenant Henry Farley pulled the lanyard of a siege mortar. A solid thump rocked the ground as a huge 10-inch shell roared from the muzzle with a yellow-white flash. The heavy ball soared in an arc toward a dark shape looming a mile out in the calm waters of the harbor, a five-sided U.S. Army stronghold known as Fort Sumter. It burst with a searing red flash over the fort’s ramparts, scattering fragments mostly into the water but also onto Sumter’s parade grounds.
The Civil War had begun.
Over the next day and a half, a glut of shell and shot struck the facility’s stout brick walls and rained upon its bastions and dirt interior. The Confederates would use 47 cannons, howitzers, and mortars during the relentless 34-hour siege, most located within a series of forts and batteries that ringed the harbor. But Sumter’s 85-man Federal garrison also had to keep an eye on a large, peculiar-looking contraption in the water itself—a device that begged for a more spectacular name but instead was known by the Rebels rather informally as the “Floating Battery.”
Equipped with four guns, the battery had been built with grandiose expectations two months earlier. It would, however, become
