Fort Moultrie, in Charleston Harbour, South Carolina—The Secession Flag Flying
Description from Fort Moultrie 1809-1930:
The English-born correspondent Thomas Butler Gunn, representing himself as a reporter for the Illustrated London News (although he was also secretly filing stories with the New York Tribune and New York Evening Post), gained admission into occupied Fort Moultrie on January 27, 1861 — unlike his friend and colleague William Waud, who was widely known throughout Charleston as being employed by the anti-secessionist Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Gunn subsequently drew a crude, error-filled sketch of Moultrie’s interior, which he dispatched to London to be featured in the March 2, 1861 edition of the Illustrated London News.
Note: how Gunn’s poor depiction includes a complete misidentification of the fort’s hot-shot furnace in the foreground, as a small building — with soldiers even apparently about to enter into its “door” — while the ramp immediately behind this structure soars up impossibly beyond the level of Moultrie’s Southwest Angle, rather than realistically leveling off at its terreplein.
Source: Original woodcut published at the bottom of Page 194 of the March 2, 1861 issue of the Illustrated London News (Volume 38, Number 1077); a sample is today preserved on Page 216 of Volume 17 of Gunn’s personal diaries, and includes his handwritten annotation “T. B. G. del.” for “Thomas Butler Gunn delineavit” — the Latin expression meaning “drawn by”. Other unannotated copies of this publication are held by libraries such as at Durham University, Emory University, etc., as well as in many private collections.
Image retrieved from:
“The Secession Flag Flying in the Fort Moultrie, South Carolina.” Open Parks Network. Accessed December 26, 2020. openparksnetwork.org/single-item-view/?oid=OPN_NS%3A933DC….
Medium: illustrations (layout features)
Item Location: Fort Sumter NM/Charles Pinckney NHS Curatorial Storage Facility, located at Charles Pinckney National Historic Site
Box: Box 2 of 3 Fosu 19th-c Illustrations Frank Leslie Harpers Weekly London Times, Etc.
Held By Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park
Identifiers
Permanent Link: purl.clemson.edu/A9154290D7A758A3E653AC8243163835
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Mike’s notes:
Special handed-tinted off-prints were also sold separately from newspapers. Numerous originals held today by public institutions and in private collections.
Note – This image has been digitally adjusted for one or more of the following:
– fade correction,
– color, contrast, and/or saturation enhancement
– selected spot and/or scratch removal
– cropped for composition and/or to accentuate subject