He [**Meade, the residing officer) stood at the parapet watching, as Pettigrew and his men ran around the side of the fort and pounded on the gate, huffing and puffing and halloing, demanding entrance. When this brought no response, they dug out their two ladders and prepared to scale the walls. Pettigrew told most of his attackers to aim their muskets on the parapet, to shoot anyone trying to man the big guns pointing out of the embrasures. Pettigrew and a dozen of his men climbed up. There they were, standing inside Castle Pinckney. Meade stood, waiting for them.
As Pettigrew’s men rushed to open the gate, he strode to Meade and began to read aloud from Pickens’s orders. Meade interrupted him. He refused, he said, to recognize any authority the governor of South Carolina might claim to have within this fort. The two then walked downstairs to the parade ground. Sergeant Skillen, who had been living here for quite some time, with only his wife and his daughter, Katie, for company, was furious. He paced back and forth, muttering. “Damn it! This is a pretty thing to happen to a U.S. fort.”
[…]
South Carolina’s legislature had called for a new flag several days earlier, just after secession, but decision-making processes moved slowly, and it would be another month before South Carolinians could agree on an official symbol. Why the Nina [the ship that the militia used to reach the fort] used a red flag with a single star is not clear, but it did, and thus it was this piece of cloth that was used in the first official military action that one day soon would be called the Civil War.
As this ceremony was going on, Skillen’s daughter Katie stood by and watched. She was sixteen, perhaps seventeen, and strikingly pretty. The young South Carolinians could not help but be aware of her presence, and the fact that she was weeping. “Don’t be afraid,” one of their officers said to her, “nobody shall hurt you.”
”I’m not at all afraid,” she replied. “I’m mad, to see our flag go down and that dirty thing take its place.” And she added that it certainly took a lot of very brave fellows to capture a fort occupied by only two soldiers and one girl.
Source:
Detzer, David. “Dueling Flags.” Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War. New York: Harcourt, 2002. 134-35. Print.
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