Fort Sumter Flag Fort Sumter Flag The Fort Sumter Flag is a historic United States flag with a distinctive, diamond-shaped pattern of 33 stars. When the main flagpole was felled by shot during the bombardment of Fort Sumter by confederate forces, Second Lieutenant Norman Hall rushed to retrieve the flag and remount it on a makeshift pole. The flag was lowered by Major Robert Anderson on April 14, 1861 when he surrendered Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, at the outset of the American Civil War. Anderson brought the flag to New York City for an April 20, 1861 patriotic
Second Battle of Fort Sumter one of the fort's guns with 320 infantrymen, who repulsed the naval landing party. Gillmore had reduced Fort Sumter to a pile of rubble, but the Confederate flag still waved over the ruins. Union efforts to retake Charleston Harbor began on April 7, 1863, when Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, led the ironclad frigate "New Ironsides", the tower ironclad "Keokuk", and the monitors "Weehawken", "Pasaic", "Montauk", "Patapsco", "Nantucket", "Catskill", and "Nahant" in an attack on the harbor's defenses (The 1863 Battle of Fort Sumter was the largest deployment of monitors in action