Fort Sumter National Flag (Stainless Banner), and (5) a 35-star United States flag. This display was added to Fort Sumter National Monument in the 1970s. In August 2015, the flagpoles were removed to create a new exhibit. The four historic national flags now fly on the lower parade ground. Fort Sumter Fort Sumter is a sea fort in Charleston, South Carolina, notable for two battles of the American Civil War. It was one of a number of special forts planned after the War of 1812, combining high walls and heavy masonry, and classified as Third System, as a grade of structural integrity.
Battle of Gloucester Point (1861) surrendered Fort Sumter to the Confederates and as the earliest reported Civil War military engagement in Virginia. Like other early engagements between Union gunboats and Confederate shore batteries, the battle at Gloucester Point was part of the Union Navy effort to blockade the Southern States in general and the Chesapeake Bay in particular. The engagement also was part of the effort by Confederate forces to deny the use of rivers in Virginia to Union military and commercial traffic. On April 15, 1861, the day after the U.S. Army garrison surrendered Fort Sumter to Confederate forces, President Abraham Lincoln called for