That's where my heart is turning over

Monday morning, we knew, my father had a doctor's appointment. Just a routine checkup, but, they had to be sometime and he wanted to do them early in the quarter. We figured we'd sleep in until we heard him getting back, since if we knew anything from the old place, my parents are fairly noisy as they get up. We didn't hear anything until pretty close to noon when my mother finally knocked on the door. My father'd gotten back long ago and apparently the soundproofing in their new place is just that good. We went to lunch at a nearby sports bar and my father wanted to make sure I saw they had a sign saying, no concealable weapons please. My father's very amused by the gun-pusher culture in his new home.

I'd wanted to see just, you know, what's normal stuff for them and they wanted to show off tourist attractions and the natural thing to bring me to would be, well, Fort Sumter but we were too late starting to really get there. Near to it, though, was Fort Moultrie and we had plenty of time for that. Fort Moultrie served well to keep the British from capturing Charleston in 1776, and then not at all to keep them from capturing it in 1780. (That was all right, as it fit well with George Washington's so-called ``Fabian strategy'', of losing so many battles and so much territory that the British would be driven to finally give up and go home.) In 1860 the federal government's extremely light garrison held Fort Moultrie until South Carolina formally started the Slavers' Treason, and at Major Robert Anderson's direction the garrison moved into the harbor and Fort Sumter.

My father by the way had some kind of super-powered admission card to National Park Service installations that let him get all four of us into Fort Moultrie for free, parking included. He bought this card several years back, before apparently anyone realized what a steal it was, and the cashier tried to offer him the new card in which he would get less stuff for free. My father declined the offer to replace his worn-out old card with a new.

The centerpiece of the visitors center, besides the piles of artifacts from the fort's service --- it was hastily built in 1776, and rebuilt after the War of 1812, became reasonably noteworthy in the Civil War, was renovated around the time of the Spanish War, and used as a garrison and training spot in the Second World War --- is a movie theater explaining all this history. I'm not positive when it's from; from the typeface on the movie's titles I wouldn't be surprised if it dated to the bicentennial, though the film stock looked awfully clean and non-faded for that. It was a little tour of the various major eras of the fort as explained by one guy per era, reenacting what a typical soldier of the time might see and might say to an unknown party poking around while the fort was under fire, if he had no sense of discretion or secrecy or suspicion whatsoever. The framing device was a guy in late-40s garb driving a jeep up to unlock and lock up the fort who certainly didn't remind me every single second he was on frame of John Cleese doing his British Army Guy in the slightest.

We prowled around the fort --- well, my father, bunny_hugger, and I prowled around; my mother raced through as if she had another appointment --- and particularly were delighted by some of the powder rooms and such. My father noticed how deeply the rooms echoed, better than the shower for singing, and before we knew it we heard him singing out, ``Way Down Upon The Swanee River'', which he recorded on his iPhone and sent to his Facebook. ``Crazy Old Man Singing At Fort Moultrie'' could be the hot new YouTube channel, so, you heard about it here first, before it even quite exists.

Histories of the Civil War, doing their best to get to the exciting part where shooting happens, tend to mention Major Anderson's withdrawal from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter vaguely if it at all. Actually being on sight made obvious why Anderson had to withdraw, though: besides Fort Moultrie having walls in spots as much as twenty inches above the surrounding ground, it's terrifically easy to walk up to from the mainland. The informational movie mentioned the threat of how a mob from Charleston could move out and overwhelm them. So I understand this action rather more immediately now.

Trivia: After driving the organized American forces out of South Carolina, British forces captured Charlotte, North Carolina, on the 26th of September, 1780. Source: America's Wars, Alan Axelrod.

Currently Reading: Powering Apollo: James E Webb of NASA, W Henry Lambright.

PS: Reading the Comics, January 17, 2015: Finding Your Place Edition, a bunch of mathematics comics from a fairly busy week. Second of these since the last roundup, in case you're not following these on either the RSS feed or the Livejournal Syndication version.