Charleston, SC - Day 1

We left the mosquitos behind and headed into Charleston intending to find our way to Fort Sumter.  Luck was on our side when we found the tourist office in Mt. Pleasant, on the north side of Charleston.  We bought our tickets for the boat as Ft. Sumter is about two miles out in the harbor.  The god of lost travelers was smiling on us again when the tourism people informed us that also in the harbor docked near our Ft. Sumter boat was the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier and the USS Laffey, a destroyer.  We bought tickets to tour both.

The first Lexington was sunk during the Battle of Midway early in WWII.  Almost immediately, a new carrier by that name was built and pressed into service in the war.  After WWII, she saw service in Vietnam before retiring.

The Laffey has just as compelling a story.  She saw sevice in the Pacific in WWII. During the invasion of Okinawa, the crew found themselves alone and under attack from 22 Japanese kamikase pilots.  The ship received help from carrier based fighter planes but was still hit by 6 Japanese planes and 4 bombs and, amazingly enough, survived.  The Laffey went on to service in Korea and was used to track Soviet submarines during the 1970's.

Okay, time now to do what we came here for - visit the site of the beginning of the Civil War.  South Carolina was the first southern state to secede, in 1861.  Ft. Sumter, in Charleston harbor, remained a Union outpost and a huge thorn in the side of the south.  President Lincoln ordered a ship to deliver supplies to Ft. Sumter and that was too much for the newly seceded South Carolina fire-eaters.  They began a two day bombardment of the fort and the war was on.