South Carolina in 1861 - Charleston, Fort Sumter, Fort Moultrie

This plan of Charleston harbor and its defenses was drawn by the Scottish geographer Alexander Keith Johnston together with the American geologist Henry Darwin Rogers for their Atlas of the United States of North America, first issued in 1857 and republished in this separate Charleston sheet by the London firm of Edward Stanford on the first of February 1861. The atlas was an unusual three-way transatlantic collaboration, a Scot, an American, and an Englishman working together, and this sheet's forts are picked out in printed red against the harbor's black-and-white grid, a targeted use of color rather than an all-over wash. It covers the city of Charleston, South Carolina, at the exact moment secession crisis tensions were peaking, published just weeks before the first shots of the Civil War would be fired in this very harbor.

Fort Sumter is marked out in the harbor's mouth, the fortification that would become the flashpoint of the war within weeks of this sheet's publication. Fort Moultrie appears on Sullivan's Island guarding the harbor's northern approach, and Fort Johnson is shown on James Island to the south, together forming the ring of defenses the map was evidently drawn to highlight. The Cooper River is traced along the city's eastern edge, with Charleston's dense street grid laid out between the river and the harbor it commands. Taken together, the red-marked forts and the tightly gridded port town capture Charleston as both a commercial harbor and a fortress city on the edge of war.

It's a pointed choice for anyone with Charleston or Lowcountry family history, a collector of Civil War-era harbor plans, or a history buff marking the anniversary of Sumter itself. Our store also carries Charleston as it appeared alongside Savannah in Colton's 1856 city-plan sheet: that map is a paired Savannah-and-Charleston view from an American world atlas with no fort detail, while this 1861 Johnston/Rogers sheet is a dedicated, British-published harbor-and-forts plan issued on the brink of war. It's available unframed in a full range of sizes, from a compact study print to a larger statement piece.