This city, at least, was primed for war. Crews of enslaved Blacks and privileged white volunteers continued to erect and expand gun batteries and to reinforce the newly seized federal forts, Moultrie and Castle Pinckney. Volunteer soldiers marched and sang. Draft horses labored through the streets hauling gun carriages and wagons filled with ammunition to the city’s wharf for transport to the batteries rising on the harbor islands. Where once enslaved people from Africa arrived by the hundreds, bewildered and ill after enduring the horrors of the Middle Passage, their captive descendants now
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