It became apparent that the Confederate batteries had begun firing “hot shot,” cannonballs heated in furnaces. One or two balls came to rest inside the fort, where one of them set a man’s bed on fire. At about nine o’clock, a shell from a mortar burst through the roof of the officers quarters. Heavy smoke rose from within. The location of the fire was too exposed to allow men to effectively fight it, Foster realized. He alerted Anderson that if the fire continued to burn out of control, it could detonate the fort’s cache of gunpowder, the thirty thousand pounds stored in barrels in Sumter’s
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