Confederate Gold and Silver Read Online Free PDF Page A

Anderson spoke to them. “If we never meet in this world again, God grant that we may meet in the next.” It is still hard to imagine such civility, demonstrated at times from both sides as they met during last ditch efforts to avoid a war, could not have prevented it from occurring. It was a war which could have been avoided by men who should have worked harder. It would soon prove to be a war that lasted far longer than anyone could have predicted. It would have terrible results and would devastate both sections of the country, particularly the South, in the years that followed.
    Charleston’s motto ‘She guards her buildings, her customs, and her laws’ would prove to be true in very short time after the Southern negotiators left Fort Sumter. Soon the Confederate Army, at around 4:30 a.m., on April 12, 1861, fired what is thought to be the first official shot of the war, a shot fired upon the garrison of Union soldiers stationed at Fort Sumter. Over the next many hours, approximately five thousand rounds of cannon fire would be traded between the two sides. When the firing slowed down, and as many of Charleston’s citizens still stood on the roofs of homes close to Charleston Harbor watching the exchange of cannon fire between the fort and the Confederate artillery batteries which lined the harbor, the flagpole at Fort Sumter saw a flag soon replaced by a newly created one. The flag of the Confederacy would fly there for some time before the flag of the United States was again raised there. On April 14 th , with supplies running low, Major Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter to the Confederacy. Nearby, two other smaller Union pieces of property, Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney, sat off in the harbor, having already been seized by the Confederacy. Having lost Fort Sumter to the Confederacy, the Union would soon lose another important asset as well. Six days later Colonel Robert E. Lee would resign his commission in the United States army; a resignation that would cause him to be remembered by the ages.
    Almost five weeks prior to the first hostile shot being fired, the Confederacy had called for one hundred thousand volunteers to help wage war against the North. Now Lincoln would do the same. The day following the fort’s surrender, he would call for seventy-five thousand volunteers to help put down the Confederacy. Neither of those first two calls for volunteers would be the last one each side would make.
    After Brigadier General Beauregard’s troops had fired on the fort, the Confederacy, at first comprised of South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida, soon would be joined by several other Southern states. In short order, the states of Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia would join the Confederacy. As the Confederacy grew, they would continue to seize other federal property in the South. Among those properties was the United States Mint in New Orleans. Within the mint was a large amount of Union gold and silver. That gold and silver would also be seized by the Confederacy to help finance their war efforts.
    The gold and silver would soon be moved from New Orleans across the Confederate States of America. It would take another one hundred and fifty years for most of it to be found.

Summer, 2011

3 A New Friend. 
    “In my mind I’m gone to Carolina, can’t you see the sunshine,
can’t you just feel the moonshine  . . .” James Taylor—Lyrics to ‘Carolina In My Mind’
    The move to Murrells Inlet had gone as smoothly for Paul and Donna as any move could go when you pull up stakes and move over eight hundred miles away from your family and friends and the world you knew. All in all it had gone fairly well. Despite the usual problems associated with such a move, such as trying to find the essentials they needed to live with, much of which was still packed away within the moving boxes stacked in their garage, they were settling nicely into their new home. They