Autograph letter signed by T.W.G. Inglet (1839-1910). Fort Sumter, South Carolina, 2 September 1863. 2 pages, 9 1/8 x 13 7/8 in., on partly printed military abstract form. 

A rare letter from the Bombardment of Fort Sumter during the Second Battle of Charleston Harbor. The author is T.W.G. Inglet of Spalding County, Georgia, of the 28th Georgia Infantry, who was stationed inside the fort. The Confederates garrisoned within the fort were short of supplies, as evidenced by Inglet's paper - an unused Article Transfer abstract form.  

He writes home to his wife with details of his ordeal: "I am in Fort Sumter, and so is Dennis and W.H. and L. Cliett. We are all volunteered to defend it. The Yankees shell it day and night with four hundred pounders. The fort is tore all to pieces and not a gun on it for service. I don't sleep day nor night. Last night six Monitors came up and shelled us all night with shells fifteen inches through, but no one got hurt. Last Sunday three got wounded but not bad. On the 29th, four Monitors came up and Fort Moultrie made them draw off, and we hit one of them 27 times or that is Fort Moultrie did. Hurt one of them very bad last Sunday night. The 23rd Ga. Regt. and a North Carolina Regt. was coming off of Morris Island on a Steamboat and got down too far towards the Yankees, and Fort Moultrie fired on them and struck the boat three times and killed a good many of them, and they all jumped off, but a few and swam to Fort Sumter. It was a half a mile and some got drowned."

Inglet enlisted into Company C of the 28th Georgia Infantry on 10 September 1861 and was elected corporal on 1 August 1863. He was present for all of the major battles of the regiment, including Williamsburg, Seven Pines, and the Seven Days Battles, where he was wounded in the left hand, necessitating the amputation of two fingers. The regiment continued in the Maryland Campaign, recording 73 casualties before engaging at Antietam (Sharpsburg), Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, all before he penned this letter.

Inglet and others from his regiment had volunteered to form part of the Fort Sumter garrison from August through December 1863. He wrote this letter in the aftermath of Union General Quincy A. Gillmore's intense 7-day bombardment of Fort Sumter in late August. Gillmore wired the War Department that "Fort Sumter is a shapeless and harmless mass of ruin." The shelling, however, would continue through the end of the year. In 1864, Inglet and his companions returned to the field and participated in the fighting at the Wilderness and in the defense of Petersburg.

An incredible Sumter relic. 

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