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This chapter discusses the renovation of Fort Sumter within the recentering of the Charleston economy on tourism. The shaping of the Fort Sumter National Monument was the single largest restoration project of mid-twentieth-century Charleston. While federal historical interpretation initially reinforced the landscape of Confederate memory built up in the city since the death of John C. Calhoun, intersectional partnership also heightened the vulnerability of the Lost Cause to a national ideological upheaval. The centennial anniversary of the first shots of the war exploded into a symbolically significant episode in the acceleration of the civil rights revolution. The ensuing transformation of Civil War memory would repudiate the Charleston Renaissance premises for the veneration of Fort Sumter.

This chapter focuses on the Hunley submarine, which had sunk nose-first into the floor of Charleston Harbor on October 15, 1863, taking its captain and crew with it. The Hunley became one of the most important vehicles through which Confederate memory addressed the process of technological change. The insistence of millennial Confederate memory that the Hunley was “literally fifty years ahead of her time” closely resembled the simultaneous steampunk fad, which used the mid-nineteenth century as a standpoint from which to imagine futuristic contraptions historically realized in later periods and different forms. Adapted from a steam boiler, the hand-cranked vessel aptly fit the pseudo-Victorian aesthetic. The promotion of the fish-boat addressed a culture enthralled by new devices for communication and entertainment. Once more aligning commemoration with technological change, South Carolina relaunched the H. L. Hunley as the flagship of the steampunk Confederacy.

Bragg’s troubled Civil War career foreshadowed a troubled post-war life. He and Elise had lost their profitable sugar plantation and more than 100 slaves in Louisiana, confiscated by the Federals. They initially lived on his brother John’s plantation near Lowndesboro, Alabama. Then Bragg flitted from one job to another, working as an engineer in harbour improvements and for railroad companies. He agreed to become an agent and regional manager for a life insurance company only because Jefferson Davis was the president of the firm. Bragg contemplated moving to Egypt but instead remained in the South. He continued to be a staunch Confederate, critical of Reconstruction. Bragg mourned the demise of the slavery-based plantation economy. He was eager to have the story of his Civil War career told from his own viewpoint although reluctant to write it himself. His efforts to find someone who could do it for him failed. Although his friend, Jefferson Davis, wrote supportively of him in his two volume history of the Confederacy, Bragg had no real champions of the pen and his effort to shape Confederate memory never bore fruit. Bragg died of heart failure in Galveston, Texas on September, 27, 1876.