The Fort Sumter Flag is a historic United States flag with a distinctive, diamond-shaped pattern of 33 stars. When the main flagpole was felled by a shot during the bombardment of Fort Sumter by Confederate forces, Peter Hart rushed to retrieve the flag and remount it on a makeshift pole. The flag was lowered by Major Robert Anderson on April 13, 1861, when he surrendered Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, at the outset of the American Civil War.