Fort Sumter fired upon - Apr 12, 1861 - HISTORY.com Fort Sumter fired upon Publisher A+E Networks The American Civil War begins when Confederates fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. The fort had been the source of tension between the Union and Confederacy for several months. After South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, the state demanded the fort be turned over but Union officials refused. A supply ship, the “Star of the West,” tried to reach Fort Sumter on January 9, but the shore batteries opened fire and drove it away. For both sides, Sumter was a symbol of sovereignty. The Union could not allow it to fall to the Confederates, although throughout the Deep South other federal installations had been seized. For South Carolinians, secession meant little if the Yankees still held the stronghold. The issue hung in the air when Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, stating in his inauguration address: “You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.” Lincoln did not try to send reinforcements but he did send in food.

This way, Lincoln could characterize the operation as a humanitarian mission, bringing, in his words, “food for hungry men.” He sent word to the Confederates in Charleston of his intentions on April 6. The Confederate Congress at Montgomery, Alabama, had decided on February 15 that Sumter and other forts must be acquired “either by negotiation or force.” Negotiation, it seemed, had failed. The Confederates demanded surrender of the fort, but Major Robert Anderson, commander of Fort Sumter, refused. At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, the Confederate guns opened fire. For thirty-three hours, the shore batteries lobbed 4,000 shells in the direction of the fort. Finally, the garrison inside the battered fort raised the white flag. No one on either side had been killed, although two Union soldiers died when the departing soldiers fired a gun salute, and some cartridges exploded prematurely. It was a nearly bloodless beginning to America’s bloodiest war.

Related Videos Fort Sumter: How Civil War Began With a Bloodless Battle Fort Sumter: How Civil War Began With a Bloodless Battle A mule was its only fatality, but the Battle of Fort Sumter nevertheless led to the United States' deadliest war, as historian Mark Jenkins recounts. View Images Historian Mark Collins Jenkins. Photograph by Mark Thiessen, NGS. During the winter of 1860-61, the citizens of Charleston (map) , South Carolina , were so sure that no war would follow their recent move to secede from the United States of America that the fiery editor of the Charleston Mercury supposedly vowed to eat the bodies of all who might be slain as a result. Related Content In This Corner of Turkey, Stories of Conflict, Loss, and Hope Not to be outdone, former U.S. Senator James Chesnut, Jr., promised to drink any blood spilled. After all, "a lady's thimble," as a common saying had it, "will hold all the blood that will be shed." Perhaps the most visible reminder to Charlestonians of the U.S.

government's dominion over them was in their harbor, where atop the lonely bulk of Fort Sumter the Stars and Stripes still flew ( pictures of Fort Sumter before and during the Civil War ). The November election of the notably antislavery Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States had so angered seven slave-owning states that they had chosen to secede and form their own union. Roughly five months later, on April 12, 1861, decades of high-flown oratory were reduced to a struggle for that pile of brick and mortar. (See National Geographic Traveler magazine's top ten U.S. Civil War sites .) Fort Sumter in First Line of Defense Fort Sumter was only one in a series of imposing masonry fortresses, decades in the building, which studded the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts from Maine to Texas. The nation's single biggest public expenditure and traditionally its first lines of defense, these symbols of sovereignty once carried an aura of impregnability—from without, if not from within. During the four months leading up to Lincoln's Inauguration, the seceding states, one after another, seized federal forts, arsenals, and customs houses within their borders.

There was little to oppose the breakaway forces, a caretaker and a guard or two comprising many of the garrisons. Most of the 16,000 or so regular Army soldiers had been posted to the western frontier to protect settlers against the perceived threat from American Indians. Civil War Inevitable? On March 4, 1861, Lincoln was inaugurated, promising the seceding states that he would use force only "to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places" belonging to the federal government. The stage was set for the inevitable showdown. As of March, only four Southern forts were still under federal control. Two of them, Forts Taylor and Jefferson, were remote way stations in the Florida Keys. They would remain in government hands, useful as prisons and coaling stations throughout the four years of the coming Civil War. The other two federal forts, however, became pawns in a game of war or peace. The Civil War might as easily have erupted at Fort Pickens, outside Pensacola, Florida, as at Fort Sumter. Seen as easier to defend than smaller bastions nearby, both forts had been hastily garrisoned early in the secession crisis.

(Read "Civil War Battlefields" in National Geographic magazine.) Though the plight of both garrisons remained in the public eye, Fort Pickens stood to the outside of Pensacola Bay, while Fort Sumter was positioned in the middle of Charleston Harbor, surrounded by hostile batteries. Sumter, therefore, became a symbol of contested sovereignty. Neither the new President nor the new Confederacy could afford to lose face by surrendering the Charleston fort. The only question was, who would shoot first? In early January the South Carolinians had actually done so, turning away the Star of the West, a federal supply ship, with gunfire. But those were more or less warning shots that kicked up plumes of spray but caused no damage. (See Civil War reenactment pictures .) The Battle of Fort Sumter As March turned to April, Lincoln, having dispatched another relief fleet to supply the beleaguered and increasingly hungry garrison, was willing to shoot his way through if need be. Lincoln soon thought better of it, however, instead informing the rebellious Southerners that the fleet would carry only supplies into Sumter. The warships would remain outside the harbor.

Should the Confederates choose to fire on this "mission of humanity," as Lincoln called the supply run, they would then become the aggressor. The Confederate government, knowing that its claims to sovereignty depended on no "foreign" power occupying any of its coastal forts, decided to act before the relief expedition arrived. Confederate leaders, therefore, ordered Charleston's chief military officer, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, a flamboyant Louisiana Creole, to demand Fort Sumter's surrender. Should that be refused, he was to open fire on the stronghold. James Chesnut, Jr., the former U.S. senator­ who'd pledged to drink the blood of casualties, was one of two emissaries who delivered the ultimatum to an ashen-faced Anderson at 3:25 a.m. on April 12, 1861—150 years ago today. (Related: "Civil War at 150: Expect Subdued Salutes, Rising Voices." ) An hour later a signaling shot curved high in the sky and burst directly over the fort. A cacophonous barrage erupted, as 43 guns and mortars opened up on Sumter.

The pyrotechnic uproar had soon summoned all Charleston to the rooftops, where the citizens spent a sleepless night, watching the arcs of mortar shells. They spent the following day deafened by the din, peering through the smoke. According to Union accounts, the noise was indescribable within the Fort Sumter's brick gun enclosures, but Anderson's men gamely returned fire, discharging about a thousand rounds as opposed to the almost four thousand shells that smashed into their walls or dropped into their courtyard. Fires were devouring the barracks and edging dangerously close to the powder magazine by the time the white flag came fluttering up Sumter's flagstaff, some 34 hours after the bombardment had begun. The opening gunfire of the Civil War—the first shots exchanged in anger between the United States and the Confederate States—then fell silent. ( Interactive Map: Battlefields of the Civil War. ) As the smoke cleared the toll of battle was taken, and it amounted to one mule. Not a single person had been killed (though one man soon died in an accidental explosion). The South had indeed won the contest over that symbol of sovereignty without spilling enough blood to fill a thimble. Or had it?

Fort Sumter Battle a "Bolt From the Sky" By firing first, the Confederates had allowed Lincoln to claim the high ground. On April 15, some 75,000 Union loyalists volunteered to help "repossess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union." The Northern states fell in behind Lincoln, while Virginia , North Carolina , and Tennessee duly tumbled into the Confederacy. But the Battle of Fort Sumter was a call to arms for both sides. The great convulsion had come at last, releasing stresses accumulated over generations of sectional strife. "We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky," wrote the ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and the "cry now is for war, vigorous war, war to the bitter end. ... " Huge, flag-waving crowds gathered in cities and towns across the country, flushed with a kind of mass hysteria, a contagious abandon, an almost suicidal zeal.

"It is a war of purification," claimed Virginia's Governor Henry Wise, "You want war, blood, fire, to purify you." Hundreds of thousands of young militiamen, parading by torchlight to the dazzle of fireworks and the music of bands, soon marched into the crucible. Many of them would never return, for the war that was ignited that April night would eventually cost nearly 620,000 men their lives—2 percent of the United States' population at the time, and nearly as many as those killed in all the country's other wars combined. The shooting was practically over by April 14, 1865, when—four years to the day after the Stars and Stripes had been lowered in defeat—the U.S. flag again rose over the rubble of Fort Sumter. But one more bullet found its victim that night. While watching a play in Washington, D.C.'s Ford's Theater, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

The dislocations of the Civil War "wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character," as writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner put it in 1873, "that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations." Nearly five generations have now passed since the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, and still their reverberations are being felt. Mark Collins Jenkins, a historian formerly with the National Geographic Society, is co-author of the new book The Civil War: A Visual History . MORE FORT SUMTER AND CIVIL WAR COVERAGE The Battle of Fort Sumter Summary & Facts | Civilwar.org Animated Map » The Problem in Charleston Harbor Learn more about Fort Sumter and the Opening Shots of the Civil War in this feature story from our Hallowed Ground Magazine. Read the Article » Voices of Secession Learn More About the Long Secession Winter and the Events Leading Up to the Beginning of the American Civil War Battle of Fort Sumter - The American Civil War The American Civil War April 12-14, 1861 On March 5, 1861, the day after his inauguration as president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln received a message from Maj.

Robert Anderson, commander of the U.S. troops holding Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The message stated that there was less than a six week supply of food left in the fort. Attempts by the Confederate government to settle its differences with the Union were spurned by Lincoln, and the Confederacy felt it could no longer tolerate the presense of a foreign force in its territory. Believing a conflict to be inevitable, Lincoln ingeniously devised a plan that would cause the Confederates to fire the first shot and thus, he hoped, inspire the states that had not yet seceded to unite in the effort to restore the Union. On April 8, Lincoln notified Gov. Francis Pickens of South Carolina that he would attempt to resupply the fort. The Confederate commander at Charleston, Gen.P.G.T. Beauregard, was ordered by the Confederate government to demand the evacuation of the fort and if refused, to force its evacuation.

On April 11, General Beauregard delivered the ultimatum to Anderson, who replied, “Gentlemen, if you do not batter the fort to pieces about us, we shall be starved out in a few days.” On direction of the Confederate government in Montgomery, Beauregard notified Anderson that if he would state the time of his evacuation, the Southern forces would hold their fire. Anderson replied that he would evacuate by noon on April 15 unless he received other instructions or additional supplies from his government. (The supply ships were expected before that time.) Told that his answer was unacceptable and that Beauregard would open fire in one hour, Anderson shook the hands of the messengers and said in parting, “If we do not meet again in this world, I hope we may meet in the better one.” At 4:30 A.M. on April 12, 1861, 43 Confederate guns in a ring around Fort Sumter began the bombardment that initiated the bloodiest war in American history. In her Charleston hotel room, diarist Mary Chesnet heard the opening shot. “I sprang out of bed.” she wrote.

“And on my knees–prostrate–I prayed as I never prayed before.” The shelling of Fort Sumter from the batteries ringing the harbor awakened Charleston’s residents, who rushed out into the predawn darkness to watch the shells arc over the water and burst inside the fort. Mary Chesnut went to the roof of her hotel, where the men were cheering the batteries and the women were praying and crying. Her husband, Col. James Chesnut, had delivered Beauregard’s message to the fort. “I knew my husband was rowing around in a boat somewhere in that dark bay,” she wrote, “and who could tell what each volley accomplished of death and destruction?” Inside the fort, no effort was made to return the fire for more than two hours. The fort’s supply of ammunition was ill-suited for the task at hand, and because there were no fuses for their explosive shells, only solid shot could be used against the Rebel batteries. The fort’s biggest guns, heavy Columbiads and eight-inch howitzers, were on the top tier of the fort and there were no masonry casemates to protect the gunners, so Anderson opted to use only the casemated guns on the lower tier.

About 7:00 A.M., Capt. Abner Doubleday, the fort’s second in command, was given the honor of firing the first shot in defense of the fort. The firing continued all day, the federals firing slowly to conserve ammunition. At night the fire from the fort stopped, but the confederates still lobbed an occasional shell in Sumter. Although they had been confined inside Fort Sumter for more than three months, unsupplied and poorly nourished, the men of the Union garrison vigorously defended their post from the Confederate bombardment that began on the morning of April 12, 1861. Several times, red-hod cannonballs had lodged in the fort’s wooden barracks and started fires. But each time, the Yankee soldiers, with a little help from an evening rainstorm, had extinguished the flames. The Union garrison managed to return fire all day long, but because of a shortage of cloth gunpowder cartridges, they used just six of their cannon and fired slowly. The men got little sleep that night as the Confederate fire continued, and guards kept a sharp lookout for a Confederate attack or relief boats.

Union supply ships just outside the harbor had been spotted by the garrison, and the men were disappointed that the ships made no attempt to come to their relief. After another breakfast of rice and salt pork on the morning of April 13, the exhausted Union garrison again began returning cannon fire, but only one round every 10 minutes. Soon the barracks again caught fire from the Rebel hot shot, and despite the men’s efforts to douse the flames, by 10:00 A.M. the barracks were burning out of control. Shortly thereafter, every wooden structure in the fort was ablaze, and a magazine containing 300 pounds of gunpowder was in danger of exploding. “We came very near being stifled with the dense livid smoke from the burning buildings,” recalled one officer. “The men lay prostrate on the ground, with wet hankerchiefs over their mouths and eyes, gasping for breath.” The Confederate gunners saw the smoke and were well aware of the wild uproar they were causing in the island fort. They openly showed their admiration for the bravery of the Union garrison by cheering and applauding when, after a prolonged stillness, the garrison sent a solid shot screaming in their direction.

“The crasing of the shot, the bursting of the shells, the falling of the walls, and the roar of the flames, made a pandemonium of the fort,” wrote Capt. Abner Doubleday on the afternoon of April 13, 1861. He was one of the Union garrison inside Fort Sumter in the middle of South Carolina’s Charleston harbor. The fort’s large flag staff was hit by fire from the surrounding Confederate batteries, and the colors fell to the ground. Lt. Norman J. Hall braved shot and shell to race across the parade ground to retrieve the flag. Then he and two others found a substitute flagpole and raised the Stars and Stripes once more above the fort. Once the flag came down, Gen. P.G.T. Beaugregard, who commanded the Confederate forces, sent three of his aides to offer the fort’s commander, Union Maj. Robert Anderson, assistance in extinguishing the fires. Before they arrived they saw the garrison’s flag raised again, and then it was replaced with a white flag. Arriving at the fort, Beaugregard’s aides were informed that the garrison had just surrendered to Louis T. Wigfall, a former U.S.

senator from Texas. Wigfall, completely unauthorized, had rowed out to the fort from Morris Island, where he was serving as a volunteer aide, and received the surrender of the fort. The terms were soon worked out, and Fort Sumter, after having braved 33 hours of bombardment, its food and ammunition nearly exhausted, fell on April 13, 1861, to the curshing fire power of the Rebels. Miraculously, no one on either side had been killed or seriously wounded. The generous terms of surrender allowed Anderson to run up his flag for a hunderd-gun salute before he and his men evacuated the fort the next day. The salute began at 2:00 P.M. on April 14, but was cut short to 50 guns after an accidental explosion killed one of the gunners and mortally wounded another. Carrying their tattered banner, the men marched out of the fort and boarded a boat that ferried them to the Union ships outside the harbor. They were greeted as heroes on their return to the North.

Sidebar Fort Sumter - American Civil War - HISTORY.com Google Fort Sumter: Construction and Design Fort Sumter was first built in the wake of the War of 1812 (1812-1815), which had highlighted the United States’ lack of strong coastal defenses. Named for Revolutionary War general and South Carolina native Thomas Sumter, Fort Sumter was one of nearly 50 forts built as part of the so-called Third System, a coastal defense program implemented by Congress in 1817. The three-tiered, five-sided fort’s coastal placement was designed to allow it to control access to the vital Charleston Harbor. While the island itself was only 2.4 acres in size, the fort was built to accommodate a garrison of 650 soldiers and 135 artillery pieces. Did You Know? There were no casualties during the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter at the start of the American Civil War. The only Union deaths came during the evacuation: One soldier was killed and another mortally wounded in an accidental explosion during a planned 100-gun salute.

Construction of Fort Sumter first began in 1829 in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, on a manmade island built from thousands of tons of granite. Building ground to a halt in the 1830s amid a dispute over ownership of the stretch of the harbor, and did not resume until 1841. Like many Third System fortifications, Fort Sumter proved a costly endeavor, and construction slowed again in 1859 due to lack of funding. By 1860 the island and the outer fortifications were complete, but the fort’s interior and armaments remained unfinished. Fort Sumter: The First Battle of Fort Sumter Construction of Fort Sumter was still underway when South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860. Despite Charleston’s position as a major port, at the time only two companies of federal troops guarded the harbor. Commanded by Major Robert Anderson (1805-1871), these companies were stationed at Fort Moultrie, a dilapidated fortification facing the coastline.

Recognizing that Fort Moultrie was vulnerable to a land assault, Anderson elected to abandon it for the more easily defensible Fort Sumter on December 26, 1860. South Carolina militia forces would seize the city’s other forts shortly thereafter, leaving Fort Sumter as the lone federal outpost in Charleston. A standoff ensued until January 9, 1861, when a ship called the Star of the West arrived in Charleston with over 200 U.S. troops and supplies intended for Fort Sumter. South Carolina militia batteries fired upon the vessel as it neared Charleston Harbor, forcing it to turn back to sea. Major Anderson refused repeated calls to abandon Fort Sumter, and by March 1861 there were over 3,000 militia troops besieging his garrison. A number of other U.S. military facilities in the Deep South had already been seized, and Fort Sumter was viewed by many as one of the South’s few remaining hurdles to overcome before achieving sovereignty. With the inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) in March 1861, the situation soon escalated.

Knowing that Anderson and his men were running out of supplies, Lincoln announced his intention to send three unarmed ships to relieve Fort Sumter. Having already declared that any attempt to resupply the fort would be seen as an act of aggression, South Carolina militia forces soon scrambled to respond. On April 11, militia commander P.G.T. Beauregard (1818-1893) demanded that Anderson surrender the fort, but Anderson again refused. In response Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter shortly after 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861. U.S. Captain Abner Doubleday (1819-1893)—later famous for the myth that he invented baseball—ordered the first shots in defense of the fort a few hours later. Beauregard’s 19 coastal batteries unleashed a punishing barrage on Fort Sumter, eventually firing an estimated 3,000 shots at the citadel in 34 hours. By Saturday, April 13, cannon fire had broken through the fortress’s five-foot-thick brick walls, causing fires inside the post.

With his stores of ammunition depleted, Anderson was forced to surrender the fort shortly after 2 p.m. in the afternoon. No Union troops had been killed during the bombardment, but two men died the following day in an explosion that occurred during an artillery salute held before the U.S. evacuation. The bombardment of Fort Sumter would play a major part in triggering the Civil War. In the days following the assault, Lincoln issued a call for Union volunteers to quash the rebellion, while more Southern states including Virginia , North Carolina and Tennessee cast their lot with the Confederacy. Fort Sumter: Later Civil War Engagements Following Beauregard’s bombardment in 1861, Confederate forces occupied Fort Sumter and used it to marshal a defense of Charleston Harbor. Once it was completed and better armed, Fort Sumter allowed the Confederates to create a valuable hole in the Union blockade of the Atlantic seaboard. The first Union assault on Fort Sumter came in April 1863, when Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont (1803-1865) attempted a naval attack on Charleston.

Commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, Du Pont arrived in Charleston with a fleet of nine ironclad warships, seven of which were updated versions of the famed USS Monitor. While Du Pont had hoped to recapture Fort Sumter—by then a symbol of the Confederate rebellion—his attack was poorly coordinated and met with unfavorable weather conditions. In collaboration with Fort Sumter, Confederate batteries commanded by P.G.T. Beauregard hammered the ironclad fleet with artillery fire, and underwater mines posed a constant threat to the ships’ hulls. Outgunned and unable to properly maneuver in heavy currents, Du Pont’s fleet eventually withdrew from the harbor after taking over 500 hits by Confederate guns. Only one Union soldier was killed during the battle, but one of the ironclads, the Keokuk, sank the next day. Five Confederates were killed during the attack, but the damage to Fort Sumter was soon repaired and its defenses improved. Confederate soldiers even managed to salvage one of the Keokuk’s 11-inch Dahlgren guns and mount it on the fortress.

In July 1863 Union troops laid siege to Fort Wagner, a valuable post on Morris Island near the mouth of Charleston Harbor. After being met with heavy fire from Fort Sumter, Union General Quincy Adams Gillmore (1825-1888) turned his guns on the fort and unleashed a devastating seven-day bombardment. On September 8 a force of nearly 400 Union troops attempted to land at Fort Sumter and capture the post by force. Union Rear Admiral John Dahlgren (1809-1870) mistakenly believed the fort was manned by a skeleton crew, but the landing party was met by over 300 Confederate infantry, who easily repulsed the assault. Following the failed infantry attack, Union forces on Morris Island recommenced their bombing campaign on Fort Sumter. Over the next 15 months, Union artillery effectively leveled Fort Sumter, eventually firing nearly 50,000 projectiles at the fort between September 1863 and February 1865. Despite suffering over 300 casualties from the Union bombardments, the beleaguered Confederate garrison managed to retain control of the fort until February 1865.

Only when Union General William T. Sherman was poised to capture Charleston did the Confederates finally evacuate. Union forces would reclaim Fort Sumter on February 22, 1865. Robert A. Anderson and Abner Doubleday, the two commanding officers from the original siege of Fort Sumter, would both return to the fortress on April 14, 1865, for a flag raising ceremony. Fort Sumter: Post-Civil War Use After the Civil War the derelict Fort Sumter was rebuilt and partially redesigned. It would see little use during the 1870s and 1880s and was eventually reduced to serving as a lighthouse station for Charleston Harbor. With the start of the Spanish-American War (1898), the fortress was rearmed and once again used as a coastal defense installation. It would later see service during both World War I (1914-18) and World War II (1939-45). In 1948 Fort Sumter was decommissioned as a military post and turned over to the National Park Service. It now attracts over 750,000 visitors every year.

Tags Attack on Fort Sumter Began the Civil War in 1861 By Robert McNamara Updated February 29, 2016. The shelling of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 marked the beginning of the American Civil War. With the booming of cannons over the harbor in Charleston, South Carolina, the secession crisis gripping the country escalated into a shooting war. The attack on the fort was the culmination of a simmering conflict in which a small garrison of Union troops in South Carolina found themselves isolated when the state seceded from the Union. The action at Fort Sumter lasted less than two days and had no great tactical significance. And casualties were minor. But the symbolism was enormous on both sides. Once Fort Sumter was fired upon there was no turning back. The North and the South were at war. The Crisis Began With Lincoln's Election in 1860 Following the election of Abraham Lincoln , the candidate of the anti-slavery Republican Party , in 1860, the state of South Carolina announced its intention to secede from the Union in December 1860.

Declaring itself independent of the United States, the state government demanded that federal troops leave. continue reading below our video Major Battles of the Civil War Anticipating trouble, the administration of the outgoing president, James Buchanan , had ordered a reliable U.S. Army officer, Major Robert Anderson, to Charleston in late November 1860 to command the small outpost of federal troops guarding the harbor. Major Anderson realized that his small garrison at Fort Moultrie was in danger as it could easily be overrun by infantry. On the night of December 26, 1860, Anderson surprised even members of his own staff by ordering a move to a fort situated on an island in Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter had been built after the War of 1812 to protect the city of Charleston from foreign invasion, and it was designed to repel a naval attack, not a bombardment from the city itself. But Major Anderson felt it was the safest place in which to place his command, which numbered less than 150 men. The secessionist government of South Carolina was outraged by Anderson's move to Fort Sumter and demanded that he vacate the fort. Demands that all federal troops leave South Carolina intensified.

It was obvious that Major Anderson and his men couldn't hold out for long at Fort Sumter, so the Buchanan administration sent a merchant ship to Charleston to bring provisions to the fort. The ship, Star of the West, was fired on by secessionist shore batteries on January 9, 1861, and was unable to reach the fort. The Crisis at Fort Sumter Intensified While Major Anderson and his men were isolated at Fort Sumter, often cut off from any communication with their own government in Washington, DC, events were escalating elsewhere. Abraham Lincoln traveled from Illinois to Washington for his inauguration. It is believed that a plot to assassinate him on the way was foiled. Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861 , and was soon made aware of the seriousness of the crisis at Fort Sumter. Told that the fort would run out of provisions, Lincoln ordered ships of the U.S. Navy to sail to Charleston and supply the fort. The newly formed Confederate government kept up demands that Major Anderson surrender the fort and leave Charleston with his men. Anderson refused, and at 4:30 a.m.

on April 12, 1861, Confederate cannon positioned at various points on the mainland began shelling Fort Sumter. The Battle of Fort Sumter The shelling by Confederates from several positions surrounding Fort Sumter went unanswered until after daylight, when Union gunners began returning fire. Both sides exchanged cannon fire throughout the day of April 12, 1861. By nightfall the pace of the cannons had slowed, and a heavy rain pelted the harbor. When morning dawned clear the cannons roared again, and fires began to break out at Fort Sumter. With the fort in ruins, and with supplies running out, Major Anderson was forced to surrender. Under the surrender terms, the federal troops at Fort Sumter would essentially pack up and sail to a northern port. On the afternoon of April 13, Major Anderson ordered a white flag to be raised over Fort Sumter. The attack on Fort Sumter had produced no combat casualties, though two federal troops died during a freak accident at a ceremony after the surrender when a cannon misfired. The federal troops were able to board one of the U.S.

Navy ships which had been sent to bring supplies to the fort, and they sailed to New York City. Upon arrival in New York, Major Anderson learned that he was considered a national hero for having defended the fort and the national flag at Fort Sumter. Impact of the Attack on Fort Sumter The citizens of the North were outraged by the attack on Fort Sumter. And Major Anderson, with the flag that had flown over the fort, appeared at a massive rally in New York City's Union Square on April 20, 1861. The New York Times estimated the crowd at more than 100,000 people. Major Anderson also toured the northern states, recruiting troops. In the South, feelings also ran high. The men who fired the cannons at Fort Sumter were considered heroes, and the newly formed Confederate government was emboldened to form an army and plan for war. While the action at Fort Sumter had not amounted to much militarily, the symbolism of it was enormous, and intense feelings over what had happened propelled the nation into a conflict that would not end for four long and bloody years. Fort Sumter National Monument (U.S.

National Park Service) Contact Us Where the American Civil War Began Decades of growing strife between North and South erupted in civil war on April 12, 1861, when Confederate artillery opened fire on this Federal fort in Charleston Harbor. Fort Sumter surrendered 34 hours later. Union forces would try for nearly four years to take it back. Much More than Brick and Mortar Loading the player... Warfare History Network » Firing on Fort Sumter: the Start of Civil War Firing on Fort Sumter: the Start of Civil War Home Daily Civil War Firing on Fort Sumter: the Start of Civil War Firing on Fort Sumter: the Start of Civil War • May 13, 2014 Despite numerous attempts to deescalate the situation on both sides, Fort Sumter was fired upon in April 1861, marking the start of the American Civil War.

by Al Hemingway Shortly after midnight on the morning of April 12, 1861, four men in a rowboat made their way across the pitch-black harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, toward Fort Sumter, an unfinished and architecturally insignificant masonry fort three miles out from the city where the harbor meets the Atlantic Ocean. For three of the men, it was their second trip of the day to the pentagonal-shaped building defiantly flying the Stars and Stripes above its ramparts. A Warning to Major Anderson Although the four men headed toward Sumter were self-professed gentlemen—three from Charleston high society, the fourth an aristocratic Virginian—this was no social call. They were there as emissaries of the newly fledged Confederate States of America, born the previous December inside the Carolina Institute Hall in Charleston, where the Ordinance of Secession had been signed and the Palmetto State had become the first star on the Confederacy’s new national flag. The men in the rowboat were flying a different flag at the moment, the white flag of truce. But if their visit was intended to be peaceable, their message most definitely was not. James Chesnut, Jr., Stephen D. Lee, Alexander R.

Chisolm, and Roger A. Pryor clambered ashore at Fort Sumter that night to tell the base commander, Major Robert Anderson, that he had but one hour to surrender the fort and evacuate himself and his undersized garrison of 82 men—or else. Get to know the stories behind the statistics... Get your copy of Warfare History Network’s FREE Special Report, The Battle of Gettysburg The Kentucky-born Anderson was in an unenviable and unprecedented situation. No state had ever seceded from the Union before; whether it was even legally possible for one to do so was a constitutional question beyond Anderson’s experience or expertise. He had arrived in Charleston the previous November, not long after the election of Abraham Lincoln as the 16th president of the United States had brought Charlestonians pouring into the streets to celebrate the much-hated Lincoln’s election—not out of joy for the “black Republican’s” victory, but because it seemed beyond doubt to presage the end of the Union.

Fort Sumter’s Shortcomings and Lack of Supply Fort Sumter itself was designed to house a garrison of about 650 men and 135 cannons that were strategically placed in a three tier-style of arrangement circling the fort. The structure was 170 to 190 feet in length, and was 50 feet in height; its walls were five feet thick. The primary purpose of the installation was to strengthen the defenses along the southern coast of the United States. The construction started in 1827 but was still not finished in December 1860. Even worse, approximately half of the guns had not been delivered because of Buchanan’s downsizing of the military during his time in office. “Few guns were mounted, and these were chiefly on the lowest tier,” noted Sergeant James Chester of Company E, 1st U.S. Artillery. Chester complained that the openings cut into the walls of Sumter for the guns had not been completed on the second tier, so that only the first and third tiers could be used. Union soldiers worked diligently to build up areas of the bastion that sorely needed it. Some continued to demonstrate a positive attitude, believing that they were a match for their adversaries.

Chester, however, was a realist. He understood that the enemy had “unlimited labor and material” and that the occupants of Fort Sumter were handicapped by having access only to materials that had been stockpiled from years past. Despite the shortcomings, Anderson was ordered “to hold possession of the forts in this harbor, and if attacked you are to defend yourself to the last extremity.” Anderson did what he could. He told yet another South Carolina emissary, Colonel J. Johnston Pettigrew of the state militia, that although his (Anderson’s) sympathies were “entirely with the South,” he was sworn to do his duty as a United States officer and “cannot and will not go back.” He called his men to the parade ground, had the chaplain offer a prayer, and instructed the band to play “Hail Columbia.” The die was cast. Jefferson Davis: “Reduce the Fort” On January 11, the State of South Carolina called for the immediate surrender of Fort Sumter. Stalling for time, Anderson responded that he did not possess the authority to hand over the fort to anyone. The following day, South Carolina Governor Francis Pickens dispatched the state’s attorney general, I.W.

Hayne, to deliver a message to President Buchanan that read in part, “The demand I have made of Major Anderson, and which I now make of you, is suggested because of my earnest desire to avoid the bloodshed which a persistence in your attempt to retain the possession of that fort will cause; and which will be unavailing to secure you that possession, but induce a calamity most deeply to be deplored.” The Buchanan administration refused to budge. Pickens dispatched a party, led by the state’s attorney general, Andrew Gordon Magrath, to discuss surrender terms with Anderson. Although they tried to “persuade and alarm him,” their efforts were in vain. Anderson informed them that before he would turn Fort Sumter over to them, he would “fire the magazine and blow fort and garrison into the air.” Lines were hardening into cement on both sides. Throughout February, demands for Sumter’s capitulation continued to be sent to Anderson, who promptly denied them. Events continued apace. On February 18, Jefferson Davis resigned his seat in the Senate and was named president of the Confederate States of America. He tried to negotiate with the North by sending a peace commission, but that failed.

On March 1, Davis appointed Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard commander of all Confederate troops in the Charleston area. On March 4, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president of the United States. In a pointed nod to the people of the South, the president declared, “You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the Government, while I have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect,’ and defend’ it.” Lincoln said that violence and bloodshed would not be his policy unless forced on him by the acts of others. On that same day, he received a letter from Anderson saying that he had enough supplies to last approximately four to six weeks. After much haggling with his cabinet, especially from Secretary of State William E. Seward, who had been telling the Confederate delegates that the fort would soon be evacuated, Lincoln decided that he would make another attempt to reinforce Fort Sumter. Little did Anderson know, but Lincoln’s telegram informing him of a resupply mission had been intercepted by the Confederates.

Fearing the additional firepower from the man o’ wars in Charleston harbor, Jefferson Davis told Beauregard to “reduce the fort.” Ironically, Beauregard would order his artillerymen to begin the bombardment on Fort Sumter early the next morning against his former artillery instructor at West Point. Article Meta Data

Question: What started at Fort Sumter in April 1861?
Answer: American Civil War