It was 150 years ago today, in the early morning of April 12, 1861, that the American Civil War officially began. This skirmish at Charleston’s Fort Sumter, then one of only two forts in the Southern states that had seceded still under federal jurisdiction, was brief and ended on April 14 with the an evacuation of federal troops and rebel Confederate victory. The photograph below shows Fort Sumter on April 14, 1861, flying the Confederate flag.
Britannica’s special feature on the Civil War Sesquicentennial, “Remembering the American Civil War,” begins with the following description of the events at Fort Sumter:
On April 11, 1861, having been informed by messengers from Pres. Abraham Lincoln that he planned to resupply Fort Sumter, the Federal outpost in the harbour of Charleston, S.C., the newly formed government of the secessionist Confederate States of America demanded the fort’s surrender. Maj. Robert Anderson, Fort Sumter’s commander, responded, “I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication, demanding the evacuation of this fort, and to say, in reply thereto, that it is a demand with which I regret that my sense of honor and my obligations to my Government prevent my compliance.” So read the report in Harper’s Weekly magazine of April 27, which continued: “Accordingly at 4:27 A.M. on 12th fire was opened from Fort Moultrie on Fort Sumter. To this Major Anderson replied with three of his barbette guns.” The exchange of fire continued throughout the day and into the next morning, when the Federal forces surrendered. “The last act in the drama of Fort Sumter has been concluded,” read the Harper’s report. “Major Anderson has evacuated, and, with his command, departed by the steamer Isabel from the harbor. He saluted his flag, and the company, then forming on the parade-ground, marched out upon the wharf, with drum and fife playing ‘Yankee Doodle.’ ” The curtain had come down on Fort Sumter, but the drama of the American Civil War was just beginning.
Though Fort Sumter was the official start of a war in which the federal armies suffered more than 630,000 casualties and the Confederates some 483,000 (including 359,000 dead on the federal side and 258,000 dead on the Confederate), it was not the first unofficial battle of the war. When the framers of the Constitution gathered in Philadelphia, they generally punted the slavery question to future generations, agreeing to both the three-fifth compromise (in which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for representation, thereby increasing the political clout of the slaveholding South) and prohibiting Congress from prohibiting the slave trade for 20 years; further compromises—the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act—all attempted to bridge the gap between North and South and forestall the possibility of Civil War.
But, with growing abolitionist sentiment in the North leading to attempts at insurrection in the South and such events as Bleeding Kansas in the mid-1850s and the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, by 1860 it appeared that all attempts to reconcile North and South had gone for naught. By February 1, 1861, only months after Lincoln’s election in November 1860, seven Southern states had seceded (South Carolina was first, on December 20, 1860, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana in January and Texas on February 1). They would be joined by four other Southern states (Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee—but not Kentucky and western Virginia would stay loyal to the Union and become West Virginia), hurtling the country headlong toward Civil War.
While we’re remembering the sacrifices of the soldiers who fought in the war and debating the war’s legacy (and its causes), it’s important to remember, of course, that while Fort Sumter was where the first shots were recorded in this conflagration, it was more than 70 years of “compromise” policies and decisions that brought the United States to that 34 hour skirmish on a man-made island in the harbor of Charleston.
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