Fort Sumter

Charleston Harbor in South Carolina became the site of a fierce artillery exchange on April 12 and 13, 1861, when South Carolina militia forces opened fire on Fort Sumter. This clash, sometimes called the Attack on Fort Sumter or the Fall of Fort Sumter, concluded when soldiers of the United States Army handed over the fort, an event that marked the opening of the American Civil War.

The roots of this confrontation stretched back to South Carolina's declaration of secession on December 20, 1860, after which state officials insisted that federal troops vacate their posts within Charleston Harbor. Major Robert Anderson responded on December 26 by quietly relocating his modest force from the exposed position at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island to the more formidable Fort Sumter, an island stronghold guarding the harbor's entrance. President James Buchanan then attempted to send reinforcements and provisions to Anderson aboard the unarmed vessel Star of the West, but shore batteries opened fire on January 9, 1861, striking the ship three times. While the damage proved minor, the assault succeeded in preventing the supplies from reaching Anderson's men.

As winter gave way to early 1861, conditions around the fort took on the character of a prolonged siege. Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard arrived in March as the newly formed Confederate States Army's first general officer, taking charge of Confederate forces stationed in Charleston. He threw himself into reinforcing the gun batteries encircling the harbor, all trained on Fort Sumter. Meanwhile, life inside the fort grew increasingly difficult as manpower, food, and other necessities ran low, even as Union troops worked feverishly to finish mounting additional artillery.

Getting supplies to Fort Sumter emerged as the first major challenge facing Abraham Lincoln's presidency, which had begun on March 4, 1861, after his triumph in the election held the previous November 6. Lincoln informed South Carolina's governor, Francis Wilkinson Pickens, of his intention to dispatch supply vessels. In response, Confederate authorities issued a demand that Fort Sumter be evacuated at once, an order Major Anderson declined to obey. At 4:30 in the morning on April 12, Confederate artillery batteries positioned around the harbor commenced their bombardment. The fort's Union defenders fired back, but faced overwhelming odds, and after roughly 34 hours of combat, Anderson agreed to surrender. Remarkably, the battle itself produced no fatalities on either side, though two U.S. Army soldiers lost their lives when a gun accidentally exploded during the surrender proceedings on April 14. Instead, the distinction of the war's "First Bloodshed" is typically assigned to the Baltimore riot, which occurred a week afterward.

In the wake of the confrontation, enthusiasm for continued military action surged among both Northern and Southern populations. When Lincoln issued an urgent appeal for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, four additional Southern states responded by seceding and joining the Confederacy. Historians generally point to this engagement as the conflict's opening battle.

Bombardment

In the predawn hours of April 12, 1861, at 4:30 in the morning, Lieutenant Henry S. Farley set off a single ten inch mortar shell from Fort Johnson, acting on orders from Captain George S. James. James had first offered the honor of firing that opening round to Roger Pryor, a well known secessionist from Virginia, but Pryor turned him down, remarking that he could not be the one to open the war. That shell burst above Fort Sumter, serving as the cue for a full assault to begin from forty three cannons and mortars positioned at Fort Moultrie, Fort Johnson, a floating gun platform, and Cummings Point. Beauregard had instructed his gunners to work their way counterclockwise around the harbor, pausing two minutes between shots, since he wanted to stretch out a supply of ammunition he believed would only hold up for two days.

Edmund Ruffin, another prominent Virginia secessionist, had made the journey to Charleston specifically to witness the war's outbreak, and once the signal shot sounded, he sent one of the earliest rounds toward Sumter himself, a sixty four pound shell launched from the Iron Battery at Cummings Point. As the guns surrounding the harbor opened up on the fort, Charleston's residents were jolted from sleep. Among them was the diarist Mary Chesnut, who hurried outside into the darkness before dawn to watch shells trace arcs across the water and detonate within the fort's walls.

Major Anderson chose not to answer the barrage right away, waiting instead for sunrise. His men assembled for muster at six that morning before eating breakfast. An hour later, Captain Abner Doubleday attempted a shot aimed at the Ironclad Battery on Cummings Point but missed his target. With the number of soldiers he had on hand, Anderson simply could not put all sixty of his cannons to use. He made a point of leaving idle any guns positioned where his men would be most exposed to danger. The fort's strongest artillery sat on its topmost level, the barbette tier, but this was also where defenders faced the greatest risk from fire coming down on them from above.

Sumter's construction had anticipated an assault from the sea, since warships of that era lacked guns able to elevate high enough to clear the fort's walls. The Confederate artillery on land, however, could fire in high arcs and reach sections of the fort that naval guns never could have touched. This left Anderson's men able to safely operate only the twenty one functioning guns on the fort's lowest tier, and even these, limited as they were by the narrow angles of their embrasures, could rarely achieve a trajectory steep enough to pose a real threat to Fort Moultrie.

Despite having transferred as much material as possible into Fort Sumter beforehand, the Union defenders found themselves critically short on ammunition, a shortage that grew nearly total by the time the thirty four hour bombardment ended. An even more pressing issue was the lack of cloth bags needed for gunpowder cartridges. Only seven hundred existed when the fighting started, forcing workers into a rush to stitch together more, at times cutting up socks belonging to Anderson himself for material. These shortages compelled Anderson to cut his response down to just six guns, splitting them so that two fired on Cummings Point, two targeted Fort Moultrie, and two aimed at the batteries on Sullivan's Island.

Vessels belonging to Fox's relief expedition started reaching the area on April 12. Fox himself, aboard the steamer Baltic, arrived at three in the morning, though the bulk of his fleet did not show up until six in the evening, and the warship USS Powhatan failed to appear at all, having been redirected without Fox's knowledge to assist at Fort Pickens in Florida. When smaller boats attempted to bring supplies toward the fort, the intensity of enemy fire forced them to turn back. Fox opted to hold off until nightfall, hoping his warships would catch up by then. Rough seas the next day made loading men and provisions onto the small boats extremely difficult, leaving Fox with little choice but to hope that Anderson's garrison could endure until darkness fell on April 13.

Though built of masonry, Sumter housed wooden structures inside that served as barracks and

Aftermath

The shelling of Fort Sumter marked the opening clash of the Civil War, and once the garrison gave up the fort, Northern citizens united behind Lincoln's appeal for troops to reclaim the seized forts and hold the Union together. Because the uprising still seemed limited in size, Lincoln asked for 75,000 men to serve for ninety days. Several Northern states met their assigned numbers with remarkable speed; Ohio, for instance, drew enough volunteers in a mere sixteen days to have supplied the entire national quota on its own.

Not every governor greeted the request warmly. Missouri's Claiborne Jackson declared that his state would not send a single man to join what he called an unholy crusade, while Kentucky's Beriah Magoffin insisted his state would offer no soldiers for what he termed the wicked purpose of subduing fellow Southern states. In the wake of Lincoln's troop request, four more slave states chose to leave the Union and join the Confederacy. The conflict that followed stretched on for four years, coming to a close in April 1865 when Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House.

For nearly the whole span of the war, Charleston Harbor stayed under Confederate control, creating a persistent gap in the Union's naval blockade. Union commanders launched significant efforts in 1862 and 1863 to take the city back. The first push came by land on James Island during the Battle of Secessionville in June 1862. A naval assault on the fort itself followed in April 1863, known as the First Battle of Charleston Harbor. Union forces then turned to capturing Confederate gun emplacements on Morris Island, opening with the Second Battle of Fort Wagner in July 1863 and continuing through a siege that lasted until September.

Having reduced Sumter to ruins through sustained shelling, Union troops attempted one last amphibious assault to seize the fort in September 1863, the Second Battle of Fort Sumter, but the attack was thrown back and no further attempt followed. The Confederates finally abandoned both the fort and Charleston in February 1865, as Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman maneuvered around the city during his Carolinas campaign. On April 14, 1865, exactly four years after he had lowered the flag in defeat, Robert Anderson, then a retired major general in poor health, came back to the shattered fort to raise once more the flag he had taken down in 1861.

General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had served as president of Louisiana State University before the war, later donated two of the cannons that had been used at Fort Sumter to that institution.

On April 12, 1961, the U.S. Post Office Department issued the Fort Sumter Centennial stamp at the post office in Charleston, launching a set of five stamps commemorating the Civil War Centennial. Charles R. Chickering designed the image, which shows an officer in period uniform aiming a seacoast gun from the fort, set against a background of palmetto leaves resembling exploding shells. Since the palmetto is South Carolina's state tree, its presence points to the region where the war's first fighting broke out. The stamp was created through engraving and produced by the rotary printing process