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The Battle of Fort Sumter (April 12 – April 13, 1861), a relatively minor military engagement at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, began the American Civil War.
Prelude
The election of Abraham Lincoln (along with other reasons) caused seven Southern states, led by South Carolina, to secede and form the Confederate States of America early in 1861. Confederate forces seized control of Federal forts and customs houses within their boundaries, mostly without incident. However, a few Union strongholds remained, including Fort Monroe (near Norfolk, Virginia), Fort Sumter (near Charleston, South Carolina), and Fort Pickens, Florida.
Siege and political maneuvering
Six days after South Carolina seceded, U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson abandoned the indefensible Fort Moultrie and secretly relocated his 85 men, two companies of the 1st U.S. Artillery, to Fort Sumter. Anderson had been appointed to command the Charleston garrison that fall because of rising tensions. Anderson had been a protégé of Winfield Scott, the senior general in the United States Army at the time, and was thought more capable of handling a crisis than the garrison's previous commander. Throughout the autumn, South Carolina authorities considered both secession and the expropriation of Federal property in the harbor to be inevitable. As tensions mounted the environment around the fort—which was located in what was still technically a constituent U.S. state—increasingly resembled a siege, to the point that the South Carolina authorities placed picket ships to observe the movements of the troops, and threatened violence when forty rifles were transferred to one of the harbor forts from the U.S. arsenal in the city.
Several forts had been constructed in the harbor, including Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie. Fort Moultrie was the oldest and was the headquarters of the garrison. However, it had been designed essentially as a gun platform for defending the harbor and its defenses against land-based attacks were feeble; during the crisis, the Charleston newspapers commented that sand dunes had grown up against the walls in such a way that the wall could easily be scaled. When the garrison began clearing away the dunes, the papers objected. Fort Sumter, by contrast, dominated the entrance to Charleston Harbor and was thought to be one of the strongest fortresses in the world once its construction was completed; in the autumn of 1861 work was nearly done, but the fortress was thus far garrisoned by a single soldier, who functioned as a lighthouse keeper. However, it was considerably stronger than Fort Moultrie, and its location on a sandbar prevented the sort of land assault to which Fort Moultrie was so vulnerable.
Under the cover of darkness on December 26, 1860, Anderson spiked the cannons at Fort Moultrie and removed his command to Fort Sumter. Confederate authorities considered this a breach of faith and demanded that the fort be evacuated. President James Buchanan was still in office, pending Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861. He refused their demand and mounted a relief expedition in January 1861, but shore batteries fired on and repulsed the unarmed merchant ship, Star of the West. The battery that fired was occupied by cadets from The Citadel, who were the only trained artillerists in the service of South Carolina at the time.
During the siege, there was some internal debate among the secessionists as to whether the capture of the fort was rightly a matter for the State of South Carolina or the newly declared national government in Montgomery. South Carolina Governor Francis W. Pickens was among the states' rights advocates who felt that all of the property in Charleston harbor had reverted to South Carolina upon that state's secession as an independent commonwealth. This debate ran alongside another discussion as to how aggressively the properties—including Forts Sumter and Pickens—should be obtained. Jefferson Davis, like his counterpart in Washington, D.C., highly preferred that his side not be seen as the aggressor. Both sides believed that the first side to use force would lose precious political support in the border states, whose allegiance was undetermined; prior to Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, five states had voted against secession, including Virginia, and Lincoln openly offered to evacuate Fort Sumter if it would guarantee Virginia's loyalty. In March, Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard took command of South Carolina forces in Charleston; on February 27, Davis had appointed him the first general officer in the armed forces of the new Confederacy, specifically to take command of the siege. Beauregard made repeated demands that the Union force either surrender or withdraw and took steps to ensure that no supplies from the city were available to the defenders, whose food was running out. He also increased drills amongst the South Carolina Militia, training them to operate the guns they manned. Ironically enough, Anderson had been Beauregard's artillery instructor at West Point; the two had been especially close, and Beauregard had become Anderson's assistant after graduation. Both sides spent the month of March drilling and improving their fortifications as best they could.
By April 4, President Lincoln, discovering that supplies in the fort were shorter than he had previously known, and believing a relief expedition to be feasible, ordered merchant vessels escorted by the United States Navy to Charleston. On April 6, 1861, Lincoln notified South Carolina Governor Francis W. Pickens that "an attempt will be made to supply Fort Sumter with provisions only, and that if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition will be made without further notice, * in case of an attack on the fort."
In response, the Confederate cabinet decided at a meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, to open fire on Fort Sumter in an attempt to force its surrender before the relief fleet arrived. Only Secretary of State Robert Toombs opposed this decision: he reportedly told Jefferson Davis the attack "will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest.... Legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary. It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal."
The Confederate Secretary of War telegraphed Beauregard that if he were certain that the fort was to be supplied by force, "You will at once demand its evacuation, and if this is refused proceed, in such a manner as you may determine, to reduce it." Beauregard dispatched aides to Fort Sumter on April 11 and issued their ultimatum. Anderson refused.
Bombardment and surrender
At 3:20 a.m., April 12, 1861, the Confederates informed Anderson that they would open fire in one hour. At 4:30 a.m., a single mortar round fired from Fort Johnson exploded over Fort Sumter, signaling the start of the bombardment from 43 guns and mortars at Fort Moultrie, Fort Johnson, and Cummings Point. Edmund Ruffin, a notable secessionist, had traveled to Charleston in order to be present for the beginning of the war, and was present to fire the first shot at Sumter after the signal round. Anderson withheld his fire until 7:00 a.m., when Captain Abner Doubleday fired a shot at the Ironclad Battery at Cummings Point. But there was little Anderson could do with his 60 guns; he deliberately avoided using guns that were situated in the fort where casualties were likely. Unfortunately, the fort's best cannon were mounted on the uppermost of its three tiers, where his troops were most exposed to enemy fire. The fort had been designed to hold out against a naval assault, and naval warships of the time did not mount guns capable of elevating to fire over the walls of the fort; however, the land-based cannon manned by the South Carolina militia were capable of landing such indirect fire on Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter's garrison could only safely fire the guns on the lower levels, which themselves, by virtue of being in stone emplacements, were largely incapable of indirect fire that could seriously threaten Fort Moultrie. Moreover, although the Federals had removed as much of their supplies to Fort Sumter as they could manage, the fort was quite low on ammunition, and was nearly out at the end of the 34-hour bombardment.
The bombardment lasted through the night until the next morning, when a shell hit the officers' quarters, starting a serious fire that threatened the main powder magazine. The fort's central flagpole also fell. During the period the flag was down, before the garrison could improvise a replacement, several Confederate envoys arrived to inquire whether the flag had been lowered in surrender. Anderson agreed to a truce at 2:00 p.m., April 13, 1861. Terms for the garrison's withdrawal were settled by that evening and the Union garrison surrendered the fort to Confederate personnel at 2:30 pm, April 14. The soldiers were safely transported back to Union territory by the U.S. Navy squadron whose arrival had prompted the barrage. No one from either side was killed during the bombardment, with only five Union and four Confederate soldiers severely injured. During the 100-gun salute to the U.S. flag—Anderson’s one condition for withdrawal—a pile of cartridges blew up from a spark, killing one soldier and seriously injuring the rest of the gun crew; this was the only confirmed fatality from the siege. The salute was stopped at fifty shots. Anderson lowered the Fort Sumter Flag and took it with him to the North, where it became a widely known symbol of the battle, and a rallying point for supporters of the Union.
Aftermath
The bombardment of Fort Sumter was the first military action of the American Civil War. Following the bombardment, Lincoln called for volunteer troops from the remaining states to retake the seized federal properties. The ensuing war would last four years, effectively ending in April 1865, with the surrender of General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. However, the local and short-term aftermath was that Charleston Harbor was completely in Confederate hands.
On April 14, 1865, four years to the day after lowering it in surrender, Anderson (by then a major general) raised the Fort Sumter Flag again in triumph over the battered remains of the fort.
References
- National Park Service battle description
- Detzer, David, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War, Harcourt, 2001, ISBN 0151006415.
Battles of the Operations in Charleston Harbor of the American Civil War | Charleston, South Carolina | Confederate victories of the American Civil War | History of South Carolina | Secession crisis of 1860-1861
"Battle of Fort Sumter"