Slaves rowed the passengers the nearly three and a half miles across the harbor to the looming hulk of Fort Sumter, where Lt. Jefferson C. Davis of the U. Army—no relation to the newly installed president of the Confederacy—met the arriving delegation.
Robert Anderson, who had been holed up there since just after Christmas with a tiny garrison of 87 officers and enlisted men—the last precarious symbol of federal power in passionately secessionist South Carolina. The Confederates demanded immediate evacuation of the fort. As the envoys departed and the sound of their oars faded away across the gunmetal-gray water, Anderson knew that civil war was probably only hours away. Many in the South have viewed secession a matter of honor and the desire to protect a cherished way of life.
But the war was unarguably about the survival of the United States as a nation. Many believed that if secession succeeded, it would enable other sections of the country to break from the Union for any reason. The Revolution had proved that we could defend ourselves against outside attack. Then we proved, in the creation of the Constitution, that we could write rules for ourselves. Now the third test had come: whether a republic could defend itself against internal collapse.
Generations of historians have argued over the cause of the war. All these interpretations came together to portray the Civil War as a collision of two noble civilizations from which black slaves had been airbrushed out. Du Bois to John Hope Franklin begged to differ with the revisionist view, but they were overwhelmed by white historians, both Southern and Northern, who, during the long era of Jim Crow, largely ignored the importance of slavery in shaping the politics of secession.
Arrangements for the sesquicentennial have been left to individual states. At the time, some Southern members reacted with hostility to any emphasis on slavery, for fear that it would embolden the then-burgeoning civil rights movement. Only later were African-American views of the war and its origins finally heard, and scholarly opinion began to shift. Most white Southerners favored racial subordination, and they wanted to protect the status quo.
They were concerned that the Lincoln administration would restrict slavery, and they were right. Many Southerners assumed that secession could be accomplished peacefully, while many Northerners thought that a little saber rattling would be sufficient to bring the rebels to their senses. Both sides, of course, were fatally wrong. Over time, the Southern states would grow increasingly determined to protect their slave-based economies. The founding fathers agreed to accommodate slavery by granting slave states additional representation in Congress, based on a formula that counted three-fifths of their enslaved population.
Optimists believed that slavery, a practice that was becoming increasingly costly, would disappear naturally, and with it electoral distortion.
Instead, the invention of the cotton gin in spurred production of the crop and with it, slavery. There were nearly , enslaved Americans in A crisis had occurred in , when Southerners had threatened secession to protect slavery. The Missouri Compromise the next year, however, calmed the waters. Under its provisions, Missouri would be admitted to the Union as a slave state, while Maine would be admitted as a free state.
And, it was agreed, future territories north of a boundary line within land acquired by the Louisiana Purchase of would be free of slavery.
The South was guaranteed parity in the U. But it had already become clear to many Southern leaders that secession in defense of slavery was only a matter of time. Library of Congress. Close Video. Charleston Harbor, SC Apr 12 - 14, How it ended Confederate victory. In context By , the country had already experienced decades of short-lived but ultimately failed compromises concerning the expansion of slavery in the United States and its territories.
Before the Battle In Charleston, the birthplace of secession, tempers are on edge. During the Battle. Union Aftermath Union. Estimated Casualties. Union 0. Questions to Consider 1. How did secession and the outbreak of civil war affect enslaved people and their southern owners?
What common experience did Beauregard and Anderson share before Fort Sumter? Fort Sumter: Featured Resources. Civil War Video. Civil War Primary Source. Civil War Article. Civil War Battle Map. Fort Sumter: Search All Resources.
Related Battles. Battle Facts. Charleston, SC April 12, Details and Itineraries ». Chesnut, Chisholm, and Lee carried back both the written message and the oral communication, which they supposed Anderson might have meant as an unofficial plea for time.
Beauregard consulted with officials in Montgomery, and late that night he sent his emissaries back to the fort with another proposal. If Anderson would specify an hour when hunger would force him to evacuate and would promise not to fire unless fired upon, the Confederates would not bombard the fort.
This message reached Anderson after midnight. The major took his time formulating a reply, and in the early hours of April 12 he presented them with his answer: he calculated that he would evacuate at noon on Monday, April 15, unless he were resupplied by that time.
That proved unacceptable, for the Confederates wanted to prevent the arrival of the supplies and end the crisis. The Confederate officers left the fort at , warning Anderson that the bombardment—and, inevitably, civil war, would begin in one hour. Some six thousand Confederate troops encircled Charleston Harbor that morning.
Several dozen cannon and mortars bore on Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter boasted more than four dozen usable guns, but the garrison could man only a few of them at a time. James that he might fire a signal gun at the specified time.
At in the morning, at Fort Johnson, a gunner in James' mortar battery pulled the lanyard on a ten-inch mortar. The projectile arched high over the harbor, bursting in midair over Sumter. Major Anderson's men made their way to shelter, and the citizens of Charleston began climbing to their rooftops for a better view of the battle. A few more guns opened up here and there, and within half an hour every Confederate battery in the harbor that could reach Fort Sumter was firing at it.
The Sumter garrison stood to reveille that morning in the bombproofs instead of on the parade. Anderson divided his men into three reliefs, each of which was to work the guns for two hours.
Anderson could count only seven hundred cartridges in the entire fort, and six men were already busy sewing new ones from blankets and spare uniform parts. Because of the shell fragments flying about the parapet, Anderson decided against using the guns on the barbette tier. The decision severely hampered the fort's ability to respond, for all the big guns lay on the barbette. The first shift stood to its guns at A.
Captain Abner Doubleday aimed the first gun, choosing one of the pounders in the right gorge angle. He trained it against the armored battery on Cummings Point, and the solid shot flew accurately enough, but it bounced harmlessly off the ironwork.
The exact number of civilian and enslaved casualties was not carefully documented and thus remains unknown, although undoubtedly significant and thought to be roughly proportionate to the soldier casualties. Life Under Fire Following the first heavy bombardment in August , cannons and powder were removed from the fort and deployed elsewhere in the harbor to avoid destruction. The size of the garrison shrunk to a daily average of about soldiers and enslaved people.
Infantry soldiers replaced artillery soldiers. Life in the fort had become a living hell. In addition to the stress and danger of exposure to exploding shells and the dank, dark, stifling atmosphere of the bombproofs, the quality and quantity of food and water deteriorated, and disease began to appear.
While supplies were ferried to the fort by boat each night and the soldiers and slaves were rotated regularly from the fort to provide some relief, the earlier days of peaceful garrison life were gone.
It was now a case of survival. Significance Despite the determined efforts of US Army and Navy gunners, the fort, while heavily damaged, was gradually transformed into a powerful earthwork that kept Union forces from penetrating the harbor defenses and capturing Charleston. With the determination of the defenders and the labor of enslaved people like Jacob Stroyer , the Confederates held on, refusing to surrender their prize of the first battle of the war, a symbol of southern secession.
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