Events

North Carolina became the first colony to officially authorize its delegates to vote for independence from Britain when the Fourth Provincial Congress passed the Halifax Resolves on April 12, 1776. The resolution, adopted unanimously in the town of Halifax, empowered North Carolina's delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to "concur with the delegates of the other Colonies in declaring Independency." No colonial government had previously taken this explicit step. The move came after months of escalating conflict. British Royal Governor Josiah Martin had fled the colony in July 1775, and North Carolina militia had defeated a force of Loyalists at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge in February 1776. Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published in January, had shifted public opinion dramatically toward independence. The Provincial Congress, meeting in Halifax, sensed that the political moment had arrived. The Halifax Resolves did not themselves declare independence. They authorized North Carolina's Continental Congress delegates, including Joseph Hewes and William Hooper, to join with other colonies in making such a declaration. This distinction mattered because it preserved the appearance of collective action rather than unilateral secession. Other colonies quickly followed, with Virginia passing similar resolves in May and the Continental Congress adopting Richard Henry Lee's resolution for independence in July. The date of the Halifax Resolves, April 12, appears on the North Carolina state flag and seal, reflecting the state's pride in leading the independence movement. The document demonstrated that by spring 1776, the question was no longer whether the colonies would separate from Britain but when and how. Three months later, the Declaration of Independence formalized what North Carolina had already authorized, and the delegates who signed it in Philadelphia included the men Halifax had empowered to do so.

Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter at 4:30 in the morning on April 12, 1861, and the shells arcing across Charleston Harbor lit up decades of political compromise gone to ash. Edmund Ruffin, a 67-year-old Virginia secessionist, reportedly fired one of the first shots. Major Robert Anderson and his garrison of 85 Union soldiers held the fort for 34 hours under a bombardment of over 4,000 shells before surrendering. Remarkably, no one on either side was killed during the battle itself. The confrontation had been building since South Carolina seceded in December 1860 following Abraham Lincoln's election. Anderson had moved his small garrison from the indefensible Fort Moultrie to the more formidable Sumter in late December, infuriating Charleston authorities. Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his military commander P.G.T. Beauregard demanded the fort's evacuation. Lincoln chose to resupply rather than reinforce, a calculated move that forced the Confederacy to either accept federal authority or fire the first shot. The bombardment unified the North in a way that months of secession debate had failed to do. Newspapers that had urged compromise suddenly demanded war. Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers, issued three days later, was oversubscribed within weeks. But the attack also pushed four additional Southern states, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina, into the Confederacy, nearly doubling its white population and industrial capacity. Fort Sumter became the opening act of a war that lasted four years and killed an estimated 750,000 Americans, more than all other American wars combined up to that point. The conflict transformed the nation from a loose federation debating slavery's expansion into a centralized state that had abolished it. Anderson returned to Fort Sumter on April 14, 1865, to raise the same flag he had lowered in surrender, the same day Lincoln was shot.