Confederates Fire on Fort Sumter: Civil War Begins

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.