Battle of Fort Sumter
On 12 April 1861 Confederate batteries under P. G. T. Beauregard opened fire on the Federal garrison holding Fort Sumter, a masonry fort on an island commanding the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina. Major Robert Anderson's small force, short of supplies and isolated after South Carolina's secession, endured some thirty-four hours of bombardment before surrendering on 13 April; remarkably, no one was killed in the exchange itself. Lincoln had deliberately narrowed the choice by announcing he would merely resupply — not reinforce — the fort, leaving the Confederacy either to tolerate a Federal outpost inside its claimed territory or to fire first. By choosing to bombard it, the South turned a tense secession stand-off into open war. Lincoln answered with a call for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion, a step that drove four more slave states — Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina — into the Confederacy while unifying Northern opinion behind coercion.
- Year: 1861 CE
- Category: Military
