Confederate Army Lt. Henry S. Farley fired a single 10-inch mortar round from Fort Johnson on James Island, South Carolina, at 4:30 a.m. April 12, 1861.
The shell arced across Charleston Harbor and burst over Fort Sumter, signaling 43 Confederate guns and mortars to open fire. The most deadly conflict in American history, a war that would last four years, kill more than 620,000 people and free 3.9 million from slavery, began with a bombardment in which not a single person died by enemy fire.
The Standoff
Fort Sumter sat on an artificial island at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. It was unfinished. Less than half its guns were in place. Its garrison consisted of 86 soldiers under the command of U.S. Army Maj. Robert Anderson, a Kentucky-born officer who had quietly moved his men from the vulnerable Fort Moultrie to Sumter on Dec. 26, 1860, six days after South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. Anderson’s move infuriated Charleston’s residents. One wrote that it was “like casting a spark into a magazine.”
For more than three months, Anderson and his garrison held the fort while Confederate batteries multiplied around the harbor. Roughly 6,000 militia troops and 43 guns surrounded them. An attempt to resupply the fort in January failed when the unarmed merchant ship Star of the West took fire from shore batteries and turned back. By early April, Anderson was down to six weeks of food and reported that reclaiming the harbor would require 20,000 men. The entire U.S. Army at the time numbered only 17,000, most of them scattered across the western frontier.
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The Bombardment
President Lincoln forced the issue by announcing that he would send supply ships carrying only food to Fort Sumter. Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, who had been Anderson’s artillery student at West Point, to demand the fort’s evacuation. Anderson refused. At 3:20 a.m. April 12, Beauregard’s aides delivered the final notice: They would open fire in one hour. Anderson shook hands with each officer and said, “If we never meet in this world again, God grant that we may meet in the next.”
Roger Pryor, a prominent Virginia secessionist who had been urging war for weeks, declined theoffer of the first shot, saying he could not fire the first gun of the war. The task fell to Capt. George S. James, who ordered Farley to fire the signal mortar. More than 3,000 shells would rain down on Fort Sumter over the next 34 hours. Capt. Abner Doubleday aimed the first Union return shot, a 32-pounder sent toward the ironclad battery on Cummings Point. The solid shot bounced off.
On the second day, Confederate hot shot, or heated cannonballs, set the fort’s barracks on fire. The flames crept toward the powder magazine, which held 300 barrels of gunpowder. Anderson’s men rolled 50 barrels to safety, then sealed the magazine door and buried it with dirt as the fire closed in. By late morning the defenders lay face down in the casemates with wet handkerchiefs pressed to their faces. Confederates on Morris Island were so impressed by the garrison’s refusal to quit that they cheered every shot Sumter fired.
The Surrender and Its Only Death
Anderson surrendered on April 13. Not a single soldier on either side had died by the bombardment itself. Beauregard granted Anderson the honor of firing a 100-gun salute to the American flag before departing. During the salute, a cartridge exploded prematurely, killing Pvt. Daniel Hough and mortally wounding another soldier. They were the first combat-related deaths of the Civil War, killed not by the enemy but by their own ceremonial cannon.
Anderson took the Fort Sumter flag with him when the garrison boarded a ship for New York, where they were greeted as heroes with a parade down Broadway. Both sides immediately called for volunteers. The war that no one was killed starting would go on to produce the bloodiest four years in American history.
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The Flag Came Back
Fort Sumter remained in Confederate hands for nearly four years. Union forces tried repeatedly to retake it, reducing the fort to rubble during a 587-day siege, one of the longest in modern warfare. The Confederates held it until Feb. 17, 1865, when they evacuated ahead of Sherman’s march through South Carolina. On April 14, 1865, exactly four years after the surrender, Robert Anderson, now a general, returned to Fort Sumter and raised the same flag he had carried out in 1861. That evening, Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre.
Sources
American Battlefield Trust, “Battle of Fort Sumter”; National Park Service, “Battle of Fort Sumter, April 1861”; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Battle of Fort Sumter”; History, “Fort Sumter: Civil War, Battle & Location”; Historical Society of Pennsylvania, “How many soldiers were killed at Fort Sumter?”
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