The Battle of Fort Sumter

The First Shots of the American Civil War

Wesley Moody

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317667179
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

On April 12, 1861, the long-simmering tensions between the American North and South exploded as Southern troops in the seceding state of South Carolina fired on the Federal forces at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. The battle of Fort Sumter marked the outbreak of Civil War in the United States. The attack provoked outrage in the North, consolidated support for the newly inaugurated President Lincoln, and fueled the onset of the war that would consume and reshape the country.

In this concise narrative, Wesley Moody explores the long history of tensions that lead to the events at Fort Sumter, the details of the crisis and battle, the impact of Fort Sumter on the unfolding Civil War, and the battle's place in historical memory. Supplemented by primary documents including newspaper coverage, first-person accounts, letters, and government documents, and supported by a companion website, this book provides students with a nuanced understanding of both the long-term and immediate origins of the American Civil War.

Chapter 1 Origins of Civil War

DOI: 10.4324/9781315768687-1

At just before 4:30 in the morning of April 12, 1861 a mortar shell exploded over Fort Sumter. The men and officers of the First Artillery United States Army had silently watched the explosive shell streak across the dark night sky. It exploded high overhead harmlessly showering the fort’s parade ground with bits of iron. There were a few moments of eerie silence before the full barrage was unleashed upon Fort Sumter and its occupants. The men inside the massive stone walls of Fort Sumter had not been caught by surprise. Following the gentlemanly laws of nineteenth century warfare they were informed an hour earlier when the Confederate batteries would open fire. This was the opening of the American Civil War, a conflict that would cost the lives of as many as eight hundred and fifty thousand people and fundamentally changed the United States of America. ¹

Fort Sumter was the key to a defensive system to protect Charleston from the type of naval invasion the British had launched against the United States during the Revolution and the War of 1812. This early morning attack was not by a foreign foe but from the city the fort was built to defend. Five months earlier South Carolina had exercised what it claimed to be its right to “withdraw from the Federal Union” and “resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State.” ²

Like any independent nation, South Carolina could not accept a foreign nation controlling the entrance of its major port. Unfortunately for the leaders of this new nation, the newly elected administration in Washington D.C. took a very different view of South Carolina’s declared right to leave the Union formed under the U.S. Constitution. With compromise impossible and Fort Sumter an irritant that could not be ignored, South Carolina found itself with no option but to take military action against the eighty six man garrison. The actions of both sides in Charleston would play an important role in this war and its eventual result.

Building of Fort Sumter

Following the War of 1812, Congress approved eight hundred thousand dollars for the building of a series of fortifications along the U.S. coast. This fortifications program was known as the Third System. President James Madison appointed a board of engineers to identify locations for the new forts. The board identified more than two hundred sites on the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific Coasts that needed permanent stone fortresses. Only about fifty were ever built and most were still unfinished at the start of the Civil War.

Fort Sumter was part of this Third System. Construction began in 1829. The first step was to build an island in the middle of the harbor. Tons of shells and waste rock from New England quarries were piled into the harbor. Nearly a million dollars were spent before dry land broke the surface. Before the first shipload of New England granite spilled into the harbor the Federal government had to win a lawsuit against a local resident who claimed he had been given sole right over the land in the harbor by the state of South Carolina.

Even after the lawsuit was settled the tides slowed work on the foundation. Occasional yellow fever and malaria outbreaks also slowed the work. Work was also slowed by finances. During economic downturns the government had to cut spending on projects like Fort Sumter. U.S. Senators and members of the House of Representatives fought for the limited funding to build the harbor defenses in their district. South Carolina did not push, for the idea of a strong Federal garrison was already distrustful to South Carolina by the 1830’s.

After thirty years work, only the outside structure was finished. Of the planned one hundred and forty guns only fifteen were in place and the interior barracks were still unfinished. As tensions rose in 1860 the Corps of Engineers rushed to finish before it came to open hostility.

Fort Sumter was well designed and well placed. For four years of war, Fort Sumter beat off several invading fleets, including those made up of ironclads, exactly what it was meant to do.

1860 Presidential Election

The causes of the conflict inside Charleston harbor and the wider war that followed date to the very beginning of this nation. The breaking point, however, for most Southerners and especially the people of South Carolina was November 6, 1860. The election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln as president, without the votes of a single Southern state, convinced them that their influence within the Republic was waning and their only recourse was to leave.

The 1860 presidential election was a bitter four way fight that put a new political party in the White House within six years of its formation. The meteoric rise of the Republican Party within so short a time was caused by the same issues that led to the Civil War itself. Among these slavery was the main issue that caused the sectional tension between North and South and created the political gap that the Republicans filled. Modern apologists for the Confederate cause identify a number of issues that created the sectional crisis, from economic issues to political philosophy. While there is truth in these arguments, if one even scratches the surface of any of them slavery is there. The economics of the agrarian South differed greatly from those of the industrializing North or even the agrarian Midwest. However, the major difference was the dependence on slave labor versus free. To discuss Antebellum economics without the slavery issue being front and center is misleading. The role of the central government is probably the most often cited reason for the Civil War given by those trying to avoid the slavery issue. It is undeniable that the issue of “States’ Rights” was first and foremost in the minds of most Southerners before the war. One can easily find throughout the writings of leading secessionists numerous references to the importance of the balance between State and Federal power as a cause for the Civil War. One has to carefully edit to disguise that the major concern over Federal power was that it would fall into the hands of abolitionists.

The Issue of Slavery

The tension had been present as early as the nation itself. Slavery would continue to grow as an issue following the creation of the United States for three major reasons. The economic expansion of the United States was like nothing the world had ever seen. Tobacco continued to be a very profitable industry in South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia. Cotton, however, would come to dominate, making up seventy five percent of the United States’ total exports in 1860. ³ While the generation of the Founding Fathers had been able to look at slavery as a necessary evil that would die a natural death in a changing world for economic reasons, as slavery became more profitable, their descendants defended slavery as a moral good and the lynchpin of a democratic society.

Another reason that slavery grew as a political issue was the growing numbers who saw slavery as a moral concern that could not be ignored. The abolitionist movement is as old as the nation itself. The Society of Friends, better known as Quakers, was the backbone of the early abolitionist movement in the English speaking world. Individual Quaker meetings spoke out against slavery as early as 1688, and in 1758 slavery was declared a sin by the Society of Friends as a body. At the first meeting of the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the first American abolition society, in 1775 most of the attendees were Quakers. ⁴

The Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers, were founded by George Fox in England in 1647. They were banned and persecuted in Britain and her American colonies. The Quakers were pacifists and heavily engaged in most reform movements.

The abolitionist movement grew beyond the Quakers. As a conflict with Great Britain neared and the popularity of European Enlightenment writers grew, the Quakers found that their neighbors in the North were becoming much more receptive to their anti-slavery message. To many New England patriots it was becoming obvious that slavery was a gross violation of Locke and Montesquieu’s natural law. At the inaugural meeting of the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in April of 1775, days before the first shots of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord, the famous Enlightenment pamphleteer Thomas Paine was present as a founding member. Before the war ended, leading patriots such as Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, James Otis, Alexander Hamilton and even the Virginians James Madison and Thomas Jefferson had questioned the morality of slavery. The belief grew among New England Protestants that the war with England was divine retribution for their sins and there would be neither peace nor independence until African slavery had ended. ⁵ Peace and independence came and slavery survived in the new nation. The institution did however appear to be coming to an end in the decades following the Revolution. All Northern states had either banned slavery or set in place laws for gradual emancipation by 1804. Although the price of tobacco declined and the number of private manumissions grew, slavery still remained a strong institution in the South. No abolition society existed south of Virginia and no serious anti-slavery legislation was mentioned in the Deep South. Although “all men are created equal” and enlightenment ideas were very important to the Revolution, the defense of private property was extremely important and was what Southerners pointed to as the important outcome of the war. ⁶

The South’s representatives at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 arrived in Philadelphia with the defense of slavery a top priority. Slave owning Southerners were not paranoid in their fear of abolitionists lurking in the Federal Convention. While the Convention was meeting, the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance which among other things banned slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. Some French settlers in the region were slave owners but the Congress ignored their petitions. ⁷

The U.S. Constitution, as originally ratified, was filled with compromises on the issue of slavery. In order to gain Southern support for the Constitution, Northern representatives accepted some major concessions. Although less of an issue in 1787 than it would become in later years, Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution required the return of runaway slaves. The Three Fifth’s Compromise counted slaves in the U.S. Census that determined representation in the House of Representatives. Southerners, of course, wanted to count the slaves the same as free citizens in order to increase their representation in the new government. The Constitution also prevented Congress from passing a law to ban the international slave trade before 1808. It furthermore gave Congress the power to pass a fugitive slave law, which they would in 1793. The debates at the Constitutional Convention over the issues of slavery showed the growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the writers’ numerous euphemisms for slavery were evidence that slavery was viewed negatively by a large portion of the population. ⁸

The Abolitionist Movement

The abolitionist movement faced a number of setbacks in the days of the early Republic. The bloody excesses of the French Revolution soured most Americans on any kind of radical reform. The successful slave revolts in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, modern day Haiti, were the stuff of nightmares for slaveholders. This was followed in 1800 by a failed slave revolt led by a free black in Virginia named Gabriel Prosser. Although the revolt never moved beyond the plotting stage there were more than thirty hangings in response. The weakness of the abolitionist movement was perhaps best illustrated by Kentucky’s entrance into the Union as a Slave State with so little difficulty and the Congress’s passage of the original fugitive slave law. ⁹

Perhaps there was no greater setback to the abolitionist movement than Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793. As every school child knows, Eli Whitney’s invention had a profound effect on the economy and the nation as a whole. Although patent issues kept him from profiting as much from his machine as he might have, his invention made cotton an extremely valuable commodity. The increase in the value of slave labor was also astronomical. As the economic impact of slavery grew, the number of those who supported abolition shrank. ¹⁰ Western Europe, followed by the Northeastern United States was going through an industrial revolution that was based on the production of textiles. This caused a high demand for cotton that further increased the institution of slavery.

The abolitionist movement did have its successes, as Congress banned the international slave trade. There were a large number of Americans who supported this ban but saw absolutely nothing wrong with slavery itself. Although this seems a rather intellectually dishonest position to take, it did allow many Americans to take a moral stand on the issue without it having an immediate effect on their lives or the economy. Following in the same line was the American Colonization Society. The Society, founded in 1816, pushed for the voluntary freeing of slaves followed by a return to Africa. This they hoped would help overcome the concern about the dangers of a large free black population. Besides the plan being wildly impractical from a purely logistical point of view, very few freed slaves were interested. The vast majority of slaves were born in the United States as were their parents and grandparents. This was the land of their birth and Africa was an unknown land. The colonization movement had mixed results and it can be debated whether there were long term effects on the abolitionist movement. It has been argued that the colonization movement allowed people who were not ready to offer their full support to abolition and civil rights to at least take incremental steps. This was a setback to the abolitionist movement because people could sooth their consciences without making too radical a stand. James G. Birney, former slave owner turned abolitionist, felt the Colonization Society was “an opiate to the consciences” and kept its members from feeling “deeply and keenly the sin of slavery.” ¹¹ However, the fact that so many members went on to become radical abolitionists in the next few decades leads one to believe that the colonization movement led to the conversion of these men to more drastic beliefs.

The American Colonization Society founded the nation of Liberia in 1822 as a place to settle freedmen. Its capital Monrovia is the only foreign capital named after a U.S. president.

During the 1830’s the abolitionist movement took a more radical turn. The idea of a gradual ending of slavery was aband...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Timeline
• 1 Origins of Civil War
• 2 The Capital of Secession
• 3 Anderson's Bold Move
• 4 Securing Sumter and the Birth of the Confederacy
• 5 Lincoln, Fox and War
• 6 The Fall of Fort Sumter
• Documents
• Documents
• Bibliography
• Index