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.
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.”…