Augustus Dickert, a Confederate teenage volunteer, recounted the bombardment in detail in a book about his years in the war. So did Captain Samuel Crawford, the surgeon at the fort. Army captain posted in Charleston (years after he purportedly invented baseball), turned his experience into a book. The moment is well documented, along with the events building toward it. on April 12, 1861, a chilly, misty morning in Charleston. The Confederates fired the first shell over Fort Sumter at 4:30 a.m. Over the next few months, both sides prepared for battle, redoubling their defenses. The result was a tense standoff between the newly declared Rebels and the soldiers in the fort. Officials in Washington-first under the outgoing president James Buchanan, and later under Lincoln-refused. But South Carolina believed the fort belonged to the state and the Federals should turn it over. These soldiers posed little threat they were so short-handed that their wives once stood watch as sentries. Army garrison of some 80 men remained at one of several Federal forts that defended the port city of Charleston.
Even after South Carolina seceded on December 20, a U.S. Senate after Lincoln’s election, declared that the Southern Confederacy would be created peacefully, with so little blood spilled that any man “might safely drink every drop shed.” Yet the question of whether Americans would take up arms against each other loomed darkly over the country, and particularly Chesnut’s home state. James Chesnut Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and politician who quit the U.S. Many in the North and the South predicted a peaceful division of the country, which after all was not yet even a century old. For months the Confede rates trained dozens of guns on Fort Sumter.Īfter Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860, even as Southern states prepared to secede, war wasn’t inevitable.
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