Fort Sumter

source of picture file and info on the painting

Ft. Sumter, 1861, National Archives (source of image file)


The Attack on Fort Sumter (April 12-13, 1861)

On April 10, 1861, Brig. Gen. Beauregard, in command of the provisional Confederate forces at Charleston, South Carolina, demanded the surrender of the Union garrison of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.

The above link includes official reports from officers involved.

Dr. Clyde Wilson responding to a piece written in the American Conservative by Dr. Andrew Bacevich:

"Mr. Andrew Bacevich (in the March 14 issue) makes some perceptive and wholesomely moral observations on "The Living Room War." However, he spoils it all when he starts out by likening Ft. Sumter to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. The last two were massive sneak attacks by foreign enemies. The firing on Fort Sumter was preceded by a gentlemanly warning and was completely bloodless. It would not have happened at all if Lincoln had not dissimulated about re-enforcements and had a hostile fleet just outside. Nor does Lincoln's call for 75,000 troops after the fall of Fort Sumter at all resemble American unity and determination after Pearl Harbor. To begin with, the call for troops was illegal, and the 75,000 was either mistaken or deceptive since the conquest of the Southern people and destruction of their state governments eventually required over a million men. Further more, its immediate effect was to drive four more states out of the Union and require immediate military occupation to forestall the secession of three others. And despite a temporary upsurge of militancy after Sumter, Lincoln's government never had the degree of support in the North for its actions that characterized the public in the two more recent events. Several hundred thousand men evaded the draft by various means, many others were enlisted by cash bonuses, public speakers and newspapers had to be suppressed, and a fourth of the army had to be recruited abroad. When this kind of folklore is invoked, putting Southerners in the basket with Tojo and Ben Laden, we despair of the possibility of collaboration with nationalist conservatives.

Clyde Wilson
Columbia SC"

Thomas Di Lorenzo:

That’s a nice turn of phrase, but it is contradicted by reams of evidence. In "Lincoln and the First Shot" (in Reassessing the Presidency, edited by John Denson), John Denson painstakingly shows how Lincoln maneuvered the Confederates into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter. Northern newspapers all recognized this at the time, but Winik seems to know nothing at all about it. As the Providence Daily Post wrote on April 13, 1861, "Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor" by reprovisioning Fort Sumter. On the day before that the Jersey City American Statesman wrote that "This unarmed vessel, it is well understood, is a mere decoy to draw the first fire from the people of the South." Lincoln’s personal secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, clearly stated after the war that Lincoln successfully duped the Confederates into firing on Fort Sumter. And as Shelby Foote wrote in The Civil War, "Lincoln had maneuvered [the Confederates] into the position of having either to back down on their threats or else to fire the first shot of the war."

After Fort Sumter Lincoln wrote to his naval commander Gustavus Fox thanking him for his assistance in drawing the first shot.

Fort Sumter National Monument (U.S. National Park Service)