Civil war project Fort Sumter

Fort Sumter was in South California

Brief description:
Throughout March of 1861 the Confederate authorities sought to drive out the Union occupants of Fort Sumter peacefully. However, once Abraham Lincoln's administration would not surrender the fort to the Confederates, Jefferson Davis decided to take action. Davis hoped that in seizing command of Fort Sumter he could drive the northerners out of the South and help South Carolina secede to the Confederate States of America. Action could not be delayed for fear of reinforcements of the garrison at Fort Sumter. Davis and his cabinet decided to dispatch General Beauregard to siege Fort Sumter. Buearegard was faced with a difficult situation. Anderson, the commanding officer at Fort Sumter, was his instructor at West Point, who recommend his elongated service at West Point due to his outstanding behavior. Prior to the bombardment, Buearegaurd sent a letter formally requesting surrender of the Fort. Anderson regretfully denied this offer, and the bombardment began. On April 12th at 4:30 AM he opened fire, bombarding the fort with heavy fire. General Anderson, with his ammunition on fire and supplies depleted, surrendered the following day and left the fort on April 14th. Although no casualties were caused by the enemy, one Union soldier was killed during the surrendering ceremony when a cannon backfired. The fort was neither a strategic location nor a deciding battle, but it did start what was to be the United States worst war and one of the bloodiest in history

How it started:
Fort Sumter had been built in South Carolina. It was named after general Thomas Sumter, who was a revolutionary war hero. The construction began in 1827 and actually unfinished in 1860 (the year the battle of fort sumter began). Six days after south Carolina declared its secession, U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson and 127 men secretly abandoned their fort, and went into fort sumter without orders from Washington. The major relocated the small army on his own initiative. He believed that providing a stronger defense would delay an attack by the South Carolina militia. The Fort was not yet complete at the time and fewer than half of the cannons that should have been available were not. Over the next few months, repeated calls for the United States evacuation of

Fort Sumter from the government of South Carolina were ignored. United States attempts to resupply and reinforce the garrison were repulsed on January 9, 1861 when the first shots of the war, fired by The Military College of South Carolina, prevented the steamer Star of the West, a ship hired by the Union to transport troops and supplies to Fort Sumter, from completing the task. After realizing that Anderson's command would run out of food by April 15, 1861, President Lincoln ordered a fleet of ships, under the command of Gustavus V. Fox, to attempt entry into Charleston Harbor and support Fort Sumter. The ships assigned were the steam sloop-of-war USS Pawnee, steam sloop-of-war USS Powhatan, transporting motorized launches and about 300 sailors (secretly removed from the Charleston fleet to join in the forced reinforcement of Fort Pickens, Pensacola, Fla.), armed screw steamer USS Pocahontas, Revenue Cutter USRC Harriet Lane, steamer Baltic transporting about 200 troops, composed of companies C and D of the 2nd U.S. Artillery, and three hired tug boats with added protection against small arms fire to be used to tow troop and supply barges directly to Fort Sumter. By April 6, 1861 the first ships began to set sail for their rendezvous off the Charleston Bar. The first to arrive was the Harriet Lane, before midnight of April 11, 1861.

The First Battle of Fort Sumter

On April 11, 1861, Confederate Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard sent three aides, Colonel James Chesnut, Jr., Captain Stephen D. Lee, and Lieutenant A. R. Chisolm to demand the surrender of the fort. Anderson declined, and the aides returned to report to Beauregard. After Beauregard had consulted the Secretary of War, Leroy Walker, he sent the aides back to the fort and authorized Chesnut to decide whether the fort should be taken by force. The aides waited for hours while Anderson considered his alternatives and played for time. At about 3 a.m., when Anderson finally announced his conditions, Colonel Chesnut, after conferring with the other aides, decided that they were not able to agree with the conditions given. The aides then left the fort and proceeded to the nearby Fort Johnson. There, Chesnut ordered the fort to open fire on Fort Sumter. On April 12, 1861, at 4:30 a.m., Confederate batteries opened fire, firing for 34 straight hours, on the fort. Edmund Ruffin, noted Virginian agronomist and secessionist, claimed that he fired the first shot on Fort Sumter. His story has been widely believed, but Lieutenant Henry S. Farley, commanding a battery of two mortars on James Island fired the first shot at 4:30 A.M.. The garrison returned fire, but it was ineffective, in part because Major Anderson did not use the guns mounted on the highest tier, the barbette tier, where the gun detachments would be more exposed to Confederate fire. On April 13, the fort was surrendered and evacuated. During the attack, the Union colors fell. Lt.Norman J. Hall risked life and limb to put them back up, burning off his eyebrows permanently. No Union soldiers died in the actual battle

though a Confederate soldier bled to death having been wounded by a misfiring cannon. One Union soldier died and another was mortally wounded. The Fort Sumter Flag became a popular patriotic symbol after Major Anderson returned North with it.

1863-1865 (End of the war)

Union efforts to retake Charleston Harbor began on April 7, 1863, when Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadro, led the ironclad frigate New Ironsides, the tower ironclad Keokuk, and the monitors Weehawken, Passaic. Montauk, Patapsc, Nantucket, Catskill, and Nahant in an attack against the harbors defenses. The attack was unsuccessful, the New Ironsides never effectively engaged, and the ironclads fired only 154 rounds, while receiving 2,209 from the Confederate defenders (Wise 1994, p. 30). Due to damage received in the attack, the Keokuk sank the next day, 1,400 yards (1,300 m) off the southern tip of Morris Island. Over the next month, working at night to avoid the attention of the Federal squadron, the Confederates salvaged the Keokuks two XI-inch Dahlgren guns (Ripley 1984, pp. 936). One of the Dahlgren guns was placed in Fort Sumter. The Confederates, in the meantime, were strengthening Fort Sumter. A workforce of just under 500 slaves, under the supervision of Confederate army engineers, were filling casemates with sand, protecting the gorge wall with sandbags, and building new travers, blindages, and bombproofs. Some of Fort Sumters artillery had been removed, but 40 pieces still were mounted. Fort Sumters heaviest guns were mounted on the barbette, the forts highest level, where they had wide angles of fire and could fire down on approaching ships. The barbette was also more exposed to enemy gunfire than the casemates in the two lower levels of the fort. A special military decoration, known as the Gillmore Medal, was later issued to all Union service members who had performed duty at Fort Sumter under the command of MajorGeneral Quincy Adams Gillmore. After the devastating bombardment, both General Quincy A. Gillmore and Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren, now commanding the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, determined to launch a boat assault on Fort Sumter for the night of September 89, 1863. Cooperation between the Army and Navy was poor, Dahlgren refusing to place his sailors and marines under the command of an army officer. So two flotillas set out towards Fort Sumter that night. The army flotilla was detained off Morris Island by the low tide. By the time they could proceed, the navy assault had already been defeated and the army flotilla returned to shore. The Navys assault involved 400 sailors and marines in 25 boats. The operation was a fiasco from beginning to end. Poor reconnaissance, planning and communication all characterized the operation. Commander Thomas H. Stevens, commanding the monitor Patapsco, was placed in charge of the assault. When Commander Stevens protested that he knew nothing of [the assaults] organization and made some remonstrances on this

grounds and others. Dahlgren replied There is nothing but a corporals guard [about 610 men] in the fort, and all we have to do is go and take possession. (Stevens 1902, p. 633). This underestimation of the Confederate forces on Dahlgrens part may explain why he was hostile to a joint operation wishing to reserve the credit for the victory to the Navy. Less than half of the boats landed. Most of the boats that did land landed on the right flank or right gorge angle, rather than on the gorge where there was a passable breach. The Union sailors and marines who did land could not scale the wall. The Confederates fired upon the landing party and as well as throwing hand grenades and masonry. The men in the boats that had not landed fired muskets and revolvers blindly at the fort, endangering the landing party more than the garrison. The landing party took shelter in shell holes in the wall of the fort. In response to a signal rocket fired by the garrison, Fort Johnson and the Confederate warship Chicora opened fire upon the boats and landing party. The boats that could withdraw withdrew, and the landing party surrendered. The Union casualties were 8 killed, 19 wounded, and 105 captured (including 15 of the wounded). The Confederates did not suffer any casualties in the assault. After the unsuccessful boat assault, the bombardment recommenced and proceeded with varying degree of intensity, doing more damage to Fort Sumter until the end of the war. The garrison continued to suffer casualties. The Confederates continued to salvage guns and other material from the ruins and harassed the Union batteries on Morris Island with sharpshooters. The Confederates mounted four 10-inch (250 mm) columbiads, one 8-inch (200 mm) columbiad rifled, and two rifled 42-pounders, in the left face, bottom tier casemates. The last Confederate Commander, Major Thomas A. Huguenin, a graduate from The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, never surrendered Fort Sumter, but General William T. Shermans advance through South Carolina finally forced the Confederates to evacuate Charleston on February 17, 1865 and abandon Fort Sumter. The Federal government formally took possession of Fort Sumter on February 22, 1865 with a flag raising ceremony. One Union soldier was killed and another Union soldier was mortally wounded during the surrender ceremony (see above). Fifty two Confederate soldiers were killed there during the remainder of the war. While a number of slaves were killed while working at the fort, the exact number is unknown.

Another way of telling the story:

The Battle of Fort Sumter (April 1213, 1861) was the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter, near Charleston, South Carolina, that started the American Civil War. Following declarations of secession by seven Southern states, South Carolina demanded that the U.S. Army abandon Fort Sumter since the fort was located in South Carolina territory and South Carolina no longer considered itself part of the Union. The Union refused to relinquish the fort. When the ultimatum deadline passed, an artillery barrage ensued, lasting until the fort was surrendered. There was no loss of life on either side as a direct result of this engagement. Following this attack, there was widespread support from both sides for further military action; the Civil War had begun.

Background of Battle of Fort Sumter

South Carolina adopted an ordinance declaring its secession from the Union shortly after Abraham Lincoln's victory in the presidential election of 1860, and by February 1861, six more Southern states had adopted similar ordinances of secession. On February 7, the seven states adopted a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America and established their temporary capital at Montgomery, Alabama. A prewar February peace conference met in Washington, D.C., in a failed attempt at resolving the crisis. The remaining eight slave states rejected pleas to join the Confederacy. Confederate forces seized all but four Federal forts within their boundaries (they did not take Fort Sumter); President James Buchanan protested but made no military response aside from a failed attempt to resupply Fort Sumter via the ship Star of the West (the ship was fired upon by Citadel cadets), and no serious military preparations. However, governors in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania quietly began buying weapons and training militia units. On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as President. In his inaugural address, he argued that the purpose of the United States Constitution was "to form a more perfect union" than the Articles of Confederation which were explicitly perpetual, thus the Constitution too was perpetual. He asked rhetorically that even were the Constitution a simple contract, would it not require the agreement of all parties to rescind it, and called any ordinances of secession "legally void". He also stated he had no intent to invade Southern states, nor did he intend to end slavery in states where it already was legal, but that he would use force to maintain possession of federal property. His speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union. Others, however, including Jefferson Davis, who would become the President of the Confederate States of America, saw the Union almost like a club, from which states could withdraw at any time. The South sent delegations to Washington D.C. and offered to pay for the federal properties and enter into a peace treaty with the United States. Lincoln rejected any negotiations with Confederate agents on the grounds that the Confederacy was not a legitimate government, and that making any treaty with it would be tantamount to recognition of it

as a sovereign government. However, Secretary of State William H. Seward engaged in unauthorized and indirect negotiations that failed.

Siege and maneuvers

political

Six days after the South Carolina government ratified an order of secession, U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson abandoned the indefensible Fort Moultrie and secretly relocated the 85 men under his command, companies E and H of the 1st U.S. Artillery, to Fort Sumter. Anderson had been appointed to command the Charleston garrison that fall because of rising tensions. Robert Anderson had been a protg of Winfield Scott, the senior general in the U.S. Army at the time, and was thought more capable of handling a crisis than the garrison's previous commander. Throughout the autumn, South Carolina authorities considered both secession and the expropriation of Federal property in the harbor to be inevitable. As tensions mounted, the environment around the fortwhich was located in what was still technically a constituent U.S. stateincreasingly resembled a siege, to the point that the South Carolina authorities placed picket ships to observe the movements of the troops and threatened violence when forty rifles were transferred to one of the harbor forts from the U.S. arsenal in the city. Many forts had been constructed in the harbor, including Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie. Fort Moultrie was the oldest and was the headquarters of the garrison. However, it had been designed essentially as a gun platform for defending the harbor, and its defenses against land-based attacks were feeble; during the crisis, the Charleston newspapers commented that sand dunes had grown up against the walls in such a way that the wall could easily be scaled. When the garrison began clearing away the dunes, the papers objected. Fort Sumter, by contrast, dominated the entrance to Charleston Harbor and was thought to be one of the strongest fortresses in the world once its construction was completed; in the autumn of 1860 work was nearly done, but the fortress was thus far garrisoned by a single soldier, who functioned as a lighthouse keeper. However, it was considerably stronger than Fort Moultrie, and its location on a sandbar prevented the sort of land assault to which Fort Moultrie was so vulnerable. Under the cover of darkness on December 26, 1860, Anderson spiked the cannons at Fort Moultrie and moved his command to Fort Sumter. South Carolina authorities considered this a breach of faith and

demanded that the fort be evacuated. At that time President James Buchanan was still in office, pending Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, 1861. Buchanan refused their demand and mounted a relief expedition in January 1861, but shore batteries fired on and repulsed the unarmed merchant ship, Star of the West. The battery that fired was manned by cadets from The Citadel, who were the only trained artillerists in the service of South Carolina at the time. Following the formation of the Confederacy in early February, there was some internal debate among the secessionists as to whether the capture of the fort was rightly a matter for the State of South Carolina or the newly declared national government in Montgomery, Alabama. South Carolina Governor Francis W. Pickens was among the states' rights advocates who felt that all of the property in Charleston harbor had reverted to South Carolina upon that state's secession as an independent commonwealth. This debate ran alongside another discussion as to how aggressively the installationsincluding Forts Sumter and Pickensshould be obtained. Jefferson Davis, like his counterpart in Washington, D.C., preferred that his side not be seen as the aggressor. Both sides believed that the first side to use force would lose precious political support in the border states, whose allegiance was undetermined; prior to Lincoln's inauguration on March 4, five states had voted against secession, including Virginia, and Lincoln openly offered to evacuate Fort Sumter if it would guarantee Virginia's loyalty. In March, Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard took command of South Carolina forces in Charleston; on March 1, Davis had appointed him the first general officer in the armed forces of the new Confederacy, specifically to take command of the siege. Beauregard made repeated demands that the Union force either surrender or withdraw and took steps to ensure that no supplies from the city were available to the defenders, whose food was running low. He also increased drills amongst the South Carolina militia, training them to operate the guns they manned. Ironically enough, Anderson had been Beauregard's artillery instructor at West Point; the two had been especially close, and Beauregard had become Anderson's assistant after graduation. Both sides spent the month of March drilling and improving their fortifications to the best of their abilities. By April 4, President Lincoln, discovering that supplies in the fort were shorter than he had previously known, and believing a relief expedition to be feasible, ordered merchant vessels escorted by the United States Navy to Charleston. On April 6, 1861, Lincoln notified South Carolina Governor Francis W. Pickens that "an attempt will be made to supply Fort Sumter with provisions only, and that if such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition will be made without further notice, [except] in case of an attack on the fort."

In response, the Confederate cabinet, meeting in Montgomery, decided on April 9 to open fire on Fort Sumter in an attempt to force its surrender before the relief fleet arrived. Only Secretary of State Robert Toombs opposed this decision: he reportedly told Jefferson Davis the attack "will lose us every friend at the North. You will only strike a hornet's nest. Legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary. It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal." The Confederate Secretary of War telegraphed Beauregard that if he were certain that the fort was to be supplied by force, "You will at once demand its evacuation, and if this is refused proceed, in such a manner as you may determine, to reduce it." Beauregard dispatched aides to Fort Sumter on April 11 and issued their ultimatum. Anderson refused, though he reportedly commented, "Men, if you do not batter the fort to pieces about us, we shall be starved out in a few days."

Battle of Fort Bombardment

Sumter:

Further discussions after midnight proved futile. At 3:20 a.m., April 12, 1861, the Confederates informed Anderson that they would open fire in one hour. At 4:30 a.m., a single mortar round fired from Fort Johnson exploded over Fort Sumter, marking the start of the bombardment from 43 guns and mortars at Fort Moultrie, Fort Johnson, the Floating Battery of Charleston Harbor and Cummings Point. Edmund Ruffin, a notable secessionist, had traveled to Charleston in order to be present for the beginning of the war, and was present to fire the first shot at Sumter after the signal round. Anderson withheld his fire until 7:00 a.m., when Capt. Abner Doubleday fired a shot at the Ironclad Battery at Cummings Point. However, there was little Anderson could do with his 60 guns so he deliberately avoided using guns that were situated in the fort where casualties were likely. The fort's best cannons were mounted on the uppermost of its three tiers, where his troops were most exposed to enemy fire. The fort had been designed to hold out against a naval assault, and naval warships of the time did not mount guns capable of elevating to fire over the walls of the fort; however, the land-based cannons manned by the South Carolina militia were capable of landing such indirect fire on Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter's garrison could only safely fire the guns on the lower levels, which themselves, by virtue of being in stone emplacements, were largely incapable of indirect fire that could seriously threaten Fort Moultrie. Moreover, although the Federals had moved as much of their supplies to Fort Sumter as they could manage, the fort was quite low on ammunition, and was nearly out at

the end of the 39-hour bombardment. The shelling of Fort Sumter from the batteries ringing the harbor awakened Charleston's residents (including diarist Mary Chesnut), who rushed out into the predawn darkness to watch the shells arc over the water and burst inside the fort. The bombardment lasted through the night until the next morning, when a shell hit the officers' quarters, starting a serious fire that threatened the main magazine.

Surrender
The fort's central flagpole also fell. During the period the flag was down, before the garrison could improvise a replacement, several Confederate envoys arrived to inquire whether the flag had been lowered in surrender. Anderson agreed to a truce at 2:00 p.m., April 13, 1861. Terms for the garrison's withdrawal were settled by that evening and the Union garrison surrendered the fort to Confederate personnel at 2:30 p.m., April 14. No one from either side was killed during the bombardment. During the 100-gun salute to the U.S. flagAnderson's one condition for withdrawala pile of cartridges blew up from a spark, killing one soldier instantly (Private Daniel Hough) and seriously injuring the rest of the gun crew, one mortally (Private Edward Galloway); these were the first fatalities of the war. The salute was stopped at fifty shots. Galloway and another injured crewman were sent to the hospital in Charleston, where Galloway died. The other crewman successfully recovered and was sent North later without exchange. Union troops were placed aboard a Confederate steamer where they spent the night and were transported the next morning to the Union steamer Baltic, resting outside the harbor bar. The soldiers along with the women and children were safely transported back to Union territory by the U.S. Navy squadron whose anticipated arrival as a relief fleet had prompted the barrage. Anderson carried the Fort Sumter Flag with him North, where it became a widely known symbol of the battle, and rallying point for supporters of the Union.

Pictures:
Charleston harbor

Robert Anderson: