Fort sumter how long did it last

South Carolina militia batteries fired upon the vessel as it neared Charleston Harbor, forcing it to turn back to sea. Major Anderson refused repeated calls to abandon Fort Sumter, and by March there were over 3, militia troops besieging his garrison.

A number of other U. With the inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln in March , the situation soon escalated. Knowing that Anderson and his men were running out of supplies, Lincoln announced his intention to send three unarmed ships to relieve Fort Sumter. Having already declared that any attempt to resupply the fort would be seen as an act of aggression, South Carolina militia forces soon scrambled to respond.

On April 11, militia commander P. Beauregard demanded that Anderson surrender the fort, but Anderson again refused. In response Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter shortly after a. Captain Abner Doubleday —later famous for the myth that he invented baseball—ordered the first shots in defense of the fort a few hours later. The first shots of the Civil War had been fired.

With his stores of ammunition depleted, Anderson and his Union forces had to surrender the fort shortly after 2 p. No Union troops had been killed during the bombardment, but two men died the following day in an explosion that occurred during an artillery salute held before the U.

The bombardment of Fort Sumter would play a major part in triggering the Civil War. In the days following the assault, Lincoln issued a call for Union volunteers to quash the rebellion, while more Southern states including Virginia , North Carolina and Tennessee cast their lot with the Confederacy.

Once it was completed and better armed, Fort Sumter allowed the Confederates to create a valuable hole in the Union blockade of the Atlantic seaboard. Commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, Du Pont arrived in Charleston with a fleet of nine ironclad warships, seven of which were updated versions of the famed U.

While Du Pont had hoped to recapture Fort Sumter—by then a symbol of the Confederate rebellion—his attack was poorly coordinated and met with unfavorable weather conditions. The garrison was secure against infantry attack but almost totally isolated from the outside world. Conditions were bleak. Food, mattresses and blankets were in short supply. Militiamen itching for a fight flooded into Charleston from the surrounding countryside. With communications from his superiors reaching him only sporadically, Anderson was entrusted with heavy responsibilities.

Although Kentucky born and bred, his loyalty to the Union was unshakeable. In the months to come, his second-in-command, Capt. Yet a better analysis of the situation might have taught him that the contest had already commenced and could no longer be avoided. He showed tremendous restraint. A Northerner with Southern sympathies, Buchanan had spent his long career accommodating the South, even to the point of allowing South Carolina to seize all the other federal properties in the state.

For months, as the crisis deepened, Buchanan had vacillated. Finally, in January, he dispatched a paddle wheel steamer, Star of the West , carrying a cargo of provisions and reinforcements for the Sumter garrison. Some were convinced the Union was finished.

The British vice-consul in Charleston, H. He predicted the North would splinter into two or three more republics, putting an end to the United States forever. Although Davis had long argued for the right of secession, when it finally came he was one of few Confederate leaders who recognized that it would probably mean a long and bloody war. Southern senators and congressmen resigned and headed south. Secessionists occupied federal forts, arsenals and customhouses from Charleston to Galveston, while in Texas, David Twiggs, commander of federal forces there, surrendered his troops to the state militia and joined the Confederate Army.

But Lincoln would not take office until March 4. Not until was Inauguration Day moved up to January The new president who slipped quietly into Washington on February 23, forced to keep a low profile because of credible death threats, was convinced that war could still be avoided. He was willing to live with slavery where it already was.

Once in office, Lincoln entered into a high-stakes strategic gamble that was all but invisible to the isolated garrison at Fort Sumter. Lincoln and his advisers believed, however, that secessionist sentiment, red-hot in the Deep South, was only lukewarm in the Upper South states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas, and weaker yet in the four slaveholding border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri.

Conservatives, including Secretary of State William H. Seward, urged the president to appease the Deep South and evacuate the fort, in hopes of keeping the remaining slave states in the Union. But Lincoln knew that if he did so, he would lose the confidence of both the Republican Party and most of the North. At the same time, he reasoned that the longer the standoff over Fort Sumter continued, the weaker the secessionists—and the stronger the federal government—would look. Rumors flew in every direction: a federal army was set to invade Texas Northern businessmen would come out en masse against war.

In Charleston, the mood fluctuated between overwrought excitement and dread. For a month after his inauguration, Lincoln weighed the political cost of relieving Fort Sumter. On April 4, he came to a decision. He ordered a small flotilla of vessels, led by Navy Capt.

The attack is over, but the war had just begun. The fort remains in Confederate hands for the next four years until all Confederate forces evacuate Charleston on the evening of February 17, Despite having surrendered, Anderson and his men are greeted as heroes when they disembark in New York.

Beauregard is also hailed for this first Confederate victory. He is later ordered to direct the troops at Bull Run. But Union commanders were not charged with protecting slaves and promptly returned them to their masters. One such slave—a teenager—made his way across Charleston Harbor to Fort Sumter in March of to appeal to Major Anderson, but was turned over to marshals in Charleston. With Union troops in their midst, white residents of Charleston were increasingly concerned about runaway slaves.

Of even greater worry, however, was the possibility of a slave uprising. Mary Chestnut, wife of prominent Charleston politician and Confederate colonel James Chestnut, started keeping a diary in February As events unfolded across Charleston Harbor on April 12, she wondered how the action at Fort Sumter would impact the future. Not by one word or look can we detect any change in the demeanor of these negro servants.

Lawrence sits at our door, sleepy and respectful, and profoundly indifferent. So are they all, but they carry it too far. You could not tell that they even heard the awful roar going on in the bay, though it has been dinning in their ears night and day.

People talk before them as if they were chairs and tables. They make no sign. Are they stolidly stupid? With the start of the Civil War, desperate refugees from slavery began to flood Union camps in earnest, but the government in Washington still had no consistent policy regarding fugitives. Often their fate was in the hands of the individual commanders. Finally, on August 6, , the North declared fugitive slaves to be "contraband of war" if their labor had been used to aid the Confederacy.

Contrabands were considered free and were protected by the Union army. As the reality of war sunk in, slaveholders in the South hoped that their slaves would remain loyal to them. Some did, and the slave uprising that Mary Chestnut feared never came. Info Alerts Maps Calendar Reserve. Alerts In Effect Dismiss. Dismiss View all alerts. Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter in December