Origins Of War The Bombardment Of Fort Sumter 2

It was the most tragic episode in America's history. During four years of bitter and bloody fighting between the North and the South, more than 600,000 soldiers lost their lives, while thousands more returned to civilian life crippled and maimed. There was hardly a family in the land that had not been affected in some way by the dreadful fighting, and for those who had lived through the war, life would never be the same again. From the first shots at Fort Sumter in 1861, to the emotional Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865, these programs tell the epic story of a conflict that scarred the soul of our nation. This is the story of the American Civil War. In all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose. In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue skies, her fertile fields, her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slaveholding and wrong. We desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco and cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want. I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. The truth was that the Northern states and the Southern states of America were on a collision course for many years before the first fateful shots of the Civil War were fired. For the two sides that would spend four blood-soaked years at war with each other, there was perhaps no other way to settle their differences. They had in most respects become irreconcilably divided, like two strangers living in the same house. The people of these two sections shared a common history. They shared the same constitution. They shared the same religions. They shared the same language. The one big thing that was separating these two sections was the existence of slave labor below the Mason-Dixon line and the existence of free labor and no slave labor north of the Mason-Dixon line. The Industrial Revolution had well and truly come to the North by the Civil War and the North was an industrialized economy. Pittsburgh was belching out steel by the time of the American Civil War. History Hit is an award-winning streaming platform built by history fans for history fans. Our goal is to bring you award-winning documentaries that cover the events and figures that have shaped our world all in one place. Travel with us to the fascinating world of prehistoric Scotland or uncover the lives of the people who called Pompeii home. We also aim to bring you the stories and legends that shaped our world through our award-winning podcast network. Sign up now for a free trial and Timeline fans get 50% off their first three months. Just be sure to use the code TIMELINE at checkout. And in the South there was an agrarian economy that was tied to producing goods, especially cotton, but also tobacco for instance. And it meant that the Southern economy was far more dependent on retaining the idea of unfree labor as opposed to the North, which was perfectly willing to enslave theoretically free people as factory workers. The Southern Americans before the Civil War thought of themselves as closely ethnically connected with the British Isles and thought of themselves as far more closely connected than the Northerners. And in the racial theories of the time, that meant that Southerners viewed themselves as a sort of ethnically pure British stock as opposed to the Northerners who had all sorts of Hungarians and Germans and Jews polluting the ethnic purity of the native British stock. This sort of thought was common in the 19th century. It shaped people's view of themselves as a nation, and it meant that people in the South viewed themselves as quite superior to Northern. The stereotypical cardboard cutout of a Southerner would be an indolent, lazy slave owner or slave driver who's afraid of hard work, who's not at all interested in anything except his own aristocratic heritage, his pretentious lineage, his cavalier blue blood inside him, and the purity of the lady who's hanging onto his arm. Similarly, the stereotypical Northerner would be a pasty-faced shop clerk or a wage slave or a grimy factory hand corrupted by the decadence of the northern cities, chasing after the almighty dollar, rubbing shoulders with the great unwashed, the immigrants festering in their crowded tenements in New York or Boston or someplace. Northerners are going to perceive a given image of a stereotypical Southerner just like a Southerner is going to perceive a certain image of a Northerner, but they were all Americans up to that point in time. America had changed beyond all recognition since winning its independence from Britain in 1776. At that time, its population numbered only four million. By 1861, that number had swollen to 31 million, thanks in part to an influx of German and Irish immigrants. Many of the 27 million new Americans had settled in the north. The country's largest city was New York, which was then the home to more than half a million people. Chicago, a mere point on the map in 1830, had grown to hold a population of 100,000. On the other hand, the largest, indeed the only, major city in the south was New Orleans, which was populated by 150,000 people. Great advances and improvements in transportation and communications had had a dramatic effect on American society. The enormous new opportunities offered by booming cities and towns sparked a rush away from the traditional settlements and villages of the country. The figures are startling. In 1820, a mere one in 14 of the population lived in the city, but only 40 years later, over one-fifth of the population had become city dwellers. This huge demographic shift also ensured that when war broke out, the north enjoyed an enormous numerical advantage over its enemy. There were some 20 million northerners, but only 9 million southerners. Crucially for the future of the Union, of those 9 million, more than 4 million were black American slaves, and it was perhaps the issue of slavery more than any other which would drive a wedge between the north and the south. There are economic differences between the north and the south. There are cultural and social differences between the northern section of the country and the southern section of the country. But all of them have as their root, have as their nucleus, if you will, the institution of slavery. You have those who will state that the Civil War was a war over states' rights, that the south wanted to defend their rights or their independence. However, you have to ask the question, the states' right to do what? They want to defend their property rights, but their property rights in what? And it all revolves around the issue of slavery. Slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. As Mr. Stearns pointed out, were there no slavery in the United States of America, there would have been no Civil War. At the same time, it is always worthwhile to point out that only 25% of southerners actually owned slaves. That left the vast majority non-slaveholders or even related to slaveholders. Insofar as slavery was needed to be the catalyst to start the war, to win over the majority of the southern population, other issues were needed. And the other issues surrounded the southern economy and the interpretation of the Constitution, especially states' rights. You don't leave the wife and kids, you don't leave the family farm, you don't leave your home to go to fight a war over tariffs. It was slavery in the minds of the south that formed the basis of their society. And a threat to the institution of slavery is what motivates the south. And it is perhaps less slavery that motivates the north, but slavery is still the core issue that makes it worth spilling blood in the 1860s as opposed to making a lot of noise in Congress. Slaves had first been imported from Britain to Virginia in 1619. By 1776, one in five of Americans was black and a very lucrative trade in slaves had grown, operated mainly by rich northerners. Although slavery was abolished in seven states after independence, it was retained in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. By 1819, the number of slave and free states was equal at 11 each. And as each state, regardless of size, had equal representation in the Senate, a fine political balance came to exist. However, the next few decades were to see the two groups drift inexorably and dangerously apart. Before long, the north, the home of the free states, and the south, the home of the slave states, had evolved into very distinct cultures and economies. And relations between them had deteriorated. An atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust, particularly in the south, came to exist between the two regions. Some in the south, some politicians, may have exhibited some jealousy because the north had been doing well as a result of the Industrial Revolution. The fact that most of the very large banking interests were in the north, a lot of the shipping and commercial interests were in the north. The fact that there were so many miles of railroads in the north. But the people of the south had these opportunities too. And most in the south chose to remain with their way of life, which was based on that very agrarian and rural lifestyle. There were large cities in the south, don't get me wrong, and there was manufacturing in the south. But the north was doing well, was prospering in the decades of the 1840s and the 1850s. There wasn't so much resentment over the north's economic prowess, particularly industrialization. But there was irritation in the south at attempts by the north, or northern politicians, to pass legislation that they saw was beneficial only to the northern part of the United States, not the south. For instance, tariffs, rivers and harbors bills, and laws designed to support American shipping, the shipbuilding industry, because that was all tied up in the north. So generally when you see the disputes over the north and the south, it does come down to this question of this industrializing north versus this largely agrarian south. And that was something southerners did get very angry about. The feeling that the south had somehow grown apart from the main U.S. economy was given further impetus by the sudden and dramatic rise in demand for cotton, particularly from the hungry textile mills that were booming as part of the industrial revolution in England. It was now that the institution of slavery began to pay rich dividends for the south, for its black American slaves provided virtually inexhaustible cheap labor. So much so that by 1861, the south's output of cotton had risen to a staggering five million bales per year. But the cotton success story was to have far-reaching effects, for the slave owners chose to reinvest their new wealth, not in agricultural machinery, but in more slaves and land. Very soon, the south's economy was entirely dependent on slave labor. In the pre-war south, regional or sectional poverty was the price that they paid for the institution of slavery, because slavery impoverishes just about everybody but the small slave-holding elite, in this case the planter class, and perhaps their immediate agents, you know, export firms and transport firms and the like. But for the mass of the southern populace, both black and white, slavery meant that they were largely denied labor and wages. And, you know, the economic argument is pretty clear. If you don't have earning power, you don't have spending power. If you don't have spending power, you don't have money to inject back into the economy to help it diversify, to grow, to expand. And, you know, this would have been the case if it were a free economy or a planned economy. It would have been the case if there were five million or four million white slaves. The economic argument would have been the same. Slavery impoverishes just about everybody. There were many other notable distinctions between northern and southern society. If the northerner likes to make money, the southerner likes to spend it, went a popular saying. And there is no doubt that the southern population saw itself as happy-go-lucky, impulsive, generous, respectful, and honorable. Men were polite and chivalrous to women. The south despised what it believed to be the greedy and grasping northern society, with its addiction to profit and loose morals. Southern society as happy-go-lucky and chivalrous and those other stereotypical sort of things, it is to some extent an accurate snapshot. The southern society is a very classist society. Now, they didn't so much see themselves as happy-go-lucky. They saw themselves as, most wealthy southerners were a very serious group of people. I mean, they might gamble, they might like to go to horse races or race their horses, but they saw themselves a very serious group of individuals. And they were very paternalistic. They ruled over a manor with servants. And so they had a very high ideal of themselves. As far as chivalrous, yes. They thought that they lived in a land of chivalry. They thought that they were the protectors of their women and their home. And they had somewhat of the old-fashioned and outdated ideas which they connected to Europe and to England, to be more specific. Certainly, that's what many northerners believed southern society looked like. But keep in mind, there was a very large section of plain folk, as we would call them, hardworking yeomen, hardworking farmers who didn't gamble, who didn't have hand servants waiting on them all the time. They worked long and hard in the fields in order to provide for their family. There were, however, other more tangible differences between the northern and southern societies. Differences which were perhaps less pleasant for the south to contemplate. For example, over half the population of the southern states was illiterate. Education was clearly not a southern priority, for only half as many white southern children went to school as those from the north. Southern society was also infamous for its violence. Differences were often settled by assaults, revenge beatings, and murders. By contrast, most crime in the north was directed against property, theft, burglary, and fraud. In addition, every southern state had an organized militia formed in part to exert control over the ever increasing slave population. Well, elements of southern society were violent. The fact that the institution of slavery was legal in the south, where you could legally beat a slave and scar a slave, I mean, that's pretty violent in itself. And I would think that that would help to breed even more violence. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, himself a slaveholder, once described the keeping of slaves as, it was like holding a wolf by the ears. You dare not hold on to it and you dare not let it go, you know. And the south had seen a number of slave rebellions or attempted slave rebellions in the decades, you know, before independence and after independence. And the people who led them demonstrated the real vengeful potential of human beings, who the popular culture was busy trying to depict as, you know, clowns, as buffoons, who actually reveled in in his bondage. There was also this idea the southern code of honor led to dueling, which had largely died out everywhere else in the union, with the exception of the south. And so then dueling was continued on right until the advent of the civil war. The southerner might have viewed himself as a duelist. The northerner might have viewed the southerner as an unpredictable madman given to flights of violence, dueling, and single combat. But I think that nobody has done research which clearly shows that the 19th century New Orleans or Charleston citizen was more violent than a citizen of New York or Boston. No day ever dawns for the slave, nor is it looked for, for the slave it is all night, all night forever. It is expected that slaves should be at work by the time it is light, and while at work they should be brisk. I have no objection to their whistling lively tunes, but no drawling tunes are allowed, for their work keeps time with the music. Although not all were treated badly, it is hard to imagine or understand the grim everyday life of most slaves. With every sunrise came the prospect of a day's back-breaking work, with every sunset the reality of a return to the harshest of living conditions. Born into bondage, a slave knew little else but a life governed by the whim of his master, the man who had complete control of his everyday existence. Sell the slave, beat the slave, or kill the slave. It mattered not, for in the south there was little legal deterrent. A slave could not marry without his owner's permission, and of course the marriage was not legal. As a consequence, familiar heartbreaking scenes were played out in the southern states, as black American slave families were separated and sold off to different owners throughout the region, never to see each other again. Daily life of the slave varied according to one's labor practices, according to one's location, and according to the relationship with an owner. I mean, you had slaves living and working in the cities, and you had slaves, you know, in the cotton fields. You could be digging a ditch in the rain, or you could be a cobbler in a workshop with a roof over your head and maybe a nice warm fire in the hearth next to you. So your conditions, your daily conditions as a slave might differ from those of a fellow slave even a few miles down the road. The deep south was generally the worst place to be as a slave. The expression down river, sold down river, comes from the day, slave days, when owners from the upper south sold their slaves down river, meaning down the Mississippi River, the plantations in the deep south. Furthermore, some states had laws to protect the slaves which were better enforced than others. So, for instance, Missouri had laws preventing masters from just murdering their slaves out of hand, and there are records of whites being convicted for murdering slaves. But some states, even though they had these laws and books, made no effort to enforce them. You have several groups of slaveholders. You have those who realize that they're dealing with a human being who can be motivated and with certain incentives, and therefore they would try to treat their slaves, if you could think of it in a nice manner, for a slave. Then there were those who had, whose minds had been tainted, so tainted by the racial ideologies that developed in the United States, that they believed that slaves could only be motivated by the whip. They saw them as little children who wouldn't listen unless they had been punished or sometimes feared you, and therefore they would abuse their slaves for any small infraction, and for the most part, a slave's life is harsh. There is no real good aspect to unfreedom. But the south knew only economic reality, and it was upon the foundation of slavery that the southern economy proudly stood. There was no prospect of change, nor was there the will to bring it about. In fact, quite the reverse. The slave economy, with all it brought with it, was soon to be something thousands of men believed was worth fighting and dying for. However, it should not be imagined that the north was a hotbed of desire for social change. Most northerners, outside the evangelicals and the Quakers, were at best ambivalent to the plight of the southern slaves. Indeed, in New York City, the segregation between colors was strictly enforced, and only in desperate poverty of the city's ramshackle housing did black and white coexist in uneasy peace. History records that the early abolitionists, given voice by William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator news sheet, were roundly abused by north and south alike. To many in the north, they were an acute, irritating embarrassment, but to the volatile southerners, the abolitionists represented a positive threat to their way of life. The abolitionists were a very radical protest group who believed that slavery was evil, that slave owners were evil, that slavery should be abolished immediately and by any means necessary to include violence. The abolitionists were not egalitarians. They did not believe that black people, that African Americans, could be equal with them socially or economically or morally. So it is a mistake to view a northern abolitionist as being a champion of the human rights of the African American slave. Garrison was a Massachusetts Baptist, an unforgiving hater of slavery who saw it as an abomination before God, and he published the country's most fiery abolitionist journal, The Liberator. Its banner cry was, I will not equivocate and I will be heard, which pretty well sums up his character. I mean, this was a guy who publicly burned the United States Constitution on the 4th of July because it protected slavery, and Garrison was so firebrand that eventually he was seen as an extremist or even a crank, even by many within his ranks. The kind of people who would read a special purpose newspaper, a political periodical, were the kind of people who would respond to what William Lloyd Garrison had to say, and that makes slavery a nationwide issue in the United States, because if you agree with Garrison, then you've got that newspaper in hand to agree with. And if you disagree with Garrison, you must respond to your neighbor who has got a copy of The Liberator on his front table. Gradually, the abolitionists won greater and wider support. They were helped by books such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe was a Connecticut-born evangelist who came from a family of prominent American social reformers. Now, she'd never lived in the South. She lived in Ohio for some time, and she said that everything she knew about slavery she learned from looking across the Ohio River into Kentucky and seeing the practices of chattel slavery there. So in Uncle Tom's Cabin, you have two escaped slaves, George and Eliza, who make it across the North and into Canada with their child, and eventually they settle in Liberia. More problematically, you have the figure of Uncle Tom, who's sort of a Christ-like figure. He's patient. He's meek, unbelievably so. He turns the other cheek, and eventually he becomes a martyr. He's beaten to death by a cruel overseer. And at the time, the book's melodrama and its sentimentality, in particular its championing of family values, that was the book's great argument that slavery breaks up families. All these did a lot to unite not only Northern opinion against American slavery, but European opinion as well. When we look at this book now, we see it as being very much emotive literature, in some ways sentimental, but nonetheless struck a powerful chord. It was published in the National Era in serial form, and it sold 300,000 copies in the first publication, and it was a worldwide bestseller. What Uncle Tom's Cabin does is it makes slavery a popular issue amongst ordinary folk who don't read abolitionist newsletters, who don't perhaps even go to a church where the parson is especially abolitionist. And that's true overseas as well. Uncle Tom's Cabin makes North American slavery, makes American slavery an issue in Canada. It makes American slavery an issue in England, and it makes American slavery an issue when it's published in translation in France as well. Everybody in Europe understands American slavery through the prism of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin. The year 1856 saw the birth of the Republican Party, the first mainstream political party to take a stand against the spread of slavery into the western territories. Events in Kansas during the 1850s saw the country take another huge step on the road to war. Left to decide for itself whether it should be a free or a slave state, Kansas quickly degenerated into bloody civil strife, earning its unfortunate nickname Bleeding Kansas. It was more positive proof that it would be almost impossible to settle the issue by peaceful democratic means. The Republican Party was born out of the pressures of the moment, and it really didn't take long for it to become the dominant political party in the north. But it didn't even exist before 1856, and that's what, five years before the start of the Civil War. It wasn't an abolitionist party as such. It was founded as a party against the extension of slavery into the territories and states out in the west. They believed that the western territories should be the enclave of free white labor, that rich southern plantation owners should not be allowed to move to these territories and take their gangs of slave labor with them, and they would have this unfair economic advantage over the common man, the middle class man who moves out to the western territories with his family. So it's not so much the Republican Party was against slavery, but they were for free labor, especially in the western territories. In 1857, the south economy largely escaped the financial chaos that brought about panic in the financial institutions of Wall Street. The fact was that demand for cotton was still as strong as ever, and the south looked on with barely concealed amusement as the northern economy struggled. To the people of the south, it was yet another reason to protect their chosen way of life. On the night of October 16, 1859, came perhaps the central act in the unfolding drama. This was John Brown's infamous raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, an ill-fated enterprise that was supposed to rouse the slaves into open rebellion. A twice married farmer who had fathered 20 children, the 59-year-old Brown was a fanatical abolitionist. I suppose nowadays you'd call John Brown an anti-slavery terrorist, or perhaps a freedom fighter, depending on your moral stance. John Brown was driven by the certainty that God spoke to him and told him to wipe out slavery and the people who perpetuated it. He proclaimed himself the captain of an anti-slavery guerrilla band in Kansas, and he and his followers cut down a group of pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek. They did this with broad swords. This was the vengeance of the Lord playing itself out on the plains of bleeding Kansas. John Brown was a very intense man, and he was sufficiently intense that if you look at a photograph of him, John Brown's eyes come out at you from the photograph. You can see this man's intensity, and you can see that John Brown is a bit crazy. John Brown is not a sane man. He and his family hack people to bits. They launch crackpot plans. They are mad people led by a madman. But he's got perhaps the same kind of mad leadership intensity that Hitler later had in service of a much less worthy and moral cause. And that means that John Brown has the ability to bring people with him, his family and his friends, bring people with him on his mad schemes. Believing that the Harper's Ferry raid had been given God's blessing, Brown ignored the military procedures that might have given it a greater chance of success. As it turned out, the whole episode was not only a military disaster, it also failed to raise the slaves to rebellious frenzy. Brown's small force of 18 men, which included three of his sons, seized the arsenal but were soon surrounded, first by angry locals and then by 90 United States Marines under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee. During the fight that followed, nine of Brown's men were killed, a toll that included two of his sons. Brown himself was severely wounded by a sword thrust when the arsenal was stormed. He was captured and imprisoned to await trial for treason against the state of Virginia. John Brown's attempted insurrection took place in Virginia or part of Virginia, which is now West Virginia. So it was the state of Virginia that tried him for treason and for murder. In spite of its failure, the Harper's Ferry raid was proof to the Southerners that their precious institution, slavery, was now under violent attack from the North. And it was during his trial that John Brown self-consciously, and I think quite effectively, engineered his transformation from terrorist to martyr. In fact, he actually wrote to his wife and said that he knew he was going to hang and that he would be much more valuable hanged than acquitted. And he conducted his defense eloquently, masterfully. His mission, he argued, was not treason, was not insurrection. It was simply one thing to free people, slaves. And if he had done the same thing for more powerful people, he would have been rewarded for it. He also argued in his trial that he had not come to Virginia to start a slave uprising. He had come to free the slaves and then arm them for self-defense. Well, the court of Virginia saw that as distinction without difference. The court in Virginia, however, was also dealing with a great deal of mob pressure. Many Southerners, had they been given a chance, would have never even given John Brown a trial. They would have simply strung him up from the nearest tree. So it didn't take long for the state of Virginia to find the infamous John Brown, remembering his activities in Kansas, guilty of fomenting slave insurrection and murder and sentenced him to hang. And he used very Christ-like imagery as he described the mingling of his own blood with that of the millions of American slaves, which was crying out from the soil of America in some shared martyrdom. So that when he was hanged, the crowds across the North did fall silent and the church bells did ring and the Northern papers reported his execution as a crucifixion. Within the month, John Brown was hanged and with his death, the North had its first martyr, while the South had further proof of the North's true intent. Brown's prophetic words to his executioner still loom large in the pages of American history. I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will not be purged away but with blood. Even Brown could hardly have known that his name would soon be upon the lips of thousands of Northern soldiers as they prepared to do battle with their Southern foe. John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on. The pace of events was quickening and the Southern states now talked openly of secession from the Union. They were a people who were fiercely protective of their way of life, proud of their strong economy, suspicious, fearful of change, and horrified at the thought of slave insurrection. But in truth, mere suspicion and mistrust of the North had by now been superseded by open hostility. After John Brown's raid on Hopper's Ferry and other events that occurred around that time, such as what they call the riot in Christiana, Pennsylvania, where a Maryland slaveholder attempted to obtain his slaves using the Fugitive Slave Law, the new fugitive slave law of 1850, and was killed in the process, Southerners saw a Northern conspiracy to destroy the institution of slavery and therefore abused the property rights or the civil rights of Southerners. Southerners, quite wrongly, linked John Brown with the new Republican Party and they formed these militia bands all across the South in preparation for what they were sure would be a Black Republican invasion in the wake of John Brown's insurrection. And they tarred and feathered Northerners that they found on Southern soil. They rid them out of town on a rail. They lynched some of them. They shut down Northern businesses and drove the proprietors back up to the North. And this meant that as the politicians and as the opinion formers are getting closer and closer to an open break between North and South, at the individual level in some of the more cosmopolitan towns in the South, there is individual violence that is an expression of sectional loyalty, Northern or perhaps more important, Southern loyalty. More significantly for what was to come, the South turned its back on the Democratic Party for not protecting slavery vociferously enough. The Southern membership split the party. They formed their own plank which explicitly promoted and protected slavery and thereby left the Republicans with a divided opposition. So that even though Lincoln and the other Republican candidates didn't even appear on the ticket in 10 Southern states, because the campaigners and the candidates would probably have been lynched if they'd shown up, still the Democrats were divided enough and in enough disarray to enable the Republicans basically to walk in in 1860. Although he polled less than 40 percent of the popular vote in 1860, the Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. The attempts by the new president to placate the South and to reassure it of its future were futile, and by the end of December 1860, South Carolina, always at the forefront of the secessionist cause, decided to leave the Union. Within weeks, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had all followed its lead, and Jefferson Davis, a senator from Mississippi, had been elected by a convention of delegates gathered at Montgomery, Alabama, to be the first President of the Confederate States of America. Alexander Stevens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, made a speech in Savannah, Georgia on March 21st, 1861, that perfectly summed up the irreconcilable differences between what were now two nations. The cornerstone of the Confederacy rests upon the truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in history based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. Not all the Southern states voted for secession. In fact, Virginia, soon to be a main theater of the Civil War, voted two to one against it, while Arkansas and Missouri both decided to remain within the Union. Some were so disinterested in the idea that they declined even to arrange conventions to debate the matter. The Northern states watched on with a mixture of bewilderment and confusion. Clearly, something needed to be done to bring the errant South back into line, but what? Once the lower South seceded and formed the Confederacy, Northerners became very indignant. They could not, they were angry, extremely angry that the Southerners would break away, secede, form their own country, and in essence, dissolve the Union. In fact, Northern newspapers ran headlines saying the Union is dissolved. And to people who are proud of their country, this angered many Northerners. They saw it as an insult and couldn't believe that the South would dissolve the Union over the issue of slavery. In essence, they wanted to find some ways to reunify the country and welcome the prospects of war. They believed that Southern slaveholders and the slaveholding aristocracy, or as they called it, the slaveocracy, needed to be taught a very valuable lesson. In addition to the clear clash of ideologies, there were also practical considerations, not the least of which were the two federal garrisons that were positioned in Confederate states. What was to be done about Fort Pickens at Pensacola, Florida, and Fort Sumter, which lay in Charleston Harbor? The Star of the West, a merchant navy ship, had already tried to deliver supplies to the Sumter garrison during January 1861, but shell fire from shore batteries, manned by cadets from the Military College of South Carolina, had forced them to return home with their cargo undelivered. Feelings in both the North and South were running high, and their positions became more intractable and more polarized with every passing day. Fort Sumter, in particular, began to take on great symbolic significance, for the South, it was an affront to have a federal military installation in the very heart of the Confederacy. South Carolina had, after all, been the first state to secede. For the North, the prospect of abandoning the fort voluntarily was unthinkable, and so Lincoln made a fateful decision. The garrison would be relieved under the strictest orders that it should use force only if it came under fire from the South Carolinians, as the previous relief expedition had done. Lincoln was determined to absolve himself of any responsibility for firing the first shot in any armed showdown. By now, however, a political solution to the showdown was nigh on impossible, although several attempts to reach a compromise were tried. The game of brinkmanship was about to end. The South had accepted that only the bullet and the cannon shell would settle the matter. It was a view probably widely held by many in the North. With the Northern relief convoy due to arrive on April the 11th, the Confederates demanded the surrender of Fort Sumter. On April 10th, Major Robert Anderson, the federal commander, refused. But the garrison had only a days' worth of supplies remaining, as few as three or four days, according to Confederate reckoning. What if the relief expedition was some kind of federal trick? The Confederate commanders asked themselves, why wait until it arrived and take the chance? So it was that at 4.30 a.m. on April 12th, 1861, Confederate forces began the bombardment of the federal garrison at Fort Sumter and the first shots of the American Civil War were fired. The first shot of a Civil War was fired by a white-haired old fiery Virginia secessionist named Edmund Ruffin, 67 years old, long white hair down to here, and he felt that the first shot of the Confederacy should be a shot of honor and he was going to fire it. In Fort Sumter, Anderson's second in command was Abner Doubleday. Doubleday was lying in bed in his quarters in Fort Sumter and about 4.30 in the morning, Ruffin's first shot crashes into the fort and buries itself in the wall about two feet above Doubleday's head. So I think Doubleday probably stayed in bed for a little while longer. Certainly the the Federals didn't even begin returning the Confederate fire for another two hours, but they were completely outgunned. They had no mortars in the fort, they had no fuses for their cannons, and meanwhile the Confederate fire had just been building and building and building. One of the Confederate gunners, a gentleman by the name of Daniel Howe, while he was loading the gun one of the men had not swabbed the barrel down properly and as a result there was a flame in the cannon. So the gun went off prematurely, ripped off his arm, and he was dead within moments. He was the first casualty of the American Civil War. After that, the casualties were few and far between. None of the soldiers, northern soldiers, in the fort were harmed. The fort was reduced to rubble. In all, Fort Sumter took more than 600 direct hits during the 34-hour artillery bombardment. No Federal soldier was killed or even seriously hurt. The fort itself, though, took a battering. Realizing the hopelessness of the garrison's position, Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter on April 13th, and he and his men were allowed to leave aboard the ships of the Federal Relief Expedition. The Federal commander, a Southerner by birth, took with him the tattered and torn Union flag that had proudly and defiantly overlooked the Confederate town of Charleston only a few hours previously. Incredibly enough, there were only four Union casualties from the bombardment, all of them wounded, and the only death occurred after Fort Sumter surrendered. As the Union garrison was leaving on April 14th, Major Anderson received permission to fire a salute to the flag, and it was during that exercise that one of the cannons exploded and killed one of the gunners. So the only death occurring as a result of bombardment of Fort Sumter actually occurred after the surrender, after the fact. The bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter provides the clear military causus belli that makes the Civil War into a war. There had to be some trigger. The shot heard around the world for this war, and Fort Sumter provides that trigger. For months, even years, the pressure had been building, and the tension had been rising, but the events at Fort Sumter put an end to all the uncertainty. Maybe it was a relief for both sides to have finally reached a position that all understood this was war, and to the victor would go the spoils. Now President Lincoln had no recourse but to use armed force. While he called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, the states of the upper south seceded from the Union, meaning that the Confederacy was able to the arrival of North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Virginia. Meanwhile, the north was quickly engulfed by a wave of patriotic fervor, and thousands of volunteers flocked to the colors to put an end to the rebellion in the south. What would the men who raced to join the ranks have thought had they known what lay in store for them? Not the short, sharp, glorious, win-or-take-all battle that would decide the war in one dramatic thrust, but four miserable years of carnage and bloodshed. Had any man on either side been able to foresee what lay ahead, would the course of events have been any different? As the drums of war beat ever louder, it is difficult to believe they would. There can be no neutrals in this war, only patriots or traitors. Whatever may have been my political opinions before, I have but one sentiment now. That is, we have a government, and laws, and a flag, and they must all be sustained. So impatient did I become for starting that I felt like a thousand pins were pricking me in every part of my body, and I started off a week in advance of my brothers. The streets of Charleston are crowded with armed men singing and promenading men, the battle blood running through their veins, that oxygen which is called the flush of victory on their cheeks.