Fort Sumter and the Impending Crisis

In the early morning hours of April 12, 1861, Confederate batteries under the command of General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter in the harbor outside of Charleston, South Carolina. Three days later, President Abraham Lincoln began mobilizing the North for war. “If the shot fired at Fort Sumter ‘was heard round the world,’” observed Ulysses S. Grant in his 1885 Memoirs, “the call of the President for 75,000 men was heard throughout the Northern States.” In addition to requesting those 75,000 state militia volunteers, Lincoln ordered an increase in the size of the regular army, instructed the Navy to erect a blockade of the Confederate coast, and suspended habeas corpus in certain areas—all without seeking the approval of Congress. Meanwhile in Montgomery, Alabama, the provisional capital of the Confederate States of America, Secretary of War LeRoy Pope Walker reportedly bragged, “before the first of May the flag of the Southern Confederacy will wave from the dome of the old Capitol in Washington and within a short time perhaps also from Faneuil Hall in Boston.” And so the war came...............