Fort Sumter: April 12, 1861

Major Robert Anderson had been in an uncomfortable position for months. The garrison he commanded at Fort Sumter, sixty-eight men on a man-made island in the middle of Charleston Harbor, belonged to the United States Army in a city that had declared itself no longer part of the United States. He had watched Confederate forces build up around him. He had run low on supplies. He had sent requests to Washington. Washington had sent ships, which Confederate cannon had turned back. By the night of April eleventh, eighteen sixty-one, he had been issued an ultimatum: surrender the fort by four-thirty in the morning or face bombardment.

The guns opened at four-thirty. They fired for thirty-four hours. Anderson's garrison held. Then they could not hold any longer. They surrendered on April thirteenth without a single combat death, which was not for lack of incoming fire, and evacuated the fort the next day. One Union soldier was killed during the evacuation ceremony, in an accidental discharge during a hundred-gun salute, which is a particular kind of tragedy for a man who survived thirty-four hours of bombardment.

Who fired the first Confederate shot? Edmund Ruffin, a sixty-seven-year-old Virginia secessionist who had traveled to Charleston specifically to be present for the moment, later claimed credit. He had positioned himself with a South Carolina artillery unit and, by his own account, pulled the lanyard on the signal gun. The historical record is more complicated. Surviving Confederate documentation and the accounts of officers present do not fully corroborate Ruffin's claim. The honor, if that is the word, may have belonged to someone else. The record does not settle it.

Anderson lowered the flag on April fourteenth. He took it with him. On April fourteenth, eighteen sixty-five, the same flag was raised again over the rebuilt fort. The same Robert Anderson raised it. That night, in Washington, Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre. The symmetry of those two dates is not something historians invented. It is simply what happened.