Fort Sumter was an island fortress located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The attack on Fort Sumter took place in April 1861 and marked the official beginning of the American Civil War. The Civil War lasted 4 years. It cost the lives of around 620,000 Americans and freed 3.9 million enslaved people from bondage.
Beauregard’s nineteen coastal batteries unleashed a heavy barrage on Fort Sumter, eventually firing an astonishing 3,000 shots at the fortress in thirty-four hours. By Saturday, Apr 13, artillery fire had broken through the fortress’s five-foot-thick brick walls, inflicting fires within the post. Along with his stores of ammunition depleted, Anderson and his Union forces had to surrender the fort shortly after 2:00 in the afternoon. No Union troops had been killed throughout the bombardment, however, two men died the subsequent day in an explosion that occurred during an artillery salute control before the U.S. evacuation. The bombardment of Fort Sumter would play a serious half in triggering the war. Within the days following the assault, Lincoln issued a demand with Union volunteers to crush the rebellion, whereas the stacking of Southern states together with Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee solidified their lot with the Confederacy.
After Lincoln’s election and the secession of the southern states, small numbers of enslaved people began showing up at Union forts in the hopes of taking refuge. 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 1861 to appeal to Major Anderson but was turned over to marshalls 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, the wife of prominent Charleston politician and Confederate colonel James Chestnut, started keeping a diary in February 1861. As events unfolded across Charleston Harbor on April 12, she wondered how the action at Fort Sumter would impact the future.
With the start of the Civil War, desperate refugees from slavery began to flood Union camps, 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, 1861, 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 numerous people feared never came. But the exodus of enslaved people who crossed Union lines and made their way to freedom steadily increased after guns were fired at Fort Sumter. By 1863, approximately 10,000 former slaves flooded Washington. By the end of the Civil War, as many as 40,000 fugitives had made their way to the Union capital.
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