Today is the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of what is considered the official beginning of the American Civil Warâ€”the bombardment and surrender of Fort Sumter, near Charleston, SC (April 12-13, 1861).
Ft. Sumter was one of five Union forts that remained in the newly formed Confederacy. In the months preceding the battle, U.S. Army forces held the fort but found themselves increasingly under seige, short of men, food, supplies, and weapons. This was the first crisis faced by President Abraham Lincoln, who had just taken office in March, shortly after seven states, led by South Carolina, had declared secession and formed the Confederate States of America. Lincoln notified South Carolina’s governor Pickens that he would be resupplying the fort. In response, the Confederate government ordered that the U.S. army forces evacuate Ft. Sumter at once.
At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, Confederate forces under the command of Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard began bombarding the fort with artillery fire. Within thirty-four hours, the army forces, significantly outmatched, agreed to evacuate. Not a single person was killed in the battle (though one perished because of an accident). Yet this “bloodless” battle inaugurated our nation’s bloodiest conflict.
The American Civil War.
In response to the battle, Lincoln called each state loyal to the Union to raise a volunteer army to oppose the secessionists and recover government property. Four more states then seceded. Several northern governors had been quietly getting their state militias ready for action, and on the day after the surrender of Ft. Sumter, they began to move. Lincoln soon announced a Union blockade of all southern ports, which proved to be a major factor in the Union’s ultimate victory.
By the time the great conflict was over and the Confederacy had surrendered, the Union had suffered 630,000 casualties, 360,000 of whom were killed in action or by disease. The Confederacy suffered 340,000 casualties, with over 250,000 killed in action or who died from disease. Two percent of the entire population of the United States died in the Civil War.
In an overview to Ken Burns’ great documentary on the conflict, we read this summary:
The Civil War has been given many names: the War Between the States, the War Against Northern Aggression, the Second American Revolution, the Lost Cause, the War of the Rebellion, the Brothersâ€™ War, the Late Unpleasantness. Walt Whitman called it the War of Attempted Secession. Confederate General Joseph Johnston called it the War Against the States. By whatever name, it was unquestionably the most important event in the life of the nation. It saw the end of slavery and the downfall of a southern planter aristocracy. It was the watershed of a new political and economic order, and the beginning of big industry, big business, big government. It was the first modern war and, for Americans, the costliest, yielding the most American fatalities and the greatest domestic suffering, spiritually and physically. It was the most horrible, necessary, intimate, acrimonious, mean-spirited, and heroic conflict the nation has ever known.
Whether we understand it or not, the Civil War has shaped each and every one of us who is an American. I am still learning to appreciate this as I grow older and reflect upon my own sheltered life. I am particularly moved when I consider the state of racial relationships in our country. Though measurable progress has been made, we have far to go.
As a privileged white man in America, I take so much for granted and far too often ignore the ongoing plight of those whose lives have continued to be difficult and discouraging since our greatest national conflict. And yet the circumstances have been all around me, crying out, every day of my life. My youth was salted with television news accounts of the Civil Rights movement, my heart stirred by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s dream. Members of my family were part of the “white flight” from Chicago’s city neighborhoods to the suburbs, as the descendants of slaves whose families had traveled