History of the Civil War: When was the First Shot?

Fort Sumter

HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR: FIRST SHOT FIRED

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What was the “trigger” that started the American Civil War?

On April 12, 1861, the first formal hostilities of the American Civil War occurred when Confederate troops attacked the military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

The Fort, located in Charleston Harbor, was a coastal fortification built after the War of 1812 as part of the U.S. coastal fortification system. Over 30 years in the building, it still was not finished when the first attack rang out in 1861.

The First Shot of the Civil War

South Carolina had already declared its secession from the Union over four months earlier. Repeated requests by the state for the Federal soldiers to evacuate had been ignored. One last request on April 11 was declined, and nearby Fort Johnson opened fire on Fort Sumter. For 34 continuous hours, Confederate batteries fired upon Fort Sumter, starting, it is reported, at 4:30 AM.

Fort Johnson, Opposite Fort Sumter, Harbor of Charleston, South Carolina.

The next day, on April 13, Fort Sumter surrendered. No soldier in the Fort died during the battle, though one Confederate soldier later died of a wound from a misfired cannon. Hostilities escalated, with President Lincoln calling for a volunteer army as four additional Southern states declared their secession from the Union.

Civil War Firsts

This War saw many “firsts” that would play out in subsequent wars.

• Trench warfare, developed by General Sherman in Georgia, would later be seen on the battlefields of World War I.

• Hand-crank-operated rapid-fire guns, like the Coffee Mill Gun and the Gatling Gun – presaging machine-gun warfare in WWI – allowed rapid shooting that could devastate an advancing line of soldiers.

• The use of electrified technologies like railroad trains, telegraph, and mines – as well as highly mechanized approaches like torpedoes, ironclad ships, and aerial observation – made their debut during this War Between the States, or as it was called in the South, the “War of Northern Aggression.”

Civil War Deaths

But the most startling fact of the American Civil War, and perhaps the least appreciated, is that it was the deadliest of all the wars Americans had fought before or since.

Civil War Deaths. Image: Civil War Trust

Six hundred twenty thousand soldiers, as well as unknown civilian deaths, occurred between 1861 and 1865. That’s about the population of modern Boston.

Why so many? It’s because casualties on both sides were counted as American deaths. In the North, one-tenth of the adult male population under 45 died. But in the South, it was almost a third of the white males.

The Reconstruction Period after the Civil War would last well over a decade.

When Was the Last Shot of the Civil War Fired?

CSS Shenandoah. Image: Smithsonian

The Civil War officially ended when General Lee surrendered at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Nobody told the CSS Shenandoah.

This Confederate commerce raider was still hunting Union whaling ships in the Arctic that June — two months after the war was over. In a single week near the Bering Strait, she captured or destroyed two dozen ships, with her captain estimating the haul at nearly $1 million (over $18 million today). Not bad for a war that had already ended.

When the crew finally learned the South had surrendered, they faced a problem: returning to an American port meant capture. Their solution? Sail 17,000 miles to Liverpool, England — making the CSS Shenandoah arguably the last Confederate force to stand down, finishing the Civil War somewhere in the North Pacific, months after everyone else had gone home. The CSS Shenandoah surrendered to the British government in November 1865

Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
billpetro.com

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