April 12 is a monumental day in American history. Although 2021 marks the 160th anniversary of the event to which I am about to refer, very few remembered. Do you recognize the date? Perhaps adding the year will help, 1861. If you are still in the dark, let me add another detail, it occurred near Charleston, South Carolina at Fort Sumter.
April 12, 1861 marked the first battle of the Civil War. South Carolina’s militia began shelling the fort at 4:30 a.m. For the next 34 hours, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 rounds at the poorly supplied fort. As the bombing continued, the citizens of Charleston celebrated the beginning of the war.
The fort’s commander Major Robert Anderson was forced to surrender the following day, April 13. As he retreated north, he took with him the United States flag that had flown over the fort.
Although the battle was a victory for the South, Charleston’s citizens would not have been so quick to celebrate if they had known how difficult the war would be for their city and indeed the entire South. The next four years were by far the deadliest in U.S. history as 620,000 Americans lost their lives. According to Wikipedia, based on 1860 census numbers, six percent of all white men in the North died during the war, while 18 percent of white men in the South, almost 1 in 5 lost their lives.
Union forces retook Fort Sumter a little less than four years later, when the Confederate army was forced to abandon not just the fort, but Charleston itself Feb. 22, 1865.