Reinforcing the Fort

Fort Sumter and its Context

April the 12th, year of our Lord 2023 marks the one-hundred and sixty second anniversary of the firing upon Fort Sumter by the Charleston Garrison under the overall command of General P.G.T. Beauregard. It was the initiating event of what’s been recently called the American Civil War.

Named for the South Carolina-adopted Virginia Native, General Thomas Sumter, Fort Sumter seemed to stand in contra to the later Senator’s “Fighting Gamecock” moniker. Its construction was ordered in response to the War of 1812, another American war which began over a foreign power’s refusal to abandon its forts. The newly elected President Lincoln had ordered the abandonment of every other Fort in the seceding states (which by this point included South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas) but held off on abandoning the uncompleted fort.

Lincoln was holding off on reinforcement because he had yet to hear back from her namesake’s native state. Governor John Letcher of Virginia desperately opposed secession, and was engaged in secret negotiations with the radical Republican to prevent the Old Dominion’s secession. Already, the Virginia Militia was being mustered in the Tidewater and the Valley, veterans of the Mexican war and young boys leaving their schools alike, intending to march southward to face the fiery Cotton States in their forests and fields, their humid bayous and flood plains.

Virginia, however, was completely unaware of such intentions. When the Virginia Assembly met to discuss secession, the majority were in opposition to the motion. Virginia was not an export economy, not like the Cotton States. By 1860, Tredegar Ironworks was the largest producer of Iron in the Country, and the Hampton Roads bustled with constructing the young America’s Atlantic fleet. Like New England, Virginia was diversifying, the cultivation of Tobacco very quickly waning in favor of the cultivation of Railroads. Secession would be a step backwards at best.

But no Virginia lawmaker, not even Governor Letcher, disputed the legality of secession, or the right of the seven deep south states to do so. In fact, they outright affirmed it. Virginia had no desire to march down and meddle in what they quite frankly saw as none of their business. Perhaps, in hindsight, they should have seen the lengths to which Lincoln was willing to go to secure dominion.

And Virginia was taking too long, far too long for Lincoln’s liking. The demands from Beauregard’s garrison and South Carolina’s governor to abandon Sumter, like every other fort in the deep south, were increasing in insistence. Lincoln weighed his options.

He wanted a war, that much is clear. The Radical Republicans very much desired to march southward and burn the South to the ground, their ideological progenitor, William Lloyd Garrison, said as much in The Liberator. But unlike the Radical Republicans, Lincoln understood diplomacy, law, and geopolitics– at least better than, say, Charles Sumner. And if Virginia would not guarantee its remaining in the Union, it would need to be sacrificed like a Bishop on a Chessboard.

Resupplying Sumter was an ingenious move on Lincoln’s part, because it killed two birds with one stone. It was an aggressive action, aggressive enough to provoke his opponents into action, but not so aggressive as to consign to his lithe shoulders the blame of firing the first shot. It was tantamount to a third party placing a knife in a man’s hand during an escalating argument in a bar. Not outright aggressive, but intended to be. South Carolina would not, and did not, tolerate such disrespect.

Fort Sumter was built as a part of the “Third System” of U.S. Fortifications, in response to the successful British Naval Invasion of the Nation’s Capital. These forts were constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from 1812 to the 1940s, with the intent of protecting every major American coastal city from attack by foreign fleets. Many of these Forts were constructed by Beauregard, an engineer by training, and his Mexican War rival, Robert E. Lee.

But the war which prompted their construction was itself prompted by forts, though they were not Naval forts. Upon signing the Treaty of Paris in 1783, Great Britain acceded to the Independence of the United States, and granted them all territory between the Mississippi River and Atlantic Coast. This included the Northwest Territory (the modern day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota) legally a part of the state of Virginia.

The Northwest Territory was sparsely inhabited, and its few inhabitants were American Indians, French Fur Trappers, Over-Mountain Men, and British Soldiers garrisoning British Forts. While Great Britain ceded this territory in the Treaty, they simply refused to abandon their forts within the territory. These forts provided supplies in support of various Indian attacks on the American frontier, which provoked the Iroquois War, the Black Hawk War, and set the stage for the Indian Removal Acts.

Numerous times, the American Government demanded the British abandon these forts, whose presence actively assisted in the death of American citizens. Each time, the British refused. And so the Americans went to war with Britain twice in one generation.

This was on the mind of every lawmaker in the Virginia Assembly, keeping the example of President James Madison’s refusal to suspend habeas corpus despite the exceptional circumstance of war. Though they argued the benefits of secession, the benefits of remaining in the Union, the benefits of a middle path, and any other number of personal agendas each Assemblyman had in their minds, Virginia would not buck a violation of South Carolina’s, or any of the Cotton States’ sovereignty.

The was also on the mind of a former Virginia lawmaker, who found himself wearing the gray of the Palmetto Guards, the garrison under the command of General Beauregard opposite Fort Sumter. His name was Edmund Ruffin, and it was on his Marlbourne Plantation in Hanover Country– the birthplace of General Thomas Sumter, that Ruffin perfected the agricultural practices which led America to conquer the world. It was on that Plantation too where Ruffin wrote about the right of sovereign states to secede in the face of tyrannical government, which led him south to join his fellow “Fire-Eaters” in Charleston harbor.

On April 6th, Lincoln ordered a fleet under Gustavus Fox to reinforce Fort Sumter, just as the British had done in the Northwest Territories. None of the South Carolinians mistook the message. Nor did Edmund Ruffin.

“The night before, when expecting to engage, Capt. Cuthbert had notified me that his company requested of me to discharge the first canon to be fired, which was their 64 lb. Columbiad, loaded with shell. By order of Gen. Beauregard, made known the afternoon of the 11th, the attack was to be commenced by the first shot at the fort being fired from the Palmetto Guard, & from the Iron Battery. In accepting and acting upon this highly appreciated compliment, that company had made me its instrument... Of course I was highly gratified by the compliment, & delighted to perform the service – which I did. The shell struck the fort, at the north-east angle of the parapet. The firing then proceeded, as stated, from 14 different batteries, including Fort Moultrie & the floating battery, which had been placed for this purpose in the cove, back of Sullivans Island.”

Keeping in its mind the example of James Madison, the Virginia Assembly voted to secede on April 17th.