The year 1861 was not exactly a banner year for the United States. Not really being super supportive of Abe Lincoln's election as president, seven states led by South Carolina seceded and formed their own government which they creatively called the Confederate States of America. One of the first acts of the new Confederate government was to seize control of all federal government property within its borders, including customs houses, arsenals, and fortifications. This move was less than popular in the United States for reasons that can only be described as obvious given that if you're probably going to fight a war with somebody the last thing you want is for them to have a bunch of guns and forts. However, president James Buchanan did nothing to stop the seizures, preferring instead to serve out his term as president with his thumb up his ass. The same could not be said for Major Robert Anderson, commander of Fort Sumter, a newly built fortification which dominated the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. Rather than hand the brand spanking new fort over, Anderson instead flipped the Confederates the bird by stockpiling it with food and weapons. The Confederates, as to be expected, responded by surrounding the fort with soldiers and cannons. This sparked a political crisis that both sides did their best to ignore over the next several months.
Unfortunately for the men serving under Major Anderson, though he had a lot of balls, he didn't exactly have much sense. Fort Sumter was technically still under construction at the time, meaning it had a big hole in its wall and only 60 cannons, most of which were facing the ocean. However, the whole cannon thing wasn’t really an issue, given that Anderson only had 85 men under his command. On the other side, the Confederates had somewhere in the vicinity of 6,000 men and a metric shit ton of cannons. It goes without saying that things were a little tense. On the Union side it was feared that any kind of attack to better secure the fort would lead to more states seceding. On the Confederate side the newly formed government, being super into states’ rights, couldn't agree whether or not it was a Confederate problem or just a South Carolina problem. When Abe Lincoln was inaugurated as president in March, this was the hot pile of shit that Buchanan left for him on the Oval Office desk.
Now for some reason the man all the Confederates hated taking office didn’t exactly calm the situation. If anything, it just kicked things up a notch. Soon after Honest Abe’s inauguration, a Confederate cannon fired a round at Fort Sumter. The Union soldiers inside braced themselves for battle, but rather than more cannonballs, they were instead greeted by a panicked Confederate officer rowing over to the fort to apologize because some idiot had accidentally fired the shot. The Union soldiers accepted the apology, and then went back to waiting to be killed. By mid-April, the Confederates finally got their shit together enough to take some action. A Union fleet carrying relief supplies was on its way, and not exactly being supportive of that, the Confederates decided to attack the fort. Over the course of a day and a half the Confederates fired over 3,000 artillery rounds into the structure, killing exactly zero people. Despite the less than stellar bombardment, Major Anderson decided that his position was untenable and that it would probably be best if he surrendered.
The surrendering did not go well. The first person Anderson negotiated with was a man named Colonel Louis Wigfall. The negotiations went well, but unfortunately it was soon after discovered that Wigfall had been given exactly zero authority to negotiate anything. He had pretty much just rowed over for a chat. Following this less than stellar start, the Confederates sent a group of officers over to the fort that could actually negotiate. However, these negotiations were a little derailed when one member of the group, a man by the name of Roger Pryor, decided that it was a perfect time to get his drink on. Grabbing a bottle of whiskey in the fort’s hospital, Pryor downed a shot and soon after went down himself, probably because what he thought was whiskey was actually a bottle of iodine. The Union soldiers, horrified at what may happen if Pryor died, desperately pumped his stomach and saved his life. After this little bit of excitement, Major Anderson quickly agreed to surrender Fort Sumter to the Confederates before anything else could go wrong, but only on the condition that he and his men would be allowed to leave and that before they did they would be able to fire off a hundred gun salute to the U.S. flag. The Confederates, apparently being a magnanimous bunch, agreed. Unfortunately, the hundred gun salute turned into a fifty gun salute, mostly because a spark blew up a pile of cartridges, killing two Union soldiers and injuring four others. This is how the U.S. Civil War began.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bombardment_of_Fort_Sumter,_Charleston_Harbor.jpg