CHARLESTON
The Civil War began here shortly before dawn when a mortar on the starlit beach fired a single shot high into the sky over this proud and elegant city.
For many who do it, reenacting — or historical acting, or living history — is more than a weekend hobby. It is part of their life.
Civil War Battles and Casualties Interactive Map
From Fort Sumter, the gun’s target out in the harbor, and from points ashore, people watched the shell arc overhead, the path marked by its burning fuse.
It was a fateful moment — one of the most profound in U.S. history — and in many ways the moment modern America was born.
Turn back the pages of the nation’s story, chapter by chapter, decade by decade, across the past century and a half, and you eventually get here: a place of pilgrimage today, where 700,000 people come every year to imagine what it was like.
April 12, 1861. Capt. George S. James of the South Carolina battalion of artillery, standing by his stubby gun on the beach, holding his pocket watch, waiting to open fire
In town, on Meeting Street, the bells of white-steepled St. Michael’s church strike 4 a.m. The minutes pass. At 4:30, there is the distant flash of James’s gun. A delayed boom, like a firework on the Fourth of July.
And the single shell fired by the fledgling Confederacy is lofted toward the Union garrison holed up in the brick fort. The last few seconds of the old America seem suspended for an instant before the shell explodes, changing the nation forever.
“I sprang out of bed,” wrote the diarist Mary Chesnut, who was in Charleston that night, “and on my knees . . . prayed as I never prayed before.”
From dozens of Confederate guns, shot and shell now rained on Fort Sumter, “as if an army of devils,” a soldier inside recalled later.
Few people grasped the ultimate meaning of the crisis that had just unfolded.
Some sensed it would bring war. Many did not. They still believed the South would be permitted to peacefully separate from the Union.
Only a handful realized it might mean freedom for the slaves. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass was one.
“We have no tears to shed . . . over the fall of Fort Sumter,” he wrote later. “God be praised. . . . The dealers in the bodies and souls of men . . . have exposed the throat of slavery to the keen knife of liberty.”
There was, indeed, more at stake than the “momentous issue of civil war,” as Abraham Lincoln had said in his inaugural address six weeks earlier.
Would the United States be one country or two?
How would the outcome affect history 50 years hence, a hundred years hence?
What would be the fate of the 4 million enslaved African Americans and their descendants?
Here, with townsfolk watching from rooftops, the opening act of the Civil War played out, beginning a drama that would claim the lives of 2 percent of the American population — the equivalent of 6 million people today.
The dead would include Capt. James — killed at the Battle of South Mountain, in Maryland, in 1862.
Fort Sumter is still perched on its shoal at the entrance to Charleston’s shimmering harbor as modern container ships the size of buildings glide by, headed to sea.
The city, which the late historian Bruce Catton called “the past incarnate,” feels like a polished antique jewel. In early spring, it is cooled by the ocean wind, which rustles ancient live oak trees much older than the Civil War.
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