Fort sumter
History
History of Fort Sumter
The battle of fort Sumter took place in CharlesTown, North Carolina.
Congress stated construction on a new series of coastal defenses that became known as the Third Coastal Defense System. Charleston Harbor was chosen as a place for one of these new forts and, was aside at the harbor’s entrance on the Main Shipping Channel of water. It was named Fort Sumter to honor General Thomas Sumter, a hero of the South Carolina militia during the Revolutionary War.
Fort Sumter became known to history because of the first shots the confederacies attack to civil war.
Fort Sumter was in confederate territory, so following South Carolina’s secession from the Union, causing U.S. Major Robert Anderson a standoff with the state’s militia forces. When President Abraham Lincoln planned to resupply the fort, Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard attack Fort Sumter. After a 34-hour of artillery fire, Anderson and his 86 soldiers surrendered the fort on April 13. Confederate troops then occupied Fort Sumter for about four years, resisting several raids by Union forces before abandoning the coastal defense before William T. Sherman’s capture of Charleston in February 1865. After the Civil War, Fort Sumter was restored by the U.S. military and armed during the Spanish-American War in 1898, World War I 1914-1918 and World War II 1939-1945.
The soldiers were low on food and ammunition, Anderson determined to protect his men and minimize their exposure to danger and casualties. He restricted them to only using the fort's lower, case mated guns which were not situated to effectively damage the other harbor forts. The confederate were surrounding the fort making the men inside suffer.
Though the fort was a man made island built from thousands of tons of granite.
However the outer fortifications were complete, but the fort’s interior and armaments remained unfinished inside.
In 1861 there were over 3,000 militia troops, with that attack 19 coastal batteries unleashed causing a barrage of damage in on Fort Sumter. Firing an estimated 3,000 shots in 34 hours, the cannon fire had broken through the fortress. Blown through the five-foot-thick brick walls, it caused fires inside the fort. Anderson’s stores of ammunition demolished, he was forced to surrender the fort. Ruining the entrance to transportation from imports and foods through the water, the people near CharlesTown were in pain. This battler on fort Sumter was triggering the start of the civil war, though zero soldiers died in fort Sumter.