Fort Sumter, SC.... Where it all began
On the afternoon of April 11, 1861, a small open boat flying a white flag pushed off from the tip of the narrow peninsula surrounding the city of Charleston. The vessel carried three envoys representing the Confederate States government, established in Montgomery, Alabama, two months before. Slaves rowed the passengers the nearly three and a half miles across the harbor to the looming hulk of Fort Sumter, where Lt. Jefferson C. Davis of the U.S. Army—no relation to the newly installed president of the Confederacy—met the arriving delegation. Davis led the envoys to the fort’s commander, Maj. Robert Anderson, who had been holed up there since just after Christmas with a tiny garrison of 87 officers and enlisted men—the last precarious symbol of federal power in passionately secessionist South Carolina.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fort-sumter-the-civil-war-begins-1018791/#0jvcRiShWD8gqp6R.99
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fort-sumter-the-civil-war-begins-1018791/#0jvcRiShWD8gqp6R.99