At 4:30 in the morning on April 12, 1861, Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and the Civil War began.
The shot most people remember belonged to Edmund Ruffin, a 67-year-old Virginia secessionist who had spent years agitating for disunion and who asked for the honor. He pulled the lanyard on a gun in the Iron Battery at Cummings Point.
Whether it was truly the first shot is still argued — the signal round came from Fort Johnson, and Ruffin’s followed. But his is the name that stuck.
Four years later, in June 1865, Ruffin wrapped himself in a Confederate flag and took his own life rather than live under what he called “Yankee rule.” He got the first shot and the last word, and neither one did him much good.
Here’s what most people don’t know about that bombardment. It lasted 34 hours and nobody was killed. Not one man on either side. The only deaths at Fort Sumter came afterward, during the Union surrender ceremony — a 100-gun salute where a cannon exploded on the final round, killing Private Daniel Hough and mortally wounding Private Edward Galloway.
The first casualties of the Civil War died saluting the flag they were lowering.
There’s another layer, and it’s the one that stuck with me. The Confederate batteries were commanded by General Pierre Beauregard, West Point class of 1838. The Union commander inside the fort was Major Robert Anderson — Beauregard’s artillery instructor at West Point.
The student shelled the teacher. And he’d been taught by the man he was shelling how to do it.
The first Union shot in reply came from Captain Abner Doubleday, another West Pointer, later credited with inventing baseball. That credit is almost certainly misplaced, but it’s fine American mythology to hang on a man who was standing in a burning fort at the time.
At West Point we memorized a piece of Plebe Knowledge: of the 60 important battles of the Civil War, graduates commanded on both sides in 55. It was, in many ways, a West Point war. Sumter is where that started.
This is one of 101 questions answered in The Civil War Little Black Book: Secrets, History, and Trivia of America’s Defining Conflict.
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I’ve also written a novel about Sherman’s March to the Sea, Howl! WT Sherman’s Monster Hunters: https://amzn.to/40WYgfJ
And a trilogy going from West Point in the 1840s through the Mexican War and into the Civil War in the vein of HBO’s Rome miniseries; Duty, Honor, Country: https://amzn.to/3RgWbXa
