On April 12, 1861, Captain George S. James fired the first Confederate shot at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, leading to a siege, a Union retreat and the start of the Civil War. Exhibits ...

You probably remember Fort Sumter as the place where the first shot of the Civil War was fired back in 1861. Today, you can see for yourself where all the action happened by taking a ferry to the ...

Authorized in 1827 by Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, Fort Sumter was still not finished when the nation slid into civil war over sectional issues. Nevertheless, it became the “flashpoint for the ...

From the Special Correspondent of the New-York Times. TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. Full text is unavailable for this digitized archive article.

April 12 (UPI) --On this date in history: In 1861, the Civil War began when Confederate troops opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. In 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the longest-serving ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of ...