AMERICA: The southern attack on Fort Sumter 150 years ago shocked northern states and galvanised them for conflict
AT 4.30am, 150 years ago Tuesday morning, the Confederate general Pierre Beauregard opened fire on the unionist Fort Sumter, a small island in the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina. Major Robert Anderson, the commander of the fort, had been Beauregard’s instructor at West Point, a fitting symbol of the way the American Civil War cleaved the nation.
The war would sink into four years of carnage, but in the heady days of April 1861, it seemed a romantic adventure. Fort Sumter was a Yankee enclave in Charleston, the epicentre of the newly secessionist south.
"A large portion of the Charleston population, including five thousand ladies, were assembled upon the Battery to witness the conflict," the Charleston Mercurynewspaper reported after the 34-hour bombardment that ended in the surrender of the fort. With just one horse killed, it was a bloodless opening to the bloodiest war in US history, which would claim the lives of 620,000 Americans.
The election of Abraham Lincoln, a northerner whose party opposed slavery, had prompted 11 states to leave the Union. “For the previous 60 years, slave-owning southerners dominated the presidency,” notes Thomas Bartlett, professor of Irish history at the University of Aberdeen. “Secession-minded southerners realised Lincoln’s election meant the north would be in the driver’s seat from then on.”
African Americans endured a century of segregation after the abolition of slavery. The 1961 centennial coincided with the beginning of the civil rights movement. There are echoes of the civil war in the rise of the Tea Party, with its obsession for states’ rights and scorn for America’s first black president.
Some still feel nostalgia for the antebellum south. Last December 20th, 300 celebrants attended the Secession Gala in Charleston in period costume.
The bombardment of Fort Sumter was comparable to the shock of the attacks of 9/11, says the US historian Adam Goodheart: “Some northerners had been willing to let the south go in peace, or compromise. But seeing the American flag fired upon changed everything. It brought people in the north together, made them ready to fight this war.”
In the revolutionary war, news of battles took months to spread through the colonies. But the new technology of the telegraph informed Americans of the fall of Fort Sumter immediately. The poet Walt Whitman described coming out of the opera in Manhattan to hear newsboys running through the streets shouting, “Fort Sumter attacked”.
"Beneath every street lamp in New York, a small group crowded around a newspaper, looking with astonishment and amazement and wondering what was going to happen next," recounts Adam Goodheart, the author of 1861: The Civil War Awakening.
For the first time, photography showed people the “squalor, terror and ugliness of war”, Goodheart continues. “One writer said it was as if the dead bodies had been laid on people’s doorsteps.”
The war also changed journalism, putting a premium on vivid description that conveyed the experience of the ordinary soldier. The prevalence of bullet wounds spurred advances in medical care. “Triage, the ambulance corps, field hospitals and many significant surgical advances all began during the civil war,” say the notes to an exhibition at the Maryland Historical Society.
The majority of Union troops at Fort Sumter were Irish and German immigrants, and the only soldier whose letters about the battle are known to have survived was John Thompson from Derry. “He wrote to his father about his pride in the American cause, how he felt when he saw ‘our flag, the glorious stars and stripes’, flying over the fort,” says Goodheart. When the Confederate envoy came to dictate the terms of surrender, Thompson held his sword.
Contrary to stereotypes of racist Irishmen in 19th-century America, Goodheart says he found “a number of examples of Irish immigrants who identified strongly with the cause of the slaves, because of their experience with the British”. Up to 180,000 Irishmen fought in the civil war, says Prof Bartlett; about 40,000 for the Confederates, the rest for the Union.
The Irish were in a sense a cause of the war: “The Irish immigration of the 1840s tilted the population dramatically in favour of the free states,” Bartlett explains. As the north became more populous, it gained political power. “Without the Famine emigration, the war could not have happened,” he says.
Most European immigrants, who were then predominantly Irish, settled in the north. “People who wanted to work for a wage did not want to live beside slaves,” Bartlett says. Some 56,000 Irish immigrated every year of the war.
Many joined the Union army upon arrival. The Union paid substantial bounties to attract recruits: “Several years’ wages in one go, which meant several hundred dollars to join up. If you were a dutiful son, you could send half that back to the old folks in Ballywherever,” says Bartlett.
Prof Bartlett will speak at The Fighting Irish? Exploring the Role of the Irish in the American Civil Warat Collins Barracks on April 16th to 17th. See museum.ie
