04-12-1861 - The Battle of Southern Aggression

Friday, April 12, 1861, 4:30 am, South Carolina

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Edmund Ruffin was ready. For years this fire-eater had studied pH balances in soil in order to improve his crop yields. He learned new ways to grow crops in land that had been worn out by years of use by using lime and rotating different crops. He advocated for farmers to pay special attention to their soils to keep them healthy.

Of course, it wasn’t really him that was planting his crops – it was his slaves. This 67 year old had benefited from owning slaves and thus was a major supporter of the institution and for its expansion into the newly acquired southwest. His writings defended it as an ancient and religious institution and he was critical of the federal government and the anti-slavery attitudes of the northern states, writing “I have declare(d) my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule” . His country was Virginia, not the United States, and he wanted his country back.

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Just two years before, he had witnessed the hanging of John Brown and since then, tensions between the states had flared. Now with the election of Abraham Lincoln, the anger in the south had risen to such a crescendo that South Carolina had written a declaration of secession. The document clearly states their reason for leaving the states:

“(A)n increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations… The State of New Jersey… passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.”

 South Carolina seceded over the institution of slavery, and Edmund Ruffin was right in the middle of it all. Now ready to enforce it, he was on Cummings Point on the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, demanding the surrender of an unfinished brick fort built on an island just off the coast named Fort Sumter. Inside the fort, were 85 men who had just gone through a tough winter with limited fuel and rations. Now they were scrambling to set up their defenses, turning their 60 guns away from the Atlantic, and toward the mainland. However, the other forts around the harbor had already been taken over by the Confederates leaving Sumter out-gunned. 

Once the Confederate States of America was established, the South sent delegates to Washington D.C. with the intention of purchasing all of the federal lands in the territory. The newly inaugurated President rejected these offers and learning of the lack of supplies in the fort, Lincoln sent a message to South Carolina’s governor informing him that a ship packed only with provisions and no weapons would be arriving at the fort. Outraged, Confederate President Jefferson Davis called for the fort to be attacked before the supply ship arrived.

After some last minute negotiations that failed, Fort Sumter received a warning that the Confederates would open fire in one hour. That hour had now passed. Ruffin kept a close eye on nearby Fort Johnson, where they were expected to fire the first shot. He witnessed a point of light shoot out from Fort Johnson up into the sky before arching down towards the island fort and exploding over the site. The booming sounds soon followed and from his Iron Battery, Ruffin open fired on the fort. For the next thirty-three hours, the Confederates would fire over 4,000 rounds at the fort – the War Between the States had begun.

The supply ship arrived later that day, but was forced to keep away from the fort by the heavy shelling. By then, the wooden buildings in the fort had caught fire. Still low on supplies, the fort fired back sparingly until the flames began creeping toward their supply of gunpowder. Most of them were moved and thrown into the sea, but would then get hit by a shell causing them to explode. Despite the fires and heavy bombardment, nobody at the fort had been killed yet.

As the day turned to night, it started to rain, extinguishing much of the fires. The siege continued into the next day until the flag pole in the middle of the fort was knocked over by the shelling. A former US Senator who was at the battle decided to take matters into his own hands, taking a small boat over to the island, waving a white flag, he was able to meet with the Commander of Fort Sumter and convince him to evacuate his men. His only condition was a 100-gun salute to the US flag.

The next day, Ruffin became one of the first Confederate soldiers to enter the fort, which had formally surrendered. The 100-gun salute was honored until about half way through, when a spark ignited a pile of cartridges and exploded, killing two Union men and injuring four – the first casualties of the new war. Ruffin, feeling the thrill of victory, wrote his son saying “The time since I have been here has been the happiest of my life”.

Not a happy time for Lincoln though. His immediate reaction to the attack on the fort was to call for 75,000 volunteers to arms. In turn, the reaction to Lincoln’s call compelled ten more States to join the Confederates. Despite firing the first shots on Fort Sumter, the Confederates took Lincoln’s call to action as one of aggression, rather than one of defense. Some dubbed it “The War of Northern Aggression”.

 In justifying succession, Mississippi declared:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth… These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

Florida declared:

“A President has recently been elected, an obscure and illiterate man without experience in public affairs or any general reputation mainly if not exclusively on account of a settled and often proclaimed hostility to our institutions and a fixed purpose to abolish them. It is denied that it is the purpose of the party soon to enter into the possession of the powers of the Federal Government to abolish slavery by any direct legislative act.”

Alabama, declared:

“Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America… is a political wrong of so insulting and menacing a character as to justify the people of the State of Alabama in the adoption of prompt and decided measures for their future peace and security, therefore: it is the desire and purpose of the people of Alabama to meet the slaveholding States of the South, who may approve such purpose, in order to frame a provisional as well as permanent Government upon the principles of the Constitution of the United States.”

Georgia declared:

“For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery… The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies… anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose.”

Louisiana declared:

“(A)n increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution… A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”

Finally Texas declared:

“In all the non-slave-holding States… the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.”

That was all before Fort Sumter, even before Lincoln's inauguration. The South, rich off of slave labor, was afraid of the Republican Party’s anti-slavery stance. The election of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, brought their paranoia to a whole new level. The state’s rights that some claim as the true reason of the separation was the state’s right to keep Africans enslaved.