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Four Days in April - The Spark of the Civil War
Description
At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor.
For 34 hours, thousands of shells rained down on the fort. Remarkably, no one was killed during the bombardment.
The first fatality came after the surrender.
As the Union garrison fired a ceremonial salute to the American flag before evacuating, a cannon accidentally exploded, killing Private Daniel Hough.
Three days later, Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion. The proclamation accelerated the secession crisis, and Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina subsequently joined the Confederacy.
In this episode of History Shorts, we explore how a battle with no combat deaths helped ignite a war that would kill hundreds of thousands.
This week is about compressed time—moments when history does decades of work in days. It's also the idea behind my new book, Eight Days in August: The Final Week of World War II, out now from Stackpole Books.
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