A t Big Bethel and Aquia Creek in Virginia, at Hoke’s Run and Philippi in what is now West Virginia, at Boonville and

Carthage in Missouri, Americans began battling one another after the fall of Fort Sumter. Casualties were light in most engagements. That changed in July 1861. A Union army of more than 30,000 commanded by Gen. Irvin McDowell set out for Richmond, Va. The immediate target was a rail junction at Manassas, not far from Washington, D.C. But Southern troops – 22,000 led by Fort Sumter hero Pierre Beauregard – blocked the fords at a creek called Bull Run. Riding to Beauregard’s aid was Gen. Joseph Johnston, with 10,000 more Confederates. The battle opened July 21, and for a while it looked as if Union forces would make short work of the new Confederate States of America. But a diversionary Union attack was

discovered, Southern reinforcements arrived, and momentum swung to the South. What started as a Union retreat collapsed into a rout. That day, two legends were born. In an effort to rally his men, Southern Gen. Barnard Bee pointed to troops under the command of Thomas Jackson and said: “There stands Jackson like a stone wall.” Historian James McPherson notes it may not have been a compliment. Some observers thought Bee was frustrated because Jackson had not come to his relief. Whatever Bee’s motive, Jackson’s troops blocked a Union assault, and on Jackson’s order to “yell like furies,” they let loose a peculiar shouting scream that one Union veteran said sent a “corkscrew” sensation down his spine, notes McPherson. From then on, Jackson owned a new first name: “Stonewall.” And the South had found its Rebel Yell. The battle of First Manassas was a Confederate victory, but both sides were

stunned by the number of casualties, which approached 5,000. Men on both sides that day would play prominent roles in the war, including William Tecumseh Sherman, who would prove to have the same killer instincts that Jackson demonstrated. Sherman was as good a prophet as he was a warrior. He had earlier warned a Southern friend that the Confederacy lacked resources to wage war, despite Southern spirit and determination: “The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make.” The South might make headway initially, Sherman warned, but the North, with resources to match its resolve, made the outcome inevitable. But not before, he predicted, “This country will be drenched in blood.” Less than three months after Fort Sumter, Sherman’s prediction was coming true.�

The Manassas battlefield in 1861 Library of Congress

Monument at the Manassas battlefield Library of Congress

T he bloodiest war in American history began with a battle that ended bloodlessly, notes historian Geoffrey Ward.

It almost never began at all. Fort Sumter, sitting like bait in the mouth of Charleston harbor, was one of a handful of federal properties within the newly organized Confederate States of America. Following Abraham Lincoln’s election and South Carolina’s secession, federal troops at nearby Fort Moultrie withdrew to the island under the command of Major Robert Anderson and awaited resupply. Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, counseled Lincoln to abandon efforts to reinforce Fort Sumter, but the new president went forward nevertheless. Meanwhile, Georgian Robert Toombs, the first secretary of state for Southern President Jefferson Davis, advised Davis against attacking Fort Sumter. “The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen,” Toombs warned Davis, as recorded by

historian Shelby Foote.  “... You will wantonly strike a hornets’ nest ... Legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. ... It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.” Davis, like Lincoln, ignored his counsel. Commanding the Southern guns pointed at Fort Sumter was Louisiana native Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, who had learned gunnery tactics at West Point from none other than the same Major Anderson he was now opposing. It was Beauregard who got the command from Davis to snap the jaw shut on that island bait. “Reduce it,” was the order. When a series of last-minute negotiations failed, Beauregard offered the honor of firing that first shot to Virginian Roger Pryor. But Pryor couldn’t accept. “I could not fire the first gun of the war,” Pryor said, according to Foote.� Southern tradition and some historians hold that the honor then fell to ardent secessionist Edmund

Ruffin, who had no qualms about inaugurating what would follow.� In the early morning of April 12, 1861, with Lincoln’s relief expedition nearby, Southern gunners poured thousands of rounds into Fort Sumter. Anderson returned fire, but he was overwhelmed and undersupplied, and surrender was inevitable. It came April 13. Not a man on either side had died. The South celebrated its victory but Lincoln was the real winner. He had  maneuvered Davis into firing the first shots of the war. When that news reached the North, there was an explosion of support for the Union. Historian James McPherson quotes an observer who described the Northern response as “one great eagle scream” for the American flag. War rallies were held, and Lincoln capitalized on the fervor, asking for 75,000 volunteers. The first of those legions Toombs feared were gathering.

Major Robert Anderson Library of Congress

Exterior of Fort Sumter in 1865 Library of Congress

Abraham Lincoln Library of Congress

T he Republic had not even survived a century.

So it was in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president. The country founded on the declaration that all men are endowed with “certain unalienable rights” was splintering over a question its forefathers, despite their collective wisdom, had been unable to solve – slavery. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner and author of the Declaration of Independence, who personified the contradiction at America’s heart. Compromises in 1820 and 1850 avoided fracturing the nation. But the 1854 Kansas- Nebraska Act and a slave case out of Missouri during the period undid those compromises and put slavery on a course that would have it expand, not contract, as

its opponents hoped. Deciding the fate of a slave named Dred Scott, the U.S. Supreme Court declared blacks “had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.”

It had become impossible for the nation to live any longer with this Jeffersonian contradiction. Lincoln told the nation it must answer the question of “whether the Negro is not or is a man ...” “If he is not a man ... he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him,” Lincoln argued in Peoria, Ill., in 1857. “... But if the Negro is a man ... why then, my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal,’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man making a slave of another.”� In February 1861, following Lincoln’s election, delegates from seven Southern states made good on their threats of secession. More states would follow. Lincoln made his case in his inaugural address the following month, as war loomed: “Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy.” Yet even then he referred to secessionists as “countrymen” and appealed to their shared memories and experiences, which he said stretched from every patriot grave to every living heart. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war ... You have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.” His vow of protection would extend to an island in the mouth of Charleston, S.C., harbor, where stood a masonry fort with a name honoring one of those patriot heroes: Thomas Sumter.�

Library of Congress Lincoln’s first inauguration

he referred to secessionists as  “countrym en” and appealed to their shared m em ories and experiences, w hich he said stretched from every patriot grave to every living heart.

Illustration of the 1863 sacking of Lawrence, Kansas, from Harper’s weekly Library of Congress

T he war that spread to Fort Sumter in April 1861 and Bull Run in Virginia that July was, in many ways, a Western war.

Violence had first erupted in the West when territories ripe for statehood provoked the question: Slave state or free? A war that would divide the young country over the next four years would first be won in the West. It was later won in the East, by Western generals employing a total-war philosophy learned on the frontier. And one of the American Civil War’s greatest heroes would be the country’s first Western president. Abraham Lincoln was the first commander-in-chief born in a state

that wasn’t one of the original 13 colonies. Indeed, Kansas was bleeding long before an island in the harbor of Charleston, S.C., became part of the national consciousness. In 1856, pro-slavery raiders sacked the anti-slavery center in Lawrence, Kan. In retaliation, John Brown killed five pro-slavery men nearby. The violence escalated as hostilities erupted nationwide. Armed bands on both sides – the pro- Union Jayhawkers in Kansas and pro- slavery Bushwhackers in Missouri – saw in the war’s outbreak a license for their actions.

In 1863, William Clarke Quantrill also sacked Lawrence, killing nearly 200 people. This time, retribution would be harsh and have the weight of the federal government. Union Gen. Thomas Ewing issued Order No. 11 – clearing Missouri counties along the Kansas border of everyone and everything. That put 20,000 people to flight, writes historian Thomas Goodrich. He quotes one refugee, Frances Twyman, who described “women walking with their babies in their arms, packs on their backs and four or five children following after them, some crying for bread, some crying to be taken back to their homes.” But there were no homes. The order left a burned-over country devoid of anything but brick chimneys. A Kansas officer bragged that his squad burned 110 houses, writes Goodrich, who described Order No. 11 as “perhaps the harshest act of the U.S. government against its own people in American history.” Twyman described a war widow, an ill infant in her arms. She sought the shade of a tree, where she rested as her baby died, while the column of refugees remained indifferent. “The crowd surged on, women and children dragging their weary limbs through the dust and heat,” he said. Violence unfolding in the West foretold one thing: What those Western generals would bring East would be severe. Historian James McPherson writes that

Ewing, a brother-in-law of William Tecumseh Sherman, “had learned what Sherman was learning – this was a war between peoples, not between armies.” And the American people – from those living in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley to those in Sherman’s eventual path in Georgia – would suffer mightily.�

Library of Congress Union Gen. Thomas Ewing