The story of the war on the one side, and on the other, is a story of American heroism in courage and in endurance, in battle and in camp, in action and in the patient submission to hardship, in dash and in defeat, in assault and in retreat. The purpose of the succeeding chapters is to tell that story without passion or prejudice, without fear or favor, and with no flinching from the truth, whithersoever it may lead.
So far as actual fighting was concerned, the war began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor on the morning of April 12, 1861.
When President Lincoln was inaugurated, the total military force at command of the Government amounted to a mere handful of men, and these were mainly occupied with the duty of garrisoning frontier posts and maintaining the subjection of the Indians. So far as eastern positions were concerned there were scarcely enough men in the forts to take care of the government property there and perform a perfunctory guard duty.
The total force in Charleston Harbor consisted of seventy men under command of Major Robert Anderson. This force occupied Fort Moultrie, at that time an indefensible position by reason of the unfinished character of its fortifications and the ease of approach to it from the land side.
As a matter of military prudence and under a threat of war, Major Anderson decided to transfer his little force to the far more defensible and, to Charleston, the far more threatening work, Fort Sumter. This he did in the early morning of December 26, 1860.
This military transfer of force from an indefensible to a defensible work, was construed by the Confederates to be a distinct violation of the agreement which had been made by the Buchanan administration, to the general effect that, pending final negotiations, there should be no change made in the military situation at any point in the South.
Major Anderson's transfer of his little force from Fort Moultrie, where it might easily have been captured from the land side to the sea-girt fortress in the middle of the harbor, was held to be a violation of this compact. Without going into the lawyers' quibbles concerning that question, let us recognize the situation and relate the events that grew out of it.
The Confederates, under the skilled direction of General Beauregard, a little later began the construction of works and the emplacement of guns that should completely command Fort Sumter. There was in all this a good deal of the "fuss and feathers" that plays so large a part in the beginning of every war made by a people wholly unused to military operations. With a field battery and one columbiad or one Dahlgren gun, General Beauregard could easily have reduced Fort Sumter on any one of the long days of waiting and preparation. Or, with a single battalion of determined men he could have taken it by assault in spite of such resistance as its feeble defending force could have offered. But those were the days of spectacular effects. The "pomp and circumstance of glorious war" were necessary agents in the work of so exciting the southern mind as to overcome the reluctance of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky and Missouri to join the seceding column. So pomp and circumstance were freely invoked.
General Beauregard's preparations for the reduction of a brick fort which must quickly crumble under an efficient artillery fire, defended as it was by less than a single company of men, were such as might have been made for the reduction of some fortress like that at Gibraltar, or the elaborate works in the Bermuda Islands.
But it was not the purpose of either side to bring on the inevitable war as yet. The quibbling lawyers and phrase-mongering diplomatists were busy at work in wordy fence, each trying to force upon the other the technical responsibility of beginning the war by some act of forcible aggression.