Great resource which covers the Battle of Fort Sumter. Includes maps, videos, image gallery, and more.

Selection of newspaper articles from April 1861 covering the siege and surrender of Fort Sumter.

The date and the hour are pretty certain. On April 12, 1861, close to 4:30 a.m., after months of escalating tension between the North and the South, a shot was fired across the harbor in Charleston, South Carolina, to the federal contingency occupying Fort Sumter. But was that the beginning of the war?

Nearly a century of discord between North and South finally exploded in April 1861 with the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

For months the Confederates trained dozens of guns on Major Robert Anderson and his men at Fort Sumter. But no one seemed eager for war.

Secession was a bone of contention charged with enough lightning to kill half a generation if it hadn't been run to ground sooner. The fact that the flashpoint burst in Charleston is no surprise; they'd been gnawing around that issue for 20 years, but if it hadn't happened there, it would have happened someplace else--that's how volatile the thing was. Or was it?

Telegram announcing the surrender of Fort Sumter to the Confederate Army in 1861.