CHARLESTON, S.C. — On an artificial island 4 miles from downtown stands an unlikely reminder of the cost of national disunion, a granite monument to discord, both a reminder of the price of division and a warning to contemporary political warriors.
It is Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began and where, 164 years ago, a garrison of American troops struggled to hold out in the face of the secession of multiple Southern states and the creation of a parallel American nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men were not created equal.
“There stands Fort Sumter,” wrote the diarist Mary Chesnut, born on a South Carolina plantation and a slaveholder herself, “and thereby hangs peace or war.”
Today, the fort can be reached by a 30-minute ferry ride as dolphins occasionally play at the water line and the cityscape of Charleston melts from view with the miles. Now, as in 1861, its importance is mostly symbolic — to contemporaries as the site of the beginning of what Abraham Lincoln would call “a great civil war, testing whether (this) nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure”; and to us, five generations later, as a reminder that the country has experienced conflict and hostility before.
The mid-19th-century divisions produced the country’s bloodiest war, setting in motion resentments decades long, demonstrated by the continuing dispute over the name of Fort Bragg, which originally honored Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg. The contemporary divisions produced the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and threaten to rent the country for years, if not decades, to come.
And a warning comes from South Carolina’s Robert Barnwell Rhett, known as the “father of secession” and an ardent slavery advocate. “There exists a great mistake,” he said just after Lincoln was elected in 1860, “in supposing that the people of the United States are, or ever have been, one people.”
Perhaps that is true today. It surely was true in the middle of the 19th century, which returns us to the centrality of Fort Sumter — constructed by enslaved workers who labored for 15 years and whose fingerprints remain visible in the bricks used to build it — in America’s story.
“The state’s ancestors had entered a deal with the fates when they embraced … the Barbadian slave culture,” Robert W. Merry wrote in “Decade of Disunion,” published last year. “Now the descendants of those people were trapped in that culture, facing a quandary that posed only ominous choices.”
Shortly after South Carolina seceded from the Union, less than seven weeks after Lincoln’s election but more than three months before his inauguration, the newly emboldened state seized federal courthouses, post offices and military installations. Maj. Robert Anderson, the Kentuckian who was the commander at Fort Moultrie, considered relocating his troops to the more secure environs, and more defensible position, of Sumter. “Anderson recognized that any attempt on his part to occupy Sumter would spark outrage among Carolina officials,” Erik Larson wrote in “The Demon of Unrest,” published in 2024.
But move he did, secretly evacuating his 84 men from the palmetto-log fortress on nearby Sullivan’s Island. Once on the exposed island where Fort Sumter sat, he raised the American flag, further infuriating Charlestonians. Soon P.G.T. Beauregard, who commanded the state troops, demanded Anderson surrender. His answer: “You have your orders, I have mine.”
No president ever faced an opening challenge as great as Lincoln’s. “The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government,” he said in his inaugural address, the speech where he spoke of “the better angels of our nature.”
The standoff continued. Lincoln and his advisers, knowing that provisioning the fort would, in the characterization of James McPherson in his 1989 landmark “Battle Cry of Freedom,” “divide the North and unite the South,” considered their alternatives. Those in the fort watched their provisions shrink. All knew that the impasse in Charleston Harbor was no ordinary conundrum. “The fate of the Southern Confederacy,” the Charleston Mercury argued, “hangs by the ensign halliards of Fort Sumter.”
The debate over slavery had been conducted for decades and had hardened with the years.
John S. Preston, sometimes considered the “spokesman of the South,” in a speech before the state’s Democratic convention in 1860: “Slavery is our king. Slavery is our Truth. Slavery is our Divine Right.”
Lincoln, sometimes considered the “great emancipator,” in one of his debates with Stephen A. Douglas in the 1858 Illinois Senate race, said: “I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country who contemplate slavery as a moral, social and political evil.”
Some 18 days later, Sen. William Howard Seward of New York, who would become Lincoln’s secretary of state, gave an address in Rochester, New York, in which he described the clash of views on slavery as an “irrepressible conflict.”
At Fort Sumter, that conflict could no longer be repressed. The Confederates opened fire in the predawn hours of April 12, 1861. The barrage continued for 33 hours. In the end, Anderson, a onetime slave owner, surrendered.
But that was not the end of the significance of Fort Sumter in the Civil War. It was a Confederate stronghold from 1863 to 1865. Three years after Anderson’s withdrawal, federal troops attempted to retake the fort and began a two-month bombardment. Union troops continued their efforts into 1865, with the Confederates evacuating their redoubt only after Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman continued his brutal advance through the South.
Today, the fort is part of the National Park Service, and Charleston is a flourishing city, a magnet for tourists. Nearby is the setting for quiet afternoons sipping tea in the country’s only tea plantation.
At war’s end, Sidney Andrews, a northern newspaper correspondent, visited Charleston and wrote, “A city of ruins, of desolation, of vacant houses of widowed women, of rotting wharves, of deserted warehouses, of weed-wild gardens, of miles of grass grown streets, of acres of pitiful and voiceful barrenness — this is Charleston, wherein Rebellion loftily reared its head five years ago.”
That’s the standard by which we measure our contemporary divisions, and through which we recall the importance of tests of our democratic values and institutions. Fort Sumter speaks to us still.
North Shore native David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.