The First Shot

[seacoastartillery]

The First Shot

     Yes, we got our mortar shot commemorating the start of the Civil War in a little early this year, on Monday April 11, 2011.  After all, the Susquecentennial Aniversary, the 150th anniversary, doesn’t happen every day.  If any member witnessed the events which occurred in Charleston, South Carolina yesterday, memorializing this event, we would be interested to have you relate what you saw on this board.

     Let me be absolutely clear as to what this first shot means to us.  It is our way of bringing people’s attention to an incredibly important United States, historical event.  We are in no way celebrating the start of this horrible war in which more Americans died than in all the wars her citizens fought after that time, combined, including Iraq, Afganistan and the Libyan Civil War. 

    The first shot in the Civil War occurred on April 12, 1861 at 4:30 A.M. as the southern secessionists gathered all around Charleston harbor to participate in the opening bombardment of Federal Fort Sumter, initiated by an artillery piece on the harbor’s southern shore at an already historic place, Fort Johnson, which was significant in the American Revolutionary War.  No one really knows who fired that first official shot of the Civil War, but most historians agree that it came from a 10” mortar, commonly stated to be a 10” seacoast mortar model of 1819. 

     Who fired that historic shot, will probably be forever unknown, but a local secesh firebrand, Edmund Ruffin, was mentioned by several contemporary accounts to be the man who fired that mortar which propelled a ‘star shell’ over Fort Sumter, signaling the start of a 3 thousand shot bombardment that killed not one Federal inside the fort in Col. Anderson’s tiny, 85 man, command.  His artillerymen, including Captain Abner Doubleday, responded at first light on the 12th with a variety of artillery mounted within the fort and didn’t manage to kill one Confederate with all their firing.  At the 36 hour mark, after they ran out of food, they ran up the white flag and were placed on ships going north.  Fort Sumter, under Confederate control had the dubious distinction of becoming the most bombarded spot in North and South America as the Federal forces under Quincy Gilmore and others tried in vain to conquer that little island fort for more than three and a half years.   

T&M   


Not having a Model 1819 10” mortar available, we decided to use Gary’s Billiard Ball Mortar made by South Bend Replicas in 1982.  It’s a very short Movie clip.

[brokenpole]

I was not in Charleston yesterday. But living in Vicksburg will give me more than ample opportunity to watch events which commemorate the 150 year anniversary.

I grow up in the north and was schooled in Maryland. Let's just say that the version of events of the civil war that I learned in school are not the same as those that were taught in Vicksburg.  It has been a really unique experience to research and learn things I never considered. For instance, I was never told in my history lessons in school all the chances that the folks in Charleston gave the Federals to leave Fort Sumter before it was shelled that morning. Makes you wonder if both sides just knew that this conflict had to occur.  Just no one thought that it would last as long as it did or that all those lives would be lost.

So now I live in a city that didn't celebrate July 4th for many years after the end of the "war of northern aggression".