The war began at 4.30 a.m. on the 12th of April 1861, when Confederate batteries on the shore of Charleston harbour opened fire on the federal garrison of Fort Sumter under Major Robert Anderson. The bombardment lasted thirty-four hours; Anderson's garrison of 80 men, with limited ammunition and no functioning long-range battery of their own, returned fire briefly and then surrendered on the afternoon of the 13th of April. No one was killed in the exchange (the only fatality of the operation, Private Daniel Hough, was killed when a federal gun firing a hundred-gun farewell salute exploded during the evacuation). The military significance of Sumter was negligible. The political significance was decisive: Lincoln, by deliberately staging the resupply attempt in a way that forced the Confederates to choose between acquiescence and military attack, had ensured that the Confederacy fired the first shot. The Confederate government had walked into the position with eyes open; Davis had ordered the bombardment knowing the political cost.
The volunteer call
Lincoln's response to Sumter, two days after the surrender, was a proclamation calling for 75,000 ninety-day volunteers from the loyal states to suppress "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings". The proclamation transformed the constitutional situation. The four upper-South slave states that had previously declined to secede — Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas — now faced a choice between contributing troops to a federal army that would invade their southern neighbours, or seceding themselves. Virginia seceded on the 17th of April (ratified by popular vote on the 23rd of May, 132,201 to 37,451); Arkansas on the 6th of May; North Carolina on the 20th of May; Tennessee on the 8th of June. The Confederacy was now eleven states with a population of approximately 9 million (3.5 million enslaved). The Union, less the eleven seceded states, was twenty-three states with a population of approximately 22 million.
The military mobilisation that followed the volunteer call was on a scale neither side had contemplated. The pre-war United States Army had numbered approximately 16,000 regulars, predominantly scattered along the western frontier in small garrisons. Within sixty days of Sumter, the Union had approximately 250,000 men under arms; within twelve months, approximately 650,000. The Confederate mobilisation was proportionally larger relative to its population: by mid-1862 approximately 350,000 men were in Confederate service, out of an adult white male population of roughly 1.1 million. The war would consume, on both sides, a combined approximately 4 million military participants and produce approximately 750,000 military deaths (the modern revised estimate, replacing the long-cited figure of 620,000) — proportionally the deadliest war in American history.
The eastern theatre and First Manassas
The Confederate capital had moved from Montgomery to Richmond on the 29th of May 1861, putting the political centre of the Confederacy within 100 miles of Washington. The proximity created an immediate strategic problem for both sides: each capital was vulnerable to a direct ground assault from the other. The first major land campaign was therefore in the eastern theatre, with Union forces under General Irvin McDowell advancing south-west from Washington toward the rail junction at Manassas (about 30 miles south-west of Washington), where a Confederate army under Generals Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston was concentrated.
The First Battle of Manassas (or Bull Run, in the Union nomenclature) was fought on the 21st of July 1861. McDowell's plan was technically sound — a flanking attack on the Confederate left across Bull Run creek — but the green troops on both sides, executing complex manoeuvres under fire for the first time, performed unevenly. The Confederate position was held by Thomas J. Jackson's brigade at the critical moment (giving Jackson the nickname "Stonewall"), and the arrival of Johnston's reinforcements by rail from the Shenandoah Valley — the first significant strategic use of railways in military history — broke the Union flanking attempt. The Union army's withdrawal across the afternoon turned into a panicked retreat as civilian sightseers from Washington (who had picnicked on the surrounding hills) attempted to flee back to the capital simultaneously, clogging the roads. Casualties: approximately 2,900 Union, 2,000 Confederate. The Confederates did not have the logistical capacity to pursue; the Union army reformed inside the Washington defences.
The strategic consequences of Manassas
The principal strategic consequence of First Manassas was that both sides realised, definitively, that the war would be long. The volunteer 90-day enlistments expired in late July; Lincoln immediately requested 500,000 three-year volunteers, which Congress granted. McDowell was replaced as the principal Union eastern commander by George B. McClellan, who would spend the next ten months training, organising and equipping the Army of the Potomac into a substantially larger and better-organised force — but who would prove operationally cautious to the point of paralysis when the time came to use it. The Confederate command on the eastern front was reorganised under Robert E. Lee (after his Virginia commission in May 1861) and Joseph E. Johnston, with Beauregard transferred to the western theatre.
The political consequences of First Manassas in the Union were the abandonment of any expectation of a quick suppression of the rebellion; the political consequences in the Confederacy were a substantial over-confidence in the prospect of European recognition and intervention, which would not, in the event, materialise. The strategic preparation for the campaigns of 1862 ran across the autumn of 1861 and the winter of 1861–62; the campaigning resumed in the spring. The next chapter covers the first full year of the war.
End of Chapter III