Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy, gave orders that two warships, the USS Powhatan and USS Pawnee, along with the steamer USS Pocahontas and USS Revenue Cutter Harriet Lane, were to provision Fort Sumter. Another steamer, the Baltic, carried about 200...
President Abraham Lincoln met with Republican governors who had been outspoken regarding the issue of Fort Sumter. No notes from that meeting remain, and historian Robert Rosen opines that we will never know for sure what transpired that day – though one might...
The merchant schooner Rhoda H. Shannon, which departed Boston on March 26 with a shipment of ice bound for Savannah, took a precipitous wrong turn the afternoon of April 3, a mistake its captain accredited to faulty navigational equipment. To make matters even worse,...
As you’ll recall from yesterday’s post, even as Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard shored up Charleston’s defenses and President Lincoln considered ways to entice the South to fire on Fort Sumter, the U.S. Congress passed the Morrill Tariff Act, a key policy in the...
Confederate Brigadier Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard messaged President Jefferson Davis and S.C. Gov. Francis Pickens, saying the military batteries surrounding Fort Sumter would be capable and ready to reduce Fort Sumter to rubble within four days. Everyone...
