Today’s Defiant Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
The first shot of the American Civil War was fired against Fort Sumter, in Charleston Harbor, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861. While the gentry of Charleston watched from that city’s fashionable Battery, Confederate artillery bombarded the fort until, his ammunition exhausted, Sumter commandant Major Robert Anderson surrendered. He and his garrison were permitted to withdraw with full military honors, and the Stars and Bars were raised over the fort’s battered interior.
The Stars and Bars (the first Confederate flag) flying above Fort Sumter
Edmund Ruffin (1794-1865), whom one historian describes as an “ancient and ardent secessionist,” claimed credit for having fired the first shot of the Civil War. Actually, Captain George S. James fired a signal gun first, but it is probable that Ruffin pulled the Lanyard that let fly the first shot from Stevens Battery on Cummings Point. He commemorated the event in this photograph, posing with a U.S. Model 1842 musket and the hat and accoutrements of the Palmetto Guards, the Charleston militia outfit in which the sixty-seven-year-old man served during the bombardment. If Ruffin was an old and defiant man at the start of the war, he was an old and broken man by war’s end. But still fanatically defiant. In 1865, with his home, cause, and country in ruins (a Federal soldier had scrawled along a wall: “This house belonged to a Ruffinly son-of-a-bitch”), Ruffin refused to accept life under Union authority. He blew his brains out, having first written a suicide note:
And now with my latest writing and utterance… I here repeat… my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule… and the perfidious, malignant and vile Yankee race.
Culled from: Portraits of the Civil War
Ghastly!
Lynching, Circa 1910, location unknown.
Culled from: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America