Troop engagements of the American Civil War, 1861 Troop engagements of the American Civil War, 1861 The following is a list of engagements that took place in 1861 during the American Civil War. The war started on April 12 when Confederate forces commanded by General P. G. T. Beauregard opened fire on the Union garrison of Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina; after a thirty-four-hour bombardment, the Union garrison surrendered. There had been no casualties during the bombardment; but the following day while the Union garrison commander, Major Robert Anderson, was firing a fifty-gun salute, there was an explosion that resulted in one man being
Tennessee in the American Civil War slaves out for "half [of what] they were worth" because "the negros think when Lincoln takes his last, they will all be free." With the attack on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, followed by President Abraham Lincoln's April 15 call for 75,000 volunteers to put the seceded states back into line, public sentiment turned dramatically against the Union. Historian Daniel Crofts thus reports: Governor Isham Harris began military mobilization, submitted an ordinance of secession to the General Assembly, and made direct overtures to the Confederate government. In the June 8, 1861 referendum, East Tennessee held firm against separation, while