Shortly after midnight on the morning of April 12, 1861, four men in a rowboat made their way across the pitch-black harbor at Charleston, South Carolina, toward Fort Sumter, an unfinished and architecturally insignificant masonry fort three miles out from the city where the harbor meets the Atlantic Ocean. For three of the men, it was their second trip of the day to the pentagonal-shaped building defiantly flying the Stars and Stripes above its ramparts.
A Warning to Major Anderson
Although the four men headed toward Sumter were self-professed gentlemen—three from Charleston high society, the fourth an aristocratic Virginian—this was no social call. They were there as emissaries of the newly fledged Confederate States of America, born the previous December inside the Carolina Institute Hall in Charleston, where the Ordinance of Secession had been signed and the Palmetto State had become the first star on the Confederacy's new national flag.
