Fort Sumter

noun

1. a fort in SE South Carolina, in the harbor of Charleston: its bombardment by the Confederates opened the Civil War on April 12, 1861.

Fort Sumter

/ ˈsʌmtə /

noun

1. a fort in SE South Carolina, guarding Charleston Harbour. Its capture by Confederate forces (1861) was the first action of the Civil War

Sumter, Fort

1. A fort at the entrance to the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina; the location of the first military engagement of the Civil War. In April 1861, several months after South Carolina had declared its secession from the United States, the militia of South Carolina demanded that the commander of the fort surrender. He refused, and the South Carolinians fired on the fort. There were no deaths in the incident. In response, however, President Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the “insurrection,” and the American Civil War began.

Example Sentences

At South Carolina’s Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park, flagged titles focused on the history of slavery, including books like Harriet A. Jacobs’ “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and the essay collection “Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff on American Memory.”

From Salon

When South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter in 1861, the reason why they got tens of thousands of Union volunteers willing to go and fight is because of this decadelong process of a vaguely antislavery public transforming into a much more militantly antislavery power.

From Slate

Passover begins this year on April 12, the 164th anniversary of the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter, which ignited the American Civil War.

From Slate

After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Isaac Mayer Wise, an early leader of Reform Judaism, published an editorial titled “Silence, Our Policy.”

From Slate

As I write in "Dangerous Learning", the South sealed the nation’s fate on the march to Civil War not when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter but in the 1830s when the South would no longer tolerate open debate and discussion around slavery.

From Salon