The shell that opened the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, and with it the Civil War, was fired from a mortar battery at Fort Johnson on the James Island shore of Charleston Harbor. Early that year state troops built two batteries of two 10-inch mortars each at Fort Johnson, and the signal came from the east battery, on the front beach facing Fort Sumter, under Captain George S. James. By the most detailed account, Lieutenant Henry S. Farley pulled the lanyard on James's order at about 4:30 in the morning, and the shell burst over Sumter as the signal for the other harbor batteries to open fire. The American Battlefield Trust says the honor was first offered to the former Virginia congressman Roger Pryor, who refused it.
Who fired it was argued for decades. Dr. Robert Lebby, for many years Charleston's quarantine officer, gathered testimony around 1893 and concluded that Farley fired the shot; his paper appeared in the South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine in 1911. General P. G. T. Beauregard credited Captain James himself. Edmund Ruffin, the Virginia secessionist long named as the man who fired the first shot, was with the Palmetto Guard at the Iron Battery on Morris Island, and his gun fired after the signal. Beauregard wrote that the first shell was not fired by Ruffin.
A stone erected for the Civil War Centennial at the end of Fort Johnson Road marks the approximate site of the battery, on the Fort Johnson grounds, where the state's Marine Resources Center now stands.
Getting there
32.7512, -79.8978
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