Role in The Beginning of The Civil War
Twice in early 1861, the Army secretly dispatched troops and provisions from Fort Columbus to relieve the besieged garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. Outgoing President James Buchanan initiated the first effort, but cadets from The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, fired on the Army-chartered New York-based steamship Star of the West on 9 January 1861 as it entered Charleston harbor. The incident provoked a crisis while other southern states began to more seriously consider secession from the Union. The second effort which marks the beginning of the Civil War also failed when it prompted South Carolina forces to fire on Fort Sumter on the early morning of 9 April 1861.
During the Civil War, Fort Columbus served as a recruitment center and hospital. Fort Columbus and Castle Williams also served as a temporary prisoner of war camp and confinement hospital for Confederate prisoners during the war. Major General William H. C. Whiting (CSA) died of dysentery in February 1865 while in captivity in post hospital shortly after his surrender at the Battle of Fort Fisher in North Carolina . He was the highest ranking Confederate officer to die as a prisoner of war.
Read more about this topic: Fort Columbus
Famous quotes containing the words role, beginning, civil and/or war:
“American feminists have generally stressed the ways in which men and women should be equal and have therefore tried to put aside differences.... Social feminists [in Europe] ... believe that men and society at large should provide systematic support to women in recognition of their dual role as mothers and workers.”
—Sylvia Ann Hewitt (20th century)
“The good—have always been the beginning of the end.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“The British blockade won the war; but the wonder is that the British blockhead did not lose it. I suppose the enemy was no wiser. War is not a sharpener of wits.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)