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 civil war, role, beginning, civil and/or war:
“Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“I wish glib and indiscriminate critics of industrialists had some conception of the problems that have to be met by factory management.... General condemnation of employers is a favorite indoor sport of the uninformed intelligentsia who assume the role of lance- bearers for labor.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos:”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“[I]t is a civil Cowardice to be backward in asserting what you ought to expect, as it is a military Fear to be slow in attacking when it is your Duty.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“In peacetime, they had all been normal decent, cowards, frightened of their wives, trembling before their bosses, terrified at the passing of the years, but war had made them gallant. They had been greedy men. Now they were self-sacrificing. They had been selfish. Now they were generous. War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best, the highest morality he is capable of.”
—Paddy Chayefsky (1923–1981)