The states in rebellion against the United States fired upon Fort Sumter, a federal installation at Charleston, South Carolina.
UPDATE: Nice piece by Ken Burns today in the New York Times: "A Conflict's Acoustic Shadows."
But in the end, it seems that the War of the Rebellion, the formal name our government once gave to the struggle, always invades our consciousness like the childhood traumatic event it was — and still is.
Maybe Walt Whitman, the poet and sometime journalist who had worked as a nurse in the appalling Union hospitals, understood and saw it best. “Future years,” he said, “will never know the seething hell, the black infernal background of the countless minor scenes and interiors … of the Secession War, and it is best they should not.
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