Fort Sumter
At the site of Fort Sumter, the first shots of the Civil War were fired on April 12, 1861. As decades of bottled-up tension between the North and the South exploded on one fair morning day, the first bloodshed of the horrendous Civil War began. The newly formed Confederate States of America even sent an envoy of delegates to convince Union Maj. Robert Anderson to abandon his tiny outpost and withdraw to Union soil. When Maj. Anderson refused to do so, the United States had officially began the war with the Confederacy.