Battle of Fort Sumter
Poets involved
What happened
On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces under General P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, after Union Major Robert Anderson refused to surrender. The bombardment continued for 34 hours until Anderson surrendered on April 13. This attack marked the official beginning of the American Civil War, a conflict that would claim over 600,000 lives.
Literary impact
The firing on Fort Sumter unleashed an avalanche of poetry across the North and South. Edmund Clarence Stedman's poem 'Sumter' (1861) captured the shock and anger of Northerners, while Southern poets like William Gilmore Simms celebrated the Confederate victory. The event also inspired Ralph Waldo Emerson's 'Voluntaries' (1863), which praised the Union soldiers who rushed to defend the flag. Poetry became a primary means of processing the war's outbreak.
Source: Wikipedia
