"5 Naturally, when one group is feeling threatened, they retaliate. The shots firing on Fort Sumter was said to be the confederacy's own version of retaliation.
In Lincoln's inaugural address he stressed the need to be cautious and to use limited force when defending federal forts and that he did not want to attempt to recapture the forts already under confederate control.6.
Lincoln, as a leader, was being pressured to make decisions regarding action at Fort Sumter. The fort itself had been running low on supplies for quite some time. Finally he decided to send some relief to the fort and at that point the confederate soldiers decided to take action also. .
The Succession.
On December 20, 1860, more than two months before Lincoln was to be inaugurated, a state-wide convention in South Carolina voted to secede from the Union; following them over the next several weeks were more than six other states to recede, including Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.7 After the state's secession, it handed down orders that all forts and facilities of the U.S. military located in and around Charleston be ceded to state confederacy control; against the request, the area commander, Major Robert Anderson, evacuated his forces of more than eighty men to Fort Sumter.8 At this point Anderson's men were at a disadvantage with little resources, but in a show of patriotism refused to give up. .
The Battle.
Defending what was left of unions forts in the U.S. would seem like the smartest thing to do when faced with the succession issues that the union was during this difficult time. One of the main reasons Anderson decided to move his troops from the fort they were at to Sumter were because they believed Sumter to be the mecca of safety and it to be the smartest move. Fort Sumter was believed to be one of the strongest fortresses in the world. Designed to house 650 men and 135 guns, construction of Fort Sumter had begun 1827 and was still not complete.