When South Carolina seceded In December 1860, Major Robert Anderson, commanding officer of United States Army forces in Charleston, South Carolina, acting without orders, moved his small garrison from Fort Moultrie, which was indefensible, to the more modern, more defensible, Fort Sumter.
On 12 April 1861 the confederate forces under Brig. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, a Mason and Knight Templar from New Orleans, Louisiana, who had been Anderson's student at West Point, fired the first shots of the American civil War from Fort Johnson. The shell exploded over Fort Sumter. During the whole of the bombardment April 12–14, no one from either side was killed.
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