Mr. Lincoln’s War – Today In Southern History
12 April 1861
On this date in 1861…
Knowing that a federal invasion fleet was on the way, General P.G.T. Beauregard ordered Confederate and South Carolina troops to begin the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, South Carolina.
Other Years:
1675 – British Colonial Governor of Virginia, Richard Bennett died.
1776 – North Carolina adopted the Halifax Resolution for independence from Great Britain.
1836 – A force nearly a thousand Seminole warriors unsuccessfully attacked a blockhouse near the mouth of the Withlacoochee River, held by 50 volunteers from the Florida militia.
1862 – “The Great Locomotive Chase,” Andrews’s raid on the Western & Atlantic Rail Road in Georgia disrupted rail service across the state.
1862 – Federal troops occupied Fort Pulaski, Georgia.
1864 – General Nathan B. Forrest took Fort Pillow, Tennessee. Federal General James R. Chalmers abandoned his troops, but later claimed that Confederate soldiers committed atrocities against his men.
1869 – The North Carolina reconstruction legislature passed an anti-Ku Klux Klan Law.
1872 – The Jesse James gang was blamed for a $1,500 bank robbery in Columbia, Kentucky that left one man dead.
1945 – The 32nd U.S. president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia at age 63. Vice-President Harry S. Truman of Missouri became president.
1981 - Space Shuttle Columbia was launched as the first orbital flight of NASA’s Space Shuttle program from Cape Canaveral.
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