A look at what happened April 7-12, 1861, before the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. The shots fired ...

The building itself was ransacked by British troops during the siege of Charleston, and parts of the main house were burned by Union soldiers during the Civil War. Now a landmark on the National ...

Charleston, a center of the slave trade ... But 750,000 Americans would be killed before the Civil War ended in 1865. Four years to the day after Sumter fell, Anderson – by then a retired ...

We will pick up the story in a special edition of this history column on April 7, covering the events of April 7-12, 1861, leading up to the first shots of the Civil War in Charleston Harbor.