PragerU’s Fort Sumter video performs magic: it erases three months from 12/1861-3/3/1861. Sumter itself held no combat garrison until the night of December 26, 1860. Six days after South Carolina seceded, Major Robert Anderson abandoned Fort Moultrie, spiked the guns, burned the carriages, and moved his roughly eighty-five men to the unfinished Sumter. State forces occupied the abandoned Moultrie and Castle Pinckney the next morning. Comparable seizures of forts and arsenals by the authorities of Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and other seceded states followed in January—weeks before the Montgomery convention met on February 4 and more than a month before Lincoln’s inauguration. On January 10, 1861, Jefferson Davis, still a U.S. senator, addressed Buchanan’s message on South Carolina and described those occupations as steps taken by the states to protect property after the federal destruction of installations inside their borders, not as operations of a Confederate government that did not yet exist. The video makes it sound like the Confederate government was stealing property. It literally erases months from the calendar. South Carolina answered at once with a legal, not military, mission. Isaac W. Hayne’s January correspondence with Buchanan stated he came “not as a military man to demand the surrender of a fortress, but as the legal officer of the State, its Attorney-General, to claim for the State the exercise of its undoubted right of eminent domain” and to pledge compensation. Shortly thereafter, Commissioners from the provisional Confederate government reached Washington in February and were refused an audience. In that setting of prior movements, refused negotiations, and Seward’s shifting assurances, Lincoln’s April notice that he would send “provisions only” was read as another lie. Therefore the CSA could not know if Lincoln was sending an invading force or only food. The bombardment that followed produced no combat deaths; Anderson’s men fired a salute, evacuated under terms, and sailed to New York with no prisoners taken. No general war existed until Lincoln’s April 15 call for seventy-five thousand volunteers to invade—without authority from Congress. Virginia remained in the Union—and both Lee and Jackson—until that proclamation; its convention had rejected secession on April 4. Browning’s diary records Lincoln explaining that he himself devised the plan of sending supplies without reinforcements, notified Governor Pickens, and concluded the resulting attack “did more service than it otherwise could.” The video’s timeline simply erases the months in which state authorities, not a Confederate government, acted, negotiations were refused, and the decision to coerce the Cotton States converted a harbor dispute into war. -Staff of Jefferson Davis

NY Times 4/6/1861: "Slavery has nothing whatever to do with the tremendous issues now awaiting decision. It has disappeared almost entirely from the political discussions of the day....No man, anywhere in the North, proposes for a moment to interfere with Slavery in any Southern State."