History for the day: 1861: The Civil War begins

History.com has this for 12 April:

The bloodiest four years in American history begin when Confederate shore batteries under General P.G.T. Beauregard open fire on Union-held Fort Sumter (photo) in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay. During the next day and a half, fifty Confederate guns and mortars launched more than four thousand rounds at the poorly supplied fort. On 13 April, Union Major Robert Anderson surrendered. Two days later, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand volunteer soldiers to quell the Southern “insurrection”.
As early as 1858, the ongoing conflict between North and South over the issue of slavery had led Southern leadership to discuss separation from the United States. By 1860, the majority of the slave states were publicly threatening secession if the Republicans, the anti-slavery party, won the presidency. Following Republican Abraham Lincoln’s victory over the divided Democratic Party in November of 1860, South Carolina immediately initiated secession proceedings. On 20 December, the South Carolina legislature passed the Ordinance of Secession, which declared that “the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved.” After the declaration, South Carolina set about seizing forts, arsenals, and other strategic locations within the state. Within six weeks, five more Southern states— Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana— had followed South Carolina’s lead.
In February of 1861, delegates from those states convened to establish a government. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was elected the first president of the Confederate States of America. When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated on 4 March 1861, a total of seven states (Texas having joined the pack) had seceded from the Union, and Federal troops held only Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Fort Pickens off the Florida coast, and a handful of minor outposts in the South. Four years after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the Confederacy was defeated, at a cost of more than six hundred thousand Union and Confederate dead, and countless more wounded.

Rico says it's always amused him that the War started and ended (technically) on the same day...