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When South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter in 1861, the reason why they got tens of thousands of Union volunteers willing to go and fight is because of this decadelong process of a vaguely antislavery public transforming into a much more militantly antislavery power.

Passover begins this year on April 12, the 164th anniversary of the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter, which ignited the American Civil War.

After the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, Isaac Mayer Wise, an early leader of Reform Judaism, published an editorial titled “Silence, Our Policy.”

As I write in "Dangerous Learning", the South sealed the nation’s fate on the march to Civil War not when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter but in the 1830s when the South would no longer tolerate open debate and discussion around slavery.

Before the first shots of the Civil War were ever fired at Fort Sumter, a poem titled “The Southland Fears no Foeman” was published in Richmond’s “Southern Literary Messenger.”