THE CHARLESTON MERCURY, South Carolina, April 13, 1861  

* Bombardment of Fort Sumter, Charleston Harbor
* Best publication to be had ? - very rare as such

When it comes to collecting historic events it is desirable to find a newspaper printed as close to the place or event as possible. Here is a Charleston newspaper reporting the opening battle of the Civil War at Fort Sumter. They don't get much better.
The top of a front page column has heads: "Bombardment of FORT SUMTER!" "Splendid Pyrotechnic Exhibition" "Fort Moultrie Impregnable" "The Floating Battler & Stevens' Battery a Success" " 'Nobody Hurt' on Our Side" and more. This reporting takes 1 1/2 columns of text.
Other early & related war items include: "Secession of Virginia" "April Twelfth,1861" "Our Montgomery Correspondence" "The Uses of War to the South" and more.
Four pages, large folio size, a bit irregular at the spine from disbinding, nice condition. Folder size noted is for the issue folded in half.

Background: Finding a newspaper reporting the bombardment of Fort Sumter printed in Charleston itself on April 13, 1861, is an extraordinary rarity because it represents a vanishingly small window of historical convergence. While major Northern and regional papers widely reprinted the news in the days and weeks that followed, firsthand accounts from the actual epicenter, fresh off the local presses while the smoke was still clearing over the harbor, are incredibly scarce. Within months of this printing, the Union blockade severely strangled the South's economy, leading to a catastrophic shortage of printing supplies and paper that forced many Confederate presses to drastically reduce their page counts, print on the back of wallpaper, or shut down entirely. Compounded by the subsequent burning and destruction of Charleston later in the war, very few of these original, locally produced opening-day editions survived the conflict, let alone the intervening generations. To hold a Charleston imprint from the literal birthplace of the Civil War is to hold a fragile, eyewitness artifact that escaped both wartime devastation and the ravages of time.