You’ve been told the Civil War began at Fort Sumter in April 1861. That’s the story in the textbooks. That’s the version on government websites. But what if we told you that the war actually began three months earlier—with cannon fire, a covert mission gone wrong, and a president paralyzed by indecision?

In this gripping episode of Civil War Stories With Waffles, we uncover the real first shots of the American Civil War—fired not by seasoned troops, but by cadets from The Citadel on a foggy January morning in 1861. At the heart of the story is a little-known steamship called the Star of the West, sent on a secret mission to reinforce Fort Sumter under the nose of South Carolina’s secessionist government. What followed was an explosive confrontation that history all but forgot.

From the unfinished fort in Charleston H ...