March 24, 2026, 6:00 a.m. CT When America called, Iowa was ready. That summons came 165 years ago, days after a member of a Confederate shore battery in South Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union, lit the fuse that launched a shell toward Fort Sumter. As the ordnance exploded over the federal installation in Charleston Harbor on April 12, 1861, the Civil War began.