On the night of 26 December 1860, Maj. Robert Anderson, Union commander at Charleston, removed his garrison of eighty-five soldiers and officers from Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan's Island, to a better defensive position at Fort Sumter. Major Anderson kept his decision to move to Fort Sumter a secret until about twenty minutes before he and his crew departed from Fort Moultrie. South Carolina’s secession brought a new urgency to an already tense situation. Anderson and his men were now considered foreign occupiers by the seceded states, and Southern leaders were pressuring the governor, Francis Pickens, to remove the Federal troops from the Harbor as quickly as possible. Removal would send a powerful signal to the world confirming the legitimacy of Confederate nationality. Abandonment of the forts, on the other hand, would reveal the weakness of the United States in the face of rebellion. On Thursday, April 11, 1861, Confederate Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, the Confederates first Brigadier General and commander of defenses for Charleston S.C. dispatched aides to Maj. Robert Anderson demanding the surrender of Fort Sumter, Maj. Anderson refused. This was the start of the Battle of Fort Sumter and essentially the start of the American Civil War.