Posted on 02/17/2017 4:07:25 AM PST by Bull Snipe
I am not inclined to allow nonsense to beget nonsense.
PeaRidge to x: "If you accept the validity of the 'Official Records...' and Lincoln's statement of approval, then you see his order to reinforce.
He said the same thing in his orders to go in to Pensacola the same day.
Here in Lincoln's words:..."
In fact there is a whole series of letters & orders which have been often posted on these threads.
What they make clear is, the distinction between "reinforcement" versus "resupply" was not fully realized by Lincoln's people in the beginning, but that by the time his mission was launched, Lincoln did order the mission was resupply first, then reinforce only if they met Confederate resistance.
So the message Lincoln sent to South Carolina Governor Pickens was consistent with the final orders issued to his mission leaders: resupply only if no resistance.
Regardless, it's a distinction without a meaning.
Many historical examples exist for similar situations which did not result in war because the local power refused to start it.
A partial listing includes:
And so with Fort Sumter, Jefferson Davis' decision to use it as his excuse to start Civil War was strictly his own, not "forced" by anything other than his own judgment as to the Confederacy's best interests.
And Davis was absolutely not mistaken, short term, since the Confederacy immediately almost doubled in size and did double in white population with the joining of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas.
Longer term, of course, Davis' Confederacy paid the price predicted at the time by his Secretary of State, Robert Toombs to President Davis:
In 1860 Fort Sumter was not a gun pointed at anybody, it was incomplete & unmanned.
A tiny US Army garrison was stationed nearby and fled to Fort Sumter to escape capture by South Carolina militia.
Some claimed that escape was against orders, but regardless, those few Union troops had no orders to be a "gun" pointed at Charleston.
Nor would their commander, a Southerner,Major Anderson, allow such a thing.
So Confederate fears were greatly overblown.
Regardless, the Deep South public demanded action against the Fort, demands which Jefferson Davis could ignore only to his own political peril.
And besides, Virginia was balanced politically on a knife's edge between Union & secession, and needed only some act of war to push them into the Confederacy.
And along with Virginia, the entire Upper South and perhaps even Border South states.
In early April, 1861, the Confederacy was rapidly raising an army of 100,000 to oppose the Union's 16,000 man US Army, most posted in small forts out west.
Clearly, for Davis in April 1861, the benefits of war outweighed any risks.
"And the war came"
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