Posted on 06/23/2016 2:04:08 PM PDT by ColdOne
My comment was: “Before he took office, New York was making plans to secede.”
Your answer: Complete hogwash
Now you say nothing came of it.
So, now you are agreeing after all.
Then you said “total rubbish” to my comment:
“The government was on the verge of collapse when Lincoln took office, and most of the northern apologists posting here know it.”
It has been reported by multiple sources that just hours before Lincoln sent Federal warships to Charleston and Pensacola, that when asked why not let the seceding states alone, his comment was “ but what about the tariff?”
Why would the greatest president in history be concerned with a little thing like a tariff?
The southern states made war against it’s northern brother states. Again, if you seek tyranny you need go no further. Had the slavocracy truly wanted a peaceful secession and independence there were ways to achieve it. They clearly did not.
BTW: The blockade of Charleston did not occur until after the rebels attacked the federal fort Sumter.
Act like red-headed step-children, get treated like red-headed step-children.
He never said that.
All the South did want was a peaceful secession from a North that reneged on the original agreement and condition to join the Union.
Slavery according to most historians was being phased out. The Yanks till this day believe they are morally and intellectually superior; some things never change.
Look -- we are not going to change each others' mind nor perspective. Appreciate the exchange.
There was certainly a precedent for a good Federal/State tariff fight leading to war.
Andrew Jackson was about to send an army against South Carolina a mere 30 years earlier over the Nullification Crisis. The issue became moot before shooting started but Jackson was more than willing to use force and South Carolina was prepping to shoot back. The argument over Federal supremacy vs State’s rights didn’t get resolved, with both sides claiming victory in the Nullification Crisis.
Immediately prior to Lincoln, James Buchanan had sent an army into Utah Territory to force the locals to acknowledge and obey Federal authority. The long forgotten Mormon War, which like the Nullification Crisis ended before any shooting started but it was headed that way.
Now Buchanan was still in office when South Carolina seceded and The Star of the West was fired upon while trying to resupply Fort Sumter - so why didn’t he call up the army to put down this rebellion like he had been willing to do with Utah? Apparently it’s because Utah was a Territory and directly governed by the Federal government, whereas South Carolina was a State and had its own government. This was an important distinction to Buchanan, and while he believed that secession was illegal he didn’t believe that the Federal government had the right to prevent states from doing so.
Timothy Pickering and the New England Essex Junto had been ginning up regional hostility as early as the election of Thomas Jefferson- Garry Wills wrote a book on this “”Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power”. Thomas Fleming’s more recent book “A Disease in the Public Mind” also deals with the longer term issues that eventually led up to outright war.
Jmacusa: “This Republican thinks of The Confederate flag as a flag of treason and separation.”
I’ve posted before, and it’s worth repeating, here in rural central Pennsylvania I often see Confederate flags on homes & pickups, usually flying beside Old Glory.
Years ago my Pennsylvanian dad married a pretty young North Carolina girl, who passed away last year, at age 93, leaving behind many children, grandchildren & great grandchildren.
Today she is buried beside Dad, here in PA.
So I consider that a highly successful, and desirable Southern invasion of the North.
We love our rebels, and don’t hold the past “unpleasantness” against them.
I appreciate that sentiment. The New Ugliness sure wasn’t present during Centennial of the Civil War when I was a boy.
Not true. The slaver aristocracy saw the writing on the wall - most civilized nations - even Mexico! - doing away with slavery. Since it was their bread and butter they would do ANYTHING to keep their gig going. They knew how costly a negotiated (and honorable) secession would be so they took the quick and dirty way out by rebelling under the pretense of a secession.
Slavery according to most historians was being phased out.
That was certainly true for most of the world, but not for the slavocracy. In fact when they threw together their constitution they enshrined the peculiar institution in perpetuity. They made it unconstitutional and illegal for any state, existing or new, to opt out of slavery. Slavery for all-time.
The Yanks till this day believe they are morally and intellectually superior; some things never change.
There appears to be some of that going around on both sides.
Look -- we are not going to change each others' mind nor perspective. Appreciate the exchange.
Enjoy your day.
I have that book, “the negros president”.
It certainly shows how US politics was always a rough & tumble sport.
I have recently discovered information about that "dust up" that is new to me, and I presume new to a lot of other people as well.
If I thought you were objective, I would inform you of it, but I already know you will try to spin it as something other than what it is. An admission of guilt (about who started the war) by a very important party who was very significant in this little "dust up."
I need to pick up a copy. A used copy is nearly free on Amazon. I learned of it through Fleming’s book and in addition to his references I found what I could out on the internet. The Pickering/Essex Junto activity is an interesting prelude of trouble to come. The roots of the Civil War were pretty long.
If I read the numbers correctly, it appears that independence for the South results in an immediate 237 million dollar loss per year for New England financial interests. Wasn't Lincoln supported heavily by rich New Yorkers in his bid to become President?
My recollection was that his New York speech is what convinced them to support him.
Is this that same "Wall Street" class that decries money in politics so long as it is someone's other than their own?
You make the statement that: “He never said that.”
Several verbose posters here and in the past have expended great energy to discredit this quote without explaining why two or more documented sources, one being sworn testimony from a Virginia pro-Union legislator, and the other a clergyman reporting the quote to newspapers, both of whom likely did not know each other, would by coincidence make the exact same claim.
Well, since neither you, them, or me were there, why not focus on what we know Lincoln knew to be true.
The Treasury Department's Secretary, John A. Dix, notified Congress on February 11, 1861 that “little more” than $500,000 remained in the central depository in Washington.
Demands for $2 million “unanswered” requisitions had accumulated in the department, with $6 million more due to public creditors in early March. Dix predicted a $21.6 million shortfall by the end of the fiscal year.
Staff in most executive departments could not draw their salaries that January. Members of Congress had gone unpaid since the start of the session the previous December. Worse yet, according to Dix, “The War and Navy departments have calls for large requisitions [that] have been delayed on account of the exhausted condition of the Treasury.”d
In 1860, the tariff supplied the Treasury with 94.5% of its total revenue base.
Would Lincoln be referring to this?
But the institution of slavery was still legal in New Jersey longer than it was in the South.
Seems to me if they thought it was so bad, they wouldn't have waited until they were forced to abolish it. Why didn't they abolish it in 1861? Wasn't that when the war started?
Four more years of Slavery in New Jersey makes you think they didn't really give a rat's @$$ about slavery as an issue.
Just found this letter from Major Anderson.
I had the honor to receive by yesterday’s mail the letter of the honorable Secretary of War, dated April 4, and confess that what he there states surprises me very greatly…I trust that this matter will be at once put in a correct light, as a movement made now, when the South has been erroneously informed that none such will be attempted, would produce most disastrous results throughout our country. It is, of course, now too late for me to give any advice in reference to the proposed scheme of Captain Fox. I fear that its result cannot fail to be disastrous to all concerned...I ought to have been informed that this expedition was to come. Colonel Lamon’s remark convinced me that the idea, merely hinted at to me by Captain Fox, would not be carried out. We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced. That God will still avert it, and cause us to resort to pacific measures to maintain our rights, is my ardent prayer.
Major Anderson himself realizes that what Lincoln is doing is a lying backstab on a agreement/truce/understanding. He realizes that what Lincoln was doing was a deliberate act of war and he says so.
He also basically says it was a real chickensh*t thing to do.
“If the cotton states unitedly and earnestly wish to withdraw peacefully from the Union, we think they should and would be allowed to do so. Any attempt to compel them by force to remain, would be contrary to the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence-contrary to the fundamental ideas on which human liberty is based”.
New York merchants agreed with this editorial. State census data had shown that annually that city merchants had sold merchandise to the five cotton states valued at $131,000,000, and that the total business with the five states was above $200,000,000 annually.
New York City did not welcome conflict for several reasons, including an indifference to slavery. Oddly enough, New York City was the headquarters of the abolitionist press, while also being a strong copperhead town at the same time. Two of the major anti-war Democrats in New York were Mayor Fernando Wood and a well-known painter, whose name adorns a world-famous code - Samuel F.B. Morse. Morse had formed the Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge and served as its president. He believed that fanatics would cause war, and he trumpeted the Peace Democrats’ anti-Administration line.
New York City’s business establishment, that annually underwrote Southern agriculture, had concern with accounts receivable. If conflict arose, New York City, America’s leading industrial powerhouse, would lose some of its most-important trading partners. Only New Orleans and Mobile shipped more cotton than New York, and the city manufactured much of the clothing worn down South. If war came, the South might just repudiate the millions of dollars that it owed to New York merchants.
That was not the case in Florida.
On March 12, 1861, eight days after his inaugural speech that was correctly perceived to mean war, Lincoln ordered that the troops on the Brooklyn, previously sent to station in Florida, be offloaded into Fort Pickens.
The order was sent by E. D. Townsend by the command of Winfield Scott. Reinforcing the fort, of course, would be in violation of the armistice and trigger an assault by the troops surrounding the fort, then maybe 5,000 in number.
It would mean war.
Lincoln’s Navy Secretary Gideon Wells knew of the armistice, certainly by communications from Pensacola dated March 18 that referred to the agreement made between Mallory and the US government and perhaps earlier from his predecessor when he took office.
Fortunately, however, the March 12 order didn't reach the Brooklyn until March 31.
The Navy commander of the vessels at Pensacola realized Scott’s orders were in direct violation of his orders from the Navy Department (which were to obey the armistice), and he declined to offload the troops.
At this point Lincoln through Welles reaffirmed the order to reinforce Pickens and orders more troops to be sent for that purpose. Like Anderson’s realization that Lincoln’s expedition to Sumter meant war, Montgomery Meigs, who headed the April effort to reinforce Fort Pickens, realized that Lincoln’s action at Pickens meant war.
Meigs put it this way: “This is the beginning of the war which every statesman and soldier has foreseen since the passage of the South Carolina ordinance of secession.” [Official Records, Series 1, Volume 1, page 368] and also from a post by Rustbucket on another thread.
No.
What “armistice”?
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