We Don't Need Another CIVIL WAR!

woodpusher: "Let me put it to you this way.
Nothing became an Opinion of the Court because of what Taney may have thought.
Only what a majority concurred in became an Opinion of the Court. "

Those words are well worth remembering when the subject changes from Dred Scott to ex-parte Merriman.
Again Crazy Roger Taney issued his personal opinions under cloak of judicial authority, regarding habeas corpus.
Lincoln rightfully ignored Crazy Roger.

Crazy Roger's Dred Scott opinion's key importance is that it helped flip many Northern Democrats to vote Republican because, as Lincoln famously pointed out:

"We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State."

Sorry, I had intended to address you too in post #354.

Time for some coffee!

“The Japanese Empire had a battle plan to knock the US Pacific Fleet out. It almost succeed. On Nov. 26 the Japanese Fleet left port to attack Pearl Harbor. That was an act of war.On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese midget subs were operating in and around Pearl Harbor on a mission to attack. That's an act of war. One was discovered by the U.S.S. Ward and fired upon and was sunk.The first wave of Japanese planes were already in the air on their way to attack Pearl Harbor. The Japanese acted first.”

Your post is excellent! I really mean it.

In a few short sentences, you have demolished the “first shot” theory so often used on these pages to justify Lincoln's levying war on the states. You get it!

You also get an A-plus.

You’re still way off the mark as usual. The Confederacy wanted war and got by opening fire on Ft. Sumter. You’ll never get it, will you?

In addition take a good look at a map ok? And you'll see Japan and the United States are two different countries thousands of miles apart.
Japan was not resupplying one of it's own military installations. Nor was it seeking to secede from the US. It was an Asian power bent on dominating the Pacific through aggressive war and in the process enslave Asians as part of it's empire. To do this it needed to eliminate The US Pacific Fleet by striking at Pearl Harbor and it had further intentions of attacking the West Coast of the United States. Japan. incidentally was the only foreign country in the modern era to attack the continental US(Attu and Kiska Islands). At the very moment the first wave of Japanese aircraft were on their way to Pearl Harbor Japanese envoys were in Washington DC talking ''peace''. Whether or not the Ward fired on the Jap minisub is inconsequential. They had crossed the Rubicon when the Japanese Fleet left port. The Confederates opened fire on Sumter.

Spouting from a List Causer who believes everyone but him is a northerner

How many times to you have to be told Reb? The Confederacy was spoiling for a fight . And started one. And lost. So take your pettifogging bs and stick it

How many times do you need to regurgitate your irrelevant, ahistoric nonsense, Mr. Liberal?

You need not tell your ignunt, irrelevant nonsense at all, much less repeat it as if doing so would make it relevant.

It is sad that you have no actual argument, nor facts, and can only spew. But spew you do.

You call yourselves conservatives and yet you come to a Conservative web site venerating a bunch o f treasonous Southern Democrats.

You call yourself conservative, yet seek to revise history to fit your desired illogic and nonsense. You can't handle the truth so you merely spew. What a sorry excuse for a make believe conservative.

Winning or losing in centuries past does not put one on the right side of history, or the law, or an argument. Your argument only lays bare the fact that you have nothing and are unable to respond on the merits. It seems you can't say much because you are choking on the Official Record.

Time to call your Daddy. Oh never mind, he's here.

[jamcusa #123 to jeffersondem] "Bullshit. Lincoln had sent resupply ships."
woodpusher #302: "Fort Sumter was being supplied by a local merchant, McSweeney under a contract pre-existing the troop movement to Fort Sumter. Buchanan and Lincoln set afoot a mission to reinforce Fort Sumter (and Fort Pickens), not to resupply."
Clueless Daddy BroJoeK #358: "Both Forts Sumter & Pickens were Federal forts occupied by Federal troops, so the Union was free to resupply or reinforce them at will, just as we do today at, for example, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

Having answered the call of your wayward son jmacusa, you have inadvertently provided further confirmation of his ahistoric claim as nonsense. Wayward child argued that there was no reinforcement mission, the claim of a reinforcing mission was bullshit, and that it was nothing more than a resupply mission. Recently, he has been choking on the Official Records of the missions to reinforce.

Your claim that the Union was free to resupply or reinforce Forts Sumter or Pickens at will is irrelevant to the question of whether a reinforcing mission was sent, or rather a mission to deliver bread. As an historical matter, the Official Records confirm that reinforcing missions were sent.

Trying to change the issue to what the Federal government had a right to do, rather than what it actually did, does not help resurrect from the dead, the false claim of jmacusa at #123. He said it and he owns it, and it was and remains false.

woodpusher #310: "Let me put it to you this way. Nothing became an Opinion of the Court because of what Taney may have thought. Only what a majority concurred in became an Opinion of the Court."
BroJoeK #361: "Those words are well worth remembering when the subject changes from Dred Scott to ex-parte Merriman. Again Crazy Roger Taney issued his personal opinions under cloak of judicial authority, regarding habeas corpus. Lincoln rightfully ignored Crazy Roger."

Daddy BroJoeK, your ignorance of the law and of Scott and Merryman is showing. It is painfully obvious that you fail to realize that Merryman was, on its face, NOT and opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was explicitly an IN CHAMBERS OPINION of the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, clearly stated as such in Taney's handwritten opinion. At chambers, refers to any place chosen to hold the hearing. In this case it was in Maryland.

Ex parte
John Merryman
Before the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
At Chambers

Aside from being unaware that Merryman was an In Chambers Opinion, you seem to be blissfully unaware of what an In Chambers Opinion is. It is an Opinion issued by a single justice on a particular matter while the Court is OUT OF SESSION. A out-of-session hearing upon a petition for habeas corpus fits the bill, and a return of the writ is required.

In Merryman, a properly issued Writ of Habeas Corpus had been issued by a district judge. General Cadwalader, the holder of the body of John Merryman, refused to appear and refused entry of a Federal marshal to effect service upon the general. The military claim was that President Lincoln had delegated his (nonexistent) authority to suspend habeas corpus to the senior military official, and authorized further delegation of this (nonexistent) authority down the chain of command. Lincoln did purport to so delegate his (nonexistent) authority; it is a matter of official record.

Nobody has the authority to suspend habeas corpus. No such authority is granted to anyone by the Constitution.

Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 provides, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."

It is the privilege of the writ, not habeas corpus or issuance of the writ itself, which may be suspended, as stated in Article I which details the powers of Cogress.

In Milligan, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court stated:

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false....

Ex Parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2, 120-21 (1866)

From the Syllabus of Milligan which recites the holdings of the unanimous opinion:

11. Neither the President nor Congress nor the Judiciary can disturb any one of the safeguards of civil liberty incorporated into the Constitution except so far as the right is given to suspend in certain cases the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.
12. A citizen not connected with the military service and a resident in a State where the courts are open and in the proper exercise or their jurisdiction cannot, even when the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus is suspended, be tried, convicted, or sentenced otherwise than by the ordinary courts of law.
13. Suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus does not suspend the writ itself. The writ issues as a matter of course, and, on its return, the court decides whether the applicant is denied the right of proceeding any further.

Milligan at 71 U.S. 130-31:

The two remaining questions in this case must be answered in the affirmative. The suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus does not suspend the writ itself. The writ issues as a matter of course, and, on the return made to it, the court decides whether the party applying is denied the right of proceeding any further with it.

Milligan was not an In chambers Opinion of one justice. It was a unanimous 9-0 opinion of the whole Court, written by a Lincoln appointee, Justice David Davis.

Nobody has the right to suspend the writ itself, but that is what Lincoln and his generals purported to do. In Merryman, it was purported that General Keim, in Pennsylvania, had suspended the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland in order to effect the arrest of John Merryman. It was purported that the authority to suspend the writ itself had been delegated to General Keim by another general. Acting on this claimed, but non-existent authority, the military unlawfully refused to issue a return of the writ (answer to the writ).

It should be noted that Lincoln was not a party in Merryman. As the military opposed the Marshals of the Court with a force too strong to overcome, Taney so wrote and had a copy of his opinion in Merryman delivered to the President. Lincoln not only failed his constitutional duty to have a return of the writ issued, he had a warrant issued for the arrest of the Chief Justice for the apparent crime of doing his legal duty. The arrest warrant was given by President Lincoln to the U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia for service, with instruction to use the marshal's own discretion about making the arrest unless he received further orders from President Lincoln. Exercising his discretion, the Marshal never executed the arrest.

It is amazing that conservatives, so called, support the rape of the Constitution, and defiance of the law, when it suits their purpose.

The below law review item comes from current Chief Justice John Roberts.

https://www.virginialawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/What-Makes-the-D.C.-Circuit-Different.pdf

Extract from pages 382-84; article from 375-89.

VA Law Review - by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr.
III. POLITICAL PRESSURES DURING THE CIVIL WAR
The D.C. Circuit would not be so lucky in its next brush with the political branches. During the Civil War, the three judges on the D.C. Circuit found themselves at loggerheads with the Lincoln administration. The court was led in this struggle by Judge William Merrick, a Democrat who had been appointed by Franklin Pierce and who was deeply suspected by the Lincoln administration of harboring secessionist sympathies. The question facing the court was whether habeas corpus could issue against the Army to secure the release of minors who had enlisted without their parents’ consent. Judge Merrick held in one decision that it could and secured the release of minors from the Army. When he tried again two weeks later to do the same thing in another case, President Lincoln reacted. He ordered the Army not to comply with the judicial process. He further ordered the Comptroller General not to pay the salaries of the three judges, and he sent an armed sentry to stand guard outside Judge Merrick’s house. There is a lot of confusion and debate about exactly what was going on, but Judge Merrick chose to regard himself as confined to his house, and so he wrote a letter to his two colleagues to explain why he could not come to court the next day.
Judge Merrick’s colleagues, in solidarity with their imprisoned-perhaps-colleague, issued an order to the Provost Marshal of the District of Columbia to show cause why he should not be held in contempt for these actions against Judge Merrick. One of the judges, Judge Morsel, said, “I intend to do my duty, and vindicate the character of this court as long as I sit here.” He then added, in my view somewhat ambiguously, “I am an old man.” This last statement seemed to detract from the threat, but maybe he was being maudlin in saying it was not going to be very long.
In any event, President Lincoln did not back down. He sent Army officials to the court to announce that he had suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the District of Columbia. The court questioned whether Lincoln had the authority to do that retrospectively, as they put it, but they concluded that in the face of military authority there was nothing more that they could do, and that they would consider the case closed and accept no further filings in it.
President Lincoln and the Republican Congress did not consider the case closed. They abolished the court and terminated the judgeships, creating in the place of the abolished court a new court called the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. It looked a lot like the old court, except for the fact that it now had four vacancies to which President Lincoln appointed, and the Senate confirmed, four new appointees -- a former Republican Congressman from New York; a Republican Congressman from Delaware; an Ohio delegate to the Republican convention that nominated Lincoln; and Andrew Wylie. Wylie was reputed to be the only person in Alexandria who had voted for Lincoln.
This Civil War episode is significant in two respects. First, I believe it is a unique episode in American legal history, in which reaction to a particular decision resulted in the abolition of the court and termination of the judgeships. Second, it shows what has been a characteristic of the District of Columbia Circuit from the beginning -- that to the extent the court asserts unique authority in the area of reviewing decisions of the national government, it is also uniquely vulnerable. Lincoln could not have ordered the Comptroller General to stop paying all the federal judges in the country, but he could order him to stop paying the judges in the District of Columbia. He could not, with the Republican Congress, have abolished all the federal courts in the country, replacing them with new courts and his appointees; but he could do that with respect to the District of Columbia Circuit, a small court in his backyard.

Apparently, if Joe Biden did that, he would have your support for following tin the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln needed those minor cildren for his Army, parental consent be damned.

See also the case of Judge Richard Carmichael. You might start to see a pattern.

http://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5321

Carmichael, Richard Bennett
Richard Bennett Carmichael was a northern educated, slave owning Maryland aristocrat with an abiding attachment to the Constitution. He was born to an old Queen Anne County family of wealth and influence; his father had roomed with Roger Brooke Taney when law students together. The young Carmichael entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a member of the class of 1827 but later transferred to Princeton where he graduated in 1828. Just four years later he was elected to Congress as a Jacksonian Democrat, serving one term before returning to his law practice. He was then named as associate justice on the 10th Judicial Circuit that covered the Eastern Shore of Maryland. When the Civil War broke out and Washington asserted its authority in divided Maryland, Carmichael began a concerted judicial campaign in his courts to have grand juries indict federal officials who had made arbitrary arrests without proper authority. The military governor in the area soon lost patience with this activity and ordered Carmichael’s own arbitrary arrest. On a rainy afternoon in May 1862, the diminutive judge was manhandled from his courtroom and delivered to federal prison. He spent six months in prison without trial before being released. He resigned from the bench in 1864 but took up Democratic politics again after the war and was the president of the Maryland constitutional convention of 1867. Carmichael died at his estate on the Wye River in October 1884 and was buried in the family plot there. (By John Osborne)

Unlike faux conservatives, just because I am a Yankee I do not support this type of unlawful nonsense. I damn sure do not praise it.

In 1842, the Russians sold Fort Ross to the US. If, in 1860, the Russians had invaded Californian, refortified Fort Ross, and threatened passage of American shipping to Bodega Bay (which supplied Santa Rosa, at the time), refused all demands to quit the occupation, had lapsed a few threatened "redline" deadlines, and kept supplying the fort with armed warships, the US MIGHT have eventually attempted some sort of intervention, there. Who would you consider to be the aggressor in that scenario?

If they sold us the fort, they would be the aggressors if they retook the fort afterwards. If we seized the fort from them without a treaty or payment, we would be the aggressors. So secessionists in seizing US property were the aggressors. There was no consent to their seizing Fort Sumter or other US property.

But you don't have to invent silly hypotheticals. Britain ceded its forts in the Northwest Territories to the US in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, but Britain didn't evacuate the forts. If we had attacked them, we could understand that they were the aggressors, and they would think of us as the aggressors, but we were wise enough not to start a war over that issue alone. If the Confederates had acted in 1861 with similar prudence (and in circumstances where their claim was much less valid) we might not be saying they started the war.

The US was doing in Charleston Harbor in 1860 EXACTLY what it has just done in 1853 in Edo Bay, and for pretty much the same reason.

You seem to like faulty analogies and rhetorical excesses. Japan was another country and a very different one from the US. South Carolina had been part of the US and Fort Sumter still was. The Confederates were acting in the spirit of a rising power by seizing federal property. The US was behaving as a conservative status quo power in wanting to hold onto its property.

Every significant Northern voice of the time very clearly expressed the intention of turning the Northwest into a purely White "workers' paradise" in keeping with the Marxist and Darwinist thought driving 'progressive' Northern politics.

John Brown? Garrison? It's clear that some Northerners didn't support such racial exclusionism. Others did. For still others that claim is hard to make. The US was overwhelmingly White and the Northern states even whiter, so a frontier settled by the Americans of the day would be largely settled by White people. Did "significant Northern voices" object if some African-Americans came, too? Some did. Some didn't. Others probably didn't think about it much. Maybe they didn't obsess about it. But most of them knew that they didn't want slavery on the frontier.

Darwin didn't publish his book until 1859. He and Marx were largely unknown in mid-19th century America and would not have been approved by Americans if they had been known.

Many Southerners wanted slaves in the territories, but they didn't want free Blacks. They'd expelled their Indian tribes. They'd supported a war to take the Southwest from the Mexicans. Any ideas of White supremacy were at least as dominant in the South as in the North.

And that "worker's paradise" BS? Seriously, be honest. Know your own heritage and own up to it. It was Southern Democrats like Jefferson and Jackson who promoted themselves as supporters of the workingman. Were they Marxists, too?

“I want five opinions, of the nine filed, that support the nonsense claims of your anonymous Wikipedia source. Correct page citations from the official opinions in U.S. Reports would nice. Even Wikipedia's footnoted source, as I quoted from, shows the article to be full of crap“

You seem to have no trouble using the cited sources of “my anonymous Wikipedia source”. Odd, that. Here’s more from the anonymous wiki article for your reading pleasure:

“Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenting vote in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which declared racial segregation constitutional and created the concept of "separate but equal". In his dissent, Harlan wrote that the majority's opinion would "prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case".[44]

Charles Evans Hughes, writing in 1927 on the Supreme Court's history, described Dred Scott v. Sandford as a "self-inflicted wound" from which the court would not recover for many years.[45][46][47]

In a memo to Justice Robert H. Jackson in 1952, for whom he was clerking, on the subject of Brown v. Board of Education, the future Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote that "Scott v. Sandford was the result of Taney's effort to protect slaveholders from legislative interference."[48]

Justice Antonin Scalia made the comparison between Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) and Dred Scott in an effort to see Roe v. Wade overturned.

Dred Scott ... rested upon the concept of "substantive due process" that the Court praises and employs today. Indeed, Dred Scott was very possibly the first application of substantive due process in the Supreme Court, the original precedent for... Roe v. Wade.[49]

Scalia noted that the Dred Scott decision had been written and championed by Taney and left the justice's reputation irrevocably tarnished. Taney, who was attempting to end the disruptive question of the future of slavery, wrote a decision that "inflamed the national debate over slavery and deepened the divide that led ultimately to the Civil War".[50]”

We could go on and on swapping other people’s quotes. But, to be perfectly honest, I have no disposition to re-argue the Dred Scott case with you (which you apparently want to do). The final decision was 7-2.

Majority: Taney, joined by Wayne, Catron, Daniel, Nelson, Grier, Campbell Concurrence: Wayne
Concurrence: Catron
Concurrence: Daniel
Concurrence: Nelson, joined by Grier
Concurrence: Grier
Concurrence: Campbell
Dissent: McLean
Dissent: Curtis

And that’s all you’re getting from me. And it’s more than you deserve. There isn’t actually anything said by me that should bring on the inquisition by you to show you individual opinions from the case. Nothing I claimed leads to that line of questioning. I posted about Taney and the final court decision. Your head is stuck in the quagmire of the case. You are stealing the narrative. You are steering the conversation. You can’t see the forest for the trees. You know more and more about less and less. So, you stay in your own bovine excrement and stop trying to pull me into it. You want “opinions”? I’ll give you a second opinion: you are a pedant.

I do not know how you can define the nation as a nation of free men when every single state had slavery when the nation was founded.

We had the idea that we were free people, a nation of free people. We talked about rights to free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the right to bear arms -- all rights denied to slaves. Therefore, we considered freedom to be the norm -- our birthright -- and slavery was an anomaly or exception.

The difference you see, is that this was not contrary to their principles, but was very much contrary to the claimed principles of the North. ... What was their hypocrisy? I'm trying to understand what you are getting at here.

But if your professed values are freedom and self-determination and you are forever complaining about being reduced to slavery and yet you own slaves, than clearly, you are acting against your own professed principles and are a hypocrite.

But his sending warships with orders to force their way into Sumter was the first belligerent act taken by the new government.

The mission was to resupply the fort. If that was not allowed there were orders about what to do, orders which may or may not have been practical, but they would have been moot if resupplying the fort had been allowed, and aren't really relevant in analyzing what actually did happen, rather than what could have happened.

But the Charlestonians regarded Anderson's seizure of the fort as the first belligerent act of the war. Holding their harbor hostage was also seen as a continuous act of belligerence.

The DDR felt the same way about West Berlin. The PRC felt the same way about Hong Kong. Spain feels the same way about Gibraltar. But still, attacking those places would be a clear act of aggression.

I have read accounts which clarify this. Their land and communities were destroyed and they would take anything they could get to survive, including government handouts.

In other words, they had been historically disadvantaged and demanded federal action in the name of equity, also known as affirmative action, also known as reparations. We could discuss the legitimacy of that further, but I think the main point here is that you probably aren't so approving when other groups make those claims.

They were not advocates of government largess until after everything they had was destroyed. You cannot overlook the effect of government action on a population and it's psyche.

Again, same thing as above. You probably aren't so sympathetic when those who aren't Southern whites make claims like that.

Oh, and this bit conforms with much other historical data about so many Massachusetts posers being trouble causing @$$holes.

You have this essentialist idea about North and South -- Northerners were always like controlling and troublemaking, Southerners were always live and let live types -- and you are extremely moralizing about it, even though you claim to have a materialistic view of things. But when Southerners behave differently you blame it on circumstances.

But your view of Northerners and Southerners is largely based on circumstances. Southerners who were hampered by slavery or segregation weren't going to tell other people how to live. When they weren't forced to defend such things, as in the Wilson/FDR era, they could be as progressive as other parts of the country.

“No fewer than five other people know you to be an idiot on this subject.”

You seem easily impressed by numbers.

I bet a million people have contacted me and praised my writing. If not a million, something just under a million.

Here's the kind of thing I hear all the time:

“I read your entire post front to back. All two lines. I could not put it down.”

And this. “Fantastic post! You need a three hour program on AM radio to combat northern blue-state culture.”

And this. “Your exciting commentary reminds me of the words of my great, great grandpa Major General Fighting Joe Wheeler at the Battle of Las Guasimas - “We got the d*** Yankees on the run again!”

And this: “J.D., keep up the good work. I know Richmond is again in the hands of the blue state culture, but help is on the way. Thanks. - DJT P.S. Please go easy on Abe L.; you don't have to tell everything you know.”

And this: “We love your warm and amusing humor. While reading your posts on the electric telephone while doing chores in the barn we were all laughing so hard milk actually spurted out the cow's nose.”

The responses I receive are unbelievable.

I bet a million people have contacted me and praised my writing. If not a million, something just under a million.

You sure it wasn't a billion people?

Oh for God's sake, shut up. How many times to get shellacked here and you go on and on with your nonsense. The violence was statred by the the bombardment of Ft. Sumter.

You wish to believe what you wish to believe, and evidence is irrelevant to you. This has become a common problem now with people being told "Trump started an insurrection in Washington DC" and the liars repeat this claim over and over again.

People with a mindset similar to yours simply believe what they are told without bothering to do any critical thinking for themselves.

The Constitution's moral & legal sanctions against slavery did not begin until ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865.

Now say I put a gun to your head and tell you I will shoot you if you do not vote as I say you should.

Is this a valid vote?

This is one reason I usually don't bother with you. Everything you say is slanted to favor your preferred version of history, and none of it is objective.

You are the sort who would declare Trump's January 6 rally against election theft an "Insurrection!" and you would be part of the Stasi mob chasing down people who entered the Capitol building and throwing them into solitary confinement for months.

There is no reasoning with emotionally driven people who will color everything they see in terms of how well it fits the narrative they are trying to advance.

The South leaving, and shrugging off the requirements of the "Navigation act of 1817" was one threat to Northern rice bowls. Importing European goods at low tariffs and selling them in the interior was an even bigger threat to Northern rice bowls.

If the threat of selling English goods in America was no big deal, then why did they want the protective Tariffs in the first place?

It mattered very much to the people who wanted those protectionist tariffs. Going around their protectionist tariffs would have financially devastated the domestic manufacturers.

I wish your side had someone like woodpusher to argue with. It would be a breath of fresh air to see someone actually making valid points on your side instead of the constant stream of silly I find myself reading whenever I bother.

"X" is the closest person you have to your very own "woodpusher", but he seldom puts forth the degree of scholarly references and quotes that woodpusher does.

But you don't have to invent silly hypotheticals. Britain ceded its forts in the Northwest Territories to the US in the 1783 Treaty of Paris, but Britain didn't evacuate the forts. If we had attacked them, we could understand that they were the aggressors, and they would think of us as the aggressors, but we were wise enough not to start a war over that issue alone.

Which of those forts would have held the harbor traffic of a major city hostage? Which one of those forts would have frightened away trade because they could threaten ships that approached?

Some meaningless plot out in the wilderness would have no great significance on people's lives and their trade. Something threatening their livelihood as a trade city was a very different thing.

Now say I put a gun to your head and tell you I will shoot you if you do not vote as I say you should.

What did Lincoln threaten them with?