DOCUMENT #16: Letter from Lincoln to the Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, March 29. Your obedient servant, A. LINCOLNSIR: I desire that an expedition, to move by sea, be got ready to sail as early as the 6th of April next, the whole according to memorandum attached, and that you cooperate with the Secretary of the Navy for that object.
So, as you can see from your own documentation, Lincoln ordered the expedition to go by sea.
Oh My God! That makes all the difference in the World!
No, Seriously, So it went by Sea. I'll acknowledge it as a mistake, but not one salient to the point. I was relying on what my friend had said to me years ago, and not on an actual letter which I only found the other day. The point remains, it was that letter from Lincoln which stimulated the hot head reaction from the Confederates. To the extent that it is relative to the point, it was the letter informing them of the re-supply that elicited their bellicose reaction.
My Friend argued that it was the Civil War equivalent of the EMS dispatch, or the Zimmermann Telegram. (An inflammatory document intended to provoke a hostile response from those to whom it was sent.) He argued that Lincoln was a Genius for conceiving of it, and for getting exactly the effect he wanted from sending it. At least I got you to acknowledge that there WAS such a letter sent. I think we are making progress.
This is just not true. If you give it some thought, you would realize that the railroads and standard roads were controlled by the states. Any sort of military expedition overland would have been stopped at state borders. Moreover, Ft. Sumter was about two nautical miles from any rail head in Charleston, thus making it impossible to transfer military items.
I Stand corrected. I had found research corroborating a Letter from Lincoln regarding a resupply effort. As I live in a land locked state, it never occurs to me that a resupply would be by anything other than overland, and I may have read my own prejudices into the information (which was not the letter) which I had earlier discovered. My friend had mentioned at the time that an effort to supply the Fort by Sea had been dismissed by Lincoln, so the natural assumption was that a different effort would be tried next. I either misunderstood what he had said, or he had misunderstood what he had read, or some of both.
In any case, it does not affect the central point he was making; that Lincoln intentionally triggered the civil war with a clever provocation. If this is true, it means that Lincoln cynically and irresponsibly triggered an event which resulted in the deaths of 620,000 people, and the destruction and devastation of large swaths of populated areas, while leaving a legacy which allowed subsequent rulers to commit other unconstitutional acts.
Lincoln brooded heavily during this time period. He had bouts of severe depression, and the war deaths weighed heavily on him. If he felt guilt for having intentionally triggered the whole thing, it would makes more sense to believe it was because he felt responsible, than to believe he felt he was behaving righteously from beginning to end.
But people are different. His brooding and depression may or may not have meant he felt responsible.
I agree.