You accept the fact that ‘who started it’ is a childish point... but you’ll go with it anyway?
OKAY...
Funny. I’ve a couple who are my friends who are having problems and they refuse to be reasonable, or even sensible.
Fits in perfectly with a discussion of the Civil War LOL!
So sad what fools we are. So hard to learn from our mistakes (not a Civil War specific statement!)
I didn’t say childish; I said irrelevant, as in irrelevant as to the cause of the war or which side was responsible for it. The fundamental cause of the war was the fact that the North and South were fundamentally different societies. Once the South tried to make that official by seceding the war was inevitable. If the South bears responsibility, it’s not because of Sumter.
Yet if someone posts on here that 2+2=5 or that the sky is green, I would call them out for being factually wrong. In similar vein, while the causes and ultimate responsibility for the war are certainly matters of debate, the immediate start of hostilities is not — the South fired the first shots of the war. If one cannot accept that fact, then there’s really no point in having a debate about the other questions.
It seems that there are quite a few posters on here who fit that description. I even saw a poster list firing on Sumter as one of the actions Lincoln took to provoke the war. I agree with you that there seems to be much more emotion than historical knowledge posted on CW threads; I’m just trying to do a little to change that.