Posted on 01/23/2003 6:06:25 PM PST by one2many
Are you at all familiar with this document? What does the title say?
Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union
TO ALL TO WHOM these Presents shall come, we the undersigned Delegates of the States affixed to our Names send greeting. Whereas the Delegates of the United States of America in Congress assembled, did, on the fifteenth day of November in the Year of our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Seventy seven, and in the Second Year of the Independence of America, agree to certain articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia in the words following...
The union was not something to be changed for light or transient causes either
The articles of Confederation clearly state from the title line forward that the Union was Perpetual.
If you think the south was deceived into union with the north, then your grasp on history (and reality for that matter) is very weak indeed.
The star of the west was one of dozens of isolated confrontations and skirmishes in the months proceding the war. It was not during the war though any more than John Brown's raid was during the war. The Harriet Lane fired the first shot of the war itself on the evening before Fort Sumter.
Well, that is an improvement. It's only a half lie.
No. Not really. Its a simple matter of fact regarding the war. Both sides raised armies of a huge size. The confederates raised theirs in anticipation of an attack. The yankees raised theirs to make that attack.
The rebels called for an army of 100,000 when the U.S. Army was only @ 17,000.
Yeah, and The Lincoln quickly called for 75,000 more giving him an army of identical strength. That army quickly got its tail kicked when it tried to march on Richmond by way of Manassas.
You can't even be rational, let alone objective.
A statement of that kind by you is akin to a lecture on the sin of adultery by Jesse Jackson.
Yes, and it did so in a harbor where it had no business conducting such patrols. Much like its nearby support garrison, the Harriet Lane was there for one reason alone - to obstruct and control access to Charleston.
You guys are really desperate for arguments if you need to cite the Lane as the first shot of the war.
Not really. That the Harriet Lane fired the first shot of the war is a matter of historical consensus. You simply don't like the fact that it confounds your attempts to blame everything on the south.
No, not really. Unlike the Harriet Lane, the Star of the West was an isolated incident with no proximity to the start of the war. Citing it as the first shot is no more applicable that citing John Brown's raid, or Potowatamie Creek for that matter, as the first attack of the war. The Harriet Lane on the other hand occurred in the immediate proximity of Sumter and helped expedite the move on Sumter. It was therefore the first shot of the war.
And the first call for 100,000 troops came weeks before Sumter
Your point? The Lincoln was making war on the south only weeks out of Sumter by way of his blockade and soon issued his own call for an additional 75,000 to the yankee troop ranks. It is only common sense that the south would prepare for what was coming by having their own army assembled.
I'm not trying to split hairs, mind. Just pointing out that an claim you are attempting fails due to fallacy.
Your history is false and correct history is needed for you to do what you claim. Therefore your attempt to use it to demonstrate a fallacy that you do not even understand fails you. Nice try though.
That point is covered in AoC Article XIII:
"...And the Articles of this Confederation shall be inviolably observed by every State, and the Union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them; unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every State."
You don't know the history.
Walt
The star of the west was one of dozens of isolated confrontations and skirmishes in the months proceding the war.
Well, firing on someone is coercion. The rebels started it, and got it shoved where the sun don't shine.
Your statement is too convenient by half in any case. What is the date on the South Cackolacky secession documents? It's well before they fired on the Star.
Walt
I guess you just scanned the timeline before:
January 4 Alabama militia sieze the U.S. arsenal at Mt. Vernon, AL. Alabama has not yet seceded.
January 5 Alabama militia sieze Ft. Morgan and Ft. Gaines in Mobile Bay.
January 7 Florida militia sieze the Federal fort at St. Augustine. Florida has not yet seceded.
January 8 Florida militia attempting to sieze Ft. Barrancas are driven off by Federal troops.
Mississippi secedes.
January 10 Louisiana militia sieze all Federal forts and arsenals in the state. Louisiana has not yet seceded.
Florida (belatedly) secedes. Federal troops abandon Ft. Barrancas.
North Carolina militia capture Ft. Johnson and Ft. Caswell. North Carolina has not yet seceded.
January 11 Alabama (belatedly) secedes.
January 12 Florida militia demands the surrender of Federal troops in Ft. Pickens. The demand is refused.
Mississippi fortifies Vicksburg and closes the Mississippi River to all traffic. Mississippi is the only state on the river, at this point, which has seceded.
January 19 Georgia secedes.
January 21 Mississippi militia sieze Ft. Massachussetts and Ship Island.
January 25 Georgia militia sieze the federal arsenal at Augusta. North Carolina calls for a referendum on secession.
January 26 Georgia militia sieze Ft. Jackson and Oglethorpe Barracks.
Louisiana (belatedly) secedes.
January 31 The U.S. Mint in New Orleans is siezed by Louisiana militia.
February 1 Texas submits an article of secession to popular referendum for February 23.
February 4 Delegates from the six seceded states meet in Montgomery to form the Confederate States of America.
February 9 Tennessee rejects secession in popular referendum by a large margin.
February 16 Texas militia sieze the federal arsenal at San Antonio. Texas has not yet seceded.
February 18 Texas militia besiege Federal army headquarters for Texas in San Antonio and force the surrender of over 3,000 troops. Texas has -still- not seceded.
Jefferson Davis inaugurated as President of the Confederacy.
February 21 The Confederate Provisional Congress orders Mississippi to end the blockade at Vicksburg.
February 23 Texas voters approve secession by a 75% majority, secession to take effect March 2 (Texas Independence Day).
February 28 North Carolina voters narrowly reject secession (by fewer than 1,000 votes).
March 2 Texas's secession takes effect; that same day, Texas is admitted into the Confederacy.
March 3 The militia units in Charleston Harbor are taken under Confederate authority.
March 20 Harbor authorities in Mobile sieze the U.S. merchant supply ship Isabella, loaded with supplies for Ft. Pickens, Florida.
April 3 Confederate batteries in Charleston harbor fire on US schooner Rhoda H. Shannon.
April 4 Virginia's State Convention rejects secession 2 to 1.
April 12 Confederate troops open fire on Ft. Sumter; Federal troops reinforcing Ft. Pickens, FL from sea are fired upon by more Confederate troops. The Civil War 'officially' begins.
April 15 Lincoln calls for 75,000 militiamen to serve for three months to put down the insurrection in the South.
April 16 Isham Harris, governor of Tennessee, requests military alliance with the Confederacy. Tennessee has NOT seceded and is making treaty or confederation with another power, violating the Constitution.
April 17 Virginia secedes.
And so forth.
Walt
If that firing is undertaken to achieve an end, then yes. With the Harriet Lane, for example, the shot was fired to exercise force denying the Nashville's entry to the harbor at the time. In the case of The Lincoln, coercion was initiated on a scale unparalleled by any action of the confederates. He assembled a massive army and navy then used those forces to invade, conquer, and coerce obedience from 11 entire states.
Yeah, and The Lincoln quickly called for 75,000 more giving him an army of identical strength.
The rebels went first. I think the subject was coercion. You don't raise a 100,000 man army without a view to coercion. Just because the rebels got slam-dunked doesn't change the fact that they planned to do some coercion. It just didn't go the way they planned.
Walt
If that is the case, acts of fighting went silent for several weeks, and confined to minimal skirmishing for several months after that before anything even remotely resembling a state of warfare occurred. This conclusively suggests that your dating is flawed.
Meanwhile the first clearly identifiable instance of warfare existing occurred at Fort Sumter, and the first shot fired in that incident came from a yankee ship. So there.
Yes. As President Lincoln said, the nation's resources "are unexhausted, and are as we think, inexhaustible."
That puts me in mind of what Bruce Catton says:
"Secession itself had involved a flight from reality rather than an approach to it....Essentially, this was the reliance of a group that knew little of the modern world but which did not know nearly enough and could never understand that it did not know enough. It ran exactly parallel to Mr. Davis's magnificent statement that the duration of the war could be left up to the enemy--the war would go on until the enemy gave up, and it did not matter how far off that day might be.
The trouble was it did matter. It mattered enormously."
--The Coming Fury, p. 438-439, by Bruce Catton
Or this:
"Alone in the south, Baltimore had the capital, expertise, and tooling to remake the southern rails as fast as they wore out (or were blown up). So too, alone in the South, Baltimore had the resources to create ironclad vessels up to Yankee standards. Instead, this pivotal slave-holding city boosted the Union's powerful advantage....In contrast, under the crushing Civil War tasks of moving gigantic quantities of food, troops and military equipment, Confederate railroads succumbed faster than Confederate troops. By midwar, an aid to the Confederacy's western commander lamented that, "locomotives had not been repaired for six months, and many of them lay disabled." The colonel knew "not one place in the South where a driving-wheel can be made, and not one where a whole locomotive can be constructed."
--The South vs. The South, p. 63-64 by William W. Freehling
Walt
I'd act with haste too if I knew the country next door was preparing to invade me.
I think the subject was coercion.
The Lincoln evidently thought so as well.
""The words ``coercion'' and ``invasion'' are in great use about these days. Suppose we were simply to try if we can, and ascertain what, is the meaning of these words. Let us get, if we can, the exact definitions of these words---not from dictionaries, but from the men who constantly repeat them---what things they mean to express by the words. What, then, is ``coercion''? What is ``invasion''? Would the marching of an army into South California, for instance, without the consent of her people, and in hostility against them, be coercion or invasion? I very frankly say, I think it would be invasion, and it would be coercion too, if the people of that country were forced to submit." - Abraham Lincoln, February 11, 1861
You don't raise a 100,000 man army without a view to coercion.
Sure you do, if that army is raised for the purpose of resisting an attempt at coercion by another army.
Now that was the bone of contention, wasn't it? You can say they had no business being there, and I say that they had every business and duty to be there and to enforce US law.
I have the strong feeling that if George Washington were still around, the gentry of Charleston wouldn't have faired any better than the dirt farmers of Western Pennsylvania did 70 years earlier when they tried rebellion. I also feel that another Virginian, James Madison, the father of the constitution, would have applauded crushing the Charleston treason.
The Lincoln also described the very same act he later took as both coercion and invasion.
"The words ``coercion'' and ``invasion'' are in great use about these days. Suppose we were simply to try if we can, and ascertain what, is the meaning of these words. Let us get, if we can, the exact definitions of these words---not from dictionaries, but from the men who constantly repeat them---what things they mean to express by the words. What, then, is ``coercion''? What is ``invasion''? Would the marching of an army into South California, for instance, without the consent of her people, and in hostility against them, be coercion or invasion? I very frankly say, I think it would be invasion, and it would be coercion too, if the people of that country were forced to submit." - Abraham Lincoln, February 11, 1861
If that is the case, acts of fighting went silent for several weeks, and confined to minimal skirmishing for several months after that before anything even remotely resembling a state of warfare occurred.
Oh, sorta the way the war went against the Germans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, huh?
Let's see. The first U.S. aircrews flew a raid over occupied France on 7/4/42 flying British aircraft; there was a 12 plane raid by B-17's on August 17. Gee, that's almost nine months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Of course there was fighting against U-boats, but that would be just a ramp-up -- sorta like the time line I provided.
You are providing a few laughs here at least.
Hmmm, Let's see...what else?
The U.S. declares war on Germany 4/6/17, but it over a year before U.S. troops enter active service against the Germans.
You're a real comic.
Walt
Should I post the timeline again?
Walt
No less a source than The Lincoln said so. His notes on Sumter mention that the federal presence there served as a thorn in the side of the confederates.
You can say they had no business being there, and I say that they had every business and duty to be there and to enforce US law.
I suppose you are free to assert as much. But just the same, I am free to respond that US law did not govern the confederacy or its member states any more. You may then respond by asserting otherwise and arguing that it did, but in doing so you concede, perhaps inadvertantly, the real issue at hand with Sumter: the yankees were there to impede access to the harbor; coerce obedience, if you will.
Since incoherent and off topic cutting and pasting seems to be your primary means of "responding" to the arguments of others, I suspect nothing I say in favor or opposition to that act will prevent it.
In the meantime, I will simply note that you have yet to respond to The Lincoln's own words in which he described the very same action he later undertook as both coercion and invasion.
No, not really. German submarine encounters, including some very near the coast of the United States, occured almost immediately. The air force was not the only means America used to fight the Germans, you know.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.