Posted on 06/03/2019 5:19:21 AM PDT by Bull Snipe
Union General George Meade launches 3 corps of his Army of the Potomac against the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia’s works near Cold Harbor. Meade’s assault is a failure. Over 7000 Union casualties and not one foot of ground gained. Lieutenant General Grant, in ordering Meade to make the attack, called it the worst mistake he ever made.
He *DID* fire on Confederate ships when he was there. He stated unequivocally in his memoirs that when he arrived, it was his intention to sail along the shore and rake the confederate gun emplacements with shell and shot. He was only stopped from doing so by Captain Meigs, who put his ship in the path of the Powhatan and got Porter to stop.
Porter recounts that he very much felt like running Meigs over with his ship, but finally chose to heave to.
You know, a supply ship.
The fact that Lincoln was pushing a constitutional amendment to protect slavery, for example.
Does not comport with the official narrative. It does in fact contradict it quite strongly.
If she was flying an America flag, she would have been fired on by the Charleston batteries.
Lincoln wasn’t “pushing a constitutional amendment to protect slavery” - the US Congress did.
Actual history begs to differ with you.
Maybe, but sporting cannons, it was guaranteed to be fired upon.
So you keep saying.
Had he instead sent nothing but a supply ship, nobody could claim that he sent a belligerent force.
Tried that with the Star of the West. The Confederates fired on that one anyway.
True that. A simple coastal schooner, the Rhoda Shannon, happened into Charleston harbor flying the Stars and Stripes and the Confederate batteries fired on it.
It was secretly carrying a whole host of Union troop reinforcements with munitions. It was a military reinforcement ship, not a "supply" ship.
Star of the West carried no cannon.
Once you've been caught trying to sneak a whole bunch of soldiers into their harbor covertly, nobody's going to trust any other supposedly innocent ships to be innocent.
As Porter said, any orders that go through official channels will be "flashed across the wires" immediately.
That's why Lincoln's secret orders to paralyze the Sumter mission did *NOT* go through official channels. If they had, the Confederates would have known it was a ruse, and wouldn't have saw it as a real threat.
You keep posting that as though it somehow buttresses your assertion - it does not. The closest it comes is here: “In his first inaugural address Lincoln declared that he had “no objection” to the Corwin Amendment, nor that it be made forever unamendable.”
Having no objection is not the same as “pushing a constitutional amendment”. Not today, not in 1861.
So what you are saying is that any ship Lincoln had sent, be it a full-blown ship-of-the-line or a 10 foot row boat, would have been fired upon since Davis didn't trust anyone. So if the supply ship was going to be fired upon no matter what then put the supplies in a ship that could defend itself from Confederate aggression.
How many Republicans voted for that monstrosity? I'll bet you it was the vast majority of them.
It would have made no difference, the Charleston authorities would have fired on a girl scout canoe if it was flying an American flag.
I'm saying by the time the Rhoda Shannon came along, they really had no reason to trust anything Lincoln said or did.
When you deliberately mislead people, they tend to not trust you anymore.
So if the supply ship was going to be fired upon no matter what then put the supplies in a ship that could defend itself from Confederate aggression.
There was no such ship, or collection of ships that could have accomplished that. Porter rightly said that the Sumter expedition was doomed to failure from the beginning, and that if they had attempted to accomplish their mission, they would have all been sunk.
Now he was a Union admiral when he said it, and I'm just a guy way in the future from him, but I kinda think he knows what he was talking about.
Maybe, but we know for certain they would fire on warships attempting to enter the harbor, or troop ships attempting to land troops.
neither of which happened. They did fire on Fort Sumter though.
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