Rubbish -- secessionists were waging war from Day One, sometimes even before formally declaring their secession.
Secessionist demands for surrender of Federal forts were threats of war and firing on Union ships sent to resupply them were acts of war against the United States.
SeeSharp: "He could have ended it at any time by simply bringing his army home."
More nonsense, since most battles in the war's first year were fought in the Union and most Confederate soldiers who died that first year died in the Union, not in the Confederacy.
For Lincoln to have withdrawn his troops would have handed over to the Confederacy yet more Union states & territories.
What sane person would do that?
Sure, as the war progressed, more & more battles were fought in Confederate states, but even as late as the summer & fall of 1864 there were still Confederate forces fighting in Union states like Kansas & Missouri.
SeeSharp: "The South didn't want war.
The Lincoln administration did."
That's nonsense -- if "the South" truly didn't want war, they would have impeached & removed from office Jefferson Davis for the crime of starting Civil War at Fort Sumter.
Of course they did no such thing, instead were deliriously happy that Davis' military assault on Fort Sumter proved so blazingly successful.
And many Southerners responded enthusiastically to Confederate calls for hundreds of thousands of volunteer troops, many of which were soon sent to invade such Union states & territories as Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma and New Mexico.
In the war's first year more Confederate soldiers died in the Union than in the Confederacy.
Later in the war Confederate forces also invaded Union states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana & Kansas, along with CSA guerilla forces in California, Colorado & Vermont.
Indeed, as late as the Battle of Nashville in 1864, Jefferson Davis' orders to CSA Gen. John B. Hood were, after defeating Union forces in Tennessee, to march on... Chicago!
SeeSharp: "So yes, Lincoln killed all those people.
His was a war of conquest, unpopular at home.
Davis's war was a war of survival, intensely popular at home."
So, now it turns out, you agree that "the South" did want Davis' war, especially when it was being fought in Union states & territories, right?
Lincoln's war was a war against rebellion, against Confederate attempts to destroy the United States, an existential war supported overwhelmingly in the North so long as it was believed Lincoln could win the war.
But by the summer of 1864 it seemed Lincoln was not winning and Lincoln himself believed the Democrats' peace candidate, George McClellan, would win election and then surrender to the Confederacy.
All such thoughts ended in Atlanta & Savanah.
SeeSharp: "The constitution says absolutely nothing about secession, either with or without consent."
All of our Founders were consistent in their ideas about "disunion" or "secession".
All believed it was acceptable under two, but only two, conditions:
- From "necessity" as spelled out in their 1776 Declaration of Independence.
"Necessity" was then fully defined as consisting of about two dozen specific complaints, including:- "He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people."
So "necessity" was not a trivial complaint about, for example, a leader tweeting too much!
Rather "necessity" arose from material acts of lawlessness & harm to citizens. - By mutual consent as in their 1788 "secession" from the old Articles of Confederation and ratification of their new Constitution.
Their new Constitution defines such mutual consent as three quarters of state ratifying conventions.
Look, here's a very simple analogy: if you ask, "can anyone take money from a bank?"
The answer is, "certainly, under two but only two conditions, first, if it's money the bank agrees is in your positive balance, or second, if the bank agrees to loan you money.
But if you walk into the bank guns a-blazing, demanding, "your money or your life", that's a crime and you will pay dearly for it.
SeeSharp: "Perhaps you can show us where the framers intended the union to be a one-way trap.
Perhaps you can show us where any of them argued that no state can ever leave the union."
Those are straw-men, red-herrings, false arguments by any name you chose.
Founders understood & practiced "disunion" from necessity (1776) and by mutual consent (1788).
Anything else they knew was rebellion, insurrection, domestic violence, invasion and/or treason.
James Madison is usually credited as "the father of the Constitution" and his explanation on this is the best I've seen, here.
SeeSharp: "Several states explicitly stated that they reserved the right to secede when they joined."
But none of those -- zero, zip, nada of them -- claimed a "right to secede" at pleasure.
All, all referred back to the conditions of "necessity" spelled out in the 1776 Declaration of Independence.
And, none of those condition from 1776 existed in 1806 when Aaron Burr plotted to secede with Louisiana, or in 1814 when New Englanders plotted secession at the Hartford Convention, or in 1830 when South Carolinians threatened secession over President Jackson's "Tariff of Abominations", or in 1860 with the election of Lincoln's "Black Republicans".
In every case those secession attempts were seen as "at pleasure" and strongly opposed by the Federal government.
SeeSharp: "Every new state, even those admitted after the first thirteen, did so with the consent of their population.
The seceding states did so with the consent of their populations.
They actually held elections to special conventions to decide the issue.
You can't claim to believe in self government and government by popular consent on the one hand and oppose secession on the other."
Complete rubbish!
The US Constitution is totally copesetic with splitting up states, merging parts of states, adjusting boundaries, and any similar changes provided, provided they are made with the mutual consent of all the parties involved, including Congress.
No state in 1860 requested to secede, nor did Congress approve any.
SeeSharp: "As for North Carolina, Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire agreeing to the loss of their territory, they were each faced with a fait accompli and couldn't do anything about it.
How Lincolnesque of you to call that consent."
As usual, you don't know your history.
On North Carolina & Tennessee:
- "When North Carolina ratified the Constitution of the United States in 1789, it also ceded its western lands, the "Tennessee country", to the Federal government.
North Carolina had used these lands as a means of rewarding its Revolutionary War soldiers.
In the Cession Act of 1789, it reserved the right to satisfy further land claims in Tennessee."
- "On March 6, 1790, the legislature of New York consented to Vermont statehood, provided that a group of commissioners representing New York and a similar group representing Vermont could agree on the boundary.
Vermont's negotiators insisted on also settling the real-estate disputes rather than leaving those to be decided later by a federal court.
On October 7, the commissioners proclaimed the negotiations successfully concluded, with an agreement that Vermont would pay $30,000 to New York to be distributed among New Yorkers who claimed land in Vermont under New York land patents.[20]
The Vermont General Assembly then authorized a convention to consider an application for admittance to the "Union of the United States of America"."