I live in the Midwest - I see more Gore votes in the South than I do in my part of the country.
Posted on 04/12/2007 9:34:54 AM PDT by TexConfederate1861
On March 5, 1861, the day after his inauguration as president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln received a message from Maj. Robert Anderson, commander of the U.S. troops holding Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The message stated that there was less than a six week supply of food left in the fort.
Attempts by the Confederate government to settle its differences with the Union were spurned by Lincoln, and the Confederacy felt it could no longer tolerate the presense of a foreign force in its territory. Believing a conflict to be inevitable, Lincoln ingeniously devised a plan that would cause the Confederates to fire the first shot and thus, he hoped, inspire the states that had not yet seceded to unite in the effort to restore the Union.
On April 8, Lincoln notified Gov. Francis Pickens of South Carolina that he would attempt to resupply the fort. The Confederate commander at Charleston, Gen.P.G.T. Beauregard, was ordered by the Confederate government to demand the evacuation of the fort and if refused, to force its evacuation. On April 11, General Beauregard delivered the ultimatum to Anderson, who replied, "Gentlemen, if you do not batter the fort to pieces about us, we shall be starved out in a few days." On direction of the Confederate government in Montgomery, Beauregard notified Anderson that if he would state the time of his evacuation, the Southern forces would hold their fire. Anderson replied that he would evacuate by noon on April 15 unless he received other instructions or additional supplies from his government. (The supply ships were expected before that time.) Told that his answer was unacceptable and that Beauregard would open fire in one hour, Anderson shook the hands of the messengers and said in parting, "If we do not meet again in this world, I hope we may meet in the better one." At 4:30 A.M. on April 12, 1861, 43 Confederate guns in a ring around Fort Sumter began the bombardment that initiated the bloodiest war in American history.
In her Charleston hotel room, diarist Mary Chesnet heard the opening shot. "I sprang out of bed." she wrote. "And on my knees--prostrate--I prayed as I never prayed before." The shelling of Fort Sumter from the batteries ringing the harbor awakened Charleston's residents, who rushed out into the predawn darkness to watch the shells arc over the water and burst inside the fort. Mary Chesnut went to the roof of her hotel, where the men were cheering the batteries and the women were praying and crying. Her husband, Col. James Chesnut, had delivered Beauregard's message to the fort. "I knew my husband was rowing around in a boat somewhere in that dark bay," she wrote, "and who could tell what each volley accomplished of death and destruction?"
Inside the fort, no effort was made to return the fire for more than two hours. The fort's supply of ammunition was ill-suited for the task at hand, and because there were no fuses for their explosive shells, only solid shot could be used against the Rebel batteries. The fort's biggest guns, heavy Columbiads and eight-inch howitzers, were on the top tier of the fort and there were no masonry casemates to protect the gunners, so Anderson opted to use only the casemated guns on the lower tier. About 7:00 A.M., Capt. Abner Doubleday, the fort's second in command, was given the honor of firing the first shot in defense of the fort. The firing continued all day, the federals firing slowly to conserve ammunition. At night the fire from the fort stopped, but the confederates still lobbed an occasional shell in Sumter.
Although they had been confined inside Fort Sumter for more than three months, unsupplied and poorly nourished, the men of the Union garrison vigorously defended their post from the Confederate bombardment that began on the morning of April 12, 1861. Several times, red-hod cannonballs had lodged in the fort's wooden barracks and started fires. But each time, the Yankee soldiers, with a little help from an evening rainstorm, had extinguished the flames. The Union garrison managed to return fire all day long, but because of a shortage of cloth gunpowder cartridges, they used just six of their cannon and fired slowly.
The men got little sleep that night as the Confederate fire continued, and guards kept a sharp lookout for a Confederate attack or relief boats. Union supply ships just outside the harbor had been spotted by the garrison, and the men were disappointed that the ships made no attempt to come to their relief.
After another breakfast of rice and salt pork on the morning of April 13, the exhausted Union garrison again began returning cannon fire, but only one round every 10 minutes. Soon the barracks again caught fire from the Rebel hot shot, and despite the men's efforts to douse the flames, by 10:00 A.M. the barracks were burning out of control. Shortly thereafter, every wooden structure in the fort was ablaze, and a magazine containing 300 pounds of gunpowder was in danger of exploding. "We came very near being stifled with the dense livid smoke from the burning buildings," recalled one officer. "The men lay prostrate on the ground, with wet hankerchiefs over their mouths and eyes, gasping for breath."
The Confederate gunners saw the smoke and were well aware of the wild uproar they were causing in the island fort. They openly showed their admiration for the bravery of the Union garrison by cheering and applauding when, after a prolonged stillness, the garrison sent a solid shot screaming in their direction.
"The crasing of the shot, the bursting of the shells, the falling of the walls, and the roar of the flames, made a pandemonium of the fort," wrote Capt. Abner Doubleday on the afternoon of April 13, 1861. He was one of the Union garrison inside Fort Sumter in the middle of South Carolina's Charleston harbor. The fort's large flag staff was hit by fire from the surrounding Confederate batteries, and the colors fell to the ground. Lt. Norman J. Hall braved shot and shell to race across the parade ground to retrieve the flag. Then he and two others found a substitute flagpole and raised the Stars and Stripes once more above the fort.
Once the flag came down, Gen. P.G.T. Beaugregard, who commanded the Confederate forces, sent three of his aides to offer the fort's commander, Union Maj. Robert Anderson, assistance in extinguishing the fires. Before they arrived they saw the garrison's flag raised again, and then it was replaced with a white flag. Arriving at the fort, Beaugregard's aides were informed that the garrison had just surrendered to Louis T. Wigfall, a former U.S. senator from Texas. Wigfall, completely unauthorized, had rowed out to the fort from Morris Island, where he was serving as a volunteer aide, and received the surrender of the fort. The terms were soon worked out, and Fort Sumter, after having braved 33 hours of bombardment, its food and ammunition nearly exhausted, fell on April 13, 1861, to the curshing fire power of the Rebels. Miraculously, no one on either side had been killed or seriously wounded.
The generous terms of surrender allowed Anderson to run up his flag for a hunderd-gun salute before he and his men evacuated the fort the next day. The salute began at 2:00 P.M. on April 14, but was cut short to 50 guns after an accidental explosion killed one of the gunners and mortally wounded another. Carrying their tattered banner, the men marched out of the fort and boarded a boat that ferried them to the Union ships outside the harbor. They were greeted as heroes on their return to the North.
The notion that the Union was not perpetual did not even occur to anyone until the 1830s, when pro-slavery politicians invented a supposed constitutional right of a state to secede.
Not certain where he stands on the confederate constitution, but his statement against slavery which you quoted should provide a clue. His paper was on why Lincoln set aside the federal constitution (costing the lives of 600,000 American) and not incorporating the slavery issue until two years after the war started.
I am entirely serious. In the first place dump Hamadi v Rumsfeld. Decisions 150 years later have no bearing on the Constitutionality of Lincoln's actions. No for the Bollman decision to be a legal precedent you would have to answer the question of who suspended habeas corpus in that case, Congress or the President?
In Taney’s opinion in Ex Parte Merryman, here’s his response to your statement about Article I...
And as a result we can hazard a good guess on how Taney would have voted had the matter ever appeared before the entire court. But Taney wasn't the entire court, he was one of 8. It takes the entire court to decide on the Constitutionality, not a single justice.
Besides Taney’s opinion, this issue was also before the Marshall court in Ex Parte Bollman...
But it was not before the Court in the Bollman decision. Habeas Corpus had not been suspend at all, not by the President and not by Congress. Since it had not been suspended then the question of who may suspend it was not before the court at the time. Chief Justice Marshall's comments form an obiter dictum and not a binding decision.
“Name one Confederate who was not a Democrat.
Name Confederate who was a Republican.
“
Sure, the entire side of my dad’s family.
No..don’t change the subject :)
Smoke, Mirrors, and bait & switch.......that is your motive.
If Confederates in Union States did the same, then they deserved the same treatment. (NOT Border states) Different circumstances.
I live in the Midwest - I see more Gore votes in the South than I do in my part of the country.
"We the Delegates of the People of Virginia duly elected in pursuance of a recommendation from the General Assembly and now met in Convention having fully and freely investigated and discussed the proceedings of the Federal Convention and being prepared as well as the most mature deliberation hath enabled us to decide thereon Do in the name and in behalf of the People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will[.]"
There was, indeed, such a party, only it was called the Constitutional Union Party.
Let's see.....who fired the first shot???
The War of Southern Agression would be a bit more accurate.
Are you from “People’s Republic of Austin”?
Or are you Gary Bledsoe in disguise?
Isn't that something for the Court to decide? Can you point out where they struck down the Militia Act?
Again, as I’ve pointed out in earlier posts, this issue isn’t even up for debate. The President can’t suspend the writ of habeas corpus. That’s just all there is to it.
Far greater legal minds than ours would disagree with you. Chief Justice Rehnquist is a speech in 2000 admits that the matter of just who may suspend habeas corpus has not been authoritatively answered to this day. Don't you think he would know?
The Articles made the Union perpetual and the superceding Constitution was an attempt to perfect that perpetual Union.
I think that was clear at the time and the Founders made the mistake of not putting it in writing as they thought people would naturally understand where they were coming from.
They did the same thing with the BOR, which was submitted as twelve Amendments not ten. The first two weren't adopted because the Convention thought them just plain common sense. The first dealt with proportional representation which, imo, should be brought back and ratified (we are not represented today the way the Founders intended. An oligarchy is not a Republic.) and the second dealt with Congressional compensation and was adopted as the 27th Amendment in 1992.
How is it that none of the neo-Confederates on the forum ever want to dicuss Old Hickory's runin with South Carolina and his attitude towards the Union?
IMO, the South Carolinians were petrified of Andy Jackson, a son of the South, and knew he'd whip them good if they continued with their nullification or seccesion BS, and so abstained until they got a guy (Lincoln) they thought would roll over for them, not knowing that Abe was channeling Andy when it came to the question of Union.
But they didn't. They lost. Big time.
So not only do you think the President can suspend habeas corpus, you don’t think he’s obligated to follow the rulings of a federal court?
Fact of the matter is that Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus was before Taney when he rode circuit. The opinion of the court was that Lincoln’s actions were plainly and certainly unconstitutional.
Even if you think Marshall’s plain statement of the law wasn’t binding, the issue was decided by a sitting federal court and Lincoln ignored it. He had no respect whatsoever for Rule of Law. He was, in fact, a tyrant.
In some ways, yes.....
If those are his words, then no. It's quite clear. If there was any debate before--which there wasn't--then it was answered by Hamdi.
You get over it. I would rather not.
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