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.
free dixie,sw
This prevented the Star of the West from resupplying Major Robert Anderson's garrison at Fort Sumter.
The Star of the West was given a warning bowshot but continued towards Fort Sumter.
She was then fired on and hit twice at which point she turned around and headed for home port.
Note that this did not start a war even though she was under the Stars and Stripes.
The Citadel has a drill competition for 4th Classmen (aka: knobs, smackheads, maggots, etc.) which is the Star of the West Award.
I've been here thirty years.
free dixie,sw
It started for the most part in the 60s and 70s. Growing up in Tennessee during that time (and you have to remember that culturally traditional values are HUGE in that part of the country, what with it being the Bible Belt and all), as the Democrats became more and more wacko on social, cultural issues you did begin to see a marked shift in voting patterns during that time.
Oh, and don't forget the effect of Jimmy Carter's disasterous presidency.
How about some original documents showing that states recognized themselves as sovereign, etc.:
thank you, I’ll take a look.
OK, so know we have an idea how Hamilton might have ruled. And?
Given that only Parliament can suspend the writ of habeas corpus, it seems strange indeed that the Constitution, which Hamilton noted was adopting English common law, would vest with the President a power that was unavailable to the Crown. Weird.
Since the Constitution doesn't specifically say we are left to puzzle.
This whole matter can be put to rest right away if you can provide the Supreme Court decision which ruled who may suspend habeas corpus and identify which party in the case had suspended it, President or Congress (or Rumsfeld). To date you have failed to do that. Habeas corpus had not been suspended in Bollman. It had not been suspended in Hamadi. So try and come up with another one.
You keep expecting debates to end simply because you say so. Sorry to disappoint.
What the 10th Amendment says is, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Clearly the power to create states by admitting them to the Union, and the power to approve any changes in their status is a power delegated to the United States in Article I, Section 10 and Article IV, Section 3. Implied in this is approval of leaving altogther.
If you think it's a bad deal, amend the constitution to require approval of Congress before a state can leave the Union, but as it stands now, it IS, in fact, a unilateral power of the state.
It is not, as the Supreme Court ruled in 1869.
I would be pleased if you could finally accept the fact that something is not unconstitutional merely because you say so. But I'm not holding my breath.
I wouldn't get too huffy about USSC rulings being the end all and be all of legal opinion. Remember that the USSC ruled for slavery in Dredd Scott.
But of course you’d still like to avoid the Jackson/Lincoln comparison vis a vis my contention that the “firebrands” were petrified of Jackson but thought Lincoln a pushover on the Union issue...
A decision that was fortunately rendered null by the ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments. But until the Constitution is amended or Texas v White is overturned by a future court then unilateral secession as practiced by the Southern states is illegal.
Teddy Roosevelt's mother was born in Georgia--if Georgia wasn't in the US in 1900 he might not have been picked as VP and then become President, and without his Presidency FDR probably would have never won. Of course without the Spanish-American War we wouldn't have gotten TR as VP.
It is interesting that the USA went to war against Yugoslavia to obtain a right for Bosnia & Kosovo that the USA denies to its own states.
If a state did have a legal right to secede, its citizens were not rebels when they supported their state.
I had two ancestors who fought in the Civil War. Both followed the course taken by their states (Virginia and Missouri).
One thing to understand is that people who were strong unionists in 1812 or 1846 came to support nullification or secession at other times. It wasn't true that "everyone believed" that secession was a right before 1860. Most people didn't think about it all. Many who did consider the question believed that unilateral secession by a state was unconstitutional.
Badly exaggerated and in some cases completely false.
Next comes the "If the Supreme Court rules the sky is green, up is down, etc." Why not stick to reality. The Constitution is clear on free speech and the right to bear arms. It is not clear on secession.
Why didn't he sell one of his slaves and buy one?
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