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.
No, they were only fighting against the Democrats' misinterpretation of the Constitution.
The Constitution never spoke of slaves as property.
Despite John C. Calhoun's delusions, the Constitution never guaranteed slave states a control of the national government.
Actually, My Confederate Ancestor bought 2500 Acres in North Texas on a handshake........
The recognition was their first duty, that is true, but I believe the CSA would have done the honorable thing....
In your opinion....of course.
“I believe the CSA would have done the honorable thing....”
In your opinoin....of course.
That is true also.
“Despite John C. Calhoun’s delusions, the Constitution never guaranteed slave states a control of the national government.”
Please show me where Calhoun EVER thought that it did.
Now, that being said, I know that he advocated AMENDING the Constitution to have two Presidents, a Northern & Southern, each with Veto power.............
DECISION.
Ex Parte.......................} Before the Chief Justice of the
.....................................} Supreme Court of the United
John Merryman.........} States at Chambers.
I added dots to preserve the spacing of the original. At Chambers rulings are rulings of the Justice as a Justice of the Supreme Court. The signature on the ruling is "R. B. Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court"
Go back and read the decision again. Better yet, read a book like "Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President's War Powers" by James Simon for a short but more than adequate overview of the case. Chief Justice Taney was acting in his position as head of the Circuit Court that included Baltimore. His ruling was issued from that bench, not the Supreme Court bench. A single justice cannot speak for the entire court, and the entire court never took up the case.
"An audience of some two thousand people assembled on the following day to witness the outcome of the struggle between the Chief Justice and the military authorities. Leaving the Campbell home in the company of his grandson, Taney remarked that he might be imprisoned in Fort McHenry before night, but he was going to court to do his duty. As he took his place he announced that he acted alone rather than with Judge Giles because of the fact that he was sitting not as a member of the circuit court, but as Chief Justice of the United States. One reason for the distinction, undoubtedly, was the belief that it would lent added weight to the decision."
“he announced” Roger Taney was a Democrat and was lying. He acted a a circuit court judge in the case.
Sorry Partisan. I’ll take Taney’s word for what he was doing rather than your speculation.
The word of Democrats - Taney, Clinton, Obama, etc. — must be Gospel to you.
"After issuing his decree to Cadwalader on the 28th, Taney began writing the judicial opinion that he had promised to send to President Lincoln for immediate action. As was his habit, he reworked the opinion over several drafts to make his point with the utmost force and accuracy. When he was finished, Taney wrote at the top of the first page that the case was "Before the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States at Chambers," in an obvious effort to call attention to the authority of his office, though, in fact, he was acting in his capacity as a circuit court judge.
By this time Taney had been on the Supreme Court for almost 25 years and certainly knew which bench he was presiding from.
Well then you would have no problems with the real estate deal I proposed? I'll be fair. I promise.
I see no reason to believe that. To date they had seized whatever they wanted with no payment, they had walked away from responsibility for the debt without discussion, they were willing to go to war to acquire Sumter. If they didn't see any of those as dishonorable acts then why should we believe that they would have a sudden change of heart and pay for anything? Wouldn't an offer to do so be an admission that their earlier actions had been wrong?
General Wilkinson, the military commander in New Orleans. He blocked the delivery of Swartwout's writ from the territorial judge, then transfered Swartwout as a prisoner beyond the judge's jurisdiction. The Supreme Court ruled that Swartwout and Bollman had a right to this writ because its suspension was not constitutionally enacted. It is actually a very similar case to the 2004 Gitmo ruling, where the court found that habeas corpus had not been constitutionally suspended even though it was being denied.
Different people at different times - mostly executive branch officials though.
1807 - General Wilkinson, commander in New Orleans, who blocked Swartwout's writ (found unconstitutional)
1866 - The military tribunal that tried Milligan (found unconstitutional)
1942 - The military tribunal and DoJ that blocked Quirin's petition for a writ (upheld for reason of expediency in a WWII emergency, but the Quirin case is almost universally considered to be bad case law today)
2004 - The Bush administration by detaining Hamdi (found unconstitutional without Congressional approval)
2006 - The Bush administration and Congress (found unconstitutional because habeas was not properly suspended in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 for cases already pending and directed them to rectify this)
2006 - Congress, which suspended habeas corpus for enemy combattants at Gitmo in the Military Commissions Act. (found constitutional by the D.C. Court of appeals and affirmed by the Supreme Court in early 2007 in Boumediene v. Bush).
care for a "do over"????
free dixie,sw
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.