[BlackElk]

Fort Sumter is located in South Carolina which had seceded from the Union. Fort Pickens is located in Florida which had also seceded from the Union. The artillery of Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutaint Beauregard began to bombard Fort Sumter only when the Yankee occupiers refused to leave South Carolina's Fort Sumter. The commanding officer of the "Union" army unit(s) garrisoned at Fort Sumter was (I believe) Robert Anderson of Indiana who was required by the lawbreakers of the Lincoln administration to remain at Fort Sumter in the criminal hope that they could be given necessary provisions to continue their sit-in at Sumter by USS Star of the West (?) which was unable to reach the occupiers because of the efforts of Confederate defensive forces. Anderson struck his colors and retired from the US military expressing his disagreement with the "Union" efforts to countermand secession. The "Union" also temporarily squatted without authority at Fort Pickens but gave up with less drama.

I am still waiting (understandably) for you to identify the specific constitutional grant of authority to Lincoln and his co-conspirators to militarily invade the Confederate States to overturn their decision to secede or to bombard NYC or to murder, rape, loot and pillage Confederate civilians or military within the Confederacy or to levy an income tax or to draft free citizens for military service against their will. It does not matter that Washington raised an army to attack Captain Shays in Massachusetts (again without constitutional authority as well). There simply is NO AUTHORITY and that is why you cannot answer the obvious challenge that the Tenth Amendment prohibited the assault on the seceded South. Then again, you are also arguing that "might makes right." I think we had gotten beyond accepting that argument even in 1865.

As to the argument that the boogie man would have gotten us without Father Abraham's massacre of the constitution, what kind of argument is that??? If Hitler had "saved" Germany from Allied devastation, would that have made him a hero? All that argument amounts to is that the end somehow justifies unconstitutional means. It does not.

[WOSG]

“The artillery of Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Toutaint Beauregard began to bombard Fort Sumter only when the Yankee occupiers refused to leave South Carolina’s Fort Sumter.”

occupiers? This was federal property, bought and paid for by the United States Government. I could declare Yosemite park part of my newly invented country too, but if I shoot at Park Rangers and claim US property, I’ve started a war with the US. Never mind that there actually is no Constitutional provision for secession (10th Amendment says nothing on it), despite what you say; the Confederacy was a stillborn illegitimate child of slavocrat extremists, a concoction whose power over the southern people soon became everything the confederates claimed to be against; and the blame for the Civil War and its aftermath should fall to those who set the wheels in motion and fired the first shots. You say Lincoln destroyed the Constutition, and yet the Constitution and our country endures, better for his effort and having saved our Union. So that we could live and argue over history.

‘Nuff said.