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.
Except that in Bollman and Hamadi habeas corpus had not been suspended so the question of who may suspend it was not an issue before the court.
In yet another stunning display of your ineptness on this matter...
Watching you in action gives one a whole new take on ineptness.
Well if we're purging the site of banned posters reincarnated under new names then shouldn't they also dump lqclamar who used to post as GOPCapitalist?
You sound like a broken record. The determining rule here is ratio decidendi - not your invented standard of suspension. If the constitutional power of suspension is a part of the case's ratio decidendi, what the ruling says about it is valid precedent. This was the case in Bollman and multiple federal courts have affirmed it since then. You cannot show even one though that says otherwise.
Watching you in action gives one a whole new take on ineptness.
Say what you will, but just keep in mind that you're the one who just incorrectly attributed the Milligan decision to Chase instead of Davis, and falsely presented the AG's oral argument as a part of the case's ruling. That sort of crap works only in Non Sequitur land, where the dissenting author becomes the majority and the Attorney General's statement becomes the opinion itself.
Grand Old Partisan was banned at his request. It’s no problem if he decides to come back under another name. Please let it go.
No problem. I’m glad he decided to come back regardless of what he’s calling himself.
Bzzt. Forts and military facilities are not "public property", for the mutual use of the general public. They are Federal property, for military purposes. "To exercise exclusive Legislation ... to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;..."
As do you.
The determining rule here is ratio decidendi - not your invented standard of suspension.
If ratio decidendi is to apply then doesn't one side or the other have to include it in their case? Yet I'm not aware of any arguements by the government or by the defense that raised the issue of suspension of the writ.
If the north broke faith, the compact was also broken and the south decided it could no longer support the relationship and declared itself divorced with the Declaration of Causes.
If it was the northern states prerogative to ignore federal law, (regardless of the slavery issue, as it could have just as well been over the return of stolen cows or horses) why the penalty of death for secession -- particularly since no penalties were mentioned, nor the illegality of succession?
Does anyone in their right mind believe the south would have ratified the constitution if it knew what was coming down the pike?
Of course not.
Even Lincoln knew that the federal government didn't have grounds or justification for attacking the south because of secession, so he set up the Fort Sumter fiasco.
IF the act of secession alone justified federal intervention, Lincoln didn't have to wait for the south to attack the Fort.
Also known as the "We wuz so stoopid we done fell into Linkum's trap" defense.
If they were really interested in peace the South could have let Lincoln supply the fort, maintain the status quo, and waited him out. Instead they chose war, and paid the consequences.
It's kind of a shame that Chief Justice Marshall couldn't have worked in some comments on abortion and gun control into the Bollman decision. Just imagine how much trouble it would have saved us? And it's not like it had to happen or anything. In your world the court can rule on something that hasn't happened, like suspension of habeas corpus.
But, they did ratify it. Shoulda-woulda-coulda's don't matter. There were four score and five years of previous shucking and jiving to clarify things legally, before the USSC. Years that saw, not only the Fugitive Slave Act (take that, ye worshipers of "State's Rights"), but the Dred Scott case, the Kansas-Nebraska act, the Missouri Compromise, even the implicit idea that the Constitution should revisit the slavery issue in 1808. It was the South that "broke faith" with the system and resorted to force.
Even Lincoln knew that the federal government didn't have grounds or justification for attacking the south because of secession, so he set up the Fort Sumter fiasco.
The only ones who "set up" the Sumter fiasco were the South Carolinians who decided to forego the rule of law and unilaterally seize Federal property at gun point. Lincoln's government did not do anything that had not been done for years, to wit, supplying a Federal fort with needed supplies.
The old Southron apologia that Lincoln somehow tricked Beauregard into firing on both acknowledged Federal military property filled with US servicemen AND an US naval vessel implies either Beauregard was stone cold stupidly gullible and unfit for command, or the South precipitated the action for its own reasons, using the resupply as a convenient causus belli.
IF the act of secession alone justified federal intervention, Lincoln didn't have to wait for the south to attack the Fort.
No, he didn't. Maybe, unlike the Charleston hotheads, he was not eager to precipitate a civil war.
But it did not BELONG to them. We had some friends over for dinner tonight. I didn' appropriate his wallet or her purse or claim their car merely because it was in MY territory. The South had no claim to the property so they stole it.
No, they were only fighting against the Democrats’ misinterpretation of the Constitution.
The Constitution never spoke of slaves as property.
Abraham Lincoln himself said that the war was not to free the slaves and that if he could maintain the union without freeing the slaves he would.
bump
Once an Ordinance of Secession is passed, all “public” property became the property of the State, ie, South Carolina. It was as if South Carolina had never been a part of the Union. An “anullment” if you will.
Here is another scenario: You make an agreement to sell your house to a friend, (Contract for Deed, as we call it in Texas). Your friend defaults on his obligations, so you EVICT him, and take BACK your property, by revoking that contract. Your friend can CLAIM he owns it all day long, but he doesn’t.
South Carolina had no jurisdiction over Federal forts, built on land they had ceded to the Federal government in toto. They could no more claim Sumter than they could claim Washington DC or Kansas or the land under any random building in Charleston. It was owned, not by "the public", but by the Federal Government under Article I. It was paid for by the taxes of ALL the States, and the willingness of SC and the rest of the South to simply steal the joint assets of the United States is a prime example of why unilateral secession is unlawful.
If your legal theory of ownership were to hold, then it would negate land ownership; the State could just declare any land theirs and take it at cannonpoint, maybe to pay later, maybe not. Now, maybe the goal of South Carolina was to set themselves up as a "banana republic" complete with "nationalization" of whatever they wanted, but they at least claimed to be a democratic republic. Their deeds belie that.
Bad analogy. SC didn't "agree to sell". They did "sell". They ceded all claim to Sumter and extinguised any private claim that might have existed.
Here's a better analogy. You have some worthless swamp. You give the land, free and clear, to a corporation in the swamp drainage business, in which you hold shares. The corporation takes the swamp, and with corporate money, improves the land, thus raising the value of your adjacent property. Then, you decide you want to unilaterally abrogate all contracts with the corporation and seize the now improved land back without the consent of the corporation. When opposed, you pull a gun.
How hard is it for you to understand the idea that the UNION is and was a voluntary agreement between the states?
South Carolina, and other states had the right to end that association, and that negates ALL deals made with the Federal Government. Now, in practice, the Feds should have been compensated for their losses, etc., but since Lincoln would not recognize the will of the Southern people, or their secession, then that wasn’t possible. Secession is the LAST resort to an overbearing Federal Government, and the Southern States took it.
The idea of a foreign power holding a fort at the entrance to a busy harbor was intolerable to the South, as it well should have been. There is no way in or out of Charleston Harbor without passing under the guns of Ft. Sumter. When Lincoln refused to negotiate, the South had no choice but to do what they did.
Is this the original thread?
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.