Let us say your 54% number is correct, does this look correct in terms of the money distribution?
Posted on 06/23/2016 2:04:08 PM PDT by ColdOne
As it is, I don't know what to make of the article:
"The delegation, on leaving 'the presence,' conferred together, and agreed on the hopelessness of their errand and the sad prospect of any good thing from such a source, and the exclamation was actually made, 'God have mercey on us, when the government is placed in the hands of a man like this!'"
It sounds like there's a very clear propagandistic purpose to the article. The story about the Irishman, the talk of "spunk" that appear in some accounts - this is certainly one of the stranger meetings any president ever had.
BroJoeK, you wrote about this last year, so maybe you know more about it and have something to contribute.
“No, we are talking about “before Fort Sumter” versus “after Fort Sumter”, meaning the Confederate military assault on April 12.”
BroJoe is ignoring the Star of the West assault that preceded it.
Well, no. There was a stand-off, a war of nerves. That could have lasted longer. Confederates could have waited until Lincoln fired the first shot. But they didn't. Once the shooting started it was war and there was no going back.
Comparing Fort Sumter to some later, worse incident doesn't change that fact. Jefferson Davis and the Confederates weren't Hitler and the Nazis, but that doesn't mean that Northerners were going to ignore the beginning of the war. Insults to the flag were serious things back then.
LINCOLN's policy OTOH was strangling the American South labor/resource-rich cousins unfairly with high tariffs and import taxes; Ironically treating the South like ITS slave.
The tariff had only been passed a few weeks before the secessionists started the war. Everybody expected that there would be some upward revision of import duties. Southerners could have stayed in Congress and kept the expected increase to a minimum if that was what they really wanted. But they didn't. The secessionists wanted a country of their own to safequard their "domestic institutions" (slavery) and the leaders were more than willing to risk war to get independence and territory.
Sorry FRiend, but Union troops in Fort Sumter "instigated" nothing, and your claiming they did reveals that you have problems sticking to the truth, and nothing but the truth, don't you?
Nor is there evidence those troops in early 1861 had anything to do with "customs enforcement".
Regardless, you also forget that relative military scales changed dramatically between Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor.
In early 1861 the entire Union army was only circa 17,000 most scattered in small forts out west.
So compared to the entire army of the time, and other forts, Sumter was hugely significant, nearly as significant as was Pearl Harbor in 1941, compared to nearing two million US military already on duty elsewhere.
And those two Union troops killed surely died as much from Confederate action as any others in the war.
HangUpNow: "LINCOLN's policy OTOH was strangling the American South labor/resource-rich cousins unfairly with high tariffs and import taxes; Ironically treating the South like ITS slave."
Total complete rubbish, since Lincoln took office on March 4 and ordered resupply of Fort Sumter around April 6, iirc.
One month during which Lincoln's biggest concerns were focused on matters like Virginia's secession convention and resupply of Fort Sumter.
So your words here are pure fantasy.
HangUpNow: "Yes, he and the PTB *knew* exactly when Japan was going to bomb Pearl and used the incident to force the US into a war in the Pacific."
The historical evidence on Pearl Harbor shows clearly that Washington suspected a Japanese attack was coming somewhere and soon, and so all the relevant commanders were sent war-warnings -- from MacArthur in the Philippines to Kimmel & Short in Hawaii.
As it turned out, none responded appropriately to these warnings, at least in hind-sight.
But the evidence also shows expectations of attack were the Philippines or Singapore, not Pearl Harbor.
Regardless, even with the war-warning and the first attack on Pearl Harbor, even MacArthur in the Philippines was not fully prepared when that attack came, and so was soon defeated.
Point is that blaming Lincoln for Fort Sumter is like saying that Roosevelt "attacked the Japanese" at Pearl Harbor!
And if that really is your opinion, FRiend, then you've left the world of the sane for a fantasy realm of your own creation.
But you know perfectly well the Star of the West assaulted nothing, and indeed was assaulted by bombardment from the shore near Fort Sumter.
Like Lincoln's mission to resupply Sumter in April, President Buchanan's earlier mission in January, sending Star of the West to resupply the fort, failed.
So you don’t count firing on The Star of the West as an act of war?
1. Link 1.
2. Link 2.
3. The Baltimore Daily Exchange article of April 3, 1861 sounds like a different reporter wrote his own version of what he was told by an attendee of the meeting with Lincoln, possibly a different attendee than the source in the Sun article. See: Link 3
4. But here is what might convince you about the Baltimore Sun article, a reprinted copy of the Sun article in another newspaper minus the last two paragraphs. This reprint was published in the Bedford Inquirer, (Bedford Pennsylvania), May 3, 1861. (I've already provided one of those last two paragraphs and would be happy to provide the other.) For the Bedford Inquirer article, see: Link 4
I've also provided a link above to the many pages of John Baldwin's 1866 congressional testimony that mentions a similar Lincoln comment about the revenue made in an April 4, 1861 meeting with Lincoln.
x, you said, If Lincoln said it, was it really a jaw-dropping moment that revealed his inner-most motivations, or was it one of many things said in the conversation?. How is your jaw? Certainly it wasn't the only thing Lincoln said in the meeting or the only topic discussed, but IMO it does indicate one of the main drivers for his actions.
rockrr, are you still a skeptic? The Belton Inquirer reprint of the Sun article matches my copy of the Sun article, minus the last two paragraphs as I mentioned above.
Here is another reprint of the April 23, 1861 article iof the Baltimore Sun. This one includes one of the paragraphs missing from the Belton Inquirer article.
And another:
And here is one that contains the complete Baltimore Sun article:
Thanks for the question.
I call every Confederate act of war before Fort Sumter (seizures of forts, ships, arsenals, mints, etc., threats against Union officials, firings on Union ships, etc.) provocations, provocations to which President Buchanan refused to respond.
But the Confederate military assault on Fort Sumter was orders of magnitude greater, an attack, I'll repeat, equivalent in its day to the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
It was a clear, unequivocal act of war against Union troops which resulted in two deaths, and surrender of the fort -- a military loss relatively far-greater than US losses at Pearl Harbor.
After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare that since the attack a state of war has existed, and that is precisely my view also of Fort Sumter.
‘But the Confederate military assault on Fort Sumter was orders of magnitude greater, an attack, I’ll repeat, equivalent in its day to the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.’
Well. At Sumter the fort suffered greatly but the sole Union casualty was a horse.
Two Union soldiers died and four others seriously wounded in the surrender.
Those casualties were caused by Confederates as surely as if they had fired the shots.
And the loss of Fort Sumter was more relatively significant than was the damage of ships at Pearl Harbor.
Finally, I’ve posted before another excellent analogy, and that is Guantanamo.
If the Cuban government demanded its surrender and launched a military assault to force that, it would be an unequivocal act of war.
Of course a Democrat President Buchanan/Obama might do nothing to stop it, but a Republican President Lincoln/Trump is made of much different metal.
I’ve never seen it claimed before that there were any Union casualties at Fort Sumter. Just the poor horse.
Evidently you are counting the two soldiers who were fatally injured in an accidental explosion when the Union troops were performing a 100 gun salute after the battle.
This is the write-up at CivilWar.org and it doesn’t mention any casualties at all:
On Thursday, April 11, 1861, Confederate Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard dispatched aides to Maj. Anderson to demand the fort’s surrender. Anderson refused. The next morning, at 4:30 a.m., Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter and continued for 34 hours. The Civil War had begun! Anderson did not return the fire for the first two hours. The fort’s supply of ammunition was not suited for an equal fight and Anderson lacked fuses for his exploding shells—only solid shot could be used against the Rebel batteries. At about 7:00 A.M., Union Capt. Abner Doubleday, the fort’s second in command, was afforded the honor of firing the first shot in defense of the fort.
The firing continued all day, although much less rapidly since the Union fired aimed to conserve ammunition. “The crashing 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 Doubleday. The fort’s large flag staff was struck and the colors fell to the ground and a brave lieutenant, Norman J. Hall, bravely exposed himself to enemy fire as he put the Stars and Stripes back up. That evening, the firing was sporadic with but an occasional round landing on or in Fort Sumter.
Southern Forces Occupy Fort SumterOn Saturday, April 13, Anderson surrendered the fort. Incredibly, no soldiers were killed in battle. The generous terms of surrender, however, allowed Anderson to perform a 100-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.
Without the “currency” of Southern produced goods, Northern businessmen would not have enough specie on deposit to buy more than half the goods they had been purchasing.
And a great deal of those goods were being sold South, and with direct trade with Europe now a reality, their market was drying up.
Here are a few quotes about the pending loss of business:
3/28/1861 The New York Herald, as quoted in the March 28, 1861, Memphis Daily Appeal
“The last Congress, in a spirit of mingled vengeance and fanaticism, enacted a tariff doubling the duties on many articles of foreign manufacture, and advancing them to a prohibitory point on others; and this was done to protect the manufacturing interests of the Northern States at the expense of the South.
It is doubtful, however, if this blundering instrument can ever be intelligibly interpreted by any collector of custom, or enforced at all in its present shape.
But at the same time the Congress of the Southern Confederacy has adopted a tariff reducing the duties on imports, the consequence of which will be that the importations will abandon the ports of the North and enter those of the South, and will then find their way to the interior by the Mississippi river and the railroads of the border States.
The result of this proceeding will be of course to destroy the trade of the North; and the very first portions of it to suffer will be New York, New Jersey, and New England. The imports here will be cut down to an insignificant figure; and the manufactures in the New England States will be seriously damaged; both business houses and factories will be transferred to the South; and, in fact, the northern tariff adopted to protect the manufacturing interests of the North will have no interests left to protect. The actual effect of the tariff, then, will be to reduce the revenues of the Government at Washington and increase the revenues of the Southern Government.
The Congress at Washington may attempt to avert this course of affairs, even to the extent of inaugurating a blockade of all the southern ports; vessels of war have been ordered home from all the foreign stations to enable the Administration to be prepared for this policy; but to such an event France and England would act as they did with regard to Texas; they would acknowledge the independence of the Southern Confederacy, and send their fleets across the Atlantic to open every port in the South.
Thus we find the country involved in a fearful commercial revolution through the policy of a fanatical party, which, for thirty years, has been endeavoring to overthrow all the best interests of the Republic for the sake of an abstraction. We see the whole current of commercial prosperity turned out of its channel, the wealth and importance of the northern cities struck down at a blow. We have experienced many commercial revulsions before now from time to time — in 1817, 1825, 1837 and 1857 — but these were the results of overtrading, of excessive speculation, and other financial causes which may produce like consequences in any country. The present revulsion, on the contrary, arises from purely political causes, and will be as disastrous in its effects as it is novel in its origin.”
You don't “understand” because you are too steeped in you bias to consider facts counter to your thinking.
So, I suppose the question remains, if Lincoln did not make the remark “...but what will become of my tariff” as several of our fellow posters claim, then you have done an excellent job of pointing out all the coincidental lies coming from so many sources.
Falsely? You don't really mean that do you?
Well, here for you is your post from July 2009:
BroJoeK: "April 8 Federal troops on board the US revenue cutter Harriot (there you go again...sic) Lane land to bolster the garrison of Fort Pickens, Florida.
Have you realized yet that the "Harriet Lane" was not in Florida when you said she was?
And that right there is the cause of the war in a nutshell. A free South would be a grave financial threat to the financial interests of the monied men of New England.
It wasn't the loss of Tariff income to the Federal Government. Although that was very significant, it wasn't enough by itself to launch a war. It is the loss of 200-400 million or more to the Northern Economy *and* the potential to have Competitors in the South that would cost them even more business, that made the problem serious enough to initiate a war to stop it.
Let us say your 54% number is correct, does this look correct in terms of the money distribution?
Lincoln was landing men at Ft. Sumter. He was going to reinforce the fort. Had they done nothing, they would have been facing even more soldiers and guns at Sumter than they were before.
The act of attempting to land those men to reinforce Sumter, after assuring everyone that he would not, was an act of War.
Even Major Anderson more or less said it was a chickensh*t underhanded move.
I’ll say it again, those soldiers were killed & wounded by Confederate actions as certainly as if Confederates had pulled the triggers.
The fact that no Union troops were killed in the bombardment itself is no thanks to Confederates, who we must presume intended to kill as many as possible.
Anderson kept his troops under cover, escaping injury, only to suffer later during the surrender.
So those were battle deaths, not “work place violence”.
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.