Posted on 05/01/2017 3:39:29 PM PDT by Timpanagos1
US President Donald Trump has stirred debate by asking why the American Civil War happened, and pondering whether it could have been "worked out".
In a radio interview, he suggested the conflict might have been avoided if President Andrew Jackson had still been in office.
The 1861-65 Civil War between the northern and southern states was principally caused by slavery.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
It wasn't sovereign Confederate soil. It belonged to the federal government. What mystical act transferred ownership from one to the other?
Not really, no. Sumter was built long after the Revolution on land deeded to the U.S. government free and clear by act of the South Carolina legislature.
Secession... both times.
Nonsense. What you're saying is that there was nothing that transferred ownership. The Confederacy chose war to take the fort by force and as that didn't turn out quite the way y'all hoped.
I don’t recall the crown just handing over land.
People have a moral right to govern themselves the way they see fit....but they can also be hit on the head for exercising that right.
The South risked everything in order to create a slave-based empire and lost. Better luck next time.
Taxes the South did not want to pay - read about it, slavery was a later issue.
Exactly what taxes didn’t the South want to pay. The Constitution required equal taxes among the States. Why would the Northern State be willing to pay taxes while the Southern States didn’t want to pay.
So you would be in favor of removing our troops from Guantanamo Bay as it is the Sovereign soil of Cuba, if the Cubans demanded it.
Suggest you find a good history book on the Civil War and read it.
Thanks Sopater. I suggested he read a good history book on the period.
I am sure that the folks of the Confederate Heritage fund are going to produce impartial scholarly research into the origins of the American Civil War. Again, which tax law, passed by Congress, was the cause of 7 Southern states to secede. My guess is that you cannot back up your claim with facts.
From Texas Secession Declaration;
In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
For years past this abolition organization has been actively sowing the seeds of discord through the Union, and has rendered the federal congress the arena for spreading firebrands and hatred between the slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.
By consolidating their strength, they have placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments.
They have proclaimed, and at the ballot box sustained, the revolutionary doctrine that there is a “higher law” than the constitution and laws of our Federal Union, and virtually that they will disregard their oaths and trample upon our rights.
They have for years past encouraged and sustained lawless organizations to steal our slaves and prevent their recapture, and have repeatedly murdered Southern citizens while lawfully seeking their rendition.
They have invaded Southern soil and murdered unoffending citizens, and through the press their leading men and a fanatical pulpit have bestowed praise upon the actors and assassins in these crimes, while the governors of several of their States have refused to deliver parties implicated and indicted for participation in such offences, upon the legal demands of the States aggrieved.
They have, through the mails and hired emissaries, sent seditious pamphlets and papers among us to stir up servile insurrection and bring blood and carnage to our firesides.
They have sent hired emissaries among us to burn our towns and distribute arms and poison to our slaves for the same purpose.
Below is Charles Dickens’s take on the Civil War:
“I take the facts of the American quarrel to stand thus. Slavery has in reality nothing on earth to do with it, in any kind of association with any generous or chivalrous sentiment on the part of the North. But the North having gradually got to itself the making of the laws and the settlement of the tariffs, and having taxed South most abominably for its own advantage, began to see, as the country grew, that unless it advocated the laying down of a geographical line beyond which slavery should not extend, the South would necessarily to recover it’s old political power, and be able to help itself a little in the adjustment of the commercial affairs.
Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there’s not a pins difference between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out, just as it happens.”
“As to Secession being Rebellion, it is distinctly provable by State papers that Washington, considered it no such thing – that Massachusetts, now loudest against it, has itself asserted its right to secede, again and again – and that years ago, when the two Carolinas began to train their militia expressly for Secession, commissioners sent to treat with them and to represent the disastrous policy of such secession, never hinted it would be rebellion.”
Charles Dickens - Letter to W W Cerjet, March 16, 1862
Andrew Jackson warned a South Carolina congressman that ‘if one drop of blood be shed there in defiance of the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man of them I can get my hands on to the first tree I can find.’ When Robert Hayne ventured, ‘I don’t believe he would really hang anybody, do you?’ Thomas Hart Benton replied, ‘Few people have believed he would hang Arbuthnot and shoot Ambrister . . . I tell you, Hayne, when Jackson begins to talk about hanging, they can begin to look out for ropes!’
If Old Hickory said he would do it, one is safe betting on the outcome. Jackson was a man of his word.
Lincoln issued the Emancipation proclaimation more than two years before the 1864 election. It took effect 18 months before the 1864 elections. Obviously, the man was considering the slavery issue along time before his re-election efforts began. The British were willing to help the Confederacy provided that the Confederacy paid for every ship and every rifle bought. If the Confederacy couldn’t pay, no ships or rifles. When the British abolished slavery, they reimbursed the slave owners for the lost value of those slaves.
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