re: Civil War Confederate veteran interview

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The treaty your “waiting” for was what the Confederate delegation was there to seek. I feel like I’m arguing with a mentally addled 10 year old.

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While South Carolina was within its rights to do what it may within the territorial confines of South Carolina, it had no right to fire upon Fort Sumter, the sovereign land of the federal government of the United States of America, a parcel of land in which South Carolina had no title.

While you may quibble about the right of South Carolina to secede, the right to secede does not come with the accessory right to fire upon and/or invade and occupy land in which South Carolina had no title.

And South Carolina had no title to Fort Sumter, a fact which you refuse to explicitly acknowledge even while your factual basis tacitly admits it.

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No, Lincoln sent troops to hold on to federal property and a state that was a part of the union.

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Apparently, sending food to your own troops is choosing war.

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South Carolina, as I be pointed out and apparently you and Cocky can’t wrap your minds around, viewed all laws and agreements it had with the US as null and void. They sought to reach a negotiated settlement to the matter of Federal Lands in the South.

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Well frickSHIT I accidentally upvoted this comment.

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The Civil War ended in 1865. The interview was conducted 82 years later in 1947.

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Yep, and Daughters of the Conferacy started their bullshite in 1894, meaning this poor old man had a solid 50 years of all the women in his life pimping the religious dogma of the lost cause myth.

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Frankly, confederate apologists are worse than the goddamned Japanese about their treatment of their neighbors in WW2.

The Germans owned up to their atrocities. The Japanese pretend it didn't happen. Us? We deny that slavery was the primary motivator - we even say that slaves didn't have it so bad. It's a source of fricking pride.

fricking disgusting.

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Ah, the incoherent ramblings of an overly emotional simpleton. You think I’m trying to apologize and make excuses for the “Lost Cause” because what I say goes against your narrative. What you fail to see, through a complete lack of critical thinking and logic, is that I judge the Civil War not from “im on this side or that side” standpoint. Instead I judge the Civil War the same way I do other wars that I’ve studied extensively for decades. I look at the matter not as a “who’s right and who’s wrong”, but rather from the perspective of an unattached observer. I’m all wars both sides think they’re the right side. And to understand any war you have to look at the perspective of both sides and take that perspective into account.

For example, as I’ve laid out here, the Southerns perspective was that federal forces in Fort Sumter were a foreign occupation of what, again from the Southern viewpoint, was sovereign Confederate soil. The Confederates attempted to find a peaceful solution via negotiation. Where they miscalculated was Lincoln was never going to negotiate with them in any real way. Had Lincoln come to a negotiated solution that would have been tantamount to official US recognition of the Confederacy as an independent country. Lincoln fully realized only war would convince the South to rejoin the union. However, Lincoln did not want to be seen as the one to start that war. He had two important reasons:

1. To many at that time, it wasn’t entirely clear he legally could stop them from leaving the union
2. There were still Southern states who had not left the Union and Lincoln did not want to seem the aggressor and thus drive those states to join the Confederacy.

Lincoln saw Fort Sumter as his way of solving both problems 1 & 2. He knew the provisioning of the garrison at Fort Sumter would signal to the Confederates there would be no negotiated settlement. This would force the Confederates hand. Either the Confederates would (1) allow a foreign power to occupy forts (Sumter was far from the only Federally occupied fort in the South), thus dealing a fatal blow on the world stage to the notion of a Confederate States or America or (2) go to war to try to force the US to leave what the Confederates considered sovereign Confederate soil.

And it worked perfectly.

(By the way, if you ever did a real study of the run-up to the war, you’d already know all this. It’s pretty much common history knowledge. )

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While there’s something to be said for the ceding of Sumter to the US, I think SC and the Confederacy recognized this, hence the offer to reimburse the US for it during peace negotiations. When SC ceded the forts to the US, the US was still an agent for the state’s defense. After SC seceded that relationship obviously changed and it seems that SC and the Confederacy acted in good faith during the negotiations. Despite this, SC and the Confederacy were apparently misled and means for their subjugation were already under way when they took the property back. SC and the Confederacy respected the US’s property right until their sovereignty was threatened I would say. And I would say it’s telling which side seemed to be acting in good faith and which wasn’t.

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That’s the thing about Fort Sumter, as well as the other forts across the south. There was no way either side could allow the other to get their way in the matter.

From the US perspective:
By ceding the forts to the Confederacy, even if recompense was received, that would be extending official recognition to the Confederate States of America as a free and sovereign country. Thus, the Confederates would get what they want, namely independence.

From the Confederate perspective:
To allow the US to continue to garrison forts throughout the South would make the notion of an independent Confederacy a joke. No country would extend them official recognition under those circumstances. Thus, the goal of the Confederacy of being recognized as an independent country on the world stage was impossible so long as Federal forces occupied any forts in those areas now claimed by the Confederacy.

In other words, short of Lincoln giving the forts over to the Confederacy, which would signal to the world US recognition of the Confederacy, which Lincoln would never do because it would fundamentally undermine the US as a viable nation itself, there was going to be war. Lincoln was just smart enough to force the Confederate’s hand into firing the first shot.

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And I would say it’s telling which side seemed to be acting in good faith and which wasn’t.

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There's nothing "bad faith" about the US sending food, supplies, and soldiers to a base it owned, in territory it owned.

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to force the Confederate’s hand into firing the first shot.

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The way this stuff gets framed

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we even say that slaves didn't have it so bad.

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Relatively?

Do you know what slavery was like in other places around the world?