re: On this day 157 years ago, William T. Sherman presented Savannah, GA to Lincoln...

Nothing to add to this thread. Just wanted to say I am thoroughly enjoying the read and no way Chicken anticipated this forum would offer discussion like this.

Carry on…

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If they considered them to be states in rebellion, then they considered them to be their citizens.

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Yeah. And? Does a kid in Tokyo become less than a person because he wasn't born an American? Is that how you justify his or her incineration at the hands of LeMay's Superfortresses? You have more in common with your Confederate ancestors than you may think.

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Gee I wonder why?

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Because they refused to evacuate and hand over federal property. Which I find ironic considering Confederates claimed they were merely defending their property from northern invaders.

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You're right, they just decided to go to war with the US for shits and giggles.

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Japan wanted to go to war with the United States so they could get us to the negotiating table to bargain for more oil so they could finish off their war against China. They received 90% of their oil from us and we had cut them off due to human rights violations they were committing in China.

Germany quite literally went to war with us for shits and giggles. To this day no one knows why Hitler declared war on the United States.

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Depends, were the Japanese trying to peaceably withdraw from the Union?

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No but neither were the Confederates. A peaceable people does not open fire on a federal installation after refusing to withdraw from their own property.

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The people of South Carolina and the Confederacy did not consider it federal land

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The United States disagreed. And clearly they ended up being correct because the Confederacy no longer exists.

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Not sure why else Savannah was spared. It's said that Sherman really liked the place, but I'm not exactly sure why.

Any ideas?

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Savannah at the time was the modern day equivalent of New York City. One does not simply burn down New York City. Atlanta at the time was a new town, a glorified train station. In fact, there weren't many white people West of the Oconee River in Georgia until after 1830. As Sherman marched down out of Tennessee into Georgia, through Chatsworth, Acworth, Kennesaw (Big Shanty), Marietta, and on across the Chattahoochee to Atlanta (previously called Marthasville, previously called Terminus due to major rail junction), all of what he was burning down was basically brand new construction with no history or monuments or grand old plantations, no reputations etc, all basically the modern day equivalent of new strip malls that popped up. Once he started getting closer to the ocean and started getting into older towns like Milledgeville, he started to chill out a little bit.

Then South Carolina was deluding itself or more likely was underestimating Lincoln and the Union and his/their resolve. When you get down to it, the South was acting like a bunch of little punks on the whole thing. They wanted popular sovereignty until the popular went against them. They wanted the slaves to be counted in apportionment but did not give at least 60% of them the rights of citizens. The Southern planter class wanted their cake and they wanted to not only eat it but they wanted the North to provide it to them and ensure that they could continue the institution through things like Fugitive Slave Laws and essentially civil war over Kansas a few years before. The planter class wanted to take their slaves with them into new territories even if the populace did not want it and did not buy into a human slave as "property"

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South Carolina seceded in December 1860 and fired on Fort Sumter in April of 1861 after many other federal sites had been abandoned, after they had been in talks as if it was going to be given up with two administrations dragging their feet despite payment being offered for the fort. How many more months ought they have waited? Also, Lincoln had been told that sending provisions would be seen as aggressive. I would say that the federals received plenty of opportunity to abandon the fort. That they didn’t I don’t think can charitably be seen as a passive undertaking.

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This assumes that South Carolina had the right to secede which, as the Civil War told us, they did not. And even if they did, that doesn't automatically make a federal installation the property of the state of South Carolina. It's federal land, owned and operated by the federal government. South Carolina had no authority to dictate to Major Anderson or the Buchanan and Lincoln administrations what they were going to do with their own property.

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Someone who killed someone else and now had possession of their stuff wouldn’t make the stuff rightfully theirs of course..

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That's how international conflicts between nations works, I'm afraid. If the Confederacy had been a legitimate nation it would have survived the Civil War. It did not. Not a single major power on the planet recognized the Confederacy as legitimate.

Lol...How's that worked for the US since WW1?

You've been on the Brit tit the whole time. And still are.

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This assumes that South Carolina had the right to secede which, as the Civil War told us, they did not. And even if they did, that doesn't automatically make a federal installation the property of the state of South Carolina. It's federal land, owned and operated by the federal government. South Carolina had no authority to dictate to Major Anderson or the Buchanan and Lincoln administrations what they were going to do with their own property.

That's how international conflicts between nations works, I'm afraid. If the Confederacy had been a legitimate nation it would have survived the Civil War. It did not. Not a single major power on the planet recognized the Confederacy as legitimate.

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If the argument from the Union perspective boils down to might makes right, I think Southern defenders have done their job. If the South had won the war I guess you’d be here providing reasons the South was right! But then I guess Sumter was rightfully South Carolina’s, because they took it from the federals, yet you seem to indicate that had they won and thus had the right to secede, the federal property still wouldn’t have rightly been theirs, so I’m not sure you’re being consistent here.

But of course I don’t think might making right is a tenable position. Will you be waving the flag of America’s future conquerer if it were to ever happen?

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But then I guess Sumter was rightfully South Carolina’s, because they took it from the federals

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Incorrect, because the Federals managed to take it back in 1865. The Japanese did something similar when they took the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island from us in the early days of our war with them in 1941-42. We took them all back. There's this whole war thing that you are ignoring. When the Confederacy opened fire on Fort Sumter on the morning of April 12, 1861, they effectively started a war. In order for them to maintain their independence they would have to win that war. They failed to do so.