re: Was the Civil War Fought Because of Slavery? It Depends on Which Side You View

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The Civil War was fought over one indisputable reason - States rights

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You'd have to ask the southern states who seceded over the issue.

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Many of the letters

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If they are invested or attacked by a force so superior that resistance would, in your judgment, be a useless waste of life, it will be your duty to yield to necessity, and make the best terms in your power.

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This is far from the President’s intentions. You are to exercise a sound military discretion on this subject. It is neither expected nor desired that you should expose your own life or that of your men in a hopeless conflict

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Anderson was a Patriot, a true Patriot.

He received order from a Traitor who hoped he would turn traitor as well.

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One Union soldier was killed, and another was mortally wounded during a 50-gun salute to the flag just before the fort was surrendered.

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Speed met with Anderson and found him reluctant to implement Lincoln's wishes to distribute rifles to Unionists in Kentucky. Anderson, Speed wrote to Lincoln on October 8, "seemed grieved that [he] had to surrender his command... [but] agreed that it was necessary and gracefully yielded."

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We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property.

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and seized it during a time of no hostilities

That is categorically false, if you were being honest you would admit that.

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Fact, they dressed in civilian clothes so as to disguise their identities, which at the time was considered an act of war.

First, thats not a fact, you obviously saw that on YouTube.
Anderson did have his men turn their overcoats inside out and take off their hats as armed South Carolinans already had them under a state of siege.

Why lie? Why call it a fact when it clearly isnt.
Someone felt they needed to enhance the historical record with lies to convince you and people like you.

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I never said that.

You quoted me in my post were quotes from another's post.

You call me out for not being factual about something I never typed is a bit dishonest.

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I misspoke about civilian clothes when they traversed from Moultrie to Sumter. Either way, they concealed their identities so as to look like civilians.

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But in reading memoirs and accounts of that night, I can't find where they were under siege or faced hostilities as you have stated.

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I can provide links to Doubleday and Crawford's memoirs from that night.

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One of the clearest violations of states’ rights came with national conscription. In April 1862, the Confederate Congress passed the first national draft in American history, compelling white men to serve directly in the Confederate army. This law stripped governors of control over their militias and placed manpower firmly under national authority.

One of the clearest violations of states’ rights came with national conscription. In April 1862, the Confederate Congress passed the first national draft in American history, compelling white men to serve directly in the Confederate army. This law stripped governors of control over their militias and placed manpower firmly under national authority.

Conscription proved to be very unpopular in many places owing to exemptions, including the Twenty-Slave Law, passed by the Confederate Congress on October 11, 1862.

Georgia governor Joseph E. Brown, a lifelong states’ rights advocate, denounced conscription as unconstitutional. He warned that it made the central government “the judge of the extent of its own powers” and argued that it reduced the states to “mere provinces of a consolidated despotism.” Brown’s protest revealed the irony at the heart of the Confederate experiment: a government born in resistance to federal coercion now exercised coercive power on a scale the antebellum United States had never attempted.

Closely related was the Confederate government’s suspension of habeas corpus, which allowed arrests without trial and the detention of civilians suspected of dissent or desertion. According to historian Mark Neely, roughly 4,100 civilians were held by military authorities at some point over the course of the war.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis defended this expansion of executive authority as a wartime necessity, insisting that “public safety” sometimes required the temporary suspension of civil liberties. Yet this argument echoed precisely the reasoning Southern leaders had condemned when used by Abraham Lincoln.

By overriding state courts and civil law, the Confederate government placed national authority above state judicial sovereignty, contradicting the very constitutional philosophy it claimed to uphold.

The Confederacy also violated states’ rights through the impressment of private property. Beginning in 1863, Confederate agents seized food, livestock, and enslaved labor for military use, often at prices set by the government rather than the market.

North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance
This policy provoked widespread resentment among civilians and state officials alike. North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance complained that impressment reduced citizens to “dependence upon the mere will of the military authorities.” For small farmers and poor whites, impressment made clear that local control and property rights could be sacrificed whenever Richmond deemed it necessary.

In short, if the Confederate government needed something, it would have it and there was nothing a state could do about it. This included private property in the form of slaves.

Finally, we come to the institution of slavery itself. The Confederate Constitution permanently protected slavery from state interference. It explicitly prohibited any Confederate state from abolishing slavery and required that “the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected.”

In this crucial respect, the Confederacy denied states the right to determine their own domestic institutions. A state that wished to end slavery—an act entirely consistent with a robust theory of states’ rights—was forbidden from doing so. As Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens famously explained, the new government rested upon the “great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery…is his natural and normal condition.” States’ rights stopped where slavery began.

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All the more reason to blame rogue Union officers for poking the bear. They where told what would happen, they did it anyway, and it happened

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An attack on or attempt to take possession of either one of them [the forts] will be regarded as an act of hostility, and you may then put your command into either of them which you may deem most proper to increase its power of resistance. You are also authorized to take similar defensive steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.

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Dude, you started it off as a response to me

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It's a good question of they were trying to stealth or blend in, either way South Carolina was looking for boats.

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To avoid her the boats under Major Anderson and Lieutenant Meade diverted their course along Sullivan's Island. Captain Doubleday's boat pushed directly across and was the first to arrive. For the moment it was thought best to turn back, but the men took off their hats and coats, concealing their arms and belts, so as to give themselves the appearance of workmen, and the boat pushed on. The steamer passed close by — within a distance of 100 yards — but instead of being upon her ordinary mission she was in the act of towing a vessel to the harbor bar. This was the only night since the establishment of the guard that the service had been interrupted.

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