Bisonfanatical wrote:CID1990 wrote:
Correct
Ft Sumter was a confederate state firing on a federal fort after an eviction notice and after secession
In fact, Sumter was fired on because Lincoln decided to resupply Maj Anderson's garrison after being told that Re supplying it would be considered an act of war.
Ultimately it was the powder keg that both sides wanted, but they would have found another - the secession had been a peaceful departure up to that point
I agree, and history agrees.
We will never know any other possibility, because this intentional act by Lincoln started the war.
Lincoln just wanted to reunite the nation.
Slavery became an issue, and was an underlying current, but the war started over Ft Sumter, not the slaves. In any body's text book.
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Well that's a bit of a "nuanced" view (klam's likes that)
But I've said many times on this forum - and since you are relatively new - I'll pull a JSO and repeat myself
Bruce Catton is one of my favorite Civil War historians because he had a singular gift of brevity and summary-
He said that the war had many causes, but if those, there was only one that if it had not existed, the war would not have happened - and that was slavery.
We got to the point of Fort Sumter because the South seceded
The South seceded because it felt an existential threat to its economy- propagated by economic policies generated in the largely abolitionist political class in northern states
The Southern economy, to a large degree, depended on cash crops made wildly profitable with slave labor.
The politics of Southern states were absolutely ruled by the planter class - much in the same way our own modern politics are ruled by the corporate class
The Civil War absolutely, at its core, could not have happened in the absence of chattel slavery
Every male ancestor of mine who was of fighting age during the war was a soldier in the confederacy. One buried his own brother at Seven Pines. Another was captured at Gettysburg and spent the rest of the war in point lookout MD and walked home to NC after he was paroled in 1865. I cart bookcases of books about the war all over the world, and I visit battlegrounds multiple times and explore every corner of them. I know just about everything there is to know about Lee and Jackson, and also Grant and Sherman.
If there is anyone who ought to be unreconstructed, it is me. But that war was about slavery, and it was prosecuted by men who profited from it. Lincoln's motivation was not about slavery at first- that much is correct - But that obscures the fact that the South most certainly WAS fighting for the preservation of the institutution
I'm an admirer of both Lee and Jackson and I want to see them memorialized for who they really were. But a lot of that is being obscured by the cause for which they ultimately fought
Lee and Jackson are Christ figures in the South- that is an artifact of the Lost Cause - But also a tacit admission that they were noble warriors for a flawed country. I think in that vein they have one last sacrifice to make
