What is clearly stated in U.S. law is how such questions of what is or isn’t permitted under the Constitution are handled: Before the Supreme Court, and not by one side declaring that they are right and attacking the side that disagrees.
And it was exactly the sort of technical question that is generally resolved by negotiation. The historical record shows that the hotheads in South Carolina weren’t interested in even finding out whether that was an option - and the rest of the South, rather than repudiating the actions of the hotheads, completely embraced them.
The South started the war. It’s that simple.
:dubious: That is a very odd characterization of his words.
Well, no; although his theory as to why it was illegal is perhaps not the best theory. You can read about that in What Lincoln Believed, by Michael Lind (who is a lawyer among other things).
Yeah, but you can tell he didn’t mean it. He delivered the whole inaugural address in a real sarcastic tone of voice and whenever he talked about how he didn’t want a war he used “air quotes.” You won’t hear that in the history books.
You also won’t hear about the heckler who called him The Weakest Lincoln.
You’re a northern industrialist. Would you rather compete against fledgeling southern industrialists or would you rather compete against all of Europe with its established industry, deeper pockets, better established resource chains, and wider market base?
Sure, you would rather not compete against anyone, but that’s not a realistic option.
If the South went industrial, then industrial profits would be split between the North and the South, with the North getting the larger share (at least at first - theoretically the South could catch up industrially in the long run). Plus, over time, industry in both the North and South would grow to become world economic players.
If the South remained agricultural, then Europe got the lion’s share of the profits, and without those profits the U.S. industry would never be able to grow enough to compete with them.
All of this ignores what the Southerners themselves (at the time) said about why they seceded – their articles of secession make it pretty clear that slavery and white supremacy were an absolute central issue for the Confederacy, and tariffs were not.
You’re wrong on several points.
It’s a settled issue that secession is not legal. You can argue that you don’t like this and you think the law should be changed. But facts is facts. Secession was not and is not legal.
There is no question over who started the war. The Confederates did. They attacked the United States. You can argue whether or not they were justified in declaring war but arguing whether or not they did it is ridiculous.
And James Buchanan did not think secession was legal. He said many times, in private and in public, that it was not. He just dithered over what authority he had to stop it.
You’re attempting to create a false dilemma.
Northern industrialists didn’t need to choose between competing against European or Southern industrialists. They had already achieved the best of both worlds - they had a tariff that protected them from the European competition and southern disinterest which protected them from southern competition. Why would they want to change a status quo that was working for them?
You’re acting as if somehow a company benefits if another company in the same country makes a sale. That doesn’t happen. If a company in Brooklyn loses a contract, it doesn’t care if it lost that contract to a company in Atlanta or a company in London - both are identical losses. As far as the Brooklyn company is concerned, it would be better off if there was no Atlanta company - that would be one less competitor to worry about.
An occupation is itself an act of war, though. If the British had sailed up the Chesapeake in 1880 and disembarked and created a fortification I don’t think anyone would say the United States started a war when it fired shots at the occupying British forces.
Lincoln wasn’t the President to whom I was referring.
I don’t think so, if Buchanan genuinely thought secession was illegal, then I’ll cop to being wrong on that as I always thought he felt it was technically legal.
It’s only been settled after the war in an atmosphere in which that settlement can only be viewed through a political lens.
I actually never said I don’t believe the Confederates started the war, my view is they did. I just don’t agree “there is no question”, I think it’s a reasonable claim that secession was debatable as to its legality and from that stems the truth that Sumter could have been an occupation by a foreign power subject to expected retaliation and in itself an act of belligerence.
[del]Since South Carolina hadn’t seceded from the Union, how could the federal government be occupying South Carolina in any comprehensible sense of the word?[/del] Nevermind- they had seceded by then.
Utter nonsense. It’s as debatable as who started WWII, Hitler or Poland. The South fired first, this is completely beyond dispute. Military action was initiated by the South, they both started the Civil War and “the war” whatever putting the words in quotes means.
It was settled by the South attacking the fort, starting the war. The semantic argument over the technical status is utterly irrelevant, rather than negotiate or accept the status queue the South attacked fort. One may as well argue the question of what the technical status was of the Danzig corridor, that it was an unsettled question that was finally settled–but not by legal arguments, and it’s thus a pretty debatable point about who started “the war”, Germany or Poland.
Of course it ignores what the southerners said. I was talking about the northern industrialist viewpoint.
For the south, it was all about slavery.
If it was working so well, why did the Republican party make tariffs one of the main parts of their platform in the 1860 election?
The Republicans in the 1856 election were completely anti-slavery and had nothing about tariffs in their platform. As more industrialists joined the party (joining forces with the abolitionists), you can see their influence. In the 1860 election, the Republicans backed off from complete abolition and only mandated that the western territories would not permit slavery, and they added tariffs that would protect industry to the party platform.
And if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bicycle. The Federal government didn’t sail into Charleston Harbor in 1861 and build a fort, the fort was in existence and garrisoned at the time that South Carolina declared it had seceded. Calling it an occupation and an act of war is ridiculous on its face. If one were to actually believe this line of thought, the act of South Carolina declaring secession caused an instantaneous de facto declaration of war by the North due to the existence of Fort Sumter.
The South tried to solve the Ft. Sumter issue through negotiations, with repeated messages sent to the Federals informing them they viewed the occupation as an illegal occupation of sovereign soil of South Carolina.
It’s not entirely dissimilar to the debate about British forts on American soil after the end of the Revolution, which were supposed to be removed but the British dug their heels on. It was technically a violation of the Treaty of Paris but certainly not enough to make the Americans want to go to war over it since they had won a pretty dicey revolution and viewed another outright war with Britain as supremely unwise at that point.
This argument is absurd; it essentially gives the “right” to anyone to attack the federal government just by declaring that they are “occupying” their property.
Were slaves still being brought over from Africa at that time? When you have a large breeding population of slaves already, why do that?
Ooops…found it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_of_Slaves
more here:
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/congress-abolishes-the-african-slave-trade