No, the American troops were on American land that the Confederates were claiming as their own. But the mere fact of making a claim is not sufficient to make the claim true.
If Canada decided to claim Alaska on Thursday and send troops in on Friday and American troops and Canadian troops started fighting in Anchorage, would you claim that the Americans were the invaders? No, because the United States did not recognize the Canadian claim to Alaska so those American troops would be defending American land.
Same thing in 1861. The Confederates might claim South Carolina was their territory but the United States didn’t recognize that claim. The American government still recognized not just Fort Sumter but all of South Carolina as American territory. So when Confederate troops attacked the troops in Fort Sumter they were attacking American troops on American territory.
The Civil War couldn’t be an invasion because it was fought entirely within the United States. It wasn’t an attempt to extend American rule because no American troops were sent to Mexico or Canada or Cuba.
If that’d been done, the U.S. might still be facing reprisal attacks from and military occupation of the former CSA, in a cycle of violence akin the Israel-Palestine conflict.
That aside, the Confederate Provisional Congress had already organized itself, and an army, in February 1861, a month before Lincoln was inaugurated. They proceeded to recruit the best West Point had to offer. After Sumter, the CSA invaded the New Mexico territories, Kentucky, and Maryland, and adopted a flag with 13 stars (not 11 - they set up their own legislatures for Missouri and Kentucky, and then tried to take both states with them although neither state ever actually seceded).
The slave power was bent on expansion. After Lincoln’s election they perceived that expansion in the territories would be impossible within the context of the Union. That’s why they seceded.
Point being, they didn’t secede to be “left alone.” That’s a post-war lie by the Christian White Southern Victim crowd, who invented the term “War of Northern Aggression,” and who continues to dominate political discourse in this country today with their tales of White Victimhood at the hands of the welfare queens, minorities and socialists.
They always intended to wage a war of expansion. If their demands for territory were not met, then they’d have used their control of the Mississippi River to cut every state west of the Ohio off from their markets in New York, and then split the Union even further. Success of the CSA would have been the death of the Union, by design.
It’s certainly true for Kentucky. The Commonwealth’s General Assembly passed a declaration of neutrality on May 20, 1861.
Confederate forces were commanded by Major General Leonidas Polk to occupy Columbus, Kentucky, a strategic point. The Union counter-invaded. Cite.
Its neutrality violated, the General Assembly passed a resolution on September 7 1861 demanding the withdrawal of only the Confederates. It read:
Pro-Confederate Kentuckians formed an unelected, ineffective shadow government.
The Congress of the CSA admitted Kentucky to the Confederacy Dec. 10, 1861. As this was done on behalf of the unelected shadow government, it constituted an attempt at forcible annexation:
Darn it, the line “An Act for the admission of the State of Kentucky into the Confederate States of America, as a member thereof” belongs with the second quote, not the first.
Even if the CSA did own South Carolina, they still would be required to give back or pay for the fort that undoubtably belonged to the federal government. Instead, they fired upon it. They declared war on the what they considered the other country, and that country retaliated.
It doesn’t matter which point of view you take, the CSA as a rebellion or second country. Military action against it was legal.
And while I personally think hating long dead people is almost pathological, it takes guts to out yourself as the Civil War equivalent of a Holocaust denier on these boards. Especially when you’ve been here since 2001.
The assertion (backed by at least some evidence) is that drone attacks aren’t exactly “clinical” or “precise”. Hence they cause a significant casualties among innocents in areas we’re not supposedly attacking.
The Confederacy definitely wanted to have its cake and eat it too. They wanted to withdraw from the United States while at the same time asserting ownership of resources that belonged to the United States.
The various military bases throughout the south were just one aspect. There was also a federal mint in New Orleans. It was full of gold that belonged to the United States government. When Louisiana withdrew from the United States, do you think it turned that American gold over to the United States? Of course not, they kept it all and declared it now belonged to the CSA. That was just pure theft. (They also stole the smaller gold depositories in Dahlonega, Georgia and Charlotte, North Carolina.)
And all the military hardware they could lay their hands on.
However, this is a complicated subject, and matters tended to roll from a relatively small but extremely committed minority. How large that minority was remains a matter of some debate among historians, but what isn’t debated is that for various reasons they were militant, fixated on grievances (mostly imagined), and that they did not themselves think the Confederacy would form without forcing the issue via bloodshed. They were likely correct; Jefferson Davis was very likely of that opinion.
Sparking a Civil War was therefore deliberate, although the individuals in question definitely didn’t think the body-count would amount to even a thousandth part of what it actually did. In general, most Southerners, when put to a choice of siding with their neighbors and relatives against a northern government they disliked, chose the former. But they also frequently did so with a grimace, and did not find it terribly hard in practice to then functionally return to the Federal government once honor had been satisfied (and their territory conquered).
That was Lincoln’s biggest mistake in the early months of the crisis. He believed that the secessions were the work of a small minority of radical extremists and that the “silent majority” of Southerners were still pro-Union. So he figured if he could just draw things out for a while, the pro-Union majority would throw out the pro-secession extremists and voluntarily rejoin the United States. It took Lincoln a while to admit to himself that there was general support for the secessionist government and the South was not going to come back on its own.
But they are decidedly not “random,” as was claimed.
Also, drone strikes aren’t clinical or precise, compared to what? The tactics used in the civil war? Drone strikes cause significant casualties among innocents, compared to what? The civil war?
Yes. He had dreams, some of which he interpreted as omens, or, at least, something more than complete fiction. cite
Shelby Foote also related a dream Lincoln said he had, of floating away to a bright (or brightly lit) land. I cannot provide a cite right this moment, my copy of vol. III is not at hand. I can get it later today, if you wish.
