At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate artillery batteries surrounding Fort Sumter opened fire. It was the beginning of a war that consumed the nation for the next four years, left more than 620,000 dead, hundreds of thousands permanently maimed, and half the country lying in ruins. On this, the 150th anniversary of the start of the most calamitous war in American history, it is worth looking back on our attempt at national suicide and observing how far we have come since.
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As a graduate of The Citadel, which is located only a few miles from Fort Sumter, I have had a personal interest in the fight that started the Civil War ever since one of my professors mentioned that the school’s senior class was given a choice between taking finals or manning the guns surrounding Fort Sumter. In fact, my alma mater collected nine battle streamers during the course of the war, something it mentions with tremendous pride to this day. I still remember the time during my freshman year when an upperclassman dangled the streamers in front of me and asked, “What do these mean to you?” My reply — that they were evidence that The Citadel was the first college to commit treason against the United States of America — is not numbered among the wisest answers I ever gave.
By then, though, such an answer, even from a Brooklyn-born Yankee, was taken in good humor. It would not have been a few generations earlier. But by the late 1970s the great rift between the North and the South was mostly healed. A country that just a century before could be reunited only through force had been reforged into a single nation in the bloody crucible of two world wars. Today, it is hard even to imagine the depth of the political and social rifts that in 1861 made war unavoidable.
Still, the Civil War was unavoidable, because despite much shared history, by the middle of the 19th century two widely divergent economic and political systems, bound by a single constitution, were finding their differences irreconcilable. Either both sides had to agree to go their separate ways, or one of the two systems had to be destroyed. When, less than a month after his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln notified South Carolina’s governor, Francis Pickens, that he planned to resupply Fort Sumter, the die was cast.
Inside the fort there were only 85 out of the 650 men required to fully man the guns, commanded by Major Robert Anderson. In an ironic twist, Anderson’s father had been an officer in the Revolutionary War, charged with defending Charleston harbor from British assault. After the city fell, he spent nine months in a British prison at nearby Fort Moultrie.
The younger Anderson was a seasoned officer with considerable experience in war. He was also a slaveholder who, despite his strong southern sympathies, remained loyal to the Union. Moreover, he had strong ties to the other key players in the unfolding drama. He was a close personal friend of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and had been since their student days at West Point. He was also well acquainted with Abraham Lincoln, whom he had recruited for the Black Hawk War of 1832. Finally, the Confederate general besieging Fort Sumter, Pierre Beauregard, had been a student of Anderson’s at West Point, and the two had later fought together during the Mexican–American War.
Professor Lacey is correct to note that his alma mater committed treason.
This is not cause for personal embarrassment on his part, unless and to the extent he celebrates that treason. Professor Lacey is to be praised for his sober consideration of the facts, and The Citadel is to be honored as a great and valuable institution of higher learning in every sense.
This same attitude requires us to shun those who would celebrate the single most unpatriotic event in American history. I'd start with the crypto-racists who dressed up and went to those balls.
Note that todays logo of Google celebrates the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight and ignored the Fort Sumter anniversary. I've noticed their preference for left leaning events of less import to American culture and history. When Sumter was fired upon there was an obscure clerk working at a Galena Illinois dry goods store by the name of Ulyesses S. Grant.
Already heard someone on the radio this morning claiming that the Civil War was about slavery. Well, no...it was about secession.
Problem is that secession was about slavery. Anyone who reads the various "Declarations of Secession" from those states that bothered to draft them cannot conclude otherwise. Slavery is often mentioned in the first paragraph of those documents. One state asserts it in the
first sentence.
A perusal of the speeches of governors and legislators in the states before the votes to secede also bears this out. They were NOT complaing about unfair tariffs and other folderol modern apologists make for them so people can hang bunting on and set to jaunty music what was an act of treason. And treason for a shoddy, shameful reason.
Undoubtedly someone living now will interpret this as almost personal criticism rather than an observation about people living 150 years ago. Amazingly, some of these people lament the Cofederacy didn't succeed. Even more amazingly, some of these people consider themselves libertarians (!), pining for a regime that
would've been the most unfree in the western hemisphere.
I'm sorry, but those calling this "treason" are wrong. Secession is a right and was understood as such at the Constitution's ratification (note that several states had ratified it with the explicitly laid-out understanding that they reserved the right to secede; a power also implicitly reserved to them under the 10th amendment). Since South Carolina was now a separate country before Lincoln provoked the crisis (by sending a ship to the US garrison, effectively invading South Carolina), there could not have been any treason committed. No more than our Revolutionary War ancestors committed treason against King George III. In fact, much less.
And MikeW, please don't call us who celebrate our side with balls and the rest as "crypto-racists." It's false to see that as anything racial. I'm a member (and former officer) in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and plenty of my compatriots there do these activities. I have witnessed a lower rate of racial prejudices within the SCV than I have in the rest of the population. I have only known one SCV member whom I think is prejudiced, and he's a jerk in many other ways, too. Among the officers at my time in office, most weren't even fully white, and absolutely NONE showed any prejudices that I could tell. My camp even had some black members. I'm an insider in these and have first-hand experience.
Come on guys, can't we avoid slandering our fellow conservatives today?
CA-tA-zen C, I disagree with slavery, too, but I would have voted for Tennessee to secede. My family had freed our slaves 17 years earlier and were solid secessionists. It's annoying that the politicians who wrote Tennessee's declaration of secession were so focused on slavery, but that doesn't mean it's why it passed. In our case, it was proposed with that language and initially failed. But then Lincoln called on us to provide him with troops to invade South Carolina, and after that the same bill passed. While a mere document trying to justify secession to preserve slavery couldn't pass Tennessee on its own merits, what did convince us to secede was Lincoln's making war on our fellow Southerners. But if Yankees can support the US war of invasion (explicitly justifiied to "preserve the union") because today they like the fact that it effectively freed a large fraction of slaves, then certainly I can support the CSA's side (which formally justified slavery, which I don't) because I'm in favor of our fighting to be left alone.
Also: most repressive government in the Western Hemisphere? Wow. But slavery was legal in several US states, even during the war. So was the US just as repressive? Or the whole US just before secession? Brazil had an emperror and slavery, both. South America generally was run by dedmagogues and undemocratic regimes at the time, and they oppressed their large Indian populations (whether they were slaes or not). Let's not jump off the bridge with these comparisons.
Nice to hear from a fellow Bulldog. As for treason, that is the opinion of the victors. I would believe that the signers of the Constitution would not have signed the document if they didn't believe that they could leave the Union as willingly as they joined it.
And lets not forget the first treasonous act, reenacted by the Corps on Morris Is. on 9 January, and that was the 150th anniversary of the firing on the supply ship, Star of the West.
Since SC had already seceeded from the Union, as it had every right to do. The fort in question was now, no longer in US territory, and SC had every right to demand that it be abandoned. Those who fired on Sumter did not commit treason against the US, as they were no longer a part of the US.
(BTW, if secession was not valid, why did the North force all of the seceeding states to reapply for admission to the union after the war?)
While slavery was one element that sparked the war, it was just one element. A more important element was the way the North had been treating the South politically. As little more than a vassal state. The North had been shutting of imports of European machine goods, and requiring those in the South to buy only from northern factories. To feed those northern factories, the north also made it illegal for the South to ship cotton to anyone other than northern factories.
The North did not go to war to free the slaves, it went to war for much the same reason that King George did. To keep control of it's colonies.
If the war was about freeing slaves, why did Lincoln wait several years to issue the Immancipation Proclamation? If the war was about freeing the slaves, why did Lincoln limit the scope of the Proclamation to only states that had seceeded? Why did he deliberately exclude slaves in states that had stayed in the US?
Slavery was already a dying institution and wouldn't have lasted many more years anyway.
Very few people in the south owned slaves, but they all fought to protect their homes.
Many free blacks fought on the side of the South.
It cannot be forgotten either, that one of the principles at stake at that time was the limit of state's rights in this new experiment called the United States. Remember, prior to the Constitution, we had the Articles of Confederation; it didn't work too well.
The fact that Virginia, South Carolina and other states had military colleges shows that we still hadn't fully embraced the concept of this unique republic.
The Civil War, in part, was a reaction to the idea of a controlling federal government, fueled by the idea that individual state's rights were more important than the federation. On the other hand, today, we find ourselves in the opposite situation, with some wanting far too much federal control at the expense of legitimate state's rights.
I, too, am a graduate of The Citadel. I didn't go to the school beause of any great love of the Confederacy. However, I did gain a greater respect for those who fought and died on both sides.
Your comment about South Carolina's status makes much sense, if the validity of secession is assumed.
But your use of the Federal demand that the Southern states reapply for admission doesn't quite work. That demand CAN be interpreted as recognition that the original secession had some validity, but that is hardly the only or even the most reasonable assumption that one could make.
Traditionally, individuals or corporate bodies [chartered or incorporated towns, guilds, associations, clans or tribes] guilty of rebellion would be assumed to have forfeited their previously granted/held status in any society and if given any chance to restore it would at minimum have to petition for it. That demand by a victorious government in no way implied recognition that the original act of rebellion was justified, rather it served to demonstrate that the rebellion had in fact occurred and to create a legal hurdle to restoring normal conditions.
In this case, the US government's position, far from recognizing the validity of secession, indicated its belief that the states in question had, through rebellion, forfeited their status as member states with self government. That would also have been the reason for placing them under the initial military occupation and reducing the region to US soil under direct Federal control.
I realize some of that is politically and philosophically contentious now, but it is pretty basic application of the laws of rebellion and the laws of war as then understood. And this is what US proclamations and behaviour at the time seems to suggest they believed.
One issue this raises for me is one that doesn't come up much in discussions of American federalism- the difference between original and later-admitted states. Without wanting to prejudice the debate, I can at least see the case for states that signed on in 1787-9 having the right to secede. They had been sovereign before, if briefly. And although I appreciate that in both theory and practice, and in terms of moral justice, all the new states joined with equal status and powers to the old ones, there IS a difference. All the new states were organized by American settlers on soil that already belonged to the US and was under Federal control, and then petitioned for statehood.
Virginia, for example, had been a sovereign state from 1776 until signing on to the Constitution. Mississippi, for example, never was. That territory had been US soil before it was settled, and the state was organized and admitted later. So for those states in similar positions, secession amounted to having moved into a US Territory, settled and developed it, achieved statehood, and then trying to make of with US territory.
As and when a majority of Mexicans holding citizenship decide to take the southwest out of the Union and re-confederate as Aztlan, they will be doing the same thing that Mississippi and every other Confederate state west of the Appalachians did.
Again, if the secessionists at the time were incensed about trade restrictions and tariffs, the almost complete absence of these issues in their Declarations of Secession is somewhat curious. I believe I've read at least two speeches from Tennessee's then governor and not only does he lead with slavery and finish with slavery, I don't believe he talks about much else. And you'll find it is the same with other pro-secession speeches of the time.
I suppose this is because it is harder to mobilize the poor guys who will carry the rifles with cries of "Free Trade!", when slave states had for decades mobilized large bodies of men against possible slave rebellions by declaring the ringleaders had already picked out white women to ravish. No, I didn't write that to be onery. Historically, that charge was made during every real or suspected slave rebellion in America since the institution began. Every. Single. One.
No, most people didn't own slaves. Did this make them disinterested parties? Bystanders? Unattached to an economic system dependent on really, really cheap labor? Or were they part of it? Let me put it this way. "Doc" Holliday, Earp's friend, once shot two black children in the post-war South before traveling west. Why? Because he saw them swimming in a spot he used when he was a boy. You didn't have to be a slaveowner in order to appreciate the caste system or be aroused when that social pecking order was threatened.
MarkW, you're right the the War wasn't about slavery, at least not for the North (it WAS the reason the South seceded; and not just to keep their slaves, but to expand the institution westward! Jefferson Davis pathetically argued that moving slaves would not actually increase the number of slaves.)
You're wrong on a lot of your facts, though. The Slave Power had IMMENSE political clout in the Senate and House. Every President until Lincoln was a Southern sympathizer.
The South was allowed to import from Europe, and the tariff at the time was actually quite low. The idea that the South couldn't export its cotton to Europe is one of the most absurd things I've ever heard, where do you think the phrase King Cotton comes from?
You've been a little brainwashed, my friend. The colonies had MUCH better reasons for seceding than the South did. At least the colonies tried to get a redress of their grievances. The South could have gotten everything it wanted, EXCEPT expansion of slavery, which was their issue.
And not to stir the pot too much more, your ancestors DID commit treason and rebellion against King George III.
I have always been and remain sympathetic to some of the reasons offered in the Declaration of Independence. As Englishmen, the colonists did not enjoy all the rights they should have, and did at earlier stages prior to the period after the Seven Years War. London should either have offered seats at Westminster, more power to the elected legislatures, some form of federal system for the colonies, or some form of federal institutions across the Atlantic, although that might have exceeded the intellectual resources of period political science. At least some sort of representative or cooperative solution on tax and tariff policy that dealt with the practical problems and acknowledged the rights issues involved.
I am also more generally sympathetic to the colonists idea that they were carrying on the struggle for parliamentary and representative government in general, which was strained to say the least in England at that time.
Of course I also think the Declaration pretty overstated. The bits about swarms of officials eating out the substance is overwrought even by the standards of period bureaucracy. France or Russia, or even England at the time were more heavily regulated than anything the government was trying to impose or capable of imposing in the 13 colonies.
And as much as I sympathize with the colonies concerns about tariff and taxation policy, I also remember that Britain had just spent vast sums clearing the French out of North America. That was done to further British interests to be sure, although they probably would have preferred Caribbean islands. And the most immediate beneficiaries were the people of the 13 colonies, who now hoped to avoid paying for their share of that war and who hoped to expand into Indian lands unchecked despite the role the same Indians had played on Britain's side.
Looked at from outside, the rebellion looks mainly like a people realizing that their political and economic interests could not be met within the imperial framework that London was prepared to provide, and their commercial and expansionist ambitions could not be realized.
Fair enough, as far as it goes.
In the end, even if I think the case was radically overstated and made into an ideological matter that it largely need not have been, I am ready to concede that those colonists had some real grievances and some ultimate right to determine their destiny. On the other hand, I would hope that some of the practical issues I have mentioned can still get a fair hearing.
And, regardless of their justification good or bad, what the colonists did undoubtedly was treason and rebellion. They levied war against the Crown, still the definition of high treason in the Crown's realms and very similar to the definition of treason against the US that was placed into the Constitution in 1787. That would be true whatever the justification. It was a fact.
The colonists won their case by winning the ensuing war, always and forever the only way to get away with treason.
random observer: Texas, California and Hawaii were sovereign states at the time they joined the union. Additionally Texas was something like 3 or 4 times larger than the current state of Texas. The existing states felt that a new state that large would have too much power, so they required it to be split up into multiple states before entry.
Cïtïzen C: It's easier to mobilize people with a claim that their way of life is under attack than with a claim that they are being economically taken advantage of.
Additionally, the members of the state bodies were members of the economic elite. IE, they were the slave owners. So of course if you want to get "them" to vote for secession, such an appeal would have more weight.
The vast majority of people in the southern states owned no slaves, and had no prospect of ever doing so. Once the British cut off the slave trade, the price of slaves went up. Slaves cost as much as several years worth of wages for most people.
I ignored California because it did not secede in 1861 and Hawaii because it was not even in the US orbit then.
But, my bad on Texas. As a prior sovereign state, Texas could make as good a claim for seceding and either going it alone or joining the CSA as the states along the eastern seaboard could [without necessarily assuming the validity of that case].
California, had it decided to do so, might have seceded on the same basis. But considering how brief and ephemeral its sovereignty was, and how directly tied to plans for American annexation, I think its case would have been weaker than Texas'.
Your reference to these three states also brings up a more tangential question. I could raise it in regard to Texas, but:
-I am very sympathetic to the Texas revolution,
-They went out of their way to secure support across ethnic and linguistic lines,
-The American settlers had initially settled by invitation and lived peacefully under the Mexican 1824 constitution,
-They initially rebelled only when that government of Mexico was overthrown and proclaimed the defence of that constitution to be their initial cause.
All of which to say that the Texans [Texicans?] to my mind did it right.
But California and Hawaii are more difficult cases, especialy Hawaii.
This issue came to mind a while ago when NRO rightly took on the bill to create a parallel Hawaiian native "government" system. I appreciated arguments Jonah Goldberg and Rich Lowry made to the effect that the Hawaiians had not been running a tribal polity, but rather a sovereign state in which the Hawaiian monarchy ruled over a multi-ethnic population.
All of which was true, and very much sufficient in that particular debate. But it generates the assumption that all one needs is a critical mass of American citizens to settle somewhere, in this case not a US territory, to overthrow a government and take over. The Texans weren't trying to take over all of Mexico and bring it into the Union.
Firing on Fort Sumter was the single greatest defeat suffered by the Confederacy.
Up until that time, Lincoln could find no causa bella worth fighting for. Had the Confederates held their fire, and been "friendly but unhelpful" to those Union troops in Fort Sumter, they would have succeeded in their war aims. These war aims for the South were merely to be left alone. Had they simply ignored the presence of Union troops in Fort Sumter, after a few years the Federals would have tired of the cost of supplying said troops and evacuated Fort Sumter without any fighting. There would have been no Civil War and the South would have succeeded in their aims.
This lesson is seldom noted by Civil War historians.
