Fifty years ago I was a 10 year old who had just moved cross-country to a new state just in time to start 5th grade. I was not the only new kid at school but very soon, at recess, the playground bully was in my face almost on a daily basis. I just wanted to play football with my new friends, I preferred he just leave me alone.
This went on for a week or so before out on the football field once more, he was in my face just itching for a fight. I looked down, and he looked to the crowd for looks of admiration, and never saw the punch coming under his chin. He lifted up in the air a bit and landed on his back with the wind knocked out of him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a teacher approaching and I melted back into the crowd while I heard “hey, what is going on here?” My new friends had seen this day AND every day prior and responded: “he must have slipped on something” and as everyone else nodded, the bully was left to get himself up off the ground.
Now I admit, I was a bit lucky because this bully could have come after me WITH some friends any day after school to settle the score, but he didn’t. And for that I am grateful.
I do hope that you are asking yourself, WHY did he write all this? Well, I just wanted to point out that while I was guilty of throwing the first punch, I was not guilty of being the first aggressor.
So like in my previous post about Pearl Harbor and getting behind the “well-known” story of the “surprise” that day, so too must we look into other events that might have been misinterpreted. This article, from Abbeville Institute, walks one through the days and months that led up to the South Carolina forces firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and rightly highlights the aggressor as well as the one who “threw the first punch”.
Carl Jones starts with the narrative believed by 95% of Americans here in 2018 when he states:
Too often a narrative is passed from one person to the next until it becomes accepted as fact or “common knowledge.” In the society that we live in critical analysis is rarely applied, and so a notion that if scrutinized would be exposed as silly (or worse), instead becomes “fact.” Such is the case with the situation at Ft. Sumter in 1861.
The narrative goes something like this- “The South fired the first shot, and thus instigated the war. The end.”
While it is true that the South did indeed fire first, there is a much deeper question to be answered. Namely, who committed the first act of hostility?
As in the case of my playground incident, one must rewind the relational history of the parties and assess properly where the responsibility of conflict rests with. In the case of South Carolina, New England colonies as well as other norther colonies were at odds in 1775 which almost led to New England battling the British Empire alone!
In Charleston harbor itself, there had already been some actions that had produced several severe irritants months before the “first shot”. More on that in a minute, but just note that South Carolina aspired to secede peacefully, after their 20DEC1860 secession decision. South Carolina’s governor Francis W. Pickens said after the bloodless victory at Fort Sumter on 13APR1861:
.. When I was called upon to preside over the destinies of this State, after an absence of three or four years from home, I felt that the heaviest and most painful situation of my life had come. But so far as I was concerned, as long as I was Chief Magistrate of South Carolina, I was determined to maintain our separate independence and freedom at any and every hazard. [Great applause.] I felt that the State was in a peculiar position; that we were immediately and at first thrown upon the most scientific and expensive branches of modern warfare. We were then but ill-prepared to meet the sudden issues that might be forced upon us, so that our cause had to present firmness and decision on the one side, with great caution and forbearance. We were, in fact, walking alone over a dangerous gulf. The least misstep or want of coolness might have precipitated our great cause into endless ruin. With the heavy ordnance we had to procure, and the heavy batteries that we were compelled to erect, I felt under these circumstances it required time, exact calculation and high science, and it would have been madness, it would have been folly, to have rushed the brave and patriotic men in my charge upon a work that was pronounced the Gibraltar of the South…
The truth is that the governments of South Carolina and the Confederate States of America had made repeated efforts to resolve the crisis of Fort Sumter, where the Union army had moved to on 26DEC1860, peacefully before any shots were fired. So some background is in order:
During the transition period from the Presidency of Buchanan to Lincoln, there had been two occurrences that had raised the ire of South Carolinians.
First was the fact that Major Robert Anderson, who commanded the US troops at Sumter, had of his own discretion moved the troops from Ft Moultrie, an indefensible position, to Ft Sumter. He had done so without the direction of President Buchanan, and because the Carolinians were unaware of this, they received the information as a signal that the US intended to forcefully maintain possession of the Fort. Although they refrained from attacking the fort, this action by US troops was regarded as an act of war.
Second, President Buchanan had ordered a reinforcement of the Fort and the USS Star of the West, loaded with supplies and additional troops, set out for Charleston. Cooper says that Buchanan attempted to rescind the order, but it was too late. The ship was already underway so word of this never reached the command. As with the relocation of troops to Sumter from Moultrie, this attempted resupply was likewise received as a hostile act by the Carolinians whose forces fired warning shots at the vessel.
The South Carolina government as well as the Confederacy already had two occurrences where they were deceived by Northern aggression.
Once Lincoln came into office in early March 1861, with William Seward as his Secretary of State, this is what transpired:
.. Correspondence between the Confederate government and Seward went on for several weeks with Seward continually stalling and assuring the South that he was in favor of avoiding hostilities. Although he assured the Confederates that Sumter would be evacuated, he deflected any attempts by their officials to ascertain specifics or details.
South Carolinians were becoming more and more alarmed as the weeks went on, especially due to the fact that Lincoln had delivered in his First Inaugural Address what the seceded States regarded as a Declaration of War:
“.. No State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances…”
Lincoln had no intention of surrendering, or selling the forts to the Confederacy because doing so would have necessarily signaled to the world that he was recognizing the South’s independence and sovereignty.
Those in Charleston harbor reading the words of Lincoln’s must have wondered what would happen next. Little did they know that only Lincoln and Postmaster Montgomery Blair were for war with the Confederate States of America while the balance of Lincoln’s cabinet wanted peace in March 1861. This all changed later that month when the reality of the United States Congress, reacting to the Confederate States of America’s decision to set tariffs at <10%, raised their own tariff rate TWICE what it was to up to 50% on some items. Having a literal free trade country adjacent to the United States threatened them economically as a majority of the tariff revenue had been collected in Southern ports.
Personally, nothing helps to know a person’s character than hearing what was said by them years ago and compare it to what they do today. Bullies have no character. Compare this quote of Lincoln’s from 1847 to what he was willing to do in 1861:
Interesting, because in 1847 in relation to the secession of Texas from Mexico, Lincoln had recognized the principle upon which America’s War for Independence had been established:
“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.” – Abe Lincoln
But, faced with losing the “duties and imposts” afforded to the US government by virtue of the booming Southern economy, he was forcefully retracting his belief in this “most sacred right.
So bent was Lincoln to reject the attempt of 7 states to leave “the union” of 33 states, that he attempted to do so in a way that he would not be seen as the aggressor.
.. The only question in his mind was how to initiate the war, and his efforts to resupply Sumter were an attempt to maneuver the Confederacy into firing the first shot while simultaneously attempting to not appear as the aggressor. This was obvious to everyone on both sides. Two of Lincoln’s trusted secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay, disclosed that:
“President Lincoln in deciding the Sumter question had adopted a simple but effective policy. To use his own words, he determined to ‘send bread to Anderson’; if the rebels fired on that, they would not be able to convince the world that he had begun the civil war.”
The ploy was that Lincoln was to resupply Fort Sumter with food, however he directed the US Navy to send troops as well.
Lost in all this was the fact that until Lincoln’s inauguration speech threatening invasion, from December of 1861 when Union General Anderson had informed by then President Buchanan that due to his relationship with the mayor of Charleston and businessmen in the harbor, he (Anderson) had access to all of the food necessary to keep his troops fed.
Bully tactics yield aggression, and aggression leads to distrust. As a result, US Naval ships were sent to Charleston and on 12APR1861 South Carolina troops under the direction of Confederate General Beauregard aware that the fleet was in route, were given the command to fire on the fort.
Many Norther newspapers (soon to be censored or shutdown by Lincoln, occasionally imprisoning the editors and writers) offered the unvarnished truth in the days that followed:
The New York Evening Day-Book opined:
“We have no doubt, and all the circumstances prove, that it was a cunningly devised scheme, contrived with all due attention to scenic display and intended to arouse, and, if possible, exasperate the northern people against the South…. We venture to say a more gigantic conspiracy against the principles of human liberty and freedom has never been concocted. Who but a fiend could have thought of sacrificing the gallant Major Anderson and his little band in order to carry out a political game? Yet there he was compelled to stand for thirty-six hours amid a torrent of fire and shell, while the fleet sent to assist him, coolly looked at his flag of distress and moved not to his assistance! Why did they not? Perhaps the archives in Washington will yet tell the tale of this strange proceeding…. Pause then, and consider before you endorse these mad men who are now, under pretense of preserving the Union, doing the very thing that must forever divide it.”
While most people have been indoctrinated to think that Lincoln “saved” the union, he in fact killed the “experiment” in this republic held together by a federation of sovereign states:
The Lincoln presidency was a catalyst for many negative developments in the ever-increasing powers of the executive office. His Presidency haunts us to this day, although far too many fail to recognize this fact. Lincoln overturned the outcome of the Philadelphia convention by forcefully relegating the “States” to “provinces” of an all-powerful Central government. He shredded the 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th and 10th Amendments, concocted the blatantly dishonest notion that the union was somehow older than the States, unilaterally invaded a sovereign country- which desired peaceful relations -without consulting congress, and extended Presidential powers well beyond anything delegated, or even hinted at, within the confines of Article II of the Constitution. As well, Lincoln committed the constitution’s own definition of treason by making war against the seceded States, shut down over 300 Northern newspapers and jailed the owners, arrested Maryland legislators who he “suspected” were sympathetic to secession and used the Federal military to effect re-election of political allies. Considering his numerous actions in defiance of the constitutional restraints on his office, as well as direct assaults against personal liberty, any rational observation must conclude that Lincoln was a dictator.
Conclusion: When you wonder where the swamp comes from in the government we have today, with a foreign policy that asserts that the US exceptionalism enables it to bully sovereign nations all across the globe, bullying independent nations that resist tyrannical forces supported by the US military directly or via the CIA indirectly, know that the source of this sociopathic character comes directly through Abraham Lincoln and what he pulled off in April 1861.
-SF1