Posted on 04/12/2007 9:34:54 AM PDT by TexConfederate1861
On March 5, 1861, the day after his inauguration as president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln received a message from Maj. Robert Anderson, commander of the U.S. troops holding Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The message stated that there was less than a six week supply of food left in the fort.
Attempts by the Confederate government to settle its differences with the Union were spurned by Lincoln, and the Confederacy felt it could no longer tolerate the presense of a foreign force in its territory. Believing a conflict to be inevitable, Lincoln ingeniously devised a plan that would cause the Confederates to fire the first shot and thus, he hoped, inspire the states that had not yet seceded to unite in the effort to restore the Union.
On April 8, Lincoln notified Gov. Francis Pickens of South Carolina that he would attempt to resupply the fort. The Confederate commander at Charleston, Gen.P.G.T. Beauregard, was ordered by the Confederate government to demand the evacuation of the fort and if refused, to force its evacuation. On April 11, General Beauregard delivered the ultimatum to Anderson, who replied, "Gentlemen, if you do not batter the fort to pieces about us, we shall be starved out in a few days." On direction of the Confederate government in Montgomery, Beauregard notified Anderson that if he would state the time of his evacuation, the Southern forces would hold their fire. Anderson replied that he would evacuate by noon on April 15 unless he received other instructions or additional supplies from his government. (The supply ships were expected before that time.) Told that his answer was unacceptable and that Beauregard would open fire in one hour, Anderson shook the hands of the messengers and said in parting, "If we do not meet again in this world, I hope we may meet in the better one." At 4:30 A.M. on April 12, 1861, 43 Confederate guns in a ring around Fort Sumter began the bombardment that initiated the bloodiest war in American history.
In her Charleston hotel room, diarist Mary Chesnet heard the opening shot. "I sprang out of bed." she wrote. "And on my knees--prostrate--I prayed as I never prayed before." The shelling of Fort Sumter from the batteries ringing the harbor awakened Charleston's residents, who rushed out into the predawn darkness to watch the shells arc over the water and burst inside the fort. Mary Chesnut went to the roof of her hotel, where the men were cheering the batteries and the women were praying and crying. Her husband, Col. James Chesnut, had delivered Beauregard's message to the fort. "I knew my husband was rowing around in a boat somewhere in that dark bay," she wrote, "and who could tell what each volley accomplished of death and destruction?"
Inside the fort, no effort was made to return the fire for more than two hours. The fort's supply of ammunition was ill-suited for the task at hand, and because there were no fuses for their explosive shells, only solid shot could be used against the Rebel batteries. The fort's biggest guns, heavy Columbiads and eight-inch howitzers, were on the top tier of the fort and there were no masonry casemates to protect the gunners, so Anderson opted to use only the casemated guns on the lower tier. About 7:00 A.M., Capt. Abner Doubleday, the fort's second in command, was given the honor of firing the first shot in defense of the fort. The firing continued all day, the federals firing slowly to conserve ammunition. At night the fire from the fort stopped, but the confederates still lobbed an occasional shell in Sumter.
Although they had been confined inside Fort Sumter for more than three months, unsupplied and poorly nourished, the men of the Union garrison vigorously defended their post from the Confederate bombardment that began on the morning of April 12, 1861. Several times, red-hod cannonballs had lodged in the fort's wooden barracks and started fires. But each time, the Yankee soldiers, with a little help from an evening rainstorm, had extinguished the flames. The Union garrison managed to return fire all day long, but because of a shortage of cloth gunpowder cartridges, they used just six of their cannon and fired slowly.
The men got little sleep that night as the Confederate fire continued, and guards kept a sharp lookout for a Confederate attack or relief boats. Union supply ships just outside the harbor had been spotted by the garrison, and the men were disappointed that the ships made no attempt to come to their relief.
After another breakfast of rice and salt pork on the morning of April 13, the exhausted Union garrison again began returning cannon fire, but only one round every 10 minutes. Soon the barracks again caught fire from the Rebel hot shot, and despite the men's efforts to douse the flames, by 10:00 A.M. the barracks were burning out of control. Shortly thereafter, every wooden structure in the fort was ablaze, and a magazine containing 300 pounds of gunpowder was in danger of exploding. "We came very near being stifled with the dense livid smoke from the burning buildings," recalled one officer. "The men lay prostrate on the ground, with wet hankerchiefs over their mouths and eyes, gasping for breath."
The Confederate gunners saw the smoke and were well aware of the wild uproar they were causing in the island fort. They openly showed their admiration for the bravery of the Union garrison by cheering and applauding when, after a prolonged stillness, the garrison sent a solid shot screaming in their direction.
"The crasing of the shot, the bursting of the shells, the falling of the walls, and the roar of the flames, made a pandemonium of the fort," wrote Capt. Abner Doubleday on the afternoon of April 13, 1861. He was one of the Union garrison inside Fort Sumter in the middle of South Carolina's Charleston harbor. The fort's large flag staff was hit by fire from the surrounding Confederate batteries, and the colors fell to the ground. Lt. Norman J. Hall braved shot and shell to race across the parade ground to retrieve the flag. Then he and two others found a substitute flagpole and raised the Stars and Stripes once more above the fort.
Once the flag came down, Gen. P.G.T. Beaugregard, who commanded the Confederate forces, sent three of his aides to offer the fort's commander, Union Maj. Robert Anderson, assistance in extinguishing the fires. Before they arrived they saw the garrison's flag raised again, and then it was replaced with a white flag. Arriving at the fort, Beaugregard's aides were informed that the garrison had just surrendered to Louis T. Wigfall, a former U.S. senator from Texas. Wigfall, completely unauthorized, had rowed out to the fort from Morris Island, where he was serving as a volunteer aide, and received the surrender of the fort. The terms were soon worked out, and Fort Sumter, after having braved 33 hours of bombardment, its food and ammunition nearly exhausted, fell on April 13, 1861, to the curshing fire power of the Rebels. Miraculously, no one on either side had been killed or seriously wounded.
The generous terms of surrender allowed Anderson to run up his flag for a hunderd-gun salute before he and his men evacuated the fort the next day. The salute began at 2:00 P.M. on April 14, but was cut short to 50 guns after an accidental explosion killed one of the gunners and mortally wounded another. Carrying their tattered banner, the men marched out of the fort and boarded a boat that ferried them to the Union ships outside the harbor. They were greeted as heroes on their return to the North.
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Wonderful Song! :)
Nonsense. He suspended Habeus Corpus in the areas under insurrection, which is constitutionally provided for "when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."
I would say that Mr. Dieteman is an idiot who knows very little about what he is talking about. If he is opposed to slavery then how can he support the confederate constitution, which specifically protected slavery and slave imports? If he places a premium on human freedom then how can he support a confederacy and confederate government specifically established to ensure that one third of their human population remained without freedom of any kind? Finally, how can he criticize Lincoln for being racist while ignoring similar, or even worse, racial viewpoints among Southern leaders. Or criticize Lincoln for allegedly ignoring the Constitution while completely overlooking actual infractions on the part of the Davis administration?
In short, Dieteman is a classic Southron hypocrite. Nothing more, and nothing less.
It didn’t “obviously” fall to the President, as the President has no constitutional authority to suspend habeas corpus—that is textually committed to Congress. It boggles the mind to say that a power textually committed to one branch of government “obviously” falls to another if one branch of government chooses not to exercise that power. That’s like saying that the President can make laws when Congress is not in session. It’s just wrong.
Indeed, as I noted above, none other than the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court held that Lincoln’s actions were unconstitutional—a ruling that Lincoln ignored, incidentally.
I think a more appropriate way of putting it would read:
In memory of those Gallant Union Soldiers who gave their lives for the cause of preserving the Union.
Again, this power falls to Congress, not the President. Congress can suspend the writ of habeas corpus, not the President.
your side has half the power the last time I checked.
He was a Southerner and a slaveowner who sympathised with the Southern Cause, but not to the point of leaving the Union.
Many regiments of Kentucky Soldiers seceded even if their state didn’t.
True...:)
We venerate ALL AMERICAN TROOPS. (Confederate Troops were Americans as well)
Negative. The end does NOT justify the means.
Try again.
Congress disagreed with your assessment about President Lincoln’s power to duspend habeas corpus, and so do I.
Oh really? Take a look at Section 10, chock full of actions forbidden to the states. Take a look at Section 8, which starts out specifically stating "Congress shall have the power to..." Section 9 does not start out with that statement. Some clauses refer to Congress, others do not. So making a blanket statement that Article I deals with Congress is incorrect.
The Constitution only says when habeas corpus may be suspended. It does not specifically state who may suspend it - Congress or the President. A case can be made for both, and absent any ruling on the matter by the Supreme Court then the final question of the legality of Lincoln's actions remains unanswered.
The scandal is not that habeas corpus was suspended--clearly, Congress has the right to do so--the scandal is that Lincoln, without the approval of Congress, suspended habeas corpus and then ignored a ruling from the Chief Justice that his actions were unconstitutional.
The Chief Justice alone does not have the authority to rule what is Constitutional and what is not. Only the entire court can do that, and so far they haven't done so.
Is that Wlat in a new doo?
Who knows..?...:)
Well he was a Democrat so he got 100% of the electoral vote from the former Confederate states. In fact, "Big Government" FDR won all of the South every time he ran for president. 100% of their electoral votes in four elections!
I don't know where the myth comes from that somehow the North was solely responsible for creating big daddy government. There were never bigger pork barrel hogs than the so-called "conservative" Democrats of the pre 1970s south. (Called that by the left-wing media trying to demonize real constrvatives in the rest of the country).
Those guys loved Federal money and would take as much of it as they could get and the only state-right they gave a damn about was the un constitutional "right" to segregate and disenfranchise blacks. They were not fiscal or constitutional conservatives in any sense of the word. They would vote for any Federal power grab if there was money in it for them and their states.
Says the Chief Justice in response to Lincoln's total usurpation of power in Ex Parte Merryman:
"With such provisions in the Constitution, expressed in language too clear to be misunderstood by any one, I can see no ground whatever for supposing that the President, in any emergency or in any state of things, can authorize the suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus, or arrest a citizen, except in aid of the judicial power. He certainly does not faithfully execute the laws if he takes upon himself legislative power by suspending the writ of habeas corpus — and the judicial power, also, by arresting and imprisoning a person without due process of law. Nor can any argument be drawn from the nature of sovereignty, or the necessities of government for self—defense, in times of tumult and danger. The Government of the United States is one of delegated and limited powers. It derives it existence and authority altogether from the Constitution, and neither of its branches — executive, legislative or judicial — can exercise any of the powers of government beyond those specified and granted."
It doesn't really matter what Congress thinks, because Congress is not the judiciary. You seem to have trouble with separation of powers.
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