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.
The Constitution, which upon ratification replaced the older document begins with a preamble which reads:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The Constitution superceded the old Articles but stressed in its opening that the Union was, is, and will be perpetual.
What the heck don't you Southrons understand about that?
Considering how far the debate has strayed from Fort Sumter then I suggest that the blatantly unconstitutional actions of Jeff Davis and his regime are just as much an issue as allegations of any violations by Lincoln. Except, of course, that when we bring up violations of article 1, section 8, clause 1; article 1, section 9, clause 1, clause 4, clause 12, clause 14, and clause 17; article 1, section 10, clause 2; article 3, section 1, clause 1; and so forth, you all refuse to come to Davis's defense.
Yeah? What do you call the regulatory powers delegated to Federal agencies?
this issue isn’t even up for debate.
How Goresque of you. Declare the issue undebatable, by authority of your "earlier posts".
I think it’s interesting that you bring up the Articles of Confederation.
The fact that the Articles of Confederation purported to form a perpetual union lends support, I would say, to the notion that the Constitution was not intended to be perpetual.
After all, the Founding Fathers clearly understood how to make the union perpetual—they had done so in the Articles of Confederation—so if the Constitution was intended to be perpetual, why didn’t the Founders so specify?
I know you did -- they did it in East Tennessee and other places too. And that's not even mentioning what they did to Black Union POWs.
But at the same time you are full of "outrage" about the violation of the Constitution when Lincoln just locked traitors up for a while to keep them out of mischief or sent them south to be with their own. I have never heard of a single report of the Union ever hanging a Copperhead or any other pro-Confederate men in their midsts.
Your selective outrage slip is showing, Tex. The neo-confederates could give the Duke 88 some lessons on hypocrisy.
Which would have put it on a par with most Southron posts in terms of inaccuracy.
In Memory of the Gallant Southern Soldiers who died defending their Constitutional Rights TO KEEP SLAVES.
blech
Well, gee, I guess when a power is textually committed to one brach of government and the Supreme Court has so held—without objection—multiple times, I imagine that to most thinking folks, that would close the debate.
Federal agencies only have rule-making authority, not legislative authority. The Supreme Court, rightly or wrongly, has drawn a clear distinction between the two.
Excuse me but “my side” is holding the Office of the President of the United States. and until a few months ago controlled Congress and the Senate. Now tell me again how the Republican Party has always stood for defending the Constitution when our President is actively breaking the law and going against his oath of office by encouraging millions of people to invade our counrty illegally.
Had Lincoln allowed the southern states to form their own country, then you wouldn't be Americans. ( you could argue that the new country was in North America so you would still be "Americans" - but by that logic Canadians and Mexicans are also "Americans".)
No matter what - the South LOST. Get over it.
You can say that until you're blue in the face, but he did and it stuck.
Yes, and as such, he was a lawless tyrant.
Look - I am probably more opposed to illegal immigration than 99.9% of the country - but just where does the Constitution say that the US MUST have tariffs on international trade? How is NAFTA "against the Constitution"???
The Constitution was to make the Union “more perfect” — that is, to make it endure.
My great great grand uncle Peter Hollenbeck fought the rebels with the 44th New York Reg. It’s funny how the goods and bad guys have switched places since Uncle Peter signed up. I don’t believe we would be better off if the Confederacy had won, but I do believe that they were far from totally wrong in their stance.
I’m not really sure how you get “perpetual” or even “enduring” out of “more perfect,” frankly.
Like I said, given that the Articles of Confederation were explicitly perpetual (but if it were indeed perpetual, as it claimed, query as to how it was eventually dissolved; after all, if it was perpetual, how come we aren’t governed by the Articles of the Confederation? And, moreover, how can a parliament bind future parliaments?), shouldn’t it have been easy to include similar language in the Constitution?
the South should have won
The South — and the North — did win the Civil War. The rebels lost.
Because NAFTA is a treaty and the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote by the Senate. It did not have that. therefore it is unconstitutional.
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