The side that fired first was not the Union.
(2) It was clear from the very beginning that the Union's chief motivation in responding to that Southern-initiated aggression was to preserve the Union.
The Confederacy was fighting a war for the expansion of slave territory, the Union was fighting for the Union.
The unionists were against expansion of slavery in the territories for racist reasons, to "keep it pure for free whites".
“(1) The aggressor in a conflict is the side that fires first.
The side that fired first was not the Union.”
No they just refused to leave your house when ordered and given ample time. I call that an act of aggression, particular when it is combined with the anti-southern Independence rhetoric of the north.
Only an insane man would stand by and do nothing.
“(2) It was clear from the very beginning that the Union’s chief motivation in responding to that Southern-initiated aggression was to preserve the Union.”
This fact I will not dispute, although I would remind you that by preserving they meant imposing upon people who no longer consented, thus suppressing their inalienable right of revolution. The exact same right by which the union was formed in the first place.
If the cost of preserving a tool is the destruction of that which it is for, then the tool has usurped the master. Such was the case with the Federal Government then as now.
“The Confederacy was fighting a war for the expansion of slave territory, the Union was fighting for the Union.”
Rather difficult to do without territory in which to expand into. Non-slave territory remained with the union.
Seriously wideawake you need to think about what you write before you write it. That statement is quite impossible to believe as it is contracted by the very Independence the South was fighting to preserve.