The bloodiest four years in American history begin when Confederate shore batteries under General P.G.T. Beauregard open fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay. During the next 34 hours, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 rounds at the poorly supplied fort. On April 13, U.S. Major Robert Anderson surrendered the fort. Two days later, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers to quell the Southern “insurrection.”
As early as 1858, the ongoing conflict between North and South over the issue of slavery had led Southern leadership to discuss a unified separation from the United States. By 1860, the majority of the slave states were publicly threatening secession if the Republicans, the anti-slavery party, won the presidency. Following Republican Abraham Lincoln’s victory over the divided Democratic Party in November 1860, South Carolina immediately initiated secession proceedings.
On December 20, the South Carolina legislature passed the “Ordinance of Secession,” which declared that “the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states, under the name of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved.” After the declaration, South Carolina set about seizing forts, arsenals, and other strategic locations within the state. Within six weeks, five more Southern states–Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana–had followed South Carolina’s lead.
In February 1861, delegates from those states convened to establish a unified government. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was subsequently elected the first president of the Confederate States of America. When Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, a total of seven states (Texas had joined the pack) had seceded from the Union, and federal troops held only Fort Sumter in South Carolina, Fort Pickens off the Florida coast, and a handful of minor outposts in the South. Four years after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the Confederacy was defeated at the total cost of 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers dead.
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John Wilkes Booth,American hero.
As always,the US has not had (yet)a civil war,big difference between a civil war and war of succession,though,will say those who died/injured and their families may not see that difference.
Many talk about the chance/some even seem to hope for a true civil war in America,hope it does not happen and for those who do study the breakup of Yugoslavia for reasons to hope it does not happen.
Will say though take away(or try)birthright freedoms from citizens and with a nothing left to lose attitude civil war then seems inevitable.
More propaganda from history.com
“Everyone should do all in his power to collect and disseminate the truth, in the hope that it may find a place in history and descend to posterity. History is not the relation of campaigns and battles and generals or other individuals, but that which shows the principles for which the South contended and which justified her struggle for those principles. ” Robert E. Lee
GOOD OL’ REBEL SOLDIER
by Major Innes Randolph, C.S.A.
Oh, I’m a good old Rebel soldier, now that’s just what I am;
For this “Fair Land of Freedom” I do not give a damn!
I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won,
And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
I hates the Constitution, this “Great Republic,” too!
I hates the Freedman’s Bureau and uniforms of blue!
I hates the nasty eagle with all its brags and fuss,
And the lying, thieving Yankees, I hates ’em wuss and wuss!
I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do,
I hates the Declaration of Independence, too!
I hates the “Glorious Union” — ’tis dripping with our blood,
And I hates their striped banner, and I fit it all I could.
I followed old Marse Robert for four years, near about,
Got wounded in three places, and starved at Point Lookout.
I cotched the “roomatism” a’campin’ in the snow,
But I killed a chance o’ Yankees, and I’d like to kill some mo’!
Three hundred thousand Yankees is stiff in Southern dust!
We got three hundred thousand before they conquered us.
They died of Southern fever and Southern steel and shot,
But I wish we’d got three million instead of what we got.
I can’t take up my musket and fight ’em now no more,
But I ain’t a’gonna love ’em, now that’s for sartain sure!
I do not want no pardon for what I was and am,
And I won’t be reconstructed, and I do not care a damn!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtOtj8dct_I
My son attended The Citadel in Charleston so I had plenty of opportunities to visit the fort. What we were never allowed to ask is why those brave Citadel students bombed that federal outpost? They did because that is where southern exporters got shaken down by tariff taxes-the loot then moved north to feed yankee infrastructure projects. Every war has two causes: political power and money. It was especially so in the Second American War of Independence.
BTW, the grey uniforms of those Citadel cadets were copied by the Confederacy.
War of aggression more like it. Lincoln the war criminal. As certainly was Sherman.
I am so sick of ignorant so called historians saying that the War was fought over slavery! Slavery was the least of the many issues that brought on the War. (90% of Southerners didn’t even own a slave. It is ridiculous to think that 90 % of the population made up of small farmers would have left their farms and families to go fight and die in a war so that a handful of Planters could keep their slaves. Furthermore, as my Grandmother said, “The truth is that in 1861, no woman North or South would have sent her husband/son off to die in a War over the plight of the Negro.” Lincoln didn’t even think up the narrative of the War was to free the slaves until 2 years into the War when he and his War was becoming increasingly unpopular and he thought that perhaps it might lend a moral justification for the unconstitutional war he had waged upon his fellow Americans. The South fought because their land was invaded. They fought to protect their farms and families. As Robert E. Lee said, ” All the South has ever desired was that the Union, as established by our forefathers, should be preserved, and that the government as originally organized should be administered in purity and truth.”
Yeah yeah f*ck your intelligent recollection of history, am on a mission here, goddam*it! STUCK! STUCK! STUCK!