The Terrible History Thread

Louis XXIV said:
I think this is being a bit nitpicky.
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You were just the person least likely to respond in a dumb way to the point :p

JEELEN said:
If slavery was the main issue for the South (which, again, is debatable), it wasn´t for the war itself: the Union did not recognize the CSA, ergo it had to be brought back into the Union.
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How is it debatable? You've haven't offered a single valid arguments to suggest there were other reasons. (Furthermore, the traitors started the damned war. Which made a considered Union recognition of the traitors something of a moot point).
 
GhostWriter16 said:
It was south carolina's land because it was right smack in the middle of south carolina. NOT destroying the fort would have been consenting to being occupied by a foreign power.
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Under what theory did South Carolina hold title? Right of discovery, right by treaty, right of conquest, right of occupation? When you talk about competing titles, South Carolina lost its title when it voluntarily ceded the land to the Federal government in order to make the fort (and Article IV of the Constitution makes it clear that Federal property was owned by the United States, not the several states in their individual capacity). The only justification I can think of is right of conquest, but that implies the right of the party possessing the land to contest this and the party who attempts to seize something through conquest is generally considered the aggressor.

That said, I THINK the US planned to attack the CSA anyway, and I think Lincoln was clear about that. If I'm wrong the Union might have been able to be portrayed in a better light.
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Lincoln explicitly said that he would not attack the South, even though he believed secession was illegal. He also specifically only sent food and supplies to Fort Sumter, not troops. I too suspect Lincoln may eventually have attacked the south, but I have absolutely no evidence that he was planning to. The Soviet Union might have eventually planned to attack Nazi Germany. It doesn't mean that Operation Barbarossa wasn't an act of aggression by Germany.
 
JEELEN said:
Which again points to secession being the issue. Which, as I already stated in my badly read original post, is the point.

Lincoln effectively refused to negotiate with the CSA, because, as said, that would imply recognition of the CSA as an independent state. And, again, slavery was only abolished reluctantly, during the war. Lincoln himself was a slaveholder and his views on the matter were ultimately governed by how abolition would affect the war. (As it turned out, it hardly did.)

If slavery was the main issue for the South (which, again, is debatable), it wasn´t for the war itself: the Union did not recognize the CSA, ergo it had to be brought back into the Union.
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Considering Lincoln lived in the free state of Illinois, I highly doubt he was a slaveholder. He was, however, a free-soiler, which means he was just as racist as the Southerners, but wanted slavery banned in the West due to a desire to avoid competition.

Louis XXIV said:
Under what theory did South Carolina hold title? Right of discovery, right by treaty, right of conquest, right of occupation? When you talk about competing titles, South Carolina lost its title when it voluntarily ceded the land to the Federal government in order to make the fort (and Article IV of the Constitution makes it clear that Federal property was owned by the United States, not the several states in their individual capacity). The only justification I can think of is right of conquest, but that implies the right of the party possessing the land to contest this and the party who attempts to seize something through conquest is generally considered the aggressor.



Lincoln explicitly said that he would not attack the South, even though he believed secession was illegal. He also specifically only sent food and supplies to Fort Sumter, not troops. I too suspect Lincoln may eventually have attacked the south, but I have absolutely no evidence that he was planning to. The Soviet Union might have eventually planned to attack Nazi Germany. It doesn't mean that Operation Barbarossa wasn't an act of aggression by Germany.
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OK, I can agree with your logic. Yes, the South did technically attack Ft. Sumter. However, it did make complete logical sense to do so, because its precense would have made a Lincoln attack easier, and Lincoln refused to pull the troops out. So it was BASICALLY like the South was under occupation. They anticipated an attack, and they reacted. I don't think that really excuses the North's actions, when they could have easily negotiated with the south. If secession were legal, the war aims would have never been to conquer the South, and had Lincoln really wanted to eliminate slavery (Which would have been a much better thing to do) he could have easily used the non-precense of the 7 deep-south states to ban slavery everywhere else.
 
So you would say that Japan was quite right to attack Pearl Harbour?
 
Would it be fine for California to nuke Washington in order to push the homosexual agenda on right fearing Christians???
 
This is ludicrous. By this logic any two neighboring countries have a right to go to war because there's territory from which their neighbor could launch an attack, and so the neighbor might as well have already launched the attack.

If the South was even a country.

Which it wasn't.
 
Does this mean Germany has the right to attack us because we have bases in Germany? Or...does this also mean we have the right to attack basically anybody because of embassies?
 
GhostWriter16 said:
OK, I can agree with your logic. Yes, the South did technically attack Ft. Sumter. However, it did make complete logical sense to do so, because its precense would have made a Lincoln attack easier, and Lincoln refused to pull the troops out. So it was BASICALLY like the South was under occupation.
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Now you know how Khrushchev and Ulbricht felt.
 
Masada said:
How is it debatable? You've haven't offered a single valid arguments to suggest there were other reasons. (Furthermore, the traitors started the damned war. Which made a considered Union recognition of the traitors something of a moot point).
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If you´re incapable of being objective, it´s obvious you won´t see a point.

Louis XXIV said:
Lincoln explicitly said that he would not attack the South, even though he believed secession was illegal. He also specifically only sent food and supplies to Fort Sumter, not troops. I too suspect Lincoln may eventually have attacked the south, but I have absolutely no evidence that he was planning to.
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Not willing to talk to the CSA makes war basically an inevitability.

North King said:
If the South was even a country.

Which it wasn't.
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It would have been if they had been succesful in the war. (There were definitely plans for Anglo-French recognition during the time of CSA miltary successes).
 
JEELEN said:
Not willing to talk to the CSA makes war basically an inevitability.
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Sure, and if you don't give the mugger your wallet, he's much more likely to stab you. That doesn't mean it's rightfully his wallet, or that he has any business demanding it. And in this case, the would-be mugger was facing down somebody who had his own knife.
JEELEN said:
It would have been if they had been succesful in the war. (There were definitely plans for Anglo-French recognition during the time of CSA miltary successes).
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So?
 
GhostWriter16 said:
OK, I can agree with your logic. Yes, the South did technically attack Ft. Sumter. However, it did make complete logical sense to do so, because its precense would have made a Lincoln attack easier, and Lincoln refused to pull the troops out. So it was BASICALLY like the South was under occupation. They anticipated an attack, and they reacted.
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But it still wasn't Confederate territory. The same argument could be made for attacking Washington DC because it's right next to Virginia. It still makes you the aggressor when you open fire.

I don't think that really excuses the North's actions, when they could have easily negotiated with the south. If secession were legal, the war aims would have never been to conquer the South, and had Lincoln really wanted to eliminate slavery (Which would have been a much better thing to do) he could have easily used the non-precense of the 7 deep-south states to ban slavery everywhere else.
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I guess the key there is "if secession were legal," which was never agreed. But there's a difference between not recognizing secession and declaring war. It was entirely possible for Lincoln to simply outwait the Confederacy and see if outside pressures forced them to change their minds.

Serutan said:
Kentucky was not coerced. Both Union and Confederacy respected KY's neutrality because initially no one wanted to risk driving them to the other side. What ended neutrality was Confederate Bishop Polk's occupation of Columbus, and the Unionist Kentucky legislature then asking Washington to repel the invasion.

If you want to claim Kentucky was treated as an occupied area later in the war,
I won't dispute that.
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You know what I've always wondered. Kentucky's "declaration of neutrality" essentially left them in limbo, but it allowed them to stall without having to supply Union troops. I wonder why the upper south didn't simply do that when Lincoln called forth the militia. Alternatively, I wonder what would have happened if Lincoln had simply asked for volunteers or militiamen from non-southern states.
 
JEELEN said:
It would have been if they had been succesful in the war. (There were definitely plans for Anglo-French recognition during the time of CSA miltary successes).
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Obviously the comment was semi-facetious, because what makes a "country" a real "country" is pretty slippery ground.

I think it's pretty bizarre that of all the independence movements in history, though, people have latched onto the South for some reason. One of the few wars in history with a clear moral divide, and people go and root for the slaveholders.

Spare me the stupid arguments that the Union didn't care about abolition. Regardless of the stated intent of the Union government (which obviously took a middle road because you don't want to piss off your citizenry while fighting a war; hell, anyone looking at the full context of that stupid Lincoln quote would realize that it's actually a quote which indicates his support for abolition rather than his moral ambiguity -- claiming otherwise is awful scholarship), public opinion of the North was pretty clearly skewed towards abolition for one reason or another and had been for some time -- see the outpouring of support and grief during and then after the trial of John Brown. At least, insofar as we can tell the public opinion of any people before Gallup tracking polls.

The point is, secession's legality is dubious at best; the fact that the one cause you people harp on in history is the second to last major slave-holding institution in the world has to make people wonder what your possible motivations are.
 
Again, that´s the winner´s point of view. The fact that the CSA was a slaveholder entity should, however, be irrelevant to the issue of statehood.

Dachs said:
Sure, and if you don't give the mugger your wallet, he's much more likely to stab you. That doesn't mean it's rightfully his wallet, or that he has any business demanding it. And in this case, the would-be mugger was facing down somebody who had his own knife.

So?
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So indeed. If you take the Union´s point of view, than the CSA would not have been not a state, but a rebellion. That´s basically the view that prevailed, but it by no means is the only view. That the CSA didn´t achieve full statehood is, however, a result of how the war progressed. Had it gone otherwise, the CSA would have been a state (failed or otherwise). An excellent example of alternative history - awful term, by the way.

The point, once again, is if you take sides - which I do not - you´ll never see the possible alternative, however remote in reality.
 
Eran of Arcadia said:
The number of people who think the Union went to war to end slavery is MUCH smaller than the number who don't think the Confederacy went to war to preserve it.

Protip: the war aims/goals of two warring nations don't need to be diametrically opposed.
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The South dragged the Union into the war over the sovereignty of some Federal forts (the South did fire the first shots), and the issue of secession. But there is no doubt that slavery was central to staging the conflict (economic power stemming from it, political power related to slavery, etc...). It might not have been so much that the Union wanted to end slavery as a popular act, but the South wanted out to maintain a system of slavery and political power it got from slavery.
 
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