Man Murders Nine in Charleston Church

This is wrong. Lincoln wasn't responsible for the fact that the South first seceded, and then the South turned it into a shooting war. The actual cause of the war was that the South started shooting at the North. Nothing the North did was responsible for that. It was wholly a decision on the part of the South. No person who was not part of the Southern leadership was in any sense responsible for the fact that the South decided to turn a legal dispute into a shooting war.

The US is a nation of laws. And there is no legal principle by which one side can unilaterally dissolve a legal contract without due process. The South had no legal right to do what they did, not because a legal case could not be made for the legitimacy of secession, but rather because no attempt was made to make a legal case for secession. So as the Southern actions were first illegal, and then they started a war on the issue before Lincoln really had taken any actions at all, Lincoln bears none of the responsibility here.

It is not the responsibility of the victim of aggression to immediately capitulate to the demands of the aggressor.

 

Wrong. The cause of the war was clearly slavery... but the "cause of the war" in the propagandist (who-shot-first) way you are trying to spin it... was the Confederates attacking US soldiers at Fort Sumter.

As for Prez Lincoln, he had little choice (in terms of making war on the Confederates)... First of all, as I already explained, he was already at War. The Confederates shot at US soldiers and captured a US fort. Saying "Lincoln started it not the Confederates" is like saying Roosevelt started the WWII Pacific theatre war because his "response" was choosing to attack Japan please...

Second, Lincoln, as the first US President facing a rebellion on that scale, with whole States embroiled in armed secession, had to set a precedent... secession is not allowed. You secede, you get invaded, period. If Lincoln had not done that, there would be no US by now, because everytime any State disagreed with anything they would just secede. Half the Union would have seceded over Prez Obama's election and/or the ACA (or Prez W Bush's election, or desegregation, or NAFTA, or abortion, or any myriad of controversial issues) by now if Lincoln hadn't set the stakes so high all those years ago.

 

Forgive me if this isn't the correct thread to bring this up, but I saw in the news that some black people got shot in a church recently?

 

Yep and you still havent answered this...

 

It was about individual liberty, not murder.

 

Saying the CSA didn't start the war is like saying I didn't start the fight when I punched you in the face, you started it when you hit me back.

 

Yeah by that logic didn't Poland start WW2?

 

The "cause" of the war was an attempt to shift power. That power happened to be the wealth and control slavery in the US, but the south would easily have pulled the same shenanigans if the government tried to centralize over a different topic that consolidated power similarly (and if this hypothetical issue wasn't a terrible human rights violation, they might have been justified in doing so). To support that statement, I cite hundreds of years of warfare in Europe whereby subjects or nobles attempted independence, including both the 80 and 30 years wars as well as the decline of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into a noble-heavy puppet buffer.

Also, the war did not start when shots were fired, nor when CSA took the fort. The war started with the act of delivering a serious declaration of independence, and thus obviously I agree it was started by CSA. When you park a large army in another nation's territory and claim "this land is ours now, not yours", that's not a passive action. That's a land grab of another nation's territory. It has had varying degrees of justification throughout history, but declaring independence *is* a hostile action. It doesn't matter if the South did that, stood still, and Lincoln blitzed them .1 second after he read the letter. That would still be CSA starting the war.

FWIW, CSA was trying to win, and to do so it would have had to win early before the north could mobilize; no time for high road tactics. They came pretty close, too. I have wondered now and then what the long-term consequences of that would be (eventual economic implosion in the south, completely different political landscape for USA in the world wars, how the Soviets would react to WW2, assuming the lack of US didn't chain into different enough political posturing that Germany didn't win). It'd be a pretty different world today.

 

That's a reasonable fundamental analysis of the type of action taken but there's a key difference which is that slavery was so integral to the South that they were willing to fight over it regardless of power centers. Or, to synthesize, there was no power to fight over without a slavery division.

 

But hang on just a minute. Poland did attack Germany first.

We have Alfred Naujocks first-hand eye-witness account as evidence. And damning evidence of Poland's aggressive nature it is, too. Also bodies, gun-shot wounds, uniforms and everything.

 

Woman removes Confederate flag in front of SC statehouse



Do you think they will ask for capital punishment?

 

I'm surprised they didn't already apply it. Apparently they told her to come down and she kept climbing. Continuing to accumulate elevation advantage put the officers at risk. I wonder why they didn't shoot her?

 

They would have if they werent under a media spotlight already.

 

Plus, she didn't have a towel.

 

So, you think she was mostly harmless?

 

It was about that excretable institution known as slavery. The North wanted to end it; the South wanted to keep it.

 

Is there a question for me to answer in any of that?

 

A common misconception; the reason there was a civil war was that the South seceded. This was the issue being decided. Lincoln wasn't fighting slave owners, he was fighting what he called 'rebels.' Slavery was't ended until after the war was done. (Not to mention that there were neutral states during the Civil War.)

 

I think it's equally fair to say that there was a civil war because there was slavery, though. The South seceded because there was a lot of pressure growing, especially in northern states to end slavery. Had that pressure not been present, the South never would have seceded to begin with.