Via Kearney
Dated.
Many current Americans, indeed perhaps most, regard the firing on
Fort Sumter in April 1861 as a premeditated act of violence by South
Carolina against the United States Government. They further assume that
violence was both intended and desired by Southern leaders in the
months leading to the War Between the States. After all, the South
should have known that a bloody conflict would follow secession. Such a
revolutionary act had to be met with force. This is a misconception
and a gross distortion of the public record. Southern men anticipated
that violence might be a possibility but they hoped not a probability,
not out of weakness, but because they considered the act of secession to
be a perfectly legal, defensible, logical, and most importantly,
American option in 1860 and 1861.
Jefferson Davis articulated this point in his First Inaugural Address,
but he was not alone. Across the South, delegates to State secession
conventions consistently spoke of peace and the legal and philosophical
underpinnings of secession. This was no revolutionary act. In November
1860 during the legislative session to consider calling a secession
convention in Georgia, Robert Toombs insisted, “We need no declaration
of independence.”
Why?
We were already a free people. Supposedly. We were already independent. Supposedly. The formation of a Union was not an irreversible act. Supposedly.
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