Tuesday, April 12, 2011

150th Annversary Of The Start Of 'The War To Perpetuate Slavery'

April 12 lives in American history as the day the 'War To Perpetuate Slavery' (aka the Civil War) started. 

Can't stand the Southern revisionist history types who are always trying to pimp the Civil War as the North starting it or it not being about slavery.

Slavery was the reason they seceded from the Union, and slavery was the reason they committed treason against the United States government by taking up arms against it..

The crisis had been building since the election of Abraham Lincoln and the secession of South Carolina on December 20, 1860.    In January 1861 the states of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas joined South Carolina with four more considering joining. 

On February 9 the Confederate States of America is formed in Montgomery, AL with Jefferson Davis as President and Alexander Stephens as its vice president and begins seizing federal forts in the territory of the seceding states.  . A supply ship named The Star Of The West that attempted to resupply Fort Sumter in Charleston, SC was repulsed and forced to return to New York.    

A few weeks later on March 4 Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated as president of the United States.  During his speech he notes that he has no plans to end slavery ion the states where it exists but will not accept their secession from the Union either.   He wishes to resolve the conflict without bloodshed.  

Lincoln decides to try to resupply Fort Sumter once again and notifies the governor of South Carolina of his intentions to do so.   Brig. General Pierre Beauregard, the local Confederate commander demanded on April 10 that Major Robert Anderson surrender Fort Sumter and he refuses to do so. 

At 4:30 AM fifty Confederate guns surrounding Fort Sumter open fire on it and commence a bombardment that results in its surrender at 2:30 PM the next day.   No one was killed during the bombardment, but two Union soldiers were killed and two wounded in the April 14 surrender ceremony when a cannon exploded prematurely.

They were the first deaths of the over 600,000 to come of soldiers on both sides during the bloody four years of combat that eventually ended on April 9, 1865.

And 150 years later, we're still arguing about it to this day.

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