America Fights Back!

[BG45]

The Civil War tended to be a grey area where no one was really 'good', and both sides were quite aggressive in the time leading up to it. As for how was the South being aggressive...

*As early as 1832, South Carolina was refusing to pay federal tariffs and raised a volunteer military force of 2,000 cavalry and 25,000 infantry. This is the [url="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ordnull.asp"]Ordinance of Nullification.[/url]

*John C. Calhoun, former Vice President prepared a [url="http://books.google.com/books?id=v19nwcfWd-oC&pg=PA212&lpg=PA212#v=onepage&q&f=false"]letter[/url] to be read a month prior to his death that was read by an Alabama Senator in Congress, blaming the North for everything short of male pattern baldness. Despite the Civil War being about states rights, the South was demanding half of California at least be a slave territory and that the North concede to stop trying to infringe upon slavery.

*Another Congressman, from Mississippi suggested [url="http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llcg&fileName=022/llcg022.db&recNum=348"]invading[/url]the North and California on the floor of the House.

*James Hammond, a prominent plantation owner and slave holder suggested, over the California issue, that the South [url="http://books.google.com/books?id=v19nwcfWd-oC&pg=PA216&lpg=PA216#v=onepage&q&f=false"]march upon the US Capitol[/url], burn it, and enforce their will.
*Senator Mason of Alabama [url="http://www.nytimes.com/1863/10/19/news/dispatches-to-the-associated-press-78708903.html"]wrote to Secretary of War[/url] (and later Confederate President) Jefferson Davis requesting he arm the southern states for a war of secession four years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War.

*A year to the day before South Carolina seceded from the Union, it was so desperate to stop a Republican, John Sherman, from becoming Speaker of the House that Governor Gist asked one of his Representatives if there was need for military action, assuring him that the [url="http://books.google.com/books?id=X29egdUI4WUC&pg=PA112&lpg=PA112#v=onepage&q&f=true"]governor would send a regiment to Washington immediately if his Representative felt it necessary to remove Sherman by force.[/url]

*Fort Sumter was a US military installation, given to the federal government by South Carolina in 1836, [url="http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moawar/ofre.html"]it was shelled first by Confederate forces in their beginning act of secession after it failed to surrender.[/url] Federal forces, by the way, did not return fire on the people trying to kill them. In the rebels favor, their lack of bombardment skill is apparent in their ability to kill only a horse.

Let's not go into the war itself, because both sides did things too terrible to imagine in modern times. Even if Lincoln suspending Habeas Corpus does foreshadow the Bush and Obama administrations national security policies.

Sources primarily taken from:
-US government records
-The Letters of John Calhoun
-Drawn With the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War

[missionseeker]

But why was South Carolina refusing to pay? The same reason the revolutionists dumped tea in the Boston harbor. The federal government implemented a tax that benefitted the northern states while South Carolina (and other southern states) took the brunt of it. The southern economy was basically bullied into buying goods from the north and that's the way northern confressman intended it to be.

[Nihil Obstat]

Protectionism is stupid and illegitimate anyway. They were right in refusing to pay tariffs. Everyone is right in refusing to pay tariffs.

[Vincent Vega]

[quote name='USAirwaysIHS' timestamp='1352962776' post='2510435']


[url="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Life_and_Works_of_Abraham_Lincoln/Volume_9/Greeley,_Horace#1862-08-22"]http://en.wikisource...race#1862-08-22[/url]
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[BG45]

[quote name='missionseeker' timestamp='1353004867' post='2510644']
But why was South Carolina refusing to pay? The same reason the revolutionists dumped tea in the Boston harbor. The federal government implemented a tax that benefitted the northern states while South Carolina (and other southern states) took the brunt of it. The southern economy was basically bullied into buying goods from the north and that's the way northern confressman intended it to be.
[/quote]

And I hold no issue with the desire not to pay tariffs which were ruining the agricultural economy in the south, the Territories, and parts of the North (which was far from some homogeneous industrialized area). My issue was when South Carolina decided the solution to the "Tariff of Abominations" was raising 27,000 soldiers and threatening what amounted to civil war over the tariffs. Then again I'm not of the Jeffersonian school of thought that advocates a violent revolution every twenty years or so, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."