The Path to Petersburg, Coming Next Month to ABC
David Weigel | September 18, 2006, 2:37pm
Quote of the day:
We need better intelligence. If we had better intelligence in the Civil War we'd be quoting Jefferson Davis, not Lincoln.
That's Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia) in a closed-door Armed Services Committee meeting, according to Roll Call (excerpted here by the Raw Story). Chambliss' office claims he said "If Gen. JEB Stuart had had better intelligence, we'd all be meeting in Richmond right now," which actually is a little different, leaving out the implied "if ONLY" tone of the first statement. More evidence (if any was needed!) of the need to repeal Godwin's Law and avoid these meddlesome Southerner-sounds-like-he-misses-slavery moments.
MUTT | September 18, 2006, 8:41pm | #
---
MUTT,
besides, slavery only benefitted a very narrow strata of society.
Generationally speaking slave owning was common (as opposed to the erroneous snapshot approach) and it benefitted artisans and small farmers in myriad ways.
>>>>>according to who?that still stands. >>>>>
Since artisans, mechanics, etc. provided supplies, tools, etc. to the plantations, as well as helped transport the cotton, sugar, etc. from plantation to market thye benefitted from the slave society around them. Look at booming cities like New Orleans for examples of such things.
>>>>>Lets see. You can have tools made in a smithy by slaves, or tools made in a smithy by people trying to earn a wage. Which is cheaper? Which tools, if sold on a "free market", would be cheaper?>>>>>>>>
So, very narrow economic interests- latifundists, wealthy commercial folks- could afford & find slaves useful.
The average slaveholding in the South was 19 slaves. While averages can hide a lot, thousands and thousands of southerners owned just a handful of slaves. Which means that their wives and children benefitted friom the labor of slaves. Indeed, it was common for the sons of slaveholders to take a few of their father's slaves and move elsewhere with them to set up shop. They were following the "American dream" in their own way. >>>> How nice for them!
Didnt have to worry about a "slave union"...
Actually, union-like activities occurred amongst the slaves, both on individual farms or plantations and on groups of farms or plantations. >>> I bet they did. And the results were??????>>>>>>
poor whites had more in actual common with blacks then than they had with the Southern aristocracy.
The most ardent supporters and members of slave patrols were poor whites.>>>>>>Yeah, so? Hows that Dylan tune go... "Medgar Evers"-
"You got more than the blacks, dont complain! Your better than them, you were born with white skin" theyd explain.....
And poor white make up the bulk of prison guards, and the bulk of W's most fervent supporters. So. What?
Mutt, whose ancestors had a slave, in the 1650's.....
MUTT | September 18, 2006, 9:13pm | #
not havin no scholarship but life, and common sense, and dodgin some bullets, I find truth in various places.
This tune struck me dumb, when I was a young redneck, and I thought Id do better justice to the quote I gave above. Its why poor whites hunted runaway slaves, in a fuckin nutshell.
I guess you'd call it "market forces"- I call it evil.
But thats just me.
Take it away, Bob....
A South politician preaches to the poor white man,
"You got more than the blacks, don't complain.
You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain.
And the Negro's name
Is used it is plain
For the politician's gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid,
And the marshals and cops get the same,
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool.
He's taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
'Bout the shape that he's in
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks,
And the hoof beats pound in his brain.
And he's taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide 'neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain't got no name
But it ain't him to blame
He's only a pawn in their game.
Pro Libertate | September 18, 2006, 9:18pm | #
PL Mk. II,
While agreeing that slavery kind of ruined the CSA's moral position, the actual tipping point for the secessions, as I recall, was an economic one. It was pretty obvious that Lincoln wasn't actually going to abolish slavery (in fact, without the war, his Constitutional authority to do so would have been doubtful), but he sure as heck could hem in the southern states and began to do so with restrictive tariff policies and other means.
What's interesting at this late date is that the seceding states didn't choose to stick it out and fight within the system. They certainly had the votes to prevent the abolition of slavery. Frankly, the fact that secession wasn't strictly required for the South to remain a slave society indicates to me that at least part of their motivation was a desire to live under a weaker central government. Not that a greater libertarian streak in the South offsets slavery, but it is also true that slavery doesn't take away that libertarianism. Remember, many of the Founders were slaveholders. Just goes to show that human beings can rationalize
any behavior, even in contradiction to their core principles.
As for the economics, the displacement of many poor whites was a major problem that was very close to becoming a serious issue for the southern states. In addition, let's not forget that the consequences of industrialization in the North (and in Europe) were already starting to be felt in the South and would've created a huge economic gap between the North and the South in a very short time--certainly by the 1880s, the South would be a joke economically if it eschewed industrialization. Slavery and the industrial process probably wouldn't have mixed well, and the economic reasons for slavery would certainly fade with industrialization.
With Europe, while it's true that the CSA had support during the war (surprise, surprise, the British and other countries were happy to see a potential great power split in half), the distaste for slavery was quite high in the UK and in other European countries. If there had been no war, I think there would have been international pressure added to that of the U.S. Assuming at least some diminished returns with the slave economy, I think gradual abolition (or maybe just de facto abolition instead of de jure) would have been the likely result.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe with a CSA victory, I own a plantation with thousands of slaves and am married to a parallel universe Salma Hayek. People call me "Colonel", and I wear a white suit and say, "Fetch me a lemonade, Beauregard". Hmmm.
MUTT | September 18, 2006, 9:43pm | #
theres another aspect to the outbreak of actual Woah, and the economics what drove it.
As I understand it, the ONLY crop the US produced which could be exported for hard cash was cotton. While it was grown in the South, Northern banking & mercantile interests had a serious chokehold on its export to Europe. Not unlike those laws enacted by the Crown which decreed Colonial imports could only travel on British bottoms, so did Northern "malfactors of great wealth" try to control the shipping of cotton, to thier benefit.
The South, threatening to succeed over this far more than slavery, meant loosing the US only, or vast majority of, its hard currency export.
Which brings me to why Abolitionists were so widely hated. You add up the value, in dollars, of slaves, and you find it exceeded most of the value of the material wealth of the entire country, or damn near close to it.
That meant multiple billions, in THAT day, would go Pffffft! up in smoke, if slaves were emancipated.
Like inside traders & corrupt brokerages did in Oct 88, but on a far vaster scale.
For an unorthodox view on slave economics, I recommend Herb Apthekers (RIP) "Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Philosophy"
I know, I know: Herb was a Commie. He also was a Commie who organized Negroes in the deep South in the 30's & 40's, so hes no commie chickenhawk. Ya got to give him that.
Besides: who ELSE risked thier lives helpin black folk organize & defend themselves, there & then? Sure as hell wasnt "free marketeers".
Matt | September 18, 2006, 9:45pm | #
Since we've moved into a "causes of the Civil War" discussion, I'd like to have my two cents thrown in, only to be inevitably eviscerated by those more knowledgable than me.
The narrative that we teach our schoolchildren seems to focus on the North having the moral superiority, as they were "against slavery". True, slavery might have ceased to exist in the North well before it ceased to exist in the South, but slavery had existed and been used in the North throughout the early part of our nation's history. There were never large numbers of slaves in the North because its economy, early on, did not require a large labour force. Thus, slavery all-but-disappeared in the North in the first decade of the 19th century because it was not needed; people's moral scruples showed them the truth of how unjust and idiotically despotic the system truly was.
The South's economy, however, needed slavery. They had their own moral doubts about slavery--viz, the abolitionist debates in Virginia in the 1820's, the back-and-forth wobbling on slavery found in Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia" and so forth. Educated Southern whites seemingly had qualms about slavery, but found means to explain it away, defend it (the lack of slave's mental faculties, the "inherent differences" between the races, etc.) because they knew it had to exist for their way of life to survive. It was, as Philleleutherus Lipsiensis notes, "quite profitable and benefitted a large swath of the South's population".
So, that's my first point: the North may have had the moral upper hand, but were not morally infallibale freedom fighters who wished to liberate all peoples (they weren't neocons, folks); the South may have taken the low road morally, but they are not ipso facto daemons and (proto?)fascists. I know I'm being completely politically incorrect when I say this, but I doubt libertarians will begrudge me that. Slavery was the main and overwhelmingly central cause of the Civil War, but it was more of a matter of the economics of slavery than the (im)morality. Which is my second point.
The South's economic way of life depended on stasis (perhaps this helps account for the continued political conservatism and slow economic development?), while the North, especially after the Industrial Revolution--pardon the pun--picked up steam, depended on change and expansion into new markets and locating new sources of labour. (It is noteworthy, to my mind, that slavery ended in the North when the IR was just beginning. Perhaps if the IR had began thirty years earlier, the story would be different?) The interstate tariffs several Northern states levied on Southern exports (though "exports" is such an odd word for interstate, as opposed to international commerce) makes economic sense--unable to control the production of the raw materials they needed, the tariffs were a manner of recouping some of their losses. Of course, it is totally sensible for the South to be similarily upset about this, too.
So, two competing economic systems, one needing to buy it's raw materials at the cheapest price possible, the other needing to sell it's products at the highest price possible and perpetuate slavery to continue to exist and be profitable. Faced with the continuing inability of the South to expand the slave bloc into new territories, thus enhancing its political clout--and without this clout, the inability to elimnate the tariffs that plagued it--the South figured it would take its chances selling its wares to the Europeans, and revolted.
The North went to war the preserve the Union, and furthermore to preserve its economic interests. Without the raw materials produced in the South, the Northern (mostly textile) idustry would fall apart. Thus, as it made economic sense for the South to secede, it made economic sense for the North to fight secession. So, yeah, economics.
Here's something I've always thought, but don't have proof. Just call it a thought exercise, I guess. As I've argued, I don't think that when it came to slavery or the situation of blacks in general, the North was anymore liberal or moral (Quakers excepted). So why did they use manumission as one of their rally cries (other than to provide a part of the American "We're all free and there's so much liberty" narrative that we lie to our schoolchildren about now)? Well, I have two ideas that tie into my point about economics. One, as the Industrial Revolution really took off after slavery for-all-intensive-purposes ended in the North, that was not a labour pool from which they could draw. However, it seems possible to me that Northerners perhaps thought a defeat of the slaveocracy would result in a massive influx of new, and presumably cheap, labourers for their factories--immoral perhaps, but it's good business, just as hiring illegal immigrants (who, like the slaves, are mostly unskilled manual labourers) is immoral but good for business nowadays. Secondly, it worked as wonderful rhetoric on both sides. Northerners could say (and again, this is just my thought experiment), "We must to do the right thing and free the slaves, it is as God intends" to average Joes who would have no other real impetus to invade another "nation" and fight an insanely deadly war. Similarily, the powers-that-be in the South could tell the poor whites, both the small-landowning yeoman and the maybe/maybe not-landowning artisan, that "God has given us the right and the mandate to enslave these people for their own good" (as we know many theologians in the South argued) and that to free the slaves would result in chaos in the South, a degradation of moral order and personal and familial safety, etc. As P.L. argues, yes artisans had an economic interest in the pepetuation of the plantation system--though I think they certainly could have survived and perhaps even thrived to a lesser extent without it--I would think peasant farmers had nothing to gain from the plantation system. So, something had to be employed to rouse him to fight (though the "defence of what's mine" probably came into play more than anything after the war really heated up, especially in extremely poor places such as Tennessee, where a huge portion of the fighting took place), and the fear of emancipation was the ticket, just as the justness of emancipation would have helped to convince a young New Yorker who would have otherwise likely seen no reason to fight.
In the end, the Civil War was, in my thinking, inevitable because of the great differences in economic life, and necessary. Not only did it do the "right thing" of freeing the slaves (though I believe this to be a secondary outcome, as argued), it was the crucible through which our nation had to pass in order to move forward. Though I'm from North Carolina, and my ancestors fought for the CSA, it was right for the South to loose, and, despite my aversions to many things that industrialism has wrought in the modern world, its establishment as the dominant economic system in the US has been, overall, quite positive and beneficial.
I'll close with why I'm more proud to be a North Carolinian than anything else; my reasons dovetail with my argument, and with the post that started this whole comment thread. NC owned the fewest slaves, and, along with the similarily slave-lacking Arkansas and Tennessee, was quite poor. But we had the most men die in the Civil War, from any state, on either side. We were the last to secede (mostly out of pragmatism, being surrounded by the CSA)) and quickly rejoined the Union. We had very little to gain by rebelling, yet we did. We fought because we had to, and when we did, we fought perhaps the hardest. Excuse me if I've moved from (perhaps flawed and foolish, please school me) logic into romance, but we NC folks, especially those like me, whose father, grandfather, and greatgrandfather were all sharecroppers and whose family (as far as we can tell) never owned slaves, are proud of how we fought, and even proudly relieved that we lost.
And yes, I did say "we". Told you I'd tie this in with the good senator. ;)
Cheers, all. I look forward to seeing my argument ripped apart. And in case you're wondering--yes, I do base my argument on economic factors, but don't worry, I'm in no way a Marxist. I see myself as more of a "leave me the hell alone" traditionalist.
--Matt
not a crooke | September 19, 2006, 12:11am | #
Matt,
I don't think you're too far off base; you're mainly wrong about the glories of being a North Carolingian (or however you call yourselves). No but seriously, here's a couple of comments in response to your missive and to the missives of others. I don't think the North's reasons for entering the war had much to do with slavery at all, and very little in Lincoln's speeches up to and through much of the war indicated that it was. In fact, he sought to assure the South many times over, that he'd leave them to their slavocracy if only other conditions were met - mainly the economic ones. The no slavery rallying cry was a late and last ditch effort in the war to drum up support in what was looking like a failing effort. However, that's not to say that for the South, slavery was not intimately tied in with their reasons for secession. The economic reasons and the protection of the 'peculiar' institution were closely linked. The South wanted to be free of the tariff to benefit themselves economically and to also preserve the status quo slave system. They also wanted to expand slavery into the territories. The North's opposition to slavery was mostly a worry that if the South would expand slavery into the new territories then they'd lose power in congress, making it more difficult to enforce their economic will on the South. And given the racism of the day, Northerners simply didn't want any more blacks in the new states and territories - they wanted those areas for themselves. Abolitionism was a very minor force and had very little early influene in the war - less than 1 percent of the populace were abolitionists. Perhaps a little more powerful than the 'free Mumia' crowd of the 90's but not much more. It only gained a little more strength in the North when Lincoln searched harder for a moral reason to shore up his cause. But anybody who thinks it was a strong reason for the North's reasons for entering the war forgets or is not aware of all the draft riots in the North (sometimes targeting blacks or abolitionists). The common man in the North had little interest in defending the rights of black men, free or otherwise.
I've debated with others and with myself whether or not it would have been better to just let the South go. On the one hand, slavery probably would have died out sometime in the 1880's as industrialism expanded - it died out everywhere else in the Americas during the 19th century, and racial relations are better there than they are here today. Also, the fugitive slave act, enforced by Lincoln, helped to sustain slavery. Without it, many more blacks could have escaped to the North. For the blacks on the plantations who found it harder to escape, perhaps certain abolitionist forces would have turned to guerrilla warfare on the plantations to free the remaining ones, thus targeting the evil, but leaving innocent whites mostly alone - at the very least, the carnage to the South would not have had to happen.
On the other hand, as Phil hinted at above, the South didn't want to be just left alone. Certain forces in the South actually wanted to expand their slavocracy to the rest of the Americas. And simply because the slavery died out in the rest of the Americas in the 19th century doesn't mean we can easily extropolate that the same would have happened in the South. It would have died out but maybe much later - and if there is any reason a war should be fought it seems like ending slavery is the best one (even if that wasn't the North's primary intention in the beginning) I can think of.
(Economically, slavery was profitable for individual slave owners but not for the Southern economy as a whole, as I understand Jeffrey Rogers Hummel right. JRH, are you listening? (insert a Woody Allen's Marshall Macluen moment here) - but sometimes powerful minority profiteers can trump the aggregate good.)
In the end, I've concluded, somewhat hesitantly (as I would have liked to have seen an end to slavery without the utter desolation of the South or the creation of a much bigger and intrusive Federal Super State that we have now, with all the attendant cruelities and abuses of power that has brought about) that for whatever reason the war was fought, it was a good thing, or a necessary evil, as slavery ended with the end of the war.
kevrob | September 19, 2006, 12:43am | #
The South used a good means - secession - to at least one bad end, the retention of slavery. - Me
Notice that I called retaining slavery a
bad end, PL. As for this:
...secession (at least from a natural rights perspective) requires some moral reason or rationale. - Phil the Lip
Nuh-uh. If
...one people.... are convinced that it has become necessary
... to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another..., it is within their power to do it. While the Founders were convinced that they had to justify those actions by recounting the
...long train of abuses and usurpations..., it would have been well within the purview of a sovereign state to resign from the Union, set an appointment for such housekeeping as dividing and pro rating Federal assets and liabilities, and execute a peaceful divorce. That's what sovereign states do when they leave customs unions, collective defense treaty organizations, and other such structures. The shooting starts when a unit of government not generally considered sovereign attepts to leave a larger unit that is.
State sovereignty, or its lack, was at the heart of the question of secession from the American Union, not just in 1860-65, but back in 1832-33, when South Carolina promulgated the doctrine of state nullificarion of federal laws. As
South Carolina's declaration of secession, 1860, put it:
We hold that the Government thus established is subject to the two great principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence; and we hold further, that the mode of its formation subjects it to a third fundamental principle, namely: the law of compact. We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.
In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.
One inconvenient fact is that in international treaties and organizations, there is usually a clause explaining how one party or another can leave the alliance, international organization, or convention. Generally, a state is required to give a specified amount of notice, just like when you want to change apartments. The Constitution is silent on what rules, if any, apply in the case of a peaceful secession. Unionists claimed that was a result of the perpetual nature of the federation.
Now, that the grievances S.C. declared seem to me to be all about the free states' obligations to support the slave states in continuing that filthy institution, and bitching "No Fair" because someone unsympathetic to slavery, if not an outright abolitionist, had beaten them fair and square in an election, makes for lousy PR, but accept their premise about state sovereignty and the rest falls.
I once told an inveterate neo-Confederate that the U.S. could have agreed to let the South go, then declared war on one or more of these new "independent" states on a "Just War" basis, since the good of freeing the slaves outweighed the evil of war. He had to chew that over for a while. Of course, Lincoln never could have tried that, or MO, MD, DE and KY would have gone out.
Matt, what are these interstate tariffs you are on about? Export tariffs have always been forbidden by the Constitution. It was the tariff on
imports that the South hated, as it made foreign goods, chiefly British, more expensive, which allowed the mills in New England to compete with those in England. What made the South dependent on the North, besides the burden of the tariff, was underinvestment in merchant shipping, factories, railroads and the banking sector. Just as, prior to the War of Independence, Virginia planters were in debt up to their periwigs to factors in London, so in the ante-bellum period did they owe money to bankers in Philly, New York and Boston.
You are dead wrong about abolition being a war aim, at least before the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln went to great lengths to resist the pressure of the abolitionists to make the war about freedom for the black man, instead of a War For Union. Northern working men feared losing their jobs to Negro refugees from the South. Northern Democrats, especially of the Copperhead variety, derided the President for enslaving free white men via the draft in order to end the slavery of the black man. Read up on the New York City draft riots. Blacks were lynched, and the local orphanage for black children was burned. As a New York-born Irish-American I've always felt conflicted about that incident, in which the Irish were notoriously prominent. OOH, they were protesting the draft, so good for them. OTOH, many if not most of them were racist pricks, and not a few of them murderers to boot. I take comfort in knowing that only one of my ancestors, that I know of, had as yet left the Auld Sod, so maybe my people had nothing to do with the atrocities.
BTW, the point-of-view characters in
Guns Of THe South are Tar Heels, in the original sense, IMS.
Kevin
Elmo | September 19, 2006, 8:19am | #
Let me enter the fray. One post and I'm out.. This battle has been fought again and again, and it always comes out the same. Some people will still claim the war was over slavery, and others will still claim it was fought over tariffs and State's Rights.
Okay then. . . . some cuts and pasts. Take them for what they are worth.
The prevalent Unionist's viewpoint today is that the Civil War was fought over slavery. (Saying it was fought "to free the slaves" is acceptable. In fact, how can the two positions NOT morally be the SAME position?).
From the Southern standpoint the dominate perception is that the war was fought over "State's Rights". Although the holding of slaves has to be included in the "State's Righter's" vision of things, it is only one aspect. Many will give equal weight to taxation, since the war is reputed to have begun at Fort Sumter, and Fort Sumpter was a tax collection point.
We are talking trade tariffs here because that was the predominate form of federal taxation, and the South felt it was not getting a fair share from the US Treasury of the tariffs it's trade generated. The South thought a dollar of trade should bring in the same tariff whether it was from the sale of cotton or steel. Not only was that not the case, the Tariff laws gave protective treatment, to the point that some Northern manufactured goods were exempt form tariffs entirely.
Tariffs are a negotiated so that a person who wants something bad enough will pay a premium for it. Apparently Northern goods were not in such high demand on the world market, so the tariffs were low. However, American cotton was collecting a premium in tariffs. But, according to the South at least, they were being spent on things that returned little the South for it's effort in generating the tariffs in the first place. i.e. western agricultural expansion that was oriented against the South's interests, and railroad construction support, to name a few.
Little has been said about Lincoln's pre-Civil War stance on slavery and secession. It should be recalled that secession began immediately upon his election in November, 1861; he was inaugurated on March 4th, 1862; and four states still didn't secede until after the shooting began on April 12th. The question has seldom been answered as to how those events are related. Here are some possible connections.
Since four states, (Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas), seceded only "after" Lincoln called for volunteers to invade the South, it can be said that the actual cause of the War itself was the Union's invasion of Virginia.
When Maryland, a slave state that did not secede, objected to federal troops crossing it to get at the Rebels, Lincoln locked up several members of the state legislature.
Please see quotes from Dickens, Marx and Lincoln below.
"The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states." Charles Dickens, 1862
"The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty." Karl Marx, date unknown but nelieved written in anger at Lincoln's failing to respond to his, (Marx's), earlier letters of support.
When asked "Why not let the South go in peace?" Lincoln replied: "I can't let them go. Who would pay for the government?"
More quotes from Lincoln:
"The [Emancipation] proclamation has no constitutional or legal justification except as a war measure." Letter to Sec. of Treas. Salmon P. Chase; 3 Sep 1863
"The suspension of the habeas corpus was for the purpose that men may be arrested and held in prison who cannot be proved guilty of any defined crime." "Arrests," wrote President Lincoln to that Albany committee of Democrats, "are not made so much for what has been done as for what might be done. The man who stands by and says nothing when the peril of his Government is discussed cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered (by arrest, imprisonment, or death) he is sure to help the enemy. "Under Lincoln's definition silence became an act of treason. "Much more, if a man talks ambiguously, talks with 'buts' and 'ifs' and 'ands' he cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered (by imprisonment or death) this man will actively commit treason. Arbitrary arrests are not made for the treason defined in the Constitution, but to prevent treason."
"Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States? And what reason is there to think it would have any greater effect upon the slaves than the late law of Congress, which I approved, and which offers protection and freedom to the slaves of rebel masters who come within our lines? Yet I cannot learn that the law has caused a single slave to come over to us."
"We didn't go into the war to put down slavery, but to put the flag back; and to act differently at this moment would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause, but smack of bad faith..."
Lincoln's letter to Gustavus Fox on 1 May, 1861, makes it clear that he was pleased by the result of the firing on Ft Sumter..." You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Ft Sumter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result. " (Gustavus Fox was Assistant Secretary of the Navy and it was he who had marshalled the ships, troops and supplies that made up the Fort Sumter expedition. It was a phenominal feat. There were six ships that had to be sailed into New York and outfitted for war, they carried supplies that had to be bought transported and loaded, plus several hundred troops who also had to be gathered, outfitted transported to New York and loaded, and the entire fleet then sailed from New York to Charleston South Carolina, and it was all done in 5 weeks.) There may have been a seventh ship that went to Fort Pickens at Pensacola, Florida, by mistake.
