RE: How should the union have responded when the south

Posted on: February 15, 2017 at 14:05:52 CT

Abraham Lincoln made the strongest defense of Southern slavery that was ever made in his first inaugural address, even pledging to support its
explicit enshrinement in the Constitution, while threatening war over tax
collection in the same speech. Since he had no intention of freeing any
slaves, and waging war over tax collection would have made him an international
war criminal, he needed to invent an excuse for invading his
own country (the very definition of treason under Article 3, Section 3 of
the U.S. Constitution, by the way). So he fabricated the notion of a “perpetual
union.” The founding fathers, Lincoln implied, would have agreed
with him that if any group of people ever attempted to leave the “voluntary”
union that the founders created, the central government would have
the “right” to invade those states, murder their citizens by the hundreds of
thousands, bomb their cities, burn some of them to the ground, and plunder
their wealth. This of course is what Lincoln’s army did, all in the name
of preserving a seventy-year old political bargain. As for Fort Sumter, it is
revealing that Lincoln wrote his naval commander, Gustavus Fox, after the
incident (in which no one was injured, let alone killed) thanking him for
his assistance in goading the South Carolinians into firing the first shot and instigating a war

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