User:Greyshaft/sandbox

Greyshaft (talk) The first sentence of the article states that the two possible outcomes were “the survival of the Union or independence for the Confederacy”, however these options are not mutually exclusive. The independence of the Confederacy would not have meant the complete dissolution of the Union of the remaining northern states.

The paragraphs beginning ‘Hostilities began on April 12, 1861,’ could be rewritten as: “South Carolina initially sought to reclaim forts and other land within her borders currently occupied by the Federal government through negotiation with the lame duck President Buchanan, an action consistent with the concept of secession. However the attempt ultimately failed since Lincoln, the incoming president, did not recognize the legality of their secession. Actual hostilities began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter, a key fort held by Union troops in South Carolina, after the Union refused to abandon it. Lincoln called for every state to provide troops to retake the fort; consequently, four more slave states joined the Confederacy, bringing their total to eleven. The first bloodshed of the Civil War occurred in Maryland during the Baltimore riot of 1861 on April 19. Lincoln soon controlled the border states, after arresting state legislators and suspending habeas corpus,[7] ignoring the ruling of the Supreme Court's Chief Justice that such suspension was unconstitutional. On 19th April 1861, Lincoln issued a Proclamation of Blockade Against Southern Ports (ref: http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/proc-2.htm) against those states whose governments had already passed acts of secession ie South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas and on 27th April 1861 he extended the blockade to include Virginia and North Carolina (ref: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=70112). The blockade became a major factor in the crippling of the southern economy. Three interesting legal points arose out of those proclamations of naval blockade. First was the contradiction between the use of the word ‘blockade’ which under international law applies to ports of a foreign power, and the publicly stated position of the Federal government that the southern states were still part of the domestic territory of the United States. A sovereign state ‘closes’ its port, it does not ‘blockade’ them. However a port closure would not give the Union a legal right for search and seizure of goods in transit on the high seas therefore a proclamation of blockade was required, despite its implied recognition of the independence of the southern states. The second point is that North Carolina did not secede from the United States until 20th May 1861, so Lincoln’s orders to blockade her ports and prevent her seaborne trade occurred while she was still a member of the United States, and therefore the President’s proclamation denied her the protection guaranteed to those states under the Article 1, Section 9 of the constitution against preferential regulation of commerce between states. The northern states were allowed to continue trade with Europe, but North Carolina would be prevented from so doing. While justification for the suspension of habeas corpus had been anticipated in the constitution in cases of rebellion or invasion, there was no such justification provided for the suspension of equal regulation of commerce. The third point relies on the ruling of the US Supreme Court in Prize Cases(1863), 2 Black 635 (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prize_Cases) that the proclamation of a naval blockade was in itself, official and conclusive evidence, that a state of war existed, thereby leaving Lincoln in the position of having instituted a state of war with North Carolina before the state had committed any legal act of rebellion against the Federal Government. Such actions may be considered to fall under the provisions of Article 3, Section 3 of the US constitution ie “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them”. None of these issues resulted in legal proceedings by the affected states. The Eastern Theater saw active but inconclusive campaigning in 1861–62. The First battle of Bull Run (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Theater_of_the_American_Civil_War#First_Bull_Run_.28First_Manassas.29) resulted in a Confederate victory but the exhausted southern armies were unable to capitalise on that success. Other Union failures in 1861 such as the Battle of Balls Bluff (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ball%27s_Bluff) reinforced the popular southern belief that their armies were innately superior and that “One Southerner could whip ten Yankees” (ref: http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs013/1102264498897/archive/1107893464563.html). The Union General George McClellan(ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_B._McClellan) (who would challenge Lincoln for the presidency in 1864) took the Union army by sea to invade Virginia in the ultimately unsuccessful Peninsula campaign (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peninsula_Campaign). Southern successes in these early battles led Confederate General Robert E. Lee (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Lee) to invade the north in the autumn 1862 Confederate campaign into Maryland (a Union state). This ended with Confederate retreat at the Battle of Antietam, dissuading British intervention.[8] Lincoln took advantage of the political goodwill provided by this Confederate strategic defeat to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which made ending slavery a war goal.[9]  Support for this declaration came from a cross-section of the northern political spectrum including War Democrats (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Democrats), who were not necessarily opposed to slavery on principle, but saw its abolition as a way of weakening the Confederate economy and ending the war sooner.