Re: I see a bad moon risin'

Posted by Loyd Smith On 2009/5/4 1:00:08

Rusty, there was sort of an unofficial and uneasy truce until General Beauregard decided, more or less on his own, to interfere with the resupply of Ft. Sumter in Charleston Harbour. The Federal Government in Washington never recognised the right of the southern states to secede and, well before Ft. Sumter, President Lincoln had called for 100,000 volunteers, presumably to put down what was considered by the Washington government to be a rebellion. Maybe he was just nervous. Both raising an army with which to invade the south and the resupply of a Federal fort located within a Confederate harbour (which one would assume was within Confederate territorial waters) could be considered acts of war, in and of themselves, as I suppose the resupplying of Ft. Sumter was by the South Carolinians and General Beauregard. The Federals had pretty much made it known that they weren't going to allow the southern states to secede, peacefully, and the Confederates had made it pretty plain that they intended to fight if interfered with. In the climate of the times war was inevitable from the time that the first southern state passed the first secession resolution. It was just waiting for a spark to set it off.

There was, about 50 years ago a book (I read it in serial form in the old, "Saturday Evening Post," magazine) called, "If the South Had Won the Civil War." I cannot recall the author's name but the book was quite well researched and logically posited the Army of Northern Virginia having flanked the Federal forces at Gettysburg, making an end run on Washington, capturing the Federal government and forcing a Union surrender. It also theorised the end of slavery within a short span of years, both because it was dying anyway and to facilitate foreign recognition of the CSA. Its author, however, theorised that with slavery no longer an issue and having so many common interests that the two nations would've reunited, if I remember correctly, under the depredations of German unrestricted submarine attacks on Allied and American shipping and the Imperial German government's plan to assist Mexico in reoccupying California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico in return for their help should either American nation join the war on the side of the Allies. The Kaiser's foreign ministry did, in fact, make such an offer to the Mexican government before the United States entered World War I.

All conjecture, of course, but interesting nonetheless.