How Did It Start?

When looking at any war a legitimate question is "How did it start?" War is an enormous undertaking, costly both in terms of human lives lost and shattered and in terms of money spent to fight. Starting a war is a serious undertaking, and most wars have started for serious reasons that were beyond resolution by any other means. At least it seems that way when the wars started. If all armies were made to fly a banner that stated "It seemed like a good idea at the time." perhaps fewer would march. The idea that got the Civil War going was secession.

Secession was not a new idea for Americans in 1860. The country was founded on the idea of seceding from the British, and we were quite successful at it. The rebels (Americans) felt that the British didn't understand the situation here, was oppressing the Americans, and therefore the best solution to the problem was to break away from the British government. The British responded by using military means, and the Americans bravely won the fight. Except we needed help from other nations. And we needed the British to be distracted by other problems. And we needed the British to run short of money. And we needed the British public to not care much about whether we were in the kingdom or not. All these things came together, and we were a nation.

We were a nation, yes, but we were a nation that remembered how we became a nation, and so the idea of secession was always in the minds of people. It was in the backs of their minds, but every so often it come to the front .

One time was during the War of 1812 when some New England states met in Hartford to discuss secession. They were upset about the loss of trade the war had caused and the fact that the government seemed to be dominated by southerners from Virginia. This convention failed due to a lack of enthusiasm for the idea and the fact that the war ended just as the convention got going.

Another time was the tariff crisis of 1828-1832 produced the theory of nullification from South Carolina, whereby the state would not follow any law (the tariff) that it found to be onerous. This would have been a secession in itself. It was averted by threat of military force and a new tariff that South Carolina found less distasteful. This crisis did leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth, though.

These were two of the big threats. The Compromise of 1850 averted what was sure to be another crisis, but the writing was on the wall for anyone who cared to read it. Someday a state, and the smart money was on the southern states and particularly South Carolina, would secede.

So, when Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, the slave holding states felt threatened. Lincoln said he didn't want to abolish slavery from where it existed; he only wanted to keep it out of the territories. That, in the South's mind, meant that any states formed from these territories would be free states, and the South would eventually be outvoted in Congress by such a margin as to make the abolition of slavery a sure thing. They didn't want this, and so the southernmost states started to hold conventions whose purpose was to vote on secession. South Carolina was first to vote, and, on December 20, 1860 published its Ordinance of Secession.

It was followed in the next six weeks by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. There the parade stopped. Other slave states in the upper section of the South hels back to see how things developed. 

All this happened before Lincoln was inaugurated. The president, James Buchanan, held the interesting notion that while secession was illegal, there was nothing he could do about it. Lincoln took over on March 4, 1861, and he apparently decided to wait and see what the seceded states would do. 

What they did was meet in Montgomery, Alabama and form a government with Jefferson Davis, lately the senator from Mississippi as interim president. The government formed an army from the militias of the states and focused their attention on the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. There in the harbor was Fort Sumter.

Fort Sumter was a fort that was supposed to guard the approaches to the harbor, and it was still in the hands of the federal government. The Confederates-taken from the name of the new nation, The Confederate States of America-told Major Robert Anderson, the commander of Fort Sumter to surrender. He politely told the delegation sent to see him that he really couldn't surrender, but that he would run out of food pretty soon, and then they could have the fort.

So there it was. They could, with a little patience, have the fort without bloodshed. This wouldn't satisfy the demands of honor, though, and on April 12, 1861, the Confederates opened fire. After 36 hours the fort surrendered.

The firing on Fort Sumter was, in my humble opinion, the biggest blunder of the war. The Confederates could have had the fort with no effort save the passage of time, and yet they used force to get it sooner. Without the firing Lincoln had only a very vague casus belli. He probably wouldn't have been able to get the public to go along with a war based on the peaceful transference of the fort to the Confederates. With the firing and resultant death of a federal soldier-killed after the bombardment by a misfire while saluting the flag as it was lowered-the populace of the northern states was enraged and called for immediate military action to preserve the Union. Lincoln called initially for 75,000 volunteers, recruiting offices were swamped, and the war started.

The war started with the United States losing a few more states. In the next five weeks Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina all seceded. The stage was set for the bloodiest war in our history.