tommie said:
The fact that the South Carolina militia attacked the Union soldiers at Fort Sumter is what started the "War of Northern Aggression" is in itself a rewrite.
You attack a dude. He beats your ass (and frees millions of people forced to work against their will in the process) is not "Northern Aggression." It's righteous.
Calling it Northern Aggression or "States Rights" is all a rewrite.
Time for a truth injection!
At the time Southern states began seceding, many of the Union forts within their borders were abandoned, save a few. Consider that the US Military (and government) at the start of the Civil War resembled little like what we have today. The United States had a standing army of about sixteen thousand men in 1861, most of whom served in poorly equipped outposts.
Fort Sumter, a sparsely populated duty collection point in Charleston harbor, was one of the few forts where Union personnel remained. As was evident from Lincoln's contemporaries, an attempt to send Union troops into any of the Confederate states would provoke a war.
Lincoln knew that if South Carolina and the Confederacy allowed the fort to be provisioned, it would make a mockery of their sovereignty. And if the Confederacy fired on the Union ships, it would have been the Confederacy, not Lincoln who fired the first shots of the war.
"He was a master of the situation," wrote Lincoln's private secretaries John G. Nicolay and John Hay.
"Master if the rebels hesitated or repented, because they would thereby forfeit their prestige with the South; master if they persisted, for he would then command a united North." Lincoln knew what he was doing when he ordered Fort Sumter to be resupplied. He was a cunning politician and Fort Sumter was his opportunity. He seized it believing it would be a short war. He couldn't have been more wrong.
Viewing the Civil War as a crusade to end slavery is simply not correct; abolitionists never accounted for more than a sizeable minority in the North. The cause of war in 1861 wasn't slavery. It was about the loss of millions in tax revenues.
The Confederate states had no aspirations to rule the Union any more than George Washington sought control over Great Britain in 1776. In both the American Revolutionary War and the "Civil War," independence was the goal.
In the British journal, All the Year Round," Charles Dickens observed, "Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils."