the north started the war
April 12, 1861, the first shots fired were not by the Union. The “War of Northern Aggression” is exactly as much of a misnomer as it seems.
Like I said, the phrase is silly, but the South didn’t come knocking on the North’s door, it was kinda closer to the other way around.
I’ve been to Fort Sumter (Charleston is really quite a beautiful city), so I understand that kerfuffle and I think I get where you’re coming from in regards to calling them “terrorists,” but I think that’s pushing it a bit. Point being, there wouldn’t be a war if the Union hadn’t decided to take back the South. Don’t take this for me saying they shouldn’t have, I just mean from the eyes of a southern soldier, they were defending themselves.
Actually I called the post-Civil War mob of cop-killers and vigilantes who got a statue honoring them terrorists. The Confederacy was what I called a white supremacist uprising (who only later turned into terrorists in the form of the Klan and the losers behind this statue).
Fair enough.
The whole point of the Ft. Sumter reference was that the Confederates started shooting at the Union long before the Union ever decided to take back the South. The North likely would have attacked the South first, if they’d had that opportunity–but the Confederates simply beat them to the punch. The Confederacy unambiguously attacked first, at Ft. Sumter.
No doubt, but even though that means they literally “started the war,” in the broader sense I think it’s fair to say the Union was responsible for the conflict. In regards to Ft. Sumter, this wasn’t the South trying to take control of northern territory. It was in SC and if the Union didn’t want a fight there, they would have left it.
It was federal property. Even granting the fairly tall order that secession was legal in the first place, South Carolina would still only have the authority over its own territory. They attacked a part of the Union that was completely surrounded by Confederate territory, but it was still Union territory.
I don’t deny this. I just mean, in the broader scope of things, from their perspective they wanted the all of the south to be the CSA and that was that. The war started when the Union wouldn’t budge and then decided to take the south back.
Again, I’m not siding with the Confederates on this but if we’re talking about the soldiers you have to look at it from their point of view. They weren’t all demons, and just because slavery was a big part of the war doesn’t mean we can spit on their collective graves. Now I’m not saying that that is what removing the statues is doing, but it’s something that careful thought should be put into. It’s not a black and white situation.