150 years ago today - Lincoln shot

Tidewater said:

Well, he could have sat down with the Confederate Commissioners who were sent to Washington specifically to discuss matters with him. He could have tried to avoid a shooting war. He could have withdrawn Federal army garrisons from Forts Sumter and Pickens, to avoid a shooting war, while discussions were going on. He could have tried to win the seceded states back by their own volition, by reassuring citizens of the southern states. That would have been leadership.
Instead, he said, "I have an army. I will crush you." He deserves to be remembered for that failure.

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April 14 marks the anniversary of three awful, fabled events: the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865; the Titanic striking an iceberg in 1912 (it sunk in the wee hours of the 15th); and the Black Sunday dust storm of 1935. Gillian Welch first brought attention to this foreboding historical confluence on her 2001 album Time (The Revelator), which has two songs chronicling the events of April 14: “April the 14th, Part 1″ and “Ruination Day, Part 2.” I caught up with Welch to discuss how she first made the connection, and how the songs in question came about.

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Bamaro said:

I'm not sure that a president elect should usurp the current POTUS and start negotiating with hostile factions.

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Especially when one of those factions has already (3 days after the election) passed a "Resolution to Call the Election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. President a Hostile Act".

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Lincoln did what he had to and saved the country as a result.

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Tidewater said:

Npot suggesting he should have, but as of March 4th, 1861, it was his job.

You do not seem to be familiar with the context. Over the previous year, members of John Brown's party, murderers, thieves and terrorists, had escaped to states with Republican governors and those Republican governors had used their powers to protect those terrorists and refused to extradite said terrorists to Virginia for trial. That was what people knew of what Republicans in Executive office did when they were in power.

The "One People, One State, One Leader" argument seems open-ended.
It would seem to excuse any act by the President, as long as he believed he was acting to "save the country."

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tidegrandpa said:

Where were you when I was in American History 1861-1885 at UA? 1975. I've learned more by reading you than staying up 24 hours with my head buried in book for finals. Thanks Tidewater

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Tidewater said:

It has to do with four things.
1. The Warehousing Act of 1846 (modeled on the British act of the same name) stipulated that an importer could deposit his merchandise in a bonded warehouse for up to a year without paying the import duty. So the importer needed a port of entry that had ample bonded warehousing facilities.
2. Once the importer had found a buyer in the US, and gotten a down payment check from the buyer, he could pay the import duty to the US Customs Officer, get his merchandise out of the bonded warehouse, and ship the merchandise to the buyer. This made proximity to a trustworthy banking system a must.
3. Trans-shipping merchandise (by rail or coastwise shipping), meant the buyer needed access to excellent rail and coasting trade facilities.
4. Which American ports were closest to northern Europe (Britain being the greatest American trading partner? New York, Boston and Phillie).

Which location had bonded warehouses, robust banking system, access to transhipment facilities and proximity to northern Europe? New York (followed distantly by Boston and Phillie).
Guess which were the three largest ports of entry into the US (regardless of where the merchandise was eventually going? New York, Boston and Phillie. In Fiscal Year ending 30 Jun 1860, 77.4% of US customs receipts were received in New York. 11.3% in Boston and 4.9% in Phillie. 93.6% for the three. If the south secedes peacefully, most of that trade would go away, and much of it would enter through New Orleans, Mobile, Charleston.

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Tidewater said:

The estimated that between $2 and $4 billion worth of slave property was in the slave states.
Split the difference and call it $3 billion. We are to believe that protecting this property was the sole motivation for the southern states, whether the southerner opting to leave the Union owned a single slave or not, they all wanted solely to protect slave property.
The northern states, by a couple of estimates (by Yancey and T. P. Kettel, a northern man) was that the United States gained $250 million in income per year from having the southern states in the Union, but northerners were unconcerned about something as tawdry as money. They only wanted to free the slaves. (Of course, nobody in the north wanted to spend their own money to buy the freedom of the slaves. They wanted someone else to bear the cost of freeing the slaves. And nobody in the north wanted the freedmen to move to their states. No, no, those freed slaves had to stay where they were. We don't want them here in the north. And while somebody should provide the freedmen some land to farm and some implements to farm with, nobody in the north wanted to spend their money to achieve these indispensable ends.)
Anyway, in 12 years, if peaceful secession had been allowed, what was left of the United States would have lost an equivalent amount of money in income ($3 billion) as the southern states would have lost in the event of immediate uncompensated emancipation. Yet, somehow, southerners were motivated only by money, and northerners were above all of that. I guess they were just "better people."

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mittman said:

Thanks. Makes more sense. I still wonder how the south let it get to that point.

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I believe there should be no doubt that the North was disingenuous, and that the South was fed up to a point that not everyone was going to stay in the union regardless, and that it is not as clean cut as many would have it.

Lincoln himself was at least on board (or appeared to be) with trying compensated emancipation. he did so in D.C. (a year after Sumter mind you). There are those that believe what happened with Delaware changed his mind, but I am not so sure that was THE pivotal point or that his mind was ever really changed. How he would have come up with the money that would have been needed to implement country wide it is another question. As you noted, it would have been staggeringly expensive, and there was no support for it.

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Tidewater said:

According to one estimate, the Federal government and northern state governments spent around $6 billion. Southern states spent more than $2 billion.Lincoln had said that slave property in 1860 was around $2 billion, and Mississippi estimated the value at $4 billion, so just Federally appropriating the higher figure would have been cheaper than fighting the war. (In fairness, nobody in 1861 knew or even suspected that the war would costs, just in dollar cost, double the value of all the slave property in the Union).

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