Underage Enlistment in the United States and the Confederacy

From the CSA's point of view, it was their fort on their land that the Union not only took but were reinforcing. It was a defensive fort at the mouth of one of their most important eastern seaboard harbors. A fort that if taken would prevent the CSA from getting anything shipped through there, in or out. It was considered an act of war and the CSA retaliated by shelling it for 3 days after they refused to leave, amazingly with no casualties. Interestingly, the CSA commander was a protege of Anderson (who took the fort).

You can't just hand wave that away because the CSA were "the bad guys," you have to be able to view both sides of it to fully understand the war, the causes and the affects, not play favorites, and especially not view it through modern eyes. There were no laws banning secession and it was deemed illegal by the SCOTUS ex-post facto.

Do you think if the Southern states thought they wouldn't be able to leave the Union when they joined in 1788 they ever would have joined in the first place? Doubtful.

>There is no indication that Anderson had any desire to "invade" the south, but rather the opposite.

Sure, but that act has obvious consequences. The first battle of the Civil War was Bull Run/Manassas. It was fought in Virginia because the Union troops crossed into the CSA territory to take the capitol. That's an invasion, an invasion that was the consequence of firing on Sumter, which was a consequence of Anderson taking it and Lincoln reinforcing it. Had cooler heads prevailed, we might not have had to lose 700k+ people.

Although the Civil War officially began when Confederate troops shelled Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, the fighting didn’t commence in earnest until the Battle of Bull Run, fought months later in Virginia, just 25 miles from Washington D.C. Under public pressure to end the war in 90 days, President Lincoln had pushed the cautious Gen. McDowell to embark on a campaign to capture the Confederate capital in Richmond, but McDowell’s troops were stopped at Bull Run by Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard’s Rebel forces. The Federals retreated to Washington, where the Lincoln administration retooled for a war that would be waged at great human and financial cost

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/bull-ru...

> From the CSA's point of view, it was their fort on their land that the Union not only took but were reinforcing

The union didn't take it, they already possessed it. This is also besides the point because it's hard to imagine that there wouldn't have be similar concerns about Anderson remaining in Moultrie or that there wouldn't have been issues with the numerous other coastal forts in the south that were posses the by the US army.

> It was considered an act of war and the CSA retaliated by shelling it for 3 days after they refused to leave

That is inaccurate. Anderson refused to leave multiple times without the refusal being taken as an "act of war". The last (4th?) time Anderson actually didn't refuse to leave, but laid out the conditions under which he would leave. Those conditions were found unacceptable so the CSA started a war.

> The first battle of the Civil War was Bull Run/Manassas. It was fought in Virginia because the Union troops crossed into the CSA territory to take the capitol.

While that could be considered the first battle (depending on your definition of "battle"), there were a number of escalating skirmishes leading up to Bull Run.

> That's an invasion, an invasion that was the consequence of firing on Sumter, which was a consequence of Anderson taking it and Lincoln reinforcing it. Had cooler heads prevailed, we might not have had to lose 700k+ people.

That's an invasion that happened AFTER the CSA started the war. Thus you simply can't say that the choice to start the war was because of that invasion.

There is an argument that the CSA started the war because they feared blockades, but again, that fear lead to preemptive action by the CSA, not responsive action.

> There were no laws banning secession and it was deemed illegal by the SCOTUS ex-post facto.

It was not "ex-post facto" as no new law was enacted. The SCOTUS interpreted the Consitution and decided that the states had agreed to a "perpetual" union

As the case Texas Vs White makes clear:

> "It was confirmed and strengthened by the necessities of war, and received definite form, and character, and sanction from the Articles of Confederation. By these the Union was solemnly declared to "be perpetual." And when these Articles were found to be inadequate to the exigencies of the country, the Constitution was ordained "to form a more perfect Union." It is difficult to convey the idea of indissoluble unity more clearly than by these words. What can be indissoluble if a perpetual Union, made more perfect, is not?"

> Do you think if the Southern states thought they wouldn't be able to leave the Union when they joined in 1788 they ever would have joined in the first place?

That is not at all clear, because they did clearly agree to join a "perpetual union" when they signed the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. My understanding is that the supreme court decided it is legal for states to leave the union, but they cannot do it unilaterally.

You may, of course, disagree with this decision by the Supreme Court and with its interpretation of constitutional law. That does not mean that any new "ex-post facto" law was passed.

The "perpetual union" text was in the Articles of Confederation, not the Constitution, which of course replaced the AoC.

When the United States Constitution replaced the Articles, nothing in it expressly stated that the Union is perpetual. Even after the Civil War, which had been fought by the U.S. to prevent eleven of the southern slave states from leaving the Union, some still questioned whether any such inviolability survived after the U.S. Constitution replaced the Articles. This uncertainty also stems from the fact that the Constitution was not ratified unanimously before going into effect, as required by the Articles (two states, North Carolina and Rhode Island, had not ratified when George Washington was sworn in as the first U.S. president). The United States Supreme Court ruled on the issue in the 1869 Texas v. White case.[3] In that case, the court ruled that the drafters intended the perpetuity of the Union to survive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_Union

The constitution wasn't explicit and the SCOTUS hadn't ruled on it yet. It wasn't certain and could be argued either way, particularly for North Carolina. The fact that the union was perpetual was confirmed in 1869 by the SCOTUS, after secession and the war, thus ex-post-facto.

Great discussion, I want to respond to your other points later.

>The constitution explicitly says that it's aim is to perfect the (perpetual) union that was established in the articles. The SCOTUS viewed that as clear evidence that the framers intended the union to be indissoluble.

You put parenthesis around perpetual because it wasn't explicit. The SCOTUS confirm that in 1868, after the fact. At the time it could have been easily argued that it was omitted from the constitution for a reason, one being that the southern states wouldn't have signed it.

>Ex-post-facto means a law that makes an act illegal that was previously legal.

>In this case, that is not what happened. The legality of unilateral succession wasn't fully clear until the supreme court ruled. There was no new law created, just an official confirmation that Lincoln's position was indeed what the framers had intended and what the law had been all along.

But it was. Lincoln deemed secession was illegal and sent troops to capture Richmond as a police/military act in response to secession. The legality of secession at the time was not clear, as in not confirmed by the SCOTUS, therefore not explicitly illegal. In the US, actions are default legal unless explicitly deemed otherwise by law and there was no law or ruling, particularly an explicit one, outside the AoC which weren't the law of the land. The SCOTUS confirmed it was illegal to secede after the fact, justifying Lincoln's prior police/military actions, which would have themselves been illegal had secession been confirmed as legal.

Ask yourself this, why were no CSA politicians or military personnel ever brought up on charges of treason?

>Trying to paint the confederate states as a victim is simply inaccurate.

I'm not trying to paint the CSA as a victim, I'm just discussing history, establishing cause and effect, chain of events, and most importantly trying to answer the "why?" Again you are looking at history through modern eyes and trying to apply modern sensibilities to it. Victim is such an overused word today. We were having a good discussion, why would you throw that angle in it?

>They chose the path of violence and the entire country paid the price for their desire to maintain slavery.

Slavery was legal in the southern states and many of the northern states at the time of secession. Of course had they been allowed to secede, which wasn't confirmed to be illegal at the time, no one would have died.

>An institution that was not only highly immoral

It was certainly immoral and it was the US' "original sin," that we are still paying for. Of course the British are the ones who introduced it to the colonies, so we inherited that sin when we rebelled and 700K+ people died trying to atone for that sin.

>but also one that was doomed and that would have put them at odds with the rest of the world within half a century.

I'm not so confident in that, though I would want it to be true. There are still major countries where slavery exists today. I think has the CSA successfully seceded, they would either be a third rate country, or would have been invaded by now. They certainly would have missed the Industrial Revolution.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

Ok, the text is getting narrow indicating this is getting to be a long thread. Thanks for the discussion, I'll let you have the last word.

I am using more contemporary theoretical terminology, but I think the basic idea of “make the Yankees bleed until they leave us alone” was within the grasp of the rebels. A lot of warfighting theory is an attempt to formalize strategic thinking that has always been with us, sort of like how stories have followed the Hero’s Journey pattern for centuries before Campbell formalized it.