wilber6150, thanks for re-posting that.
In his book book At the Precipice: Americans North and South during the Secession Crisis, the late Shearer Bowman wrote that after the Star of the West incident in early January 1861,
Let us settle this,Northern bankers has large invesments in the forms of loans to the platation owners in the South. These loans could not be repaid.In order to avoid further indebtness to these banks these planters plotted a politcal movement whereby they would move their states to leave the Union.But in the end with the defeat of the South these bankers did achieve their own goal of regaining their loans and much more with the aid of the Radical Republicans.So the people on both sides were lead like goats to the slaughter for nobel reasons which did not matter to the ones who in the end prehaps came to beleve that propaganda that they had told the people for years.History is always told from the victor's view.The deafted must explain to others why they fought and why they lost.Believe This;The North was the VICTUM of Southern agression. If the South had not had not had slavery,if they had not fired on Sumter.and if they would have just behaved the war would not have come.
The fact is, all of the actions taken by seceding states against federal property were acts of war. Buchanan just refused to do anything.
And that's one thing I don't like about the way American Civil War history is taught. I remember that a few years ago, before my budding interest in the war, I read a story about the top five or ten things Americans don't know about history, or something like that. One of those was the fact that many more federal properties beside Sumter were taken by the secessionists than the average person knows or realizes.
If it is true that the war started when armed force was used to seize federal property; then the start of the War was not Sumter, but rather, in December, when the first set of federal properties were taken by the secessionists. That's how I think the history should be taught. Perhaps Sumter is where the shooting war started, but that was clearly not the first use of military force against the Union.
Bringing the