I think my tone has been reasonable as has yours, and I appreciate the fair and reasoned way you have discussed this. You said:
But, as far as law, as an independent country, SC had the right to demand the removal of foreign troops garrisoned on its soil and to act to remove them.
This assumes and states unequivocally secession was legal in 1860–61 and that U.S. military properties automatically became owned by the seceding states.
Importantly it is, at a minimum, highly debatable whether secession was illegal then. It is also highly debatable, though perhaps less important, whether the seceding states took ownership of federal property within their borders.
How can I be so sure it was at least debatable whether secession was illegal in 1860–61? Well:
A. The Supreme Court decided in 1869 in Texas v. White that Texas’s secession in 1861 was illegal when it happened (and thus all CSA secessions were too). (If you want a good analysis of the side of the debate that secession was always illegal, I’d recommend reading that decision.) [Admittedly, it is unlikely that after the Civil War the Supreme Court would have ruled that secession had been legal all along. But read the case and try to dispute its reasoning. It is very convincing and logical, and I don’t think it was results oriented.]
B. Also, the case can and has been convincingly made that if secession had been permitted under the Constitution, a process for it would have been explicitly provided for in the Constitution (as it was for adding new states). But the Constitution did not provide for secession.
C. The supremacy clause and the property clause also make a convincing case that secession was illegal in 1860.
D. James Madison wrote that secession would be illegal in the 1832.
You can disagree or argue those points all you want, but that only shows that the question of the legality of secession in 1860–61 was not settled at the time or since.
If secession was illegal, then what happened was an armed rebellion or insurrection, which, under international law and its own law, the U.S. was free to put down by force without a declaration of war. (There was no country to declare war against if secession was illegal.) The U.S. had done this before during the Whiskey Rebellion.
So I think when you state as a given that secession was legal and that the acts of the U.S. in responding to it were illegal, you are just not correct. You might believe or think that it was illegal, but it is not honest to say that it is not a debatable question.
If it was debatable, then we are talking about a war 150+ years ago that was fought by the South to defend slavery, as you admit. And if it is debatable whether secession was legal and thus who started the war, I am going to align with the side of the debate and war that says the United States was right, secession was illegal, that the U.S. should have legally and morally won, and that the CSA should legally and morally have been defeated because they were fighting for a morally repugnant cause. I think this is the better factually supported side of the debate, but also the right side to choose if its a close question.
By stating as a fact that secession was legal, you give yourself cover to say that the war was fought to defend slavery and that the Lost Cause myth is wrong, and that it’s a good thing ultimately that the South lost, etc., but to also say the South were basically the good guys, legally correct, and had the moral high ground from the outset. Then you can say you’re just stating the “inconvenient truth.”
But you are also giving cover to those who wish the South had been allowed to secede or that they had won the Civil War because they, then and now, want — not slavery anymore, necessarily — but a racially segregated society with the former slaves, African-Americans, at the bottom of an economic pyramid.
I’m not ascribing that belief to you.
I am just saying you give cover to it by promulgating the idea that secession was absolutely, clearly, indisputably legal. If that’s the case then those neo-Confederates today can cloak their secret wish with the legal nicety that they’re only supporting the side who was legally in the right, and that the “unfortunate” after effects of accepting that position (that the CSA either should have been allowed to peacably secede and seize all U.S. forts) are just that — unfortunate side effects.
And I am not saying that secession was unquestionably legal in 1860–61, just that it was debatable. I don’t think that’s overstating my position. I think, however, that stating that secession was indisputably legal is overstating a position, and it is a position that is put to political use in this country by those who want to literally undo the results of the Civil War from 1865 to today.
FN — Even if secession were legal, you have the question of ownership of federal lands in the CSA, including forts, after secession. That question is also highly debatable, not a given, as you say.
The case already can and has been made that when it seceded (presuming for the sake of argument that secession was legal) the CSA would “legally” have had to negotiate the purchase of U.S. property and the withdrawal of U.S. troops within the CSA’s borders because that “soil” (forts, naval bases, etc.) belonged to the U.S. federal government, not the states, just like army bases are federal property today. (Or Gibraltar, or Guantanamo Bay, for example.) (See Const. Art IV, Sec. 3, Part 2. “The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States . . . .”)
Here again, I am not saying this is undeniably true, but it is highly debatable as a legal question. It is not a given. And if so, then the South’s/the CSA’s position in the war loses a lot of its luster.
