Was Robert E. Lee guilty of treason?

@roger & Panzade

Thank you for the kind words and the warm welcome. I think I will. I've been lurking for close to a year and really enjoy the forum.

Once more LOL as it was not the southern government calling for very large troops call up numbers to smash the North and it was not the northern government sending envoys to negotiate the peaceful parting of the ways.

Come on now this conflict was far far far too recent to be doing any creative re-writing of history.

Yes you did . . . mea culpa for having forgotten that when i posted.

In response to Joe's post about southerners who remained true to their oaths to the United States Army, i would like to point out that (as i've said before in these fora) that i consider George Henry Thomas to have been the best, most modern general in either army. Officers from border states faced similar, difficult choices. John Buford of Kentucky remained loyal to his oath, and he served honorably and well, most notably on the first day of the battle of Gettysburg, where he significantly delayed the advance of Harry Heth's division. Another son of Kentucky, John Bell Hood, was to render crucial aid the Mr. Lincoln . . .by serving in the Confederate States army.

A glance at this Wiki map shows the position of 3 Southern armies, including Beauregard's in the centre just 25 miles from Washington.
The North therefore had no choice but to respond in self-defence.
Like I said earlier, the South went about it the wrong way, first by shelling Sumter, and then deploying its armies aggressively in front of Washington.
If they'd simply announced secession and left it at that, maybe there wouldn't have been a war but we'll never know..

Give me a break..........the south was not marching on Washington the North was marching on Richmond instead.

Next the two capitals was only a 100 miles or so apart, therefore the south is of course going to have troops between the two cities.

Lord it take a great deal of nerve to re-write history to this degree and think you can get away with it.

priceless

Hook was a people person.

I'm British and am therefore strictly neutral about the Civil War and can look at it coldly and logically, why on earth should I want to re-write it?
Are you pro-North?
The fact remains there were 20,000 Southern troops sitting in front of Washington, and the South had already proven itself hostile by shelling Sumter, so the North had to do something about it and moved to check them at Manassas/Bull Run.
Maybe if the South had backed off a bit, the North wouldn't have felt so threatened, but like I said we'll never know..

PS- there are plenty of precedents in history, for example when Hitler sat across the English Channel shaping up to invade Britain in 1940, we had to bomb his invasion barges.
And when the Rooskis wanted to deploy nuke missiles in Cuba on America's doorstep, Kennedy had to say "No!"

I do not care where you are living you are trying to rewrite the history of the US civil war in a silly manner indeed.

With special note that I do have a number of ancestors that fought on the Northern side.

Footnote not one union soldier was killed in the Fort Sumter conflict by Southern hands the only deaths resulted after the fort had surrounded when a cannon blow up during the saluting of the American flag being taken down.

Can you just clarify a couple of things mate-
1- Are you saying the South didn't march on Washington, and that it was the North who opened hostilities by advancing into Virginny to attack them?

2- And are you saying it was fine for the south to shell Ft Sumter because nobody in it was killed?

LOL I was saying it was the north that march on the capital of the confederacy not the other way around and it was the north that needed to conquest the south to end the rebel not the south needing to conquest the north.

Lincoln desire the south to open the conflict and the south was dumb enough to do so by shelling Fort Sumter but the south did not need or desire an armed conflict with the north. The south should had just starved the fort out but no matter how they did it that fort could not remain in foreign hands in the middle of one the south main ports.

Peace envoys from the south was send to Washington to deal with such matters as Federal forts on southern territory but Lincoln would not meet with them.

His side lost, ergo he was a traitor.

Perhaps Lincoln was pouting because they'd shelled Sumter.
As a matter of interest why were the South's forts manned by Northern troops?
No wonder the South's backs were up!
And what were the forts for anyway? Who was the enemy they were guarding against?

He was very happy that they shell the fort as he strongly desire the south to make the first hostage more.



Most of the population was northern so most of the troop would be northern as a matter of course out of the tiny US military at the time.



To guard the major ports and port cites from possible attacks from the European powers the last example being the attacks by your nation in the war of 1812 with special note of the attack on Fort Fort McHenry and the city of Baltimore if successfully defended from a very large English fleet.

Did the South ever present a list of grievances to Lincoln before the war?
What exactly were the grievances?
What did he say?

I suggest you get a few books on that era of American history to understand what was the roots causes of the south deciding that would be better off as a nation apart from the north.

Explaining it in the details the subject deserve can not be done in a few postings on this website.

But I'm sure these questions were what a lot of troops were asking-
1-Did the South ever present a list of grievances to Lincoln before the war?
2-What exactly were the grievances?
3-What did he say?

and i'm just wondering what their leaders replied in a short simple way; i don't think they'd shunt them off to read up on it somewhere..

"Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand"
-Gen. Colin Powell

We're so used to thinking North vs.South that it's easy to see why a non-Amrican like Romeo would get confused. Try to think of it as USA vs. CSA instead. Southern forts were not manned by Northern troops.These were military bases, established for defense of the country, manned by soldiers in the US Army. There were soldiers of both Northern and Southern birth stationed at these posts. In fact, ina number of states, when the state opted to leave the Union and become a state of the Confederacy, the entire military post, officers and men, simply turned their facility over to Southern (i.e.Confederate) administration.
Major Anderson,commanding the harbor defense at Fort Sumter in Charleston, S.C. was not one of these traitors. (Neither, for the record, was Robert E. Leeat that point. His command was in Texas. When Texas seceded,he refused to turn anything over to the Confederacy andmaintained a Federal presence. But he was eventually recalled to Washington by President Lincoln with an offer of command of the Army of the Potomac and thus had to abandon his post.)

The situation as it stood at this point was that there were now USA military installations in what the local Southerners considered CSA territory. Thus, in effect, the US Army was seen as "foreign" troops on Southern soil. That's why Fort Sumter was fired upon -- to dislodge these troops which the Confederates deemed as foreign, potentially hostile, troops.

Romeo, the Confederacy had no specificlist of grievances that could have been presented to the executive administration in Washington prior to the War. But it was a foregone conclusion that with Lincoln in office as the chief executive, the tenor of the times being what it was, slavery would besoon be outlawed in the United States. The Southern states seceded because they were the ones where slavery was a way of life that they did not want to see changed. In the North, all the states had opted to abolish slavery at the time of the adoption of the Constitution (1784). The slave states said, in effect, if slavery is to become illegal in the United States, then we no longer wish to be a part of the United States. We shall found our own union, called the Confederate States of America. Whether or not this was in any sense a legally justifiable action is a moot point. It is really irrelevant to the issue of waging a war between the two countries. And that is precisely what had happened -- there were now two enitrely separate countries on the North American continent, the USA and the CSA. Again, whether the Southern Confederacy was a legally instituted government or a traitorous, treasonous upstart is irrelevant. The fact was that the two regions were now separate political entities.

Is that terse enough for you, Romeo? It barely covers themost essential point.