I hope you are enjoying this holiday!
This is NOT Veterans Day. That is on November 11. This day is meant to honor Civil War vets, which is why I observe it a bit differently than Veterans Day.
Civil War Factoids:
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/faq/?referrer=https://www.google.com/
Q. When did the Southern states secede from the Union?
- South Carolina - December 20, 1860
- Mississippi - January 9, 1861
- Florida - January 10, 1861
- Alabama - January 11, 1861
- Georgia - January 19, 1861
- Louisiana - January 26, 1861
- Texas - February 1, 1861
- Virginia - April 17, 1861
- Arkansas - May 6, 1861
- North Carolina - May 20, 1861
- Tennessee - June 8, 1861
No, although it was not ruled illegal until after the war. This was a complex question at the time, with able legal minds to be found arguing both sides, but the United States Supreme Court, in Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 (1868), determined that secession was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Salmon Chase wrote in his majority opinion that, "The ordinance of secession...and all the acts of legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law."
Q. What caused the Civil War?
While many still debate the ultimate causes of the Civil War, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson writes that, "The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries."
