The Truth of the War Conspiracy of 1861
Description
About the Author Huger William Johnstone was born on June 12, 1846, one of three children of William and Mary Blanch (Hardin) Johnstone. From May 1861 to January 1862, Johnstone served with the 5th Georgia Volunteers, C.S.A. at Pensacola, Florida, rising to the rank of Colonel. He first encountered U.S. Major Israel Vogdes during the Battle of Santa Rosa Island in July of 1861. Twenty years later, during a second meeting between the former enemies, Vogdes told Johnstone that he had secretly reinforced Fort Pickens before Fort Sumter was attacked, but that this act of war had been overshadowed by the excitement of the Sumter affair. Intrigued by this information, Johnstone began to scour the official records compiled by the U.S. Government and uncovered how Abraham Lincoln and his co-conspirators used deceit and violated international law in order to instigate war in early 1861, while laying the blame on the South. Writing in 1917, Johnstone had access to documentation which was not available when other post-war Confederates, such as Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens, wrote their own histories of the conflict.
Features & Highlights
- In the early months of 1861, the Northern people were overwhelmingly opposed to military coercion of the seceded Southern States. Such was the general feeling when Abraham Lincoln took office, assuring the public of his pacific intentions in his first inaugural address. However, as the author of this little book proves from the U.S. Government's own official records, while the Confederate Peace Commissioners were being stalled in Washington with promises of the evacuation of troops from Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Lincoln was secretly working behind the scenes to reinforce the fort in order to force the South to fire the first shot and thus "put the rebellion in the wrong."
