There Are Ten Sunspots on the Sun Today, but the Solar Wind Is a Paltry 274. Solar Activity

There are ten sunspots on the sun today, but the solar wind is a paltry 274. Solar activity is low. However, there are four sunspots facing Earth that pose a threat for geoeffective flares: AR2104, AR2107, AR2108, AR2109. NOAA forecasters estimate a 60% chance that one of those active regions will produce an M-flare during the 4th of July weekend.

HEWITT: I’m going to borrow some of the power that I need. Now that does bring me, though, to one development that my guests have been split on. Michael O’Hanlon thought it was a good idea. It makes VDH a little bit nervous, which is that our friends in Japan have reinterpreted their constitution vis-à-vis the amount of military power that they can deploy, use in support of other allies, et cetera, abroad, away from Japan. Mike O’Hanlon said this is common sense. Victor Davis Hanson said this reflects the evaporation of American power in the world, and it’s not going to be just Japan. It’s going to be everybody running to get their own guns. What do you think, Mark Steyn?

STEYN: Yes, I tend to agree with that, and Victor is a believer in the American umbrella, which is the situation that’s prevailed since the Second World War, where some of the wealthiest countries in the world like Japan or like Germany were able to not, in a sense, put up the money for their own defense, because America, the American umbrella was over them. Obama, if you learn anything from the last six years, it’s that we are entering the post-American world. And whether you’re an enemy of the United States or an ally of the United States, you’ve got to adjust to that. And I entirely understand why the Japanese would conclude, as the Polish foreign minister concluded a couple of weeks ago, that when it comes to it, the Americans are not going to be there for them. The Royal Australian Navy a couple of years ago held exercises with the Chinese, joint exercises. And I said to a naval officer down there that I know, I said well, didn’t you guys all find that a bit odd? And he said well, this is the reality. When America withdraws from the Pacific, Japan and Indonesia and Australia and China are all still going to be there, and we’re going to have to deal with the new reality as best we can. Japan is dealing with the post-American world. Poland is. Australia is. Singapore is. That is simply a reality of five years of Obama foreign policy.

HEWITT: Well then, Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie, America: Imagine The World Without It, is not so much a dire projection, it’s reality. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, yet, by the way. It’s a terrific movie, and it’s not really apocalyptic. It simply presents what the left has been about, believes, and what Hillary’s about. I think it’s going to do very well as the box office, but I don’t know if the great turn is upon us. We’ll know in five months, Mark Steyn. What do you think?

STEYN: Well, again, I think that’s the great question. You know, when you go back and look at some of the things Mitt Romney was saying, for example, about the economy in 2012, it made a lot of sense. The economy’s a disaster, the economy’s a bust, Obama hasn’t been able to jump start the economy. And I think the response of a big sliver of the American people was that’s all the more reason to vote for more permanent, multigenerational government dependency, which is a very sad thought for the eve of Independence Day. But a lot of Americans, particularly the ones who supplied his margin of victory, voted for a kind of big government nanny, because Obama has so flat-lined the economy, that they don’t want to take their risks out there in the new normal, and they’ll cling to nanny’s apron strings in the service of government dependence, a very sad thought.

HEWITT: But Mark, we’ve seen that. We saw that in Great Britain in the 50s and the 60s. Do people not remember that?

MS: Well, I think that’s what’s so interesting. There’s nothing new. There’s nothing new about Obama, what Obama’s doing. It’s ancient stuff that was applied in the rest of the Western world between the 1940s and the 1970s, in which they all gradually pulled away from, not just in Britain, not just in New Zealand, but even Sweden. And he has not, and so there’s nothing new about it. All that’s different is nobody’s ever tried to do it to a nation of 300 million people on the scale that this guy’s doing it.

HEWITT: What a sobering thought on the eve of the 4th of July.

America: The War of Northern Aggression

The Gettysburg Address is a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, one of the best-known in American history. It was delivered by Lincoln during the American Civil War, which people in the South still call the War of Northern Aggression, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg.

The question I would like you to consider is why was this speech given at this time? I guess first, we need to understand what started it all, and why it came to historic violence to try to end the conflict.

On December 20, 1860, shortly after Abraham Lincoln's victory in the presidential election of 1860, South Carolina adopted an ordinance declaring its secession from the United States of America and by February 1861, six more Southern states had adopted similar ordinances of secession. On February 7, the seven states adopted a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America and established their temporary capital at Montgomery, Alabama. A February peace conference met in Washington, D.C., but failed to resolve the crisis. The remaining eight slave states declined pleas to join the Confederacy.[3]

The seceding states seized numerous Federal properties within their boundaries, including buildings, arsenals, and fortifications. President James Buchanan protested but took no military action in response. Buchanan was concerned that an overt action could cause the remaining slave states to leave the Union, and while he acknowledged there was no constitutional authority for a state to secede, he could find no constitutional authority for him to act to prevent it.[4]

The forts of Charleston

Charleston Harbor, showing forts and Confederate artillery positions

Several forts had been constructed in Charleston's harbor, including Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, which were not among the initially seized properties. Fort Moultrie on Sullivan Island was the oldest—it was the site of fortifications since 1776—and was the headquarters of the U.S. Army garrison. However, it had been designed as a gun platform for defending the harbor, and its defenses against land-based attacks were feeble; during the crisis, the Charleston newspapers commented that sand dunes had piled up against the walls in such a way that the wall could easily be scaled. When the garrison began clearing away the dunes, the papers objected.[5]

Major Robert Anderson of the 1st U.S. Artillery regiment had been appointed to command the Charleston garrison that fall because of rising tensions. A native of Kentucky, he was a protégé of Winfield Scott, the general in chief of the Army, and was thought more capable of handling a crisis than the garrison's previous commander, Col. John L. Gardner, who was nearing retirement. Anderson had served an earlier tour of duty at Fort Moultrie and his father had been a defender of the fort (then called Fort Sullivan) during the American Revolutionary War. Throughout the fall, South Carolina authorities considered both secession and the expropriation of Federal property in the harbor to be inevitable. As tensions mounted, the environment around the fort increasingly resembled a siege, to the point that the South Carolina authorities placed picket ships to observe the movements of the troops and threatened violence when forty rifles were transferred to one of the harbor forts from the U.S. arsenal in the city.[6]

In contrast to Moultrie, Fort Sumter dominated the entrance to Charleston Harbor and, though unfinished, was designed to be one of the strongest fortresses in the world. In the fall of 1860 work was nearly done, but the fortress was thus far garrisoned by a single soldier, who functioned as a lighthouse keeper, and a small party of civilian construction workers. Under the cover of darkness on December 26, six days after South Carolina declared its secession, Anderson abandoned the indefensible Fort Moultrie, ordering its guns spiked and its gun carriages burned, and surreptitiously relocated his command by small boats to Sumter.[7]

President Buchanan and the Star of the West

Maj. Robert Anderson

South Carolina authorities considered Anderson's move to be a breach of faith. Governor Francis W. Pickens believed that President Buchanan had made implicit promises to him to keep Sumter unoccupied and suffered political embarrassment as a result of his trust in those promises. Buchanan, a former U.S. Secretary of State and diplomat, had used carefully crafted ambiguous language to Pickens, promising that he would not "immediately" occupy it.[8] From Major Anderson's standpoint, he was merely moving his existing garrison troops from one of the locations under his command to another. He had received instructions from the War Department on December 11, written by Major Don Carlos Buell, Assistant Adjutant General of the Army, approved by Secretary of War John B. Floyd:[9]

... you are to hold possession of the forts in this harbor, and if attacked you are to defend yourself to the last extremity. The smallness of your force will not permit you, perhaps, to occupy more than one of the three forts, but an attack on or attempt to take possession of any one of them will be regarded as an act of hostility, and you may then put your command into either of them which you may deem most proper to increase its power of resistance. You are also authorized to take similar steps whenever you have tangible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.[10]

Governor Pickens therefore ordered that all remaining Federal positions except Fort Sumter were to be seized. State troops quickly occupied Fort Moultrie (capturing 56 guns), Fort Johnson on James Island, and the battery on Morris Island. On December 27, an assault force of 150 men seized the Union-occupied Castle Pinckney fortification, in the harbor close to downtown Charleston, capturing 24 guns and mortars without bloodshed. On December 30, the Federal arsenal in Charleston was captured, resulting in the acquisition of more than 22,000 weapons by the militia. The Confederates promptly made repairs at Fort Moultrie and dozens of new batteries and defense positions were constructed throughout the Charleston harbor area, including an unusual floating battery, and armed with weapons captured from the arsenal.[11]

President Buchanan was surprised and dismayed at Anderson's move to Sumter, unaware of the authorization Anderson had received. Nevertheless, he refused Pickens's demand to evacuate Charleston harbor. Since the garrison's supplies were limited, Buchanan authorized a relief expedition of supplies, small arms, and 200 soldiers. The original intent was to send the Navy sloop-of-war USS Brooklyn, but it was discovered that Confederates had sunk some derelict ships to block the shipping channel into Charleston and there was concern that Brooklyn had too deep a draft to negotiate the obstacles. Instead, it seemed prudent to send an unarmed civilian merchant ship, Star of the West, which might be perceived as less provocative to the Confederates. As she approached the harbor entrance on January 9, 1861, Star of the West was fired upon by a battery on Morris Island, which was staffed by cadets from The Citadel, among them William Stewart Simkins, who were the only trained artillerists in the service of South Carolina at the time. Batteries from Fort Moultrie joined in and Star of the West was forced to withdraw. Major Anderson prepared his guns at Sumter when he heard the Confederate fire, but the secrecy of the operation had kept him unaware that a relief expedition was in progress and he chose not to start a general engagement.[12]

Preparations for war

Fort Sumter before the battle

Conditions at the fort were difficult during the winter of 1860–61. Rations were short and fuel for heat was limited. The garrison scrambled to complete the defenses as best they could. Fort Sumter was designed to mount 135 guns, operated by 650 officers and men, but construction had met with numerous delays for decades and budget cuts had left it only about 90 percent finished in early 1861. Anderson's garrison consisted of just 85 men, primarily made up of two small artillery companies: Company E, 1st U.S. Artillery, commanded by Capt. Abner Doubleday, and Company H, commanded by Capt. Truman Seymour. There were six other officers present: Surgeon Samuel W. Crawford, First Lt. Theodore Talbot of Company H, First Lt. Jefferson C. Davis of the 1st U.S. Artillery, and Second Lt. Norman J. Hall of Company H. Capt. John G. Foster and First Lt. George W. Snyder of the Corps of Engineers were responsible for construction of the Charleston forts, but they reported to their headquarters in Washington, not directly to Anderson. The remaining personnel were 68 noncommissioned officers and privates, eight musicians, and 43 noncombatant workmen.[13]