Editor:

When the provinces of Ossetia and Abkhavia announced their secession from Georgia, the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, immediately ordered the artillery shelling of Ossetia as punishment for their announced secession.

Some people who criticized this Georgian punishment for secession have been reminded by pro-Georgian defenders that the Georgian president is doing exactly what Abraham Lincoln did when he went to war against the seceding southern states in the American Civil War.

But although the southern states of the Confederacy seceded right after the election of Lincoln in November of 1860, Lincoln did not attack the secessionists immediately as Saakashvili has done. He was not at war with the South until four months later in April of 1861.

And at that time, it was not Lincoln who struck the first blow, but it was his southern enemies who struck first.

After the departure of the southern states from the Union in 1860, Lincoln announced that although they perceived him to be opposed to slave labor, he would not interfere with their slave-labor system in the southern states where it existed.

The Southerners, indeed, wanted exactly what Lincoln opposed - that is, the legality of slavery throughout the whole country. Their argument was that the Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case did exactly what Lincoln was denouncing - that is, the legalization of slavery in every state.

Dred Scott was a slave who said when his master had taken him into a northern state where slavery was illegal, he should, therefore, have been granted his freedom. The Supreme Court had ruled that a slave was property and our constitution decrees that Dred Scott's master could not be deprived of his property without due process of law.

In April of 1861 Lincoln had a federal arsenal in South Carolina. The governor of South Carolina informed the fort's commander, Maj. Robert Anderson, that he should evacuate the fort. On April 11, the Confederate Gen. Beauregard delivered that demand to Maj. Anderson who replied that he would evacuate by April 15.

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12 Confederate guns in a ring around Fort Sumter began the bombardment that initiated the bloodiest war in American history.

SYDNEY SPIEGEL, Casper