Posted on 02/23/2014 6:39:53 PM PST by grumpa
Few people understand how lawless Abraham Lincoln was in propagating our country’s biggest nightmare—the Civil War. And not enough people sense the parallel of Obama’s emerging lawlessness.
Lincoln achieved his political aims by bullying—rather than effective, innovative solutions and negotiations. Here are some facts:
• Lincoln closed more than 300 newspapers that disagreed with him.
• He arrested members of state legislatures, preventing them from debating the secession issue.
• He ordered military trials for citizens when civilian courts were available. Many of these trials resulted in hangings.
• Operating as a military dictator, Lincoln spent millions not authorized by the Congress.
• He suspended the writ of habeas corpus, a law that prevents people from being imprisoned without due process. This suspension, along with the military tribunals, resulted in the imprisonment of 14,000 war opponents illegally. (For comparison, Mussolini is reported to have jailed around 2,000 people.)
• When Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney ruled Lincoln’s suspension of the writ unconstitutional, amazingly, Lincoln ordered Taney arrested! But the United States Marshal’s office refused to make the arrest without a valid arrest warrant. However, due to the political situation at the time, the writ was never officially restored until Andrew Johnson’s tenure.
• The cruelty of the Northern generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan was authorized by Lincoln. The wanton cruelty toward civilian life and property made Lincoln clearly guilty of war crimes.
• His dishonorable prosecution of the war is responsible for the failure to re-assimilate the South after the war, and left bitterness for a hundred years. The Ku Klux Klan is certainly a result of this bitterness.
• Lincoln signed the order approving the hanging of 39 Sioux Indians, for dubious reasons. This was the only mass hanging in American history.
• Lincoln was a liar, changing his message to suit the audience and his political objectives.
This is all presented in an amazing book by Charles Adams entitled, When in the Course of Human Events. Adams concludes, as any reasonable man would, that Lincoln should have been impeached. The war would thus have not progressed to its devastating conclusion. And slavery, which was clearly on its way out anyway, would have ended without the loss of 630,000 American lives.
So, how is this relevant today? Is it not ironic that a black president is potentially taking us down a path of a constitutional crisis not seen since Lincoln? History never repeats itself exactly. But the parallels should be apparent to anyone willing to see them.
Not sure I agree with this criticism of Lincoln.
Just saying.
I will wait to see what everyone else thinks.
Believe I read somewhere where Obama called himself a Lincoln scholar. Getting pointers, maybe?
ping
True, but it won’t make a difference. The Lincoln worship in this country is too widespread at this point. Any criticism of him is viewed as crazy talk.
There are legitimate reasons to criticize Lincoln but people who equate him with Obama are unworthy of wasting my time dealing with.
All he cared about was saving the union and he said he didn’t care about slavery.The union was his goal at the expense of states rights.
Well, I understand that southerners have a thing about Lincoln. Without getting into all that, I’ll just say that there is one major difference that deserves emphasis. Lincoln wanted to save the Union. Obama wants to destroy it.
I used to think that Arkansas was the bottom of the barrel when it came to politicians but I have changed my opinion to Illinois.
Lincoln was a progressive. The overriding motivation of all progressives is control.
>> Not sure I agree with this criticism of Lincoln.
Fair enough, but it’s mainly a laundry list of data offered as facts, with a couple of (IMO reasonable) opinions thrown in.
Which of these do you dispute, and why?
every time bammey the boy pulls another sneaky attack, someone always has to pull out some pub somewhere that did something that somebody didn’t like....just to cover their asses....
>> The union was his goal at the expense of states rights.
Thank you for that. Succinct, and important.
I don’t know.
It just seems a bit like a smear.
Maybe I’m wrong. He was a Republican, and held America together through a terrible war.
I would give me a bit of slack. That is just me however.
Your opinion may differ.
BTTT.
‘I really do not want to find out what this man is really made of.’
I’ve heard that he has a caramel center.
Why? How was Lincoln better? Asking for my own edification.
Thank you for setting the records straight on Lincoln. From day one in school he is lionized, but the real truth is never presented and the average American is totally unaware.
I think it is a pile of manure.
One of the biggest errors of anti-Lincoln propaganda is the ignoring of the far greatest abuses carried out by Jefferson Davis.
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