Posted on 02/13/2009 2:08:04 PM PST by hellbender
Though Lincoln has already been canonized by those who settle for partial histories, in the words of John Adams, "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
In our steadfast adherence to The Patriot Post's motto, Veritas Vos Liberabit ("the truth shall set you free"), and our mission to advocate for the restoration of constitutional limits on government, I am compelled to challenge our 16th president's iconic standing.
Lincoln is credited with being the greatest constitutional leader in history, having "preserved the Union," but his popular persona does not reconcile with the historical record. The constitutional federalism envisioned by our Founders and outlined by our Constitution's Bill of Rights was grossly violated by Abraham Lincoln. Arguably, he is responsible for the most grievous constitutional contravention in American history.
(Excerpt) Read more at link.patriotpost.us ...
Once again the thread is titled “Lincoln’s Legacy at 200”, no mention of Davis in the title.
To understand and appreciate Winston Churchill's actions it helps to have an idea about what sort of people Hitler and the Nazis were.
invoking Godwins law....you’re not worthy of my time
Sorry. I'll rephrase that.
To understand and appreciate Ronald Reagan's actions it helps to have an understanding of what sort of people Yuri Andropov and the Soviets were.
Where to begin? There's his judging Lincoln by todays standards of racism. His misquoting Lincoln to make it appear that he used the term 'ni**er' rather than quoting other or attributing the term to them. Lincoln himself never used the term in common conversation or in any of his correspondence. There's his claim that nobody was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. His selective quoting of Frederick Douglass out of context to make it appear that he thought Lincoln was no friend of the black man, the exact opposite is true. There's his claim that many historians agree that the South would have reunited with the North without a war, I don't know of a single historian who says that. His claim that all the founders thought unilateral secession was legal; I'm not aware of a single one who said that and Madison is very dismissive of the idea. Then there's the claim that Robert Lee detested slavery when he in fact believed that was the best condition for blacks to be in. The claim of tens of thousands of polticial prisoners, hundreds of newspapers closed down, and on and on and on. It's nothing more that a list of the top 100 Southron myths.
OK?
On the other hand, the relative reasonableness of his prose will likely lessen its appeal with the usual consumers of such work.
He may not have the mouth-foaming intensity of Tommy DiLusional, true. But with all due respect, bullsh*t is bullsh*t no matter how it’s packaged. His paper his nothing less than a garbage dump of the highlights from DiLorenzo and the Kennedy boys, with a dose of Crocker thrown in.
The Civil War was fought almost entirely on Southern soil, and conditions there soon became desperate. Conditions like that motivate extreme measures against people perceived as giving aid and comfort to the invaders, in every war. However, only the North had a specific planned national policy of making war on civilians. When an army invades a rural agricultural society and burns buildings and crops, kills or steals livestock, it is tantamount to killing civilians by starvation and exposure. That's an atrocity unmatched in scale by anything the Confederacy did. In contrast, when Lee invaded PA, his men were commanded to respect civilians, and officers were ordered to pay civilians for supplies they requisitioned. They did not go around burning down PA barns and crops a la Sherman.
I repeat: Lincoln did irreparable damage to the Constitutional, Federal system. Not until FDR was his trashing of States' rights surpassed. If Alexander does exaggerate a little, I don't really care, because we desperately need some antidote to the disgusting sentimental hype about a man who sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths in order to establish by force the outrageous concept that every State and its citizens belongpermanently to some imperialistic "national" govt., instead of being sovereign entities who voluntarily delegated limited powers to a small central govt. Union victory in the war basically trashed every principle on which this country was founded.
If you go on reading slanted liberal academic propaganda about the Civil War and other things, you are well on your way to becoming a fan of FDR ("he had to be fascist to save capitalism") and 0bama.
I deny his suspension was illegal or that the number reached the tens of thousands the author claimed. People who have studied the matter have found that on a per-capita basis you were far more likely to have been locked up without trial in a Jeff Davis confederacy than an Abe Lincoln United States.
That's a fact. Lincoln immediately raised a huge army specifically to invade the South, which had declared independence on exactly the same legal basis as that used by the 13 colonies less than a century before.
If memory serves, the United Kingdom then raised a large army to oppose the 13 colonies and their rebellion. So if you want to equate the two then fine, both rebelled but only one actually won their rebellion.
And I'll point out that the confederacy called for raising an army of 100,000 the day Lincoln was inaugurated and over a month before Lincoln called for troops. What was their army for? Parades?
You describe every pro-Confederate argument as a "myth," probably because a bunch of liberal professors filled you with all the gushing Lincoln mythology and Yankee propaganda, just the way they are filling empty heads with worship of 0bama today.
And here we see that grand old Southron whine in all it's full-blown glory - anyone who doesn't believe in the confederate cause has just got to be a liberal. You all are nothing if not predictable.
The Civil War was fought almost entirely on Southern soil, and conditions there soon became desperate.
Having chosen war, only the confederacy was in a position to keep it from being fought on their own territory. They didn't do a very good job of it.
When an army invades a rural agricultural society and burns buildings and crops, kills or steals livestock, it is tantamount to killing civilians by starvation and exposure.
Fair enough. We'll ignore the rebel stripping of Pennsylvania during their campaign there and instead ask how many civilians died of starvation or exposure as a result of Sherman's or Sheridan's armies? Thousands? Tens of thousands? If it's as many as you would have us believe then it has to be documented somewhere. Can you enlighten us?
In contrast, when Lee invaded PA, his men were commanded to respect civilians, and officers were ordered to pay civilians for supplies they requisitioned.
So if Sherman had paid for the food he foraged with toilet paper, about the same value as confederate currency, then that would be all right? In fact, if you would read up on the campaigns in the North, Lee's men looted and foraged and "requisitioned" to much the same extent that Sherman's men did. And then there was that whole abduction of free blacks in Pennsylvania and Maryland and sending them down south to slavery thing that you all try to ignore. But I'm sure they were very polite on the trip back to slavery.
I repeat: Lincoln did irreparable damage to the Constitutional, Federal system.
And I repeat: Nonsense.
Not until FDR was his trashing of States' rights surpassed.
In what way did Lincoln trash state's rights. Be specific now.
If Alexander does exaggerate a little...
A little????? Baby Lord Jesus, boy, that's like saying the Obama administration upped spending a little. Lies are lies. Deliberate misquotes are deliberate misquotes. Whether you do it a little or a lot it still makes a mockery of your arguement.
If you go on reading slanted liberal academic propaganda about the Civil War and other things, you are well on your way to becoming a fan of FDR ("he had to be fascist to save capitalism") and 0bama.
Nothing is more amusing than a confederate kool-ade guzzler in high dudgeon.
I don't think we disagree on that. My point is that the result was one that the Confederacy provoked.
Davis fired on Sumter in part because he was afraid the South Carolinians would do it with out him and in part because he thought the Northern reaction would drive the upper tier of slave states into the Confederacy, which it did.
Secession was a very sketchy business. Historians have had a hard time trying to figure out whether Georgia's secession really resulted in a valid win for the secessionists. Virginia's convention rejected secession, and then, in the panic over Sumter and the Union draft, accepted it.
North Carolina voters rejected a secession convention in February, and the legislature called on in May, which passed an Ordinance of Secession, which was never submitted to the people in a referendum. Arkansas's convention rejected secession in March and called for a referendum in August, then voted for secession in May. The referendum was never held.
Even if you assume that unilateral secession was constitutional, there was room for controversy over these rushed secession resolutions. Davis was willing to do everything he could to weaken the Union. That's what I meant by "smash and grab." The country didn't go through a reasoned process of deliberation about union or disunion. The process was rushed and forced by secessionist elements, so that they could pick up the pieces themselves.
I was thinking along the same lines about DiLusional, but didn't know how to put it without the four letter words.
Everyone on both sides knew the election of Lincoln meant secession and war against the South. The majority of Northerners elected him anyway. The North invaded the South from the very beginning. The North had an official policy at the highest level to commit war crimes against Southern civilians. That was never the policy of Jeff Davis, and certainly against the direct orders of R.E. Lee. No general can control every soldier, but I can tell you this: I have been all over southern PA where the Army of N. VA invaded, and there are thousands of fine old barns and houses standing unscathed, which would not be the case if Lee's army had a policy of trashing civilians and their property, as did Sherman's and Sheridan's. The ANV paid civilians with what they had, Confederate currency. That's what their own soldiers were paid with, when they were paid at all. I don't know where you get this crap about the Confederate Army kidnapping free blacks from PA. Lee's army limped back to the Potomac, barely able to take away its own thousands of wounded; there was no time to capture and guard blacks, even if they had wanted to. Those are facts, but you prefer the propaganda of your liberal historians, apparently. And yes, the overwhelming majority of historians, esp. in academia, are liberals. Maybe you believe in global warming also, because most self-styled experts" in academia tell you that's true too.
You finally acknowledge that the South acted on the principles of the Declaration of Independence, then sneer that the South lost and the colonial rebels won. Obviously you don't care about principles, but think that might makes right, that Lincoln was entitled to make himself a military dictator, by the same principle 0bama uses to trash his Republican opponents and the American taxpayer--because the arrogant bastard WON (by hook or by crook) and raised a huge army to crush his opponents, Northern and Southern. You justify Lincoln's tyranny the same way 0bama justifies his--he "had to" to fix a "national crisis" --which in both cases was created by the tyrant's own party. 0bama wants to stamp out the last vestiges of conservative influence, like talk radio, just as Lincoln silenced his opponents, and as Republicans disenfranchised Confederates for many years and ruled the South with an army of occupation and corrupt civilian carpetbaggers.
And southern leaders, itching to secede, intentionally split the Democratic party into the Breckinridge and Douglas factions, ensuring that Lincoln would be elected and they'd get what they wanted.
self-ping
It seems like the presence of armed force trying to prevent you from fulfilling your oath of office is threat enough.
The Confederacy sought only independence, just as their forefathers had from Britain
Nope. Independence had already been won in 1776-83. The secessionists wanted more than mere independence, they wanted a central national government of their own that would be an engine to protect and advance slavery, the greatest material interest of the world according to the Mississippi secessionists.
Even Northerners who advocated peace were "put in their place," either prison or exile.
And in the South, the place for people who advocated the old Union was often six feet under in a grave. The comparison makes the North look a whole lot better.
Yes, it's obvious your imagination knows no bounds.
Incidentally, I grew up and have lived almost all my life in the North, and have almost no Confederate ancestors.
A Copperhead. I should have guessed.
Everyone on both sides knew the election of Lincoln meant secession and war against the South.
Because of Lincoln's steadfast opposition to the expansion of slavery, his election certainly made Southern secession inevitable. But only the South could have their war.
The North invaded the South from the very beginning.
It is true that the South started losing territory almost from the moment they started the war, yes.
The North had an official policy at the highest level to commit war crimes against Southern civilians.
ROTFLMAO!!
I don't know where you get this crap about the Confederate Army kidnapping free blacks from PA.
I read it. See "Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage" by Noah Andre Trudeau; "Retreat From Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign" by Kent Masterson Brown, or "A Regular Slave Hunt" by Ted Alexander which was in the September 2007 issue of North and South magazine. In fact, Brown's book also goes into great detail about the lengths Lee went to strip the Maryland and Pennsylvania countryside of everything usable and how his commanders would ride into towns and place levies on them for a specific amount of supplies or else he would burn the town. So please spare us your fairy tales on how noble Lee and Davis were. The documentation disputing it is there if you care to look.
You finally acknowledge that the South acted on the principles of the Declaration of Independence, then sneer that the South lost and the colonial rebels won.
It is true that both sides rebelled. But to equate the reasons why the Founding Father's rebelled against the King with the reasons why the Southern states rebelled against the federal government is ridiculous.
And the Southern independence movement had nothing in common with the American Revolution, even though the Confederate constitution was almost identical with the U.S. one.
I think you need to broaden your horizons and find new heroes to go along with Lincoln. Just as baboon-face "had to" be a tyrant and unleash total war on his own former countrymen "to save the Union," King George "had to" unleash war "to save the Empire," FDR "had to" impose socialism and trash the Constitution "to save capitalism," and 0bama "has to" socialize the rest of the economy "to save" the country from an unprecedented crisis.
All your hyperbole aside, war was what the South chose when they fired on Sumter. Having chosen war then only the South was in a position to keep that war from coming into its homes. It's the risk you take when you start a conflict like that. So if your asking me to feel sorry for your precious confederacy because they lost the war then you're looking to the wrong person.
And the Southern independence movement had nothing in common with the American Revolution, even though the Confederate constitution was almost identical with the U.S. one.
Of course it didn't. The Founding Fathers rebelled on the principle that those being taxed should have representation in government. Well the South certainly had representation in Congress and they were overly represented in the House. They had their voice in each and every act of government. So rather than rebel in the face of injustice, the South chose to rebel to defend their institution of slavery.
I think you need to broaden your horizons and find new heroes to go along with Lincoln. Just as baboon-face "had to" be a tyrant and unleash total war on his own former countrymen "to save the Union," King George "had to" unleash war "to save the Empire," FDR "had to" impose socialism and trash the Constitution "to save capitalism," and 0bama "has to" socialize the rest of the economy "to save" the country from an unprecedented crisis.
I think you need to go and read up on the subject.
I guess I need to read more of your bizarre revisionist historians. Then I'll realize that the Confederates didn't blunder into Gettysburg looking for shoes for their pathetically equipped troops, but in order to round up blacks to take home. I'll also realize that the common Confederate soldiers often fought with fierce courage not because they were defending their homeland, but because they wanted to get up North and seize the farms and factories from their kindly pacifist owners and replace them with slave plantations.
Your theories have about as much validity as Louis Farrakhan's about the origins of the white race, or Jeremiah Wright's about the origin of AIDS.
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