Posted on 06/22/2013 6:03:24 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Weighing the economics of Abraham Lincoln isn’t easy to do in today’s terms. Lincoln was pro-subsidy and pro-tariff, both of which stances tend to be assigned to the interventionist left in today’s discussions. But Lincoln’s infrastructurally and financially primitive economy was not ours, and it’s worth thinking about how he might govern today given that in his words there is an unshakeable faith in free enterprise.
Lincoln was pro-business, laudatory of wealth creation (and the inequality that goes with it), against class warfare and in favor of exploiting natural resources. “Property,” he said in 1864, “is the fruit of labor — property is desirable — is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich, shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise.”
In short, the Great Emancipator was also a capitalist tool.
In his considered, wide-ranging yet agreeably brief book, Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream — and How We Can Do It Again, Rich Lowry finds in Lincoln a man who deeply respected an essential American freedom — the freedom to succeed and accumulate wealth without fearing the heavy hand of the government.
Lincoln’s humble background is often misread; he chafed and rebelled against what he might have been expected to see as “his people,” the Andrew Jackson populist Democrats. Instead, he took a contrarian path and joined the Whigs, stereotyped as a party of wealthy Eastern elites and no enemy to the well-off. In 1830s Illinois, to declare yourself a Whig was roughly the equivalent of being a Republican in today’s San Francisco.
It was no coincidence that Lincoln went to work as a corporate lawyer. Rather it was an instance of Lincoln’s defiance of convention.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Year
Volume
Union Official
Excerpt
August 1861
Series I, Volume IV
Colonel John W. Phelps (1st Vermont Infantry)
They—the enemy—talked of having 9,000 men. They had twenty pieces of artillery, among which was the Richmond Howitzer Battery, manned by negroes.
May 1862
Series I, Volume XIV
Colonel Benjamin C. Christ (50th Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers)
There were six companies of mounted riflemen, besides infantry, among which were a considerable number of colored men.”
July 1862
Series I, Volume XVI
Lieutenant Colonel John G. Parkhurst (9th Michigan Infantry)
There were also quite a number of negroes attached to the Texas and Georgia troops, who were armed and equipped, and took part in the several engagements with my forces during the day.
July 1862
Series III, Volume II
Richard Yates, Governor of Illinois
Excerpt from a Letter to President Abraham Lincoln:
They [CSA] arm negroes and merciless savages in their behalf. Mr. Lincoln, the crisis demands greater efforts and sterner measures.
Sept. 1862
Series I, Volume XV
Major Frederick Frye (9th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers)
Pickets were thrown out that night, and Captain Hennessy, Company E, of the Ninth Connecticut, having been sent out with his company, captured a colored rebel scout, well mounted, who had been sent out to watch our movements.”
Sept. 1862
Series I, Volume XIII
Major General Samuel R. Curtis (2nd Iowa Infantry)
We are not likely to use one negro where the rebels have used a thousand. When I left Arkansas they were still enrolling negroes to fortify the rebellion.
Oct. 1862
Series I, Volume XIX, Part I-Reports
Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Wheeler Downey (3rd Maryland Infantry, Potomac Home Brigade)
Question by the Judge Advocate.: Do you know of any individual of the enemy having been killed or wounded during the siege of Harpers Ferry?
Answer. I have strong reasons to believe that there was a negro killed, who had wounded 2 or 3 of my men. I know that an officer took deliberate aim at him, and he fell over. He was one of the skirmishers of the enemy, and wounded 3 of my men. I know there must have been some of the enemy killed.
Question. How do you know the negro was killed?
Answer. The officer saw him fall.
Jan. 1863
Series I, Volume XVII
Brigadier General D. Stuart (U.S. Army 4th Brigade and Second Division)
It had to be prosecuted under the fire of the enemy’s sharpshooters, protected as well as the men might be by our skirmishers on the bank, who were ordered to keep up so vigorous a fire that the enemy should not dare to lift their heads above their rifle-pits; but the enemy, and especially their armed negroes, did dare to rise and fire, and did serious execution upon our men.
June 1863
Series II, Volume VI
(Prisoners of War)
Lieutenant-Colonel William H Ludlow (Agent for Exchange of Prisoners / 73rd New York Volunteer Infantry)
And more recently the Confederate legislature of Tennessee have passed an act forcing into their military service (I quote literally) all male free persons of color between the ages of fifteen and fifty, or such number as may be necessary, who may be sound in body and capable of actual service; and they further enacted that in the event a sufficient number of free persons of color to meet the wants of the State shall not tender their services, then the Governor is empowered through the sheriff’s of different counties to impress such persons until the required number is obtained.
September 1863
Series III, Volume III
Thomas H. Hicks (United States Senator, Maryland)
Excerpt from a Letter to President Abraham Lincoln:
I do and have believed that we ought to use the colored people, after the rebels commenced to use them against us.
Aug. 1864
Series I, Volume XXXV, Part I, Reports, Correspondence, etc.
Brigadier General Alexander Asboth (U.S. Army, District of West Florida)
We pursued them closely for 7 miles, and captured 4 privates of Goldsby’s company and 3 colored men, mounted and armed, with 7 horses and 5 mules with equipments, and 20 Austrian rifles
Nov. 1864
Series I, Volume XLI, Part IV, Correspondence, Etc.
Captain P. L. Powers (47th Missouri Infantry, Company H)
We have turned up eleven bushwhackers to dry and one rebel negro.
April 1865
Series I, Volume XLIX, Part II
Major A. M. Jackson (10th U. S. Colored Heavy Artillery)
The rebels are recruiting negro troops at Enterprise, Mississippi, and the negroes are all enrolled in the State.
“all because of the murdering railroad lawyer from Illinois.”
Not all because. Many other before and after him did their best to take power into DC and State legislatures. Liberty has been stomped on by everyone ever elected.
“Lincoln never wanted war.”
Yet, everyone claims he waged war to keep the union together. You’re going to need to reconcile the two stories.
It's certainly true that many New Yorkers were Confederate sympathizers, but the July 1863 riots were not caused by Lincoln's September 1862 Emancipation Proclamation.
The New York City draft riots were caused by just that: the draft.
They also gave some New Yorkers an opportunity to express their sympathies for the Confederacy, and take out their frustrations on the competing black labor force.
According to this source, by 1865 the black population in New York City had been reduced to 10,000 out of NYC's total 850,000 inhabitants.
Thanks, I've seen others here make the same argument, but I've never found a source for it.
Considering so much false information on this subject put out by our pro-Confederates, it's a point which needs to be made more often, and more strongly.
Since you don't cite the sources, I'd presume that most or all came from Democrat papers, which then as now loathed and despised anything Republican.
Democrats then as now were the pro-slavery "peace party".
The difference is: today instead of many slave-holders, we only have one socialist Marse in Chief, living in the big white house in DC.
What, do you call that an exaggeration?
Do you want to explain how it's exaggerated? ;-)
I said, confirmed reports (if any) were few and far between.
In this case, we don't have confirmation that the black Confederate "snipers" were even armed.
And we certainly can't presume them to be anything other than slaves forced into service.
I also mentioned free-black Confederate units in New Orleans, but these were never allowed to fight for the Confederacy, and if I remember correctly, eventually joined and fought for the Union.
So slavery made the South much more powerful than it's five million whites would otherwise be.
But it was also their Achilles heal.
“...the Union didn’t “cease to exist” just because seven states declared secession...”
-
If the wife (the states) storms out of the house,
and leaves her husband (the federal government),
declaring to everyone that the marriage (the union) is over.
Then the marriage is pretty much over, done, through, kaput, finished.
She did not need his permission to leave, and by own her deeds, it was done.
Oh, and the fact that she ‘keyed his car’ (Ft. Sumter)
that he left parked in her front yard doesn’t change any of that.
If the husband claims she does not have his permission to leave,
and pursues her, grabs her by the hair, beats her, and drags her back into the house,
is the husband justified in his actions because he did it to “save the marriage”?
Has the marriage really been saved?
The wife and her family took revenge on the husband
in every way they could for more than 100 years
due to the resentment and hatred of what was done,
and some of her family will never forget it.
The war was forced upon him. Even after Sumter the evidence is he believed Southern Unionists would come to the fore to stop the war before it really began.
Problem was...after First Bull Run...a Southern victory gave the secessionists a taste of coming independence. It rallied most of the South to the Cause. I think that after Shiloh...there was no chance for an early peace. Too much had happened.
Lincoln said time after time...he only wanted to save the union. He did not want war. He did not want to subjugate the South. In 1864...when it became clear that the North would win...what did Lincoln do when faced with the Radical Republican Wade-Davis Plan? He pocket vetoed it. If anything shows his true attitude to the nature of the coming peace, it is this act.
His early death was beyond tragic.
“The war was forced upon him.”
It was? You mean he didn’t take a single step towards it? He didn’t wage war to keep the union together? I thought all the liberals claimed he waged war to keep the union together.
“he only wanted to save the union.”
Two primary claims about Lincoln that are not true: He wanted to keep the union together for patriotic sake and he wanted to end slavery. Those are two things he stated he did not intend to ever do. His words, directly stated.
The fact is he wanted to make his railroad buddies happy. He, himself, said the South had the right to succeed and even in his inaugural address he claimed not to want to try to end slavery.
His railroad buddies, for which he was their attorney in Illinois, needed the breakup not to happen to get their railroads built out west and through the South. He radically changed his posture once the money became in jeopardy.
DC has always been a corrupt money pit.
I'd call those reports "few and far between".
Of circa one million Confederate soldiers, in thousands of company-sized units, we are talking about a handful of reports of a handful of black Confederate soldiers, most or all undoubtedly slaves / man-servants of nearby white masters.
By very stark contrast, the Union army eventually included roughly 200,000 volunteer free-black soldiers, who more than carried their weight, despite reduced pay and poor conditions.
And they were certainly massacred at every opportunity by Confederate troops -- Forrest at Fort Pillow coming immediately to mind:
Not ONE single step.
He inherited Buchanan’s mess. Lincoln only tried to resupply Sumter. That was his plain duty under the Constitution.
BTW...I am no liberal.
Granted Lincoln was a Whig...but I remember no historical evidence that he had “railroad buddies”.
In fact...it was Stephan Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, designed to build the transcontinental with a stop in Chicago...that brought Lincoln out of political retirement, in opposition to the bill. If Lincoln were a true railroad-first man...he would have supported the bill.
Lincoln’s goal was...one union...coast to coast...with slavery kept from encroaching on any more free soil.
Lincoln wanted the USA to be lily white from coast to coast and deport all blacks to Liberia and Haiti post war.
It's so completely inappropriate and non-analogous as to be pitiable but it does offer insight to the thinking (or lack thereof) of those who advance it.
If the wife (the states) storms out of the house, and leaves her husband (the federal government), declaring to everyone that the marriage (the union) is over. Then the marriage is pretty much over, done, through, kaput, finished. She did not need his permission to leave, and by own her deeds, it was done.
The matrimonial bonds may be broken perhaps (or perhaps not. How many twitterpated females have exploded in emotion outbursts only to return, relent, and recant once they've calmed down?) but the marriage still exists - and will continued to exist until legally dissolved. You can't just run away from your obligations.
Oh, and the fact that she ‘keyed his car’ (Ft. Sumter) that he left parked in her front yard doesn’t change any of that.
More like stole everything that wasn't nailed down and then started taking potshots at him from the driveway. See how analogies are two-way streets?!
If the husband claims she does not have his permission to leave, and pursues her, grabs her by the hair, beats her, and drags her back into the house, is the husband justified in his actions because he did it to “save the marriage”? Has the marriage really been saved?
When one of those pot-shots takes off the tip of his ear, the husband might well say, "Man this b!tch is crazy!" and recognize her murderous intent. It sure is a good thing that he merely subdued her and didn't dispatch her like a rabid dog.
The wife and her family took revenge on the husband in every way they could for more than 100 years due to the resentment and hatred of what was done, and some of her family will never forget it.
It's sad how some folks are so shallow that they can't let the dead bury the past. Fortunately that sort of ancestral grudge holder is few and far in between.
“but I remember no historical evidence that he had “railroad buddies”.”
That’s because public schools have been teaching Lincoln was this “Honest Abe” that was humble and grew up in this little old cabin and wouldn’t harm a fly.
Fact is, he was the biggest lawyer in the mid-west.
Did you even know he served in Congress or that he even presented cases before the US Supreme Court?
Baloney cva - and you know it.
You mean like jeff davis and rel?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.