Posted on 05/20/2014 8:57:04 AM PDT by Sioux-san
Not much media coverage, not much fanfare, not much reflection. A war that carved over 600,000 lives from the nation when the nation’s population was just 31 million. To compare, that would equate to a loss of life in today’s population statistics, not to mention limb and injury, of circa 6 million.
We are in the month of May, when 150 years ago Grant crossed the Rapidan to engage Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Lee stood atop Clark’s Mountain and watched this unknown (to the eastern theatre) entity lead a massive army into Lee’s home state. Soon there would be the Wilderness, where forest and brushfires would consume the wounded and dying. Days later, the battle of Spotsylvania ensued, in which hand-to-hand combat would last nearly 12 hours. Trading casualties one for one and rejecting previous prisoner exchange and parole procedures, Grant pushed on, to the left flank. The Battle of the North Anna, then the crossing of the James, and thus into the siege of Petersburg. This was 1864 in the eastern theatre.
Today there is hardly a whisper of the anniversary of these deeds, sacrifices, and destruction. Why?
One can suppose that the weak treatment of history at the alleged higher levels of education in this country contributes to the lack of attention. “It was about slavery; now on to WWI.” The War between the States was so much more complicated than the ABC treatment that academia presents. And as the old saying goes, the more complicated the situation, the more the bloodshed...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The only thing more pathetic than drawing comparisons between Lincoln and Hitler (I call Godwin’s Law BTW) is stooping to Di Lorenzo to do it.
Well, I count Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton among our Founding generation. Not long after Washington began his first term as President, Hamilton started pushing the idea of chartering a Bank of the United States. Jefferson argued that the plan was unconstitutional. The debate concerned in part the interpretation of the Constitution's "necessary and proper" clause.
Hamilton's argument can be found here.
Jefferson's argument can be found here.
If ever you are able to read and understand those two arguments, you will discover that members of our Founding generation found plenty of room for debate and disagreement about the interpretation to be given to our Constitution. Had you been there at the time, you might have been able to convince President Washington that one or the other of these two Founders was clearly correct and the other clearly incorrect. Maybe the immediacy, the simplicity and the clarity of your interpretation would have thoroughly amazed and impressed all three of them. Maybe Washington might have fired both Jefferson and Hamilton and let you serve as both Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury.
Or, maybe not.
In the end, Washington sided with Hamilton. Was Washington clearly right or clearly wrong?
Extra Credit - Is George Washington to blame for our having a federal Department of Education?
Hint for Extra Credit Question - Washington had slaves at Mt. Vernon and he never took away anybody's slaves.
The “necessary and proper clause” does NOT grant substantive enumerated powers. In the monetary arena, for example, the experience with the Continental gave rise to the Federal government’s power being limited to only the enumerated power of coining of money. Coining money requires a mint or contracting with a mint. That would be “necessary and proper”. Creating a Central Bank obviously is not “necessary or proper” with respect to carrying out the function of making coins. Hamilton, Marshall and others were engaged in trying to get by chicanery and stealth what had been denied them in the compromise that resulted in the Bill of Rights and Constitution. They were much more persistent and consistent than their opposition. I’ll give them that, but that seems to be true of statists generally, perhaps because capturing government and expanding it provides them with a considerable payoff.
Washington’s biographers will tell you that he had little grasp of the financial issues that were Hamilton’s forte. Washington was mainly what the historians call a “military” federalist. He wanted the Constitution because he believed, rightly IMHO, that a somewhat more powerful federal government would be able to defend the US better from foreign aggression. I also agree with Washington’s foreign policy advice in his Farewell Address. On the other issues, he largely listened to Hamilton, with whom he had been close. Hamilton got part of what he wanted in the Constitution, and then he, and others like him, got busy trying to get by other means what they didn’t get in the first place.
You need to disabuse yourself of the notion that the Constitution was personal to a small group of people and that it was theirs to change as their political objectives changed. Madison was quite clear that the actual founders were the ratifying conventions, which is the legal fact. The plain meaning of “Congress shall make no law...”, for example, can’t legitimately be changed by Washington, Adams, or anyone else deciding that the restriction was inconvenient. If that had been the Constitutional plan, it never would have been ratified, which would have been a shame.
I guess you really are on the same page as the progressive left; you just would like a somewhat different agenda.
Hey! The Lincolnolaters need your help on a Corwin Amendment thread ;-)
Well, there you go. Here we have three members of our Founding generation (Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton) struggling and wrestling with an issue of Constitution interpretation and you feel comfortable in finding that the answer adopted by President Washington and Secretary Hamilton was just obviously wrong. You must at times wonder how Washington, Hamilton and others could have become so confused about the one and only true and correct interpretation of the Constitution that you have so readily discovered. How could they have completely missed the answer that you think is so obvious?
Listen, any person who can read the competing arguments of Jefferson and Hamilton and conclude as you do that there is only one simple and obvious answer is a person who obviously doesn't understand the complexity of the question. Given that Washington was the presiding officer at our Constitutional Convention, you should be a bit more reluctant to assume that Washington's views about the meaning of the Constitution are so obviously inferior to yours.
Not exactly. He deported an ex-Congressman who had recently lost his campaign for re-election. And one who was quite literally (in the actual meaning of the word, not the Biden sense) guilty of treason by the Constitution's definition, though this was never proven in a court of law.
That was of course the Founders' position.
"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
From 1861 to 1865 a rebellion was in full swing, and every year from 1861 to 1864 invasions of actual Union states by large forces in the service of a purported "foreign power" took place.
IOW, throughout the Civil War both rebellion and invasion were in progress, fully authorizing suspension of habeas corpus and other civil rights if "the public safety requires it."
One can make a claim that the public safety did not require such action, in which case the suspension of civil rights would not be constitutional. But I don't think there is a very good argument for such a position.
By what calendar? Everything I've seen says Sherman was born on February 8.
Every day is Sherman’s Birthday to a Lost Cause Loser ;’)
Maybe it's understandable. They've got more Confederate Memorial days than you can shake a stick at.
Despite generations of pro-Confederate propaganda, there's no historical evidence of mass rapes or murder by any Union army, including Sherman's.
As for "pillage", that term describes the Confederate army whenever it left the Confederacy (which was more often than people want to admit), and only fails to describe Confederate army behavior within the Confederacy by the legal fiction of worthless money used to requisition its supplies.
As for Sherman's "tough love", it's fair to say: he understood the South better than most, and what it would take to defeat them.
In November 1860 -- immediately after the election of Abraham Lincoln and his "Black Republicans", when Deep South Fire Eaters began organizing to declare secession -- then there was no actual threat to slavery, whatever.
In Novembert 1860, the Federal government was still largely under control of the Democrat slave-power and its Northern Dough-Faced minions -- i.e., President James Buchanan.
The Supreme Court was still ruled over by Southern Chief Justice Taney, of Dred-Scott fame.
Even the so-called "Black Republican" Party, was pledged to protect slavery within states where it was already legal.
The only possible threat to slavery involved territories which had not yet determined their slave/free status, and of those, Republicans pledged to protect ones who wished to become free states.
In other words, Republicans favored choice while the Slave-Power wanted its "peculiar institution" imposed everywhere, thanks to Taney's Dred-Scott decision.
Point is: in November 1860, the only real threat to slavery -- "existential" or otherwise -- was in the fertile & overheated imaginations of the Slave-Power Fire Eaters.
In fact, there is solid proof that our Founders knew exactly what they were doing constitutionally, on this issue and others.
The proof is that where they determined a need for Constitutional Amendments, they went ahead and passed them -- the 11th & 12th Amendments were adopted in the 1790s.
That demonstrates beyond all reasonable doubt where our Founders believed they needed Amendments, and where simple laws passed by Congress, signed by the President, were adequate constitutionally.
Suggest you go back and take another look at how those freedom-loving Founders treated those of their fellow citizens who disagreed with them on whether America should split with Britain.
The Tories were treated MUCH worse than rebels were during the War Between the States and its aftermath.
http://threerivershms.com/loyalistspersecution.htm
That's how the Founders themselves treated those who fought them in a civil war.
Since we are in revisionist la la land I’d say if I could go back in time I would like to put a Lapua .338 sniper rifle in a confederate sharpshooters hands somewhere along the line on Sherman’s march from Atlanta to Savannah. We could have loved him back. :-)
You are naïve. The entire bank fiasco was a political deal that, in part got, the capitol moved to the Potomac, which was a pet project of Washington’s. The Constitution says what the enumerated power is regarding money, and the men you have on a pedestal were not merely mortal, but politicians, too. This isn’t uncommon. The same thing has been going on in the Eurozone with the ECB. The people (especially the German public) was given express treaty language prohibiting “quantitative easing. With the Euro in place and the ECB up and running, the “founding fathers” there are violating what the people signed up for.
Yeah, it's hard for us to imagine a Supreme Court justice writing such baloney.
But, time moves on. Generations come and go. Lincoln is now generally regarded as one of our two or three greatest presidents.
Nearly everyone now recognizes that the slaveholders were trapped in a pathological culture of dependency from which they could not escape without intervention by an external force. Lincoln and the Union provided the tough love that slaveholders desperately needed to discover that they really could face the world on the their own two feet without the support of slaves. That is why most of their descendants are now grateful to Lincoln for all that he did to end slavery and grateful, too, to the United States for reconstructing Southern culture and creating what we know now as the New South.
Progress continues. There are now fewer people than ever who are burdened with hatred for the abolitionists or resentment for the elimination of slavery. They may be as noisy as ever, but they are very few in number now and, if asked, most of them will now bitterly concede that slavery is gone - gone forever and never coming back.
The Founders fought a War of Independence, a war of secession from the British Empire. Your claim regarding the Tories is quite debatable, but also beside the point. You are talking about a period before the Constitution by which the states had created a federal republic that was to be bound by certain rules. In fact, after the founding in the situation most analogous to part of the Lincoln dictatorship, the Federalists’ Alien & Sedition Act, was repudiated by most of the Founding generation, and its repeal was forced in 1802.
Of the four acts in question, some are still on the books. Several lapsed, but none were repealed.
Try to be patient with yourself. Slavery was a losing issue long before you were born. Try not to personalize it. None of it is your fault. ;-)
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