Posted on 04/28/2002 1:24:25 PM PDT by Ditto
Debate continues over 'The Real Lincoln'
Richard Ferrier counters critic of Abe in Metcalf interview
Editor's Note: WorldNetDaily talk-radio host Geoff Metcalf recently interviewed Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo, author of "The Real Lincoln." In his book, as in the interview published April 14, DiLorenzo claims the 16th president was far more concerned with economic centralization than the abolishment of slavery. The interview elicited strong responses from readers, about half of whom disagreed with the author's assertions. Among them was Dr. Richard Ferrier, president of the Declaration Foundation. According to Ferrier and scholars at the foundation, the evidence DiLorenzo uses to back his claims actually proves the author wrong. Ferrier, who calls DiLorenzo's scholarship "sloppy," explains the quandary in his interview with Metcalf.
Metcalf's daily streaming radio show can be heard on TalkNetDaily weekdays from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern time.
By Geoff Metcalf
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
Q: What is the bone you have to pick with Tom DiLorenzo?
A: Falsehood, basically. Falsehood in details, sloppiness of scholarship and a fundamentally wrong-headed view of the role of Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence, and American history and our political philosophy.
Q: One of the key items DiLorenzo focused on was his suggestion that the debate between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton was won for Hamilton by Lincoln. Was he wrong?
A: Yes, I think he's wrong. I think Jefferson and Hamilton fundamentally agreed, and Jefferson is the one DiLorenzo will pick as being on his side – that the American Union began not with the Constitution but with the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson said so in a letter to the board of governors.
Q: Tom said as much when he was here.
A: What that means is that we are a people with a limited but sovereign federal government under the rule of law whose spirit is given in the Declaration of Independence. I think on that point Hamilton and Jefferson agree, and they both disagree with Calhoun and Jefferson Davis and the people who started the rebellion of 1860-61. He's just wrong on that, but he's wrong on more gross and obvious matters.
Q: What I am specifically concerned with is what you claim are his factual errors.
A: Suppose I said to you, "Jesus said, 'I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones where I will store all my grains and all my goods, and I will say to my soul, soul you have ample goods laid up for many years. Take your ease and eat, drink and be merry.'" Is that true?
Q: Did Jesus say that?
A: He did. It's in a parable. He has somebody else say it. Jesus tells the story about the rich man, and those are the words of the rich man. So in a way, it's true that Jesus said that; he said it in quotation marks. He didn't say it himself.
Q: OK.
A: So listen to this from Tom DiLorenzo's book: "Lincoln even mocked the Jeffersonian dictum enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. He admitted that it had become a genuine coin in the political currency of our generation but added, 'I am sorry to say that I have never seen two men of whom it is true. But I must admit that I never saw the Siamese twins and therefore will not dogmatically say that no man ever saw proof of this sage aphorism.'" That is supposedly from Lincoln. DiLorenzo goes on to add, "So with the possible exception of Siamese twins the idea of equality, according to Lincoln, was a sheer absurdity." This is in stark contrast to the seductive words of the Gettysburg Address 11 years later, in which he purported to rededicate the nation to the notion that all men are created equal.
Q: There is a footnote in DiLorenzo's book regarding that quotation, citing the first Lincoln-Douglas debate.
A: Yes, and when I was researching the book, I dutifully followed up the footnote and read the passage. Rather, I didn't find the passage because it isn't there. It is nowhere in the first debate. It is nowhere in any of the debates. Where it is is in an 1852 eulogy of Henry Clay, and Lincoln is quoting a Virginia clergyman with whom he disagrees. In other words, it's a lie. Lincoln never said those words in his own voice. It is not only a lie, but it is either an incompetent or malicious inference that Lincoln contradicts himself in the Gettysburg Address when he declares his solemn faith in the American creed that "all men are created equal."
Q: DiLorenzo quotes Lincoln from the Lincoln-Douglas debates, saying, "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between white and black races, and I have never said anything to the contrary." Did Lincoln ever say that?
A: He did say that. But DiLorenzo has the citation wrong there, too. It is from a speech Lincoln gave in Peoria in 1854. Lincoln, who was a lawyer and was careful with his words, did not say "I do not believe in that equality. I do not think it is a good thing." He said, "I have no purpose to introduce it." Those are the words of a careful lawyerly politician who knows perfectly well how much good you can accomplish in your time and how much (if you espouse it) will ruin your career and keep you from accomplishing the good you can accomplish. So yes, it's perfectly true that Lincoln said, "I have no purpose," meaning, "I don't at the moment intend to bring about such equality." And if he had said anything else in Illinois in the 1850s, he couldn't have been elected to dogcatcher.
Q: DiLorenzo includes the Lincoln letter to Horace Greeley in 1862. Is that accurate?
A: Yes, but he cuts it off at the end.
Q: Hold on, here's the quote: "My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union; it is not to either save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it." What's the rest of it?
A: He continues, "I say nothing about my well-known desire that all men everywhere should be free." In other words, he's speaking as a public man with respect to his constitutional duty, which is to preserve the Union. Now it should be said that Lincoln thought the Union wasn't just a legal entity or a practical entity but an entity like a human being – a body and a soul. And the soul of that entity was the truths that are expressed in the Declaration, including the truth that all men are created equal.
I was a vice chair of the Proposition 209 [California's anti-discrimination law] campaign and a friend of Glynn Custred. This principle of human equality and treating people according to skin color or race is more than dear to me. I have labored in the vineyards for it. Lincoln thought the American Union was not just a matter of laws and conventions and agreements, but it was a kind of spiritual compact. He drew that from the Declaration that, itself, goes back to our Protestant colonial forebearers who believed from Scripture and reason that all men are created equal. So when Lincoln wanted to save the Union – and told Greeley that in a letter – Lincoln is thinking, "I will save the Union, whose heart and soul are the truths that are spoken of in the Declaration." In fact, if it was unwise in the short term to issue an Emancipation Proclamation, he would hold it off. When it was the right time to do it, he would do it.
Q: I asked Dr. DiLorenzo if, in his opinion, Lincoln was a dictator. He said that even some of the most pro-Lincoln historians had called him a dictator. Do you consider Lincoln a dictator?
A: No, I don't. That is a vexed question. By the way, it's a good question for both sides of the Civil War. One of the unhappy things about DiLorenzo's scholarship is that he pays no attention to broad historical context and doesn't look for example at the actions of Jeff Davis and the Confederate government. He finds fault with Lincoln for the suspension of habeas corpus, for various measures taken to suppress sedition in the states under control of the Union, and pays no attention …
Q: I didn't realize so many American citizens were thrown in the slammer just for disagreeing with him.
A: They weren't thrown in the slammer for disagreeing with him. They were thrown in the slammer for encouraging sedition and desertion. There is a long and complex scholarship on this, and you won't get much of it or a balance of it from the book. There was suppression of newspaper editors in Richmond, declaration of martial law in numerous areas of the Confederacy. The Confederacy instituted conscription in advance of the Union. Tom is a libertarian, and he thinks economic issues dominate everything. He thinks personal liberty is the absolute trump card in every argument. He's entitled to think that, but he applies that to Lincoln and the Union without a glance at the corresponding actions in the Confederacy.
Both parts of the American republic in that unhappy war did similar things, and they both did them with respect to sustaining the integrity and security of the Confederacy or the Union. Lincoln is consistently modifying the actions of his subordinates in the direction of liberty and leniency. He has hotheads he has to keep under his control – notably Ambrose Burnside and Ben Butler, who are responsible for unwise actions. And down the line, Lincoln reverses those actions in the direction of liberty. He did that because he conceived of the war and of his sustaining of the Union as a defense of fundamental human rights as expressed in the Declaration.
Q: I was intrigued by Tom's book, because I don't have a dog in this fight. My litmus test is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
A: I'd add the Declaration.
Q: Fine, we'll make it the troika. Several of the things Lincoln did were specifically designed to abrogate, eviscerate and destroy the very document to which he swore an oath. To say, "Well, gosh, the other guys were doing it too," is not an adequate defense.
A: That is fair enough. In a way, you almost want to look at what Davis and company said. Davis and company argued like Hamilton, and so did Lincoln. That is to say both men, Lincoln and Davis, saw their fundamental duty to support the integrity and security of the republic to which they saw themselves belonging. Of course, Lincoln never saw the Confederacy as a republic; he thought it was an insurrection. They looked at the sections of both the Confederate and U.S. Constitutions, in which the executive is given fairly broad powers with respect to seeing that the laws are upheld and that the public peace is maintained. They both made appeals of that sort. You can hammer out the details ad nasuem.
Q: And you academic guys do.
A: The one that is most plain and reasonable to think about, I think, is the suspension of habeas corpus. That is authorized in the United States Constitution. DiLorenzo and his friends niggle on a small point: that it's Article 1, Section 9, and not Article 2 under the executive power. But the whole first article is about the power of the United States government. Section 10 of Article 1 prohibits the states from doing a number of things. It is not restricted to the powers of Congress. The complaint, if I'm being obscure …
Q: You are.
A: What I'm saying is this: The complaint is Lincoln suspended habeas corpus for the sake of the security of the national capitol. When the bulk of the active powers in Maryland were about to prevent him from being inaugurated, prevent the United States Congress from meeting, organizing military forces to oppose the national government and the like, Lincoln cited Article 1, Section 9. Namely, that habeas corpus could be suspended in the case of insurrection or rebellion in defense of the Constitution and laws that he was sworn to uphold.
The confederates suspended habeas corpus, too, and for the same reason. Namely, that they were concerned with security within the Confederacy. I think in their own lights, both men were right. If the Confederacy was a government and had real independence, it couldn't put up with insurrection in the Confederacy. And there was insurrection in the Confederacy.
Q: What about the repression of all those newspaper editors? The numbers vary; I've heard from 13,000 to a gazillion.
A: Well, not 13,000 newspaper editors …
Q: No, but were the incarcerated people all preaching desertion and sedition, or were they merely critical of Lincoln and as a result got thrown in stony lonesome?
A: There were blockade runners. There was an extensive Confederate spy network. There were plans to disrupt public meetings in Ohio and Indiana. To look at that fairly, you have to look at the scholarship on it. There was an organized seditious campaign, especially in Ohio and Indiana. It was run in part by exiles from Canada in Canada, across the Great Lakes, with actual plans for violent acts and the encouragement of desertion from the United States armed forces. Among those people were newspaper editors. How would you have felt about that during the Vietnam War? What if there had been in Vancouver an organized pro-Viet Cong movement with financial arrangements to the North Vietnamese paying and organizing newspaper writers, agitators on the ground, and planning to disrupt American political meetings?
Q: I wouldn't tell or involve my government, but I'd take about four A-Teams and covertly visit and counsel the offenders with extreme prejudice.
A: Yes, but we didn't want to invade Canada. I feel kind of the same way. But that was the actual situation. When his generals went over the line on that and suppressed people who shouldn't have been suppressed, Lincoln was consistently on the side of clemency. It is an old and ugly grudge that is held against Lincoln and the Union for various reasons. I think partly regional sentimentality, partly racism sometimes and various other reasons make people state a one-sided case against a man who sustained the founding principles of this country.
Q: You are accusing DiLorenzo of sloppy and disingenuous scholarship. Can you give me an example?
A: In support of his thesis, he says, "In virtually every one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln made it a point to champion this corrupt economic agenda …"
Q: Which was the excessive tariffs.
A: Tariffs and internal improvements and a number of other things of that sort.
Q: I'm still not clear on the subtleties of "internal improvements."
A: It's like chartering canal companies and banks and things. He gives a footnote to that, and it's to the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Go look in those debates; there is not a word about this economic agenda. Not a word! Let me read from the Oxford history of this period. It's called "Battle Cry of Freedom," written by Dr. James McPherson, and it is a very respectable book. It's sort of the standard work on the matter. He talks about the Lincoln-Douglas debates:
"Desiring to confront Douglas directly, Lincoln proposed a series of debates." The famous debates that school kids used to read back in the days when we actually taught them something about American history. "The stakes were higher than a senatorial election. Higher even than the looming presidential contest of 1860 … for the theme of the debates was nothing less than the future of slavery and the Union. Tariffs, banks, internal improvements, corruption and other staples of American politics received not a word in these debates."
Q: Nothing about the excessive tariffs?
A: Nothing. I teach this at my college. I must have read and re-read seven debates 20 times. Trust me, Geoff, there is not a word about tariffs in those debates. Nothing.
Q: There is no argument that the tariffs imposed by the North on the South were draconian. You wouldn't refute that, would you?
A: The tariff of 1857, which was the existing tariff at the time, had bipartisan support. The South Carolina delegation voted for it. It was the lowest tariff in 20 years. That's not to say there wasn't debate about tariffs.
Q: The tariffs went from about 15 percent to 40 percent. I'd call that a big hike.
A: Yes, but that's two-and-a-half years later, in 1861. Democrat president James Buchanan signed that tariff, and it had bipartisan support. He called for its passage; he didn't just support it. In the '58 Senate contest and their seven famous debates, Douglas and Lincoln did not cross swords once over tariffs or the bank or internal improvements. I'm sorry to say this, Geoff, but what DiLorenzo says is a lie. These debates are available online. The books are widely published. Your readers should just go out and look. Also, the Declaration Foundation has a number of articles and a forum discussing this very matter of DiLorenzo's book and the legacy of Lincoln.
Q: DiLorenzo includes references to Frances Key Howard and Rep. Vallandigham. What can you tell us about them?
A: I don't know about the first one, but Clement Vallandigham was a Democrat from Ohio. When I mentioned Ambrose Burnside, Vallandigham was the congressman who gave speeches calling for the end of the war and for resistance to conscription …
Q: And against protectionist tariffs and the income tax.
A: That's right, but there was an income tax when he gave the speech that got him in trouble.
Q: My question is about congressional immunity. Unfortunately, Congress critters can get away with saying anything they want, as long as they say it in the well of Congress. How did Vallandigham end up getting his front door kicked in by federal soldiers?
A: He gave his speeches out in his home area in Ohio. The local general, Ambrose Burnside, thought it was treason and put him under arrest right away. When the facts came back to Lincoln, he thought it was unwise and possibly illegal, and he undid Burnside's action. What they offered him was a free pass through Confederate lines. And it's Vallandigham who wound up in Canada organizing seditious anti-Union, and sometimes violent, groups in the period of '63-'64, to undermine the national war effort. But Lincoln let him out. Lincoln turned the key. Burnside is the guy who did that, and Lincoln didn't think it was the right thing to do.
Q: What about the Morrill tariff bill, which bumped the tariff from 15 percent to 47 percent?
A: That bill would never have passed if the Southern states had not seceded. It passed in the Senate – before Lincoln was president, by the way – because 14 Southern senators were out of the Senate. They could have blocked it, but they walked out in advance.
When the neo-Rebels say the tariff was the cause of the war, they conveniently overlook the fact that South Carolina withdrew on December 20th of 1860 – not because of any tariff that had been passed or signed, but because Abraham Lincoln, who declared that slavery was a moral wrong, had been elected president of the United States. The Morrill tariff that you are referring to was not passed until three months after South Carolina and six other states went out.
Q: So if they blame secession on the tariff, they are being more than a little disingenuous.
A: They are doing a little bit of time travel.
The Declaration Foundation's initial response to Thomas DiLorenzo's interview with Geoff Metcalf, written by David Quackenbush, was published by WorldNetDaily on April 23.
Thomas J. DiLorenzo's book, "The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War," is available at Amazon.com.
Visit Geoff Metcalf's archive for previous "Sunday Q&A" interviews.
Notice how this foreshadows the 10th Amendment. No accident there.
It doesn't foreshadow the 10th amendment because the word "expressly" was expressly left out of the latter.
Forgive the Dr. Suess-like sentence, but whether or not to include the word "expressly" WAS debated at the Constitutional Convention. And they left it out, expresssly for this reason:
"Even the 10th amendment, which was framed for the purpose of quieting the excessive jealousies which had been excited, omits the word "expressly," and declares that the powers "not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited to the states are reserved to the states or to the people," thus leaving the question, whether the particular power which may become the subject of contest, has been delegated to the one government, or prohibited to the other, to depend on a fair reading of the whole instrument.
The men who drew and adopted this amendment had experienced the embarrassments resulting from the insertion of this word in the articles of confederation, and probably omitted it, to avoid those embarrassments. A constitution, to contain an accurate detail of all the subdivisions of which its great powers will admit, and of all the means by which they may be carried into execution, would partake of the prolixity of a legal code, and could scarcely be embraced by the human mind. It would probably never be understood by the public.
Its nature, therefore, requires, that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objectives designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects,, be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves. That is the idea entertained by the framers of the American constitution, is not only to be inferred from the nature of the instrument, but from its language. Why else were some of the limitations, found in the 9th section of the 1st article, introduced? ....
The subject is the execution of those great powers on which the welfare of the nation essentially depends. It must have been the intention of those who gave these powers, to insure, their beneficial execution. This could not be done, by confining the choice of means to such narrow limits as not to leave it in the power of congress to adopt any which might be appropriate, and which were conclusive to the end.
...any means adapted to the end, any means which tended drectly to the execution of the constitutional powers of the government are themselves constitutional."
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, 1819
The Congress is charged with providing for the general welfare and the common defense of the United States. Anything inimical to those ends are covered in Marshall's ruling. The Congress clearly is empowered to deal lwith them. This includes secession. The right to secession CANNOT be retained to the states because the right of perpetuity is retained by the federal government.
Walt
Walt, the only way you can get to this conclusion is to throw out the Declaration of Independence and say that "We the people" belong to the United States government instead of the other way around.
I can say it by pointing out that the D of I is not the law of the land. The Constitution is.
If the government becomes abusive of its powers, then is the time to call the D of I into play.
Walt
Which the South did when it seceded.
Which the South did when it seceded.
I always ask this, and I NEVER get an answer.
Lay out the long train of abuses prior to 1860 of the type that TJ lays out in the D of I.
Walt
Particularly given Democrat and Southern domination of the Senate and White House in the decades before the rebellion.
The "abuse" that was "intolerable" was the advent of a federal administration that was resolved in principle to treat slavery as a Constitutionally protected evil in the states where it existed, and to oppose it strenuously wherever state authority did not protect it. That was intolerable to the Slave Power.
People who depend on the parts of the D of I easily committed to memory are typically going to be surprised and chagrined when the record is a bit more fully explored. :)
They get out the Brasso and lovingly shine up their replica Great Seal of the CSA with George Washington's image, never realizing that he was perhaps the single most adamant proponent of UNION.
Walt
Lincoln's argument would obviously be that it lies within the scope of Art. II, Section 2, paragraph 1 ("The President shall be Commander in Chief...").
Would you argue that the Judicial branch has this power as well?
Such an argument could perhaps be plausibly made. Note as I stated earlier that in Ex parte Bollman and Swartwout the Supreme Court held that the federal courts had the authority to issue a writ of habeas corpus even in the absence of statutory authorization from Congress. Where is that power enumerated in the Constitution?
So why have a three month delay before Congress convened?
Aside from the logistical difficulties of getting Congressmen from Oregon and California to D.C. (even by Pony Express it took at least 7 days for mail to move between telegraph stations in April 1861), Washington wasn't exactly a safe place to be in April 1861, and until Bull Run, Lincoln (and almost everyone else in the Union) anticipated a short war. Nevertheless, he called Congress in for the special session which convened on July 4, 1861. I'm not sure when Lincoln called for the special session, but it appears he wanted to give every Congressman plenty of time to get their personal affairs in order and travel to Washington and he also wanted to take advantage of the Independence Day symbolism. Note that he had suspended habeas corpus on April 27 and Taney had issued his Merryman ruling on May 28.
Ambiguous? Only if you don't believe in "separation of powers", limited powers, "checks and balances".
Stack up all of the paper it has taken to interpret the U.S. Constition and then tell me if you still believe that.
What do we do, add an amendment "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"?
Of course, that provision still requires judges to determine exactly what power has been delegated and whether the powers not delegated are reserved to the people or the states.
And your point is? Do we let everyone slide?
I thought I was pretty clear about that. I'd like to see more energy focused on improving the Constitution rather than blaming the politicians who take advantage of its weaknesses, loopholes, and ambiguities.
Was Lincoln above the law? Pardon me, but Lincoln insisted that the seceded states had never left, yet southern property was seized in the blockades, a violation of property rights.
As I've stated, Lincoln was acting within the scope of a plausible, good faith interpretation of his Article II powers as Commander in Chief. Would you have preferred that he acted meekly and permitted the Southern slaveocracy to survive in perpetuity?
Unable to win on the battlefield, Lincoln made innocent civilians legitimate military targets, women and children slaughtered, property and crops destroyed.
Now you've gone way off the deep end into Confederate fantasyland. The Union forces prevailed on the battlefield without slaughtering women and children. Certainly there were innocent civilians who were caught in the crossfire from time to time as in all wars, but they were not targeted by the Union forces. Property and crops were legitimate military targets, since they provided the fuel, sustenance, and transportation of the Confederate forces. There certainly was some retaliatory property damage in areas in which the inhabitants were known to have provided aid and comfort to Confederate guerillas/raiders like Forrest, Morgan, Mosby, and Quantrill. There were also numerous incidents of rogue soldiers harming civilians by both sides in the war. In comparison to other wars before and after, however, the Civil War was a rather civilized conflict.
After the war, the Confederate states ratified the 13th as a condition of RE-admission to the union, then refused to ratify the 14th Amendment, which promptly led to them being "declared out of the union" (which is what they wanted in the 1st place, but their vote on the 13th put them back into a union they allegedly never left), the federal government deprived millions the right of suffrage. Hundreds of thousands of southerners were killed, raped, robbed, and starved, millions of dollars of property stolen during reconstruction, and you and others have the audacity to insist that "we" are picking on someone?
Lincoln had nothing to do with reconstruction. In fact, it was the Confederates' assassination of him that triggered the harshness of reconstruction, and once again, the ambiguities of the Constitution made it easier for that harsh treament to occur.
Slavery was legal at the time, and was still practiced in Illinois after the start of the War for Southern Independence.
Slavery was outlawed in Illinois by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Given that Southern Illinois was surrounded on two sides by slave states, however, it is not surprising that there are reports of slaveholding in "Little Egypt" -- and of course the fugitive slave laws made it easier for people to get away with that.
Blacks were not wanted in the North, and what few were there were despised.
There is an immense moral difference between merely not wanting to associate with people and enslaving them. Americans (especially poorer white people) have never been very enthusiastic about hordes of refugees pouring into their neighborhoods. The Northern Democrats certainly took advantage of that anxiety in their campaigns against the Republicans. Nevertheless, by the end of the war people like Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln had made great strides in persuading most fair minded Americans that negroes could become full citizens without shattering American society.
Brazil and several other countries all ended slavery well after the war - and without a war.
" By 1872, there were 4.25 million free blacks and mulattos, and they accounted for at least three-quarters of all African Brazilians (as compared to a mere 262,000 or 6 percent of all African Americans in the U.S. South on the eve of emancipation)." Source.
Despite these much more favorable numbers, slavery was not abolished in Brazil until 1888. If you were a slave in the South in 1865, would you be comfortable with waiting even as little as 23 years for your liberty?
In his inaugural address, Lincoln made it perfectly clear that all he wanted was the revenues from Southern ports. He stated uneqivocally that he had no desire nor authority to interfere with anything - only that he wanted the money. That in itself, puts to rest any legitimate claims that the war was to preserve the union, or to free the slaves.
Hardly. Lincoln made it very clear when he was inaugurated that his first priority was preserving the Union. He had also made it very clear during the campaign that although he despised slavery, he preferred to try to appeal to Southerners' Jeffersonian instincts to negotiate a peaceful end to slavery.
The radical Republicans, on the other hand, made it clear that they were determined to abolish slavery as soon as possible. The Confederates made little distinction between radical Republicans and moderate Republicans, labeling them all "Black Republicans". I give the Confederates credit for being smart enough to see the writing on the wall if they remained in the Union and maintained their affinity for slavery. You apparently do not, even though you have the advantage of knowing what happened to the institution of slavery during the war at a time when abolishing it was not the President's first priority.
"The Declaration does not say that the right to self-determiniation is conditional."
Yes, it does. Or rather, it means that the right to self-determination is not conditional, but qualified. The right to self-government arises from human equality and the divine endowment of rights, and its legitimate exercise must, accordingly, to be rational, be claimed in light of its origin. You disagree with the Declaration when you speak of an absolute right to self-determination.
==================================
Notice how you get 'no response' when an obvious fallacy is pointed out in ROL's position.
As you & others here have made clear, the Declaration qualifies; -- "That to secure these Rights, - [inalienable rights, - to life, liberty, property] - Governments are instituted among men," -----.
Seeing that only a republican form of constitutional government can 'secure' such rights, it is specious of ROL to claim that our declaration would allow states to secede to form ANY type of government that a states majority would will.
In reality, his position is clear. He disagrees with certain basic principles of both the declaration & the constitution/bill of rights.
He favors majority rule, - statism. - And refuses to admit this simple truth.
Read the D of I. It says, "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. "
Yes, The D of I lists greivences against King George. But the heart of the matter is that whenever the people no longer consent to a particular form of government, the just powers of that government are at an end. The people of the South no longer consented to be governed by the United States. The government of the United States did not have the right to impose their will on the people of the South.
You may not agree with what the South believed, but it is not your place (nor was it Lincoln's) to impose your beliefs on the people of the South. To impose a government on the unwilling is tyranny.
You obviously don't honor the D of I.
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Were the secessionists acting prudently?
Walt
Excellent point. Do you think we'll ever see one of the Confederate glorifiers publishing a book trashing Andrew Jackson?
Two of the states had to hold special elections to select Congressmen to the special session.
If my memory is correct, and this fact is true, it would seem to be another reason that the 2 1/2 (not three months -- it was 4/17/61 -- 7/4/61, I believe) time period was perfectly reasonable, as you indicate.
Other factors making the date Lincoln set reasonable, if not too soon, include this: Congressmen and Senators coming to Washington were leaving behind -- unexpectedly -- the constituents, citizens and state legislators, whom they were to represent. They were going to a special session of unique importance in the history of the Republic. Once in Washington, or on the road, consultation with those constituents would become nearly impossible. And yet the decisions to be made in Washington were of the absolutely first order of importance. Surely it was necessary to make sure that representatives left their states with some confident opinion of what their constituents wished them to do. And this would also have added some days or weeks to the reasonable time it would take for such a deliberative body to assemble.
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the "delay" is among the most unreasonable criticisms leveled at Lincoln, and shows again how willing his critics are to hit him with any stick they can find, reasonable or not.
As I have pointed out in a private reply to Mr. Quackenbush, I have not forgotten him and will reply when I collect the necessary data.
Mr. Paine, I have asked you to quit these childish personal attacks on me. I will ask you one more time to cease. Your personal attacks on people (and I'm certainly not the only person you routinely attack) do not add to the debate. They do not do anything except disrupt this forum.
If you have something to add, some fact or some, reasonable, logical argument, then by all means, add it. Don't distort other people's arguments. Don't insult people. And don't play out childish vendettas against people.
It is not for you or me to decide whether they were prudent. And you will notice that the D of I says whenever the people think their government needs to change, they can change it. It then goes on to say that if they are prudent, they won't do so rashly.
I do not believe that the people of Sweden are prudent for adopting socialism. But who am I to impose my will on the people of Sweden? I do not consider Islamic fundementalism a prudent form of government. But if the people of the Middle East wish to live under that form of government, it's up to them.
The fact that you may not believe the South was prudent does not mean that you would be right to deny them their self-determination.
What is the Southern explanation, by the way, for the enormous tariffs DURING the war, after the South was gone?
As I have indicated, my bookmarks for the reasons for secession are at home. I will post the links when I can.
But even if they do not list the tariff, it was an issue they felt so strongly about that they outlawed protectionist tariffs in the Confederate Constitution.
As for tariffs during the war, Lincoln had to get money somewhere. He used high tariffs and paper money.
I disagree with you. Read it again. You are wanting to read the section about prudence as a requirement for self-determination. It says that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Not, governments derive their just powers from the consent of the goverened as long as the people are prudent. Or even morally right.
I don't believe that the people in Iran, for instance, are morally right. They certainly don't believe in human equality. But I also believe they have the right to determine their form of government. I disagree with that form of government. But I don't think that anyone has the right to impose a government on the people of Iran without their consent. Do you?
And if it would be wrong to impose a government on the people of Iran without their consent, how can it be right to impose a government on the people of the South without their consent?
My apologies.
Not so. A southern minority of the citizens of the US no longer consented to a valid constitutional republics overall views on ending a violation of human rights, - slavery. They rebelled against their own constitutions principles.
The people of the South no longer consented to be governed by the United States. The government of the United States did not have the right to impose their will on the people of the South.
The people of the south had no right to oppose the clear intent of the constitution to abolish slavery, as Article I section 9, infers. - They chose violent rebellion to resolve political differences over human rights, in the stead of constitutional remedies. Big mistake. Their fellow citizens had every right to enforce & defend the constitution & the entire republic from such a division.
Actually, as pointed out, the whole of the world didn't move away from slavery. It is still alive in much of the world. Africa, the Middle East, much of Asia still practices slavery. Unfortunately, we have a long way to go before we eliminate slavery.
In the places where slavery was abolished, it was almost without exception done peacefully, generally through compensated emancipation or through phasing out slavery over a period of years. And while the Psalms singers like to take credit for ending slavery, it was really simple economics that did the trick. Owning slaves just didn't pay. (We might as well face facts, for many people, if not most, money counts for more than morality.)
Don't think I am defending slavery or defending the South's stance on slavery. But this is not a question of whether slavery was right or wrong. There's no question that slavery is wrong. It is a question of whether people may decide what kind of government they will live under.
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