Posted on 05/01/2002 4:26:35 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
One thing that can never be admitted in polite academic company is the notion that economics had anything to do with the American War between the States. This may seem strange, since wars throughout all of economic history have had important economic components, but it is true nevertheless. For example Richard Ferrier, a critic of my book, The Real Lincoln, recently insisted in a WorldNetDaily interview that in the Lincoln-Douglas debates “there is not a word about [Lincoln’s] economic agenda. Not a word!’
Absolutely correct. There are many words, not just one. Such as during the July 17, 1858, debate in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln said to Douglas, “You remember we once had a national bank . . . the Supreme Court decided that the bank was unconstitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General Jackson himself asserted that he, as president, would not be bound to hold a national bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided to do so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. Jefferson, and acted upon it under official oath, in vetoing a charter for a national bank.”
Lincoln here was voicing his career-long animosity toward the Democratic Party’s opposition to central banking. Ferrier’s rather hysterical claim that there was “not a word” about any economic agenda in the Lincoln-Douglas debates is simply untrue.
Indeed, a major component of the debates – Lincoln’s opposition to the extension of slavery into the new territories – had a huge economic component. One of the reasons Lincoln and the Republican Party establishment gave for their opposition was, as he stated in his October 16, 1854, speech, that “the whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these [new] territories. We want them for the homes of free white people. This they cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted with them.”
Labor market protectionism was a basis for Lincoln’s opposition to the extension of slavery. A key strategy of the Republican Party was to buy votes from white laborers in the territories by promising to protect their jobs from competition with slave labor. This was not a very attractive position to hold, but it was indeed economically and politically motivated, despite Ferrier’s denials of any economic agenda appearing in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Ferrier invokes the authority of James McPherson, who also said there was no talk of banks in the debates, but McPherson is clearly wrong in light of the above quotation. There was no great emphasis on monetary policy, but Lincoln did bring it up.
Ferrier also misstates my position in asserting that “neo-Rebels,” whatever that may mean, argue that “the tariff was the cause of the war” (emphasis added).” I do not say this; he is setting up a straw-man argument. What I say in the book is that the tariff issue was one among many issues in the war, and one that has been studiously ignored or downplayed by people like Ferrier.
He argues that the Morrill Tariff of 1861 was passed before Lincoln was inaugurated and uses that fact to make the case that Lincoln did not care about the tariff and that it had nothing to do with secession. He is being deceptive here, since I say the same thing in The Real Lincoln. I do not claim that Lincoln was in office when the U.S. Senate passed the tariff shortly before his inauguration. What I do say, though, is that as the leader of the Republican Party and its presidential candidate he must have had a hand in the political maneuvering that was involved in getting the tariff passed. I also quote Richard Bensel, author of the book, Yankee Leviathan (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), as saying that the Morrill Tariff was “the centerpiece of the Republican Party platform” of 1860. If it was not “the” centerpiece it was certainly “a”centerpiece, and Lincoln, as the party’s presidential nominee, was expected to enforce it when elected.
As the great historian of tariff history, Frank Taussig, wrote in Tariff History of the United States (p. 158), the Morrill Tariff “was passed, undoubtedly, with the intention of attracting to the Republican Party, at the approaching Presidential election, votes in Pennsylvania and other States that had protectionist leanings.”
Several southern states had already seceded, including South Carolina in December, when it was apparent that the tariff would probably pass the Senate and would be enforced by Lincoln, the career-long protectionist. Again, this is not to say that the tariff was the sole cause of the war, but it was certainly relevant.
Lincoln did play a more direct role with regard to the tariff in his First Inaugural Address, as I argue in The Real Lincoln. There he stated, “The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion – no using force against, or among the people anywhere.”
I attempt to put this in historical context in my book. South Carolina nullified the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, forcing Andrew Jackson to back down and negotiate a lower tariff rate by 1833. That tariff originally had a 40 percent average rate. Southern statesmen continued to complain about tariffs, though, since according to Taussig, by 1860 the import-dependent South was paying some 80 percent of all tariffs. But by 1857, writes Taussig, the United States enjoyed the closest proximity to free trade that would exist in the nineteenth century, with an average tariff rate of around 15 percent.
Then in the 1859-1860 congressional session the House of Representatives passed the Morrill tariff, followed by the Senate in the next session, in early 1861, just before Lincoln’s inauguration. The average rate would soon be elevated to 47.06 percent, according to Taussig.
So, Southerners had been complaining bitterly about being plundered by the tariff, paying some 80 percent of it while, in their view, most of the money was being spent in the North. Then the Republican Party gains power and, before anyone expects a war, more than triples the average rate at a time when the tariff was the primary source of federal tax revenue; there was no income tax yet. Then Lincoln makes his First Inaugural Address and says it is his duty to “collect the duties and imposts” (among other things) and, as long as those much higher duties are collected, “there will be no invasion.”
My interpretation of these events is this: The tripling of the average tariff rate was the keystone of the Republican Party platform of 1860, as Richard Bensel argues. Once in power, Lincoln announced to the South, effectively: We are going to make tax slaves out of you by tripling the rate of taxation, and as long as you collect these taxes there will be no military invasion. He was not going to back down to the South Carolinian nullifiers, as Andrew Jackson did.
This was being done while the Confederate Constitution was outlawing protectionist tariffs altogether, which would have caused most of the trade of the world to be diverted from high-tariff Northern ports to lower-tariff Southern ones. Some Northern newspapers affiliated with the Republican Party were openly calling for the bombardment of Southern ports (before Fort Sumter). “Let the South adopt the free-trade system,” the Daily Chicago Times editorialized on December 10, 1860, and the North’s “commerce must be reduced to less than half of what it now is.” The Newark Daily Advertiser editorialized on April 2, 1861, that Southerners had apparently “taken to their bosoms the liberal and popular doctrine of free trade,” which “must operate to the serious disadvantage of the North.” The paper called South Carolina the “chief instigator” of these free-trade doctrines, and called for the “closing of the ports” in the South by military force. Ferrier’s casual dismissal of the role of the tariff in the war as only being of interest to “neo-Rebels” is ahistorical.
Ferrier continues to insist that economics (besides the economics of slavery) had nothing to do with Lincoln’s election and the South’s reaction to it, but the preeminent Lincoln scholar, Pulitzer Prize winning Lincoln biographer David Donald, would probably disagree. In his book, Lincoln Reconsidered (p. 106)., Donald quotes U.S. Senator John Sherman, the brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman and a major Republican Party figure in the U.S. Senate during the war, as explaining why Lincoln was elected: “Those who elected Mr. Lincoln,”said Senator Sherman, “expect him . . . to secure to free labor its just right to the Territories of the United States; to protect . . . by wise revenue laws, the labor of our people; to secure the public lands to actual settlers . . . ; to develop the internal resources of the country by opening new means of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific.”
David Donald claims to interpret this remark “from the politician’s idiom” into plain English by saying that Lincoln and the Republicans “intended to enact a high protective tariff that mothered monopoly, to pass a homestead law that invited speculators to loot the public domain, and to subsidize a transcontinental railroad that afforded infinite opportunities for jobbery.”
Donald left one thing out – the first sentence, in which the first goal of the Republican Party, according to Senator Sherman, was labor market protectionism. “To secure to free labor its just right to the Territories” meant to keep slavery out, not for moral but for purely economic and political reasons.
In conclusion, one of the most prominent Republicans of Lincoln’s time, and perhaps the most prominent Lincoln biographer of our time, are of the opinion that economics was at the heart of Lincoln’s ascendancy to the presidency. In Sherman’s interpretation, the basic stratagy of the party was to buy votes and campaign contributions from 1) protectionist manufacturers; 2) mining and timber companies who would get cheap federal land; 3) Subsidy-seeking railroad corporations and associated industries; and 4) white laborers who did not want competition for jobs from either freed blacks or slaves.
One is inclined to assume that the reason why people like Ferrier so hysterically deny that Lincoln had any economic motivations, despite having spent a 25-year political career promoting the Whig Party’s economic agenda, is that they are deathly afraid that the public will begin to develop an interest in the real Lincoln, as opposed to the fantasy Lincoln that has been created by the cartel of Lincoln scholars.
One thing that can never be admitted in polite academic company is the notion that economics had anything to do with the American War between the States.
A straw man the author puts forth to criticize a critic.
“You remember we once had a national bank . . . the Supreme Court decided that the bank was unconstitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General Jackson himself asserted that he, as president, would not be bound to hold a national bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided to do so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. Jefferson, and acted upon it under official oath, in vetoing a charter for a national bank.”
A very interesting comment on an early conflict (1820's) between the executive and judicial branches. Required reading for those who think "loose interpretation" of the Constitution is a recent Leftist perversion.
One hardly knows where to begin.
Perhaps reading the whole of Donald's chapter 6, "The Radicals and Lincoln," in Lincoln Reconsidered would help. Donald is, in the section DiLorenzo cites, presenting a school of historians with whom he disagrees, at least in part. See esp. pp 109, 110 and 245 in the Bibliographical Essay.
Donald does not think any one of the "Radicals" [his term for Sumner, Sherman, Wade, Greeley, etc.,] speaks for Lincoln, the Party, or the Administration, and when he translates Sherman's remarks, cited in the article, he is imitating the voice of T. Harry Williams, J. G. Randall, and the like.
But setting aside DiLorenzo's always crude reading of texts, there is no doubt that the tarrif and other economic matters figured in the election of 1860, and even in the secession movement.
As with all historical matters, one has to use judgment and see the whole. And the best way to do that, in the present case, is to look at the words of the leaders of the secession cause in the states, both in 1860-1, and in the period in which the crisis developed, roughly 1846-60. That evidence points, overwhelmingly, to slavery. Slavery in the territories, Dres Scott, the fugitve slave law, fear of slave insurrection, defense of slavery as a positive good, and so forth.
Cheers,
Richard F.
We are going to make tax slaves out of you by tripling the rate of taxation, and as long as you collect these taxes there will be no military invasion. He was not going to back down to the South Carolinian nullifiers, as Andrew Jackson did.
This DiLorenzo guy is such a hoot! Where in the world does he get this stuff? Old Hickory told the Charleston idiots he would personally lead the Army and crush them. (see Jackson's message to the People of South Carolina) The fire-eating morons in Charleston backed down. Andrew Jackson never "backed down" from any man or any thing.
It will suffice to say here, in conclusion of this subject, that the passage of the Force Bill, and the energetic preparations of the President, deterred the nullifiers. The President had declared in his proclamation that as chief magistrate of the country he could not, if he would, avoid performing his duty; that the laws must be executed; that all opposition to their execution must be repelled, and by force, if necessary. That Jackson meant all that he said no one for a moment questioned, and South Carolina hastened to "nullify" her hostile action, though still loudly advocating her favorite doctrine of "State rights."The tariff difficulty, which had led to this controversy, was for the time quieted by another "compromise bill," offered by Henry Clay. This provided for the gradual reduction of duties till 1843, when they were to reach a general level of twenty per cent. This bill was accepted by Calhoun and his friends as a practical concession to their doctrines, and as enabling them to retire with some dignity from the discreditable attitude into which they had forced their State.
For DiLorenzo to say that Jackson "backed down" is ..... well.... typical of DiLorenzo.
Like one moron was telling me the other day about the slaves in the North AFTER the war. lol.
Of course, he also believed that the skirmish at Sabin Pass was the equivalent of Thermopylae.
Wlat must still be in bed with his teddy bear and pacifier.
"In all this I can see but the doom of slavery. The North do not want, nor will they want, to interfere with the institution. But they will refuse for all time to give it protection unless the South shall return soon to their allegiance." - April 19, 1861, in a letter to his father-in-law, Frederick Dent.
"My inclination is to whip the rebellion into submission, preserving all Constitutional rights. If it cannot be whipped any other way than through a war against slavery, let it come to to that legitimately. If it is necessary that slavery should fall that the Republic may continue its existence, let slavery go." - November 27, 1861, in a letter to his father.
"I never was an abolitionist, not even what could be called anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly and honestly and it became patent in my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace established, I would not therefore be willing to see any settlement until the question is forever settled." - August 30, 1863, in a letter to Elihu Washburne.
"As soon as slavery fired upon the flag, it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle... there had to be an end to slavery." -In a conversation with Bismarck, 1878.
"The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true." - U.S. Grant, in his Memoirs, 1885.
Must have changed his mind, huh?
Do you have a source for that quote? Oh... I forgot. Neo-confederates are allowed to just make things up. Neither accuracy nor honest is a requirement for membership in the DiLorenzo brigade.
If anyone is interested in what U.S. Grant really thought about slavery, not the words that the revisionist anti-American neo-confederates put into his mouth, they can click HERE
The predicament in which both the Government and the commerce of the country are placed, through the non-enforcement of our revenue laws, is now thoroughly understood the world over....If the manufacturer at Manchester [England] can send his goods into the Western States through New Orleans at less cost than through New York, he is a fool for not availing himself of his advantage...If the importations of the counrty are made through Southern ports, its exports will go through the same channel. The produce of the West, instead of coming to our own port by millions of tons, to be transported abroad by the same ships through which we received our importations, will seek other routes and other outlets. With the lost of our foreign trade, what is to become of our public works, conducted at the cost of many huindred millions of dollars, to turn into our harbor the products of the interior? They share in the common ruin. So do our manufacturers...Once at New Orleans, goods may be distributed over the whole country duty-free. The process is perfectly simple... The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North...We now see clearly whither we are tending, and the policy we must adopt. With us it is no longer an abstract question---one of Constitutional construction, or of the reserved or delegated powers of the State or Federal government, but of material existence and moral position both at home and abroad.....We were divided and confused till our pockets were touched. ---New York Times March 30, 1861
The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing....It is very clear that the South gains by this process, and we lose. No---we MUST NOT "let the South go." ----Union Democrat , Manchester, NH, February 19, 1861
That either revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the ports must be closed to importations from abroad....If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe.....Allow rail road iron to be entered at Savannah with the low duty of ten per cent, which is all that the Southern Confederacy think of laying on imported goods, and not an ounce more would be imported at New York; the railroads would be supplied from the southern ports. ---New York Evening Post March 12, 1861, recorded in Northern Editorials on Secession, Howard C. Perkins, ed., 1965, pp. 598-599.
Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge. --Cicero
"In Dick Dowling At Sabine Pass, he wrote of an incident in the Civil War when a handful of Confederate artillerymen led by Dowling turned back an armada of twenty-one Union warships?a battle sometimes referred to as the Thermopylae of the Civil War." - Fred Tarpley, Professor Emeritus of English Texas A&M University
"The Thermopylae in Texas is the Sabine Pass" - John McCormack, Professor of History Villanova University
"You may ask the schoolboy in the lowest form, who commanded at the Pass of Thermopylae. He can tell you. But my friends there are few in this audience who, if I ask them, could tell me who commanded at Sabine Pass. And yet, that battle of Sabine Pass was more remarkable than the battle of Thermopylae, and when it has orators and poets to celebrate it, will be so esteemed by mankind." - Jefferson Davis, President of the CSA
Respond if you like. I will gladly dig up more quotes for you and taunt you with them.
"The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has ever seen. It is suicide, murder...You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountain to ocean; legions, now quiet, will swarm out and sting us to death; It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal." -- Robert Toombs to Jefferson Davis.
(Maybe one of the Ape Linkum scholars can tell us if this newspaper was later closed down by the Ape.)
Many whites came to this country as slaves, or indentured servants, including my ancestors from Germany. But the bleeding-heart liberals don't cry for the white man's suffering, only for the poor, oppressed "coloreds." Take a long, hard look at our sick, violent, crime-ridden, openly gay society, and realize that this is what our heroic Confederate ancestors were fighting against. -–Cracker Tex
And what makes you say that?
Do your have a source, or did you just pull a 'DiLorenzo' on us?
And, if so, which of the newspapers quoted below were among them?
Of course the crux of the argument, in this and ALL of the threads about the destruction wrought by Ape Linkum, is in red below.
10 Nov 1860 from the _Albany (New York) Atlas and Argus_ " . . .We sympathize with and justify the South" because "their rights have been invaded to the extreme limit possible within the forms of the Constitution." If the South wanted to secede, the editors wrote, "we would applaud them and with them God-Speed."
The _Chicago Daily Times and Herald_ declared, eleven days later, that "like it or not, the cotton States will secede." The government will not then "go to pieces," but Southerners will be allowed to regain their "sense of independence and honor."
On Nov 24, 1860, the _Concord (New Hampshire) Democratic Standard_ complained of "fanatics and demagogues of the North" who "waged war on the institutions of the South" and appealed for "concession of the just rights of our Southern brethren."
Two days later, the _New York Journal of Commerce_ condemned the "meddlesome spirit" of people of the North who wanted to "seek to regulate and control" people in "other communities."
On 13 November 1860, the _Bangor (Maine) Daily Union_ defended southern secessionists by explaining that the Union "depends for its continuance on the free consent and will of the sovereign people" of each state, and "when that consent and will is withdrawn on either part, their Union is gone." If military force is used, then a state can only be held "as a subject province," and can never be "a co-equal member of the American Union."
On the same day, the _Brooklyn Daily Eagle_ clearly explained that "any violation of the constitution by the general government, deliberately persisted in would relieve the state or states injured by such violation from all legal and moral obligations to remain in the union or yield obedience to the federal government." And while the editors saw "no real cause for secession on the part of the South, should any states attempt it there is nothing to be done but let them go."
The _Cincinnati Daily Commercial_ echoed similar sentiments by advocating that the southern states be allowed to "work out their salvation or destruction in their own way" rather than "to attempt, through forcible coercion, to save them in spite of themselves."
The _Davenport (Iowa) Democrat and News_ on 17 November 1860, editorialized against secession, but in its editorial it noted that it was apparently in the minority in the North, where most of the "leading and most influential papers of the Union" believe "that any State of the Union has a right to secede."
The _Providence (Rhode Island) Evening Press_ wrote on that same day that sovereignty "necessarily includes what we call the "right of secession" and that 'this right must be maintained" unless we would establish "colossal despotism" against which the founding fathers "uttered their solemn warnings."
The _Cincinnati Daily Press_ repeated this sentiment on 21 November 1860: "We believe that the right of any member of this Confederacy to dissolve its political relations with the others and assume an independent position is *absolute* -- that, in other words, if South Carolina wants to go out of the Union, she has the right to do so, and no party or power may justly say her nay."
The _New York Daily Tribune_ made the same point on 17 December 1860, adding that if tyranny and despotism justified the American Revolution in 1776, then "we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861."
Once South Carolina seceded on 20 December 1860, dozens of northern editorialists viewed it as a confirmation of the principle of sovereignty and self-government, while others, like the _Indianapolis Daily Journal_ said "thank God that we have had a good riddance of bad rubbish."
The _Kenosha (Wisconsin) Democrat wrote on 11 January 1861, that secession was "the very germ of liberty" and declared that "the right of secession inheres to the people of every sovereign state."
The _New York Journal of Commerce_ reminded its readers on 12 January 1861, that by opposing secession, northerners would be changing the nature of government "from a voluntary one, in which the people are sovereigns, to a despotism where one part of the people are slaves. Such is the logical deduction from the policy of the advocates of force."
The _Washington (D.C.) Constitution_ concurred, stating that the use of force against South Carolina would be "the extreme of wickedness and the acme of folly." It further opined the desire "that all the Southern states will secede."
On 5 February 1861, the _New York Tribune_ characterized Lincoln's latest speech as "the arguments of a tyrant -- force, compulsion and power." "Nine out of ten of the people of the North," the paper surmised, were opposed to forcing South Carolina to remain in the Union.
"We ought to let them go," said the _Greenfield (Massachusetts) Gazette and Courier_, once additional southern states began to follow South Carolina's lead.
The _Detroit Free Press_ declared on 19 February 1861, that "an attempt to subjugate the seceded states, even if successful, could produce nothing but evil -- evil unmitigated in character and appalling in extent."
The _New York Daily Tribune_ argued once again that "the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration . . .Is that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed." Therefore, if the southern states want to secede, "they have a clear right to do so."
On March 21, 1861, the _New York Times_ intoned "that there is a growing sentiment throughout the North in favor of letting the Gulf States go."
"The people are recognizing the government of the Confederates," the _Cincinnati Daily Commercial_ wrote on 23 March 1861, and "there is room for several flourishing nations on this continent; the sun will shine brightly and the rivers run as clear . . .when we acknowledge the Southern Confederacy as before."
"Public opinion in the North," said the _Hartford (Connecticut) Daily Courant_ on 12 April 1861, "seems to be gradually settling down in favor of the recognition of the New Confederacy by the Federal Government." The thought of a "bloody and protracted civil war . . .Is abhorrent to all."
(Howard Cecil Perkins, _Northern Editorials on Secession_ (Gloucester, AHA, 1964)
Again, my apologies. I didn't realize
that you were so sensitive about it.
I did not mean to offend.
I make the same offer to you that I have to all of the noisemakers here:
you refrain from addressing me and I will do the same.
It was my mistake and I apologize.
I had inferred that to be the case due to your absolutely clinging to the position that "..Honest Abe freed the slaves..." despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I can see why you would have an irrational and emotional attachment to that point of view and its OK. Let's be friends and if we can't be friends then let's just agree to not speak to each other on the forum.
That's reasonable isn't it?
Again, you have my assiduous apologies.
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union." --Abraham Lincoln in an 1862 letter to Horace Greeley on his justification for the Northern War of Aggression against the South.
In other words, you just made it up. That's about what I expect from you.
Lincoln here was voicing his career-long animosity toward the Democratic Party’s opposition to central banking.
The collected Lincoln notes about this speech that DOUGLAS WAS NOT PRESENT. But even granting, what is a typical DiLorenzo truth-twist, that the July 17, 1858 speech is a debate, DiLorenzo's text is NOT ABOUT LINCOLN'S ECONOMIC AGENDA.
The claim that Lincoln expresses animosity about a bank decision simply a lie. Even in the part that DiLorenzo snippingly quotes, there is not a word that expresses "animosity" or any opinion whatsoever about economic policy. It is an entirely historical statement.
More importantly, as DiLorenzo either knows, or would know if he could read, Lincoln's entire point is to catch Douglas in an inconsistency in demanding Republican assent to the Dred Scott decision, after 30 years of Democrat insistence that Supreme Court decisions were not the final word.
I post below an extended quotation, uninterrupted by snips, of what Lincoln actually said. DiLorenzo has lied about this speech repeatedly, banking that no one of his audience would bother to read it. I would be very interested if anyone who reads the whole thing can claim honestly that DiLorenzo is not fundamentally misrepresenting, again, this plain passage of a speech entirely, totally devoted to the subject of slavery. The rest of this post is the relevant consecutive portion of the speech DiLorenzo snips from.
"Now, as to the Dred Scott decision; for upon that he makes his last point at me. He boldly takes ground in favor of that decision.
"This is one-half the onslaught, and one-third of the entire plan of the campaign. I am opposed to that decision in a certain sense, but not in the sense which he puts on it. I say that in so far as it decided in favor of Dred Scott's master and against Dred Scott and his family, I do not propose to disturb or resist the decision.
"I never have proposed to do any such thing. I think, that in respect for judicial authority, my humble history would not suffer in a comparison with that of Judge Douglas. He would have the citizen conform his vote to that decision; the Member of Congress, his; the President, his use of the veto power. He would make it a rule of political action for the people and all the departments of the government. I would not. By resisting it as a political rule, I disturb no right of property, create no disorder, excite no mobs.
"When he spoke at Chicago, on Friday evening of last week, he made this same point upon me. On Saturday evening I replied and reminded him of a Supreme Court decision which he opposed for at least several years. Last night, at Bloomington, he took some notice of that reply; but entirely forgot to remember that part of it.
"He renews his onslaught upon me, forgetting to remember that I have turned the tables against himself on that very point. I renew the effort to draw his attention to it. I wish to stand erect before the country as well as Judge Douglas, on this question of judicial authority; and therefore I add something to the authority in favor of my own position. I wish to show that I am sustained by authority, in addition to that heretofore presented. I do not expect to convince the Judge. It is part of the plan of his campaign, and he will cling to it with a desperate gripe. Even, turn it upon him---turn the sharp point against him, and gaff him through---he will still cling to it till he can invent some new dodge to take the place of it.
"In public speaking it is tedious reading from documents; but I must beg to indulge the practice to a limited extent. I shall read from a letter written by Mr. Jefferson in 1820, and now to be found in the seventh volume of his correspondence, at page 177. It seems he had been presented by a gentleman of the name of Jarvis with a book, or essay, or periodical, called the ``Republican,'' and he was writing in acknowledgement of the present, and noting some of its contents. After expressing the hope that the work will produce a favorable effect upon the minds of the young, he proceeds to say:
"That it will have this tendency may be expected, and for that reason I feel an urgency to note what I deem an error in it, the more requiring notice as your opinion is strengthened by that of many others. You seem in pages 84 and 148, to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions---a very dangerous doctrine indeed and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is, ``boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem''; and their power is the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.
"Thus we see the power claimed for the Supreme Court by Judge Douglas, Mr. Jefferson holds, would reduce us to the despotism of an oligarchy.
"Now, I have said no more than this---in fact, never quite so much as this---at least I am sustained by Mr. Jefferson.
"Let us go a little further. You remember we once had a national bank. Some one owed the bank a debt; he was sued and sought to avoid payment, on the ground that the bank was unconstitutional. The case went to the Supreme Court, and therein it was decided that the bank was constitutional.
"The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General Jackson himself asserted that he, as President, would not be bound to hold a national bank to be constitutional, even though the Court had decided it to be so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. Jefferson, and acted upon it under his official oath, in vetoing a charter for a national bank. The declaration that Congress does not possess this constitutional power to charter a bank, has gone into the Democratic platform, at their national conventions, and was brought forward and reaffirmed in their last convention at Cincinnati. They have contended for that declaration, in the very teeth of the Supreme Court, for more than a quarter of a century. In fact, they have reduced the decision to an absolute nullity.
"That decision, I repeat, is repudiated in the Cincinnati platform; and still, as if to show that effrontery can go no farther, Judge Douglas vaunts in the very speeches in which he denounces me for opposing the Dred Scott decision, that he stands on the Cincinnati platform.
"Now, I wish to know what the Judge can charge upon me, with respect to decisions of the Supreme Court which does not lie in all its length, breadth, and proportions at his own door. The plain truth is simply this: Judge Douglas is for Supreme Court decisions when he likes and against them when he does not like them. He is for the Dred Scott decision because it tends to nationalize slavery---because it is part of the original combination for that object. It so happens, singularly enough, that I never stood opposed to a decision of the Supreme Court till this. On the contrary, I have no recollection that he was ever particularly in favor of one till this. He never was in favor of any, nor opposed to any, till the present one, which helps to nationalize slavery.
"Free men of Sangamon---free men of Illinois---free men everywhere---judge ye between him and me, upon this issue.
"He says this Dred Scott case is a very small matter at most---that it has no practical effect; that at best, or rather, I suppose, at worst, it is but an abstraction. I submit that the proposition that the thing which determines whether a man is free or a slave, is rather concrete than abstract . I think you would conclude that it was, if your liberty depended upon it, and so would Judge Douglas if his liberty depended upon it. But suppose it was on the question of spreading slavery over the new territories that he considers it as being merely an abstract matter, and one of no practical importance. How has the planting of slavery in new countries always been effected? It has now been decided that slavery cannot be kept out of our new territories by any legal means. In what does our new territories now differ in this respect, from the old colonies when slavery was first planted within them? It was planted as Mr. Clay once declared, and as history proves true, by individual men in spite of the wishes of the people; the mother government refusing to prohibit it, and withholding from the people of the colonies the authority to prohibit it for themselves. Mr. Clay says this was one of the great and just causes of complaint against Great Britain by the colonies, and the best apology we can now make for having the institution amongst us. In that precise condition our Nebraska politicians have at last succeeded in placing our own new territories; the government will not prohibit slavery within them, nor allow the people to prohibit it.
"I defy any man to find any difference between the policy which originally planted slavery in these colonies and that policy which now prevails in our own new Territories. If it does not go into them, it is only because no individual wishes it to go. The Judge indulged himself, doubtless, to-day, with the question as to what I am going to do with or about the Dred Scott decision.
"Well,Judge, will you please tell me what you did about the Bank decision? Will you not graciously allow us to do with the Dred Scott decision precisely as you did with the Bank decision? You succeeded in breaking down the moral effect of that decision; did you find it necessary to amend the Constitution? or to set up a court of negroes in order to do it?
No, like you fantasy that Calhoun's rantings are sacred text but Madison's pronouncemnts on Constitutional matters mean nothing.
You stick with the mad-man Calhoun, and I stay with James Madison, the father of the Constitution.
Quote all you want to but a thousand quotes from insignificant sources will not elevate this picayune encounter to historical significance nor the immortal Dork Dowling to Leonidas. It is merely another chance to laugh at the ridiculous pretensions and megalomania of the D.S.s old and new. LoL.
An English prof., Jefferson Davis desparate for any victories, and a history prof. stating what some ignoramuses in TEXAS call a fight are the best support you can come up with? Yessir, D.S. "scholarship" at its best. LoL
I know not whether they can, but I am sure they will not.
Still, good reply for the rational lurkers ... if any can stay through the vitriol.
Cheers,
Richard F.
by Anton Chaitkin
In 1839 the Illinois state legislature faced with gloom the complete ruin of its pioneering railroad system. The state had persisted in selling bonds for the construction of some 2,000 miles of rail lines, despite the national depression. Financial chaos had erupted with the closing of the Bank of United States, and the Bank of England stopping credit to the unprotected American economy. Quoting the Hay-Nicolay biography of Lincoln, "One banker and one broker after another, to whose hands [state bonds] had been recklessly [sic] confided in New York and London, failed, or made away with the proceeds of the sales." The Whig Party leader in the Illinois legislature, 30-year old Abraham Lincoln, had led the fight for the state-built railroads. He was justifiably bitter against the aristocratic "free trade" faction which had brought down the Founding Fathers' economic system; the northeastern bankers, political followers of Swiss nobleman Albert Gallatin, president of John Jacob Astor's National Bank of New York; and the South Carolina-based slaveowners' secession movement, organized around the free-market doctrines of British revolutionary immigrant Thomas Cooper.
Alexander Hamilton's program of protective tariffs, government-sponsored transportation projects, and the national bank, enacted in the first Congress over the opposition of Albert Gallatin, had now been aborted. The bankers-planters alliance was rolling the U.S.A. back to colonial status, to be a mere producer of cheap raw materials for the British Empire, with themselves the colonial overseers.
Abraham Lincoln and the other Henry Clay Whigs were determined to rescue American financial, industrial, and political independence. From late 1839 through the presidential election of 1840, Lincoln led the Illinois Whig campaign by focusing his party's program around the restoration of the Bank of the United States.
Lincoln knew that national survival depended on their political success. This is the conclusion of his Dec. 26, 1839 speech on banking:
"[A debate opponent] confidently predicts, that every State in the Union will vote for Mr. Van Buren at the next Presidential election. Address that argument to cowards and to knaves; with the free and the brave it will effect nothing. It may be true; if it must, let it. Many free countries have lost their liberty; and ours may lose hers; but if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her. I know that the great volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns there, belching forth the lava of political corruption, in a current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land, bidding fair to leave no green spot or living thing, while on its bosom are riding like demons on the waves of Hell, the imps of that evil spirit, and fiendishly taunting all those who dare resist its destroying course, with the hopelessness of their effort; and knowing this, I cannot deny that all may be swept away. Broken by it, I, too, may be; bow to it I never will.
"The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me. If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and alone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, before High heaven, and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty and my love. And who, that thinks with me, will not fearlessly adopt the oath I take. Let none falter, who thinks he is right, and we may succeed. But, if after all, we shall fail, be it so. We still shall have the proud consolation of saying to our consciences, and to the departed shade of our country's freedom, that the cause approved of our judgment, and adored of our hearts, in disaster, in chains, in torture, in death, we never faltered in defending."
The Whig candidate, Gen. William Henry Harrison, was elected U.S. President. He appointed as Treasury Secretary Thomas Ewing of Ohio, stepfather of future Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and co-leader of the Whigs with Sen. Henry Clay. But the boisterously healthy President Harrison mysteriously died of pneumonia complications one month after inauguration; the disloyal vice-president, John Tyler, assuming Harrison's place, vetoed the Bank. Another Whig President elected in 1848, Gen. Zachary Taylor, also died early in his term. Lincoln was forced to watch his country fall under the complete control of the free-trade faction. Instead of government-fostered industrial development edging out the slave plantation system, plantation cotton, supported by anti-industrial bankers in New York and London, spread westward and dominated national politics. The banking system itself was an unregulated, chaotic swindle. Each bank printed its own notes, redeeming what it would. There was no national currency. Bank-fed speculation exploded in 1857, collapsing much of the factory system.
Lincoln, the respected political leader of the Henry Clay tradition, was elected President in 1860, prompting the anti- nationalists to launch secession and civil war. It was a two-front war, militarily in the South...and politically against the London-allied Northern bankers, only recently the main brokers of slave cotton. The Associated Banks of New York were led by James Gallatin, a resident of Switzerland and the son of Albert Gallatin.
The Eastern banks had agreed to a $150 million government loan package just after the Civil War commenced in 1861. They would resell U.S. bonds in England with the Barings and Rothschilds, putting the United States at the mercy of the British aristocracy.
In December 1861, President Lincoln's own financial plan was presented by Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase (a free-trade liberal sweating and agonizing in the President's harness), and by Lincoln himself. Its measures included:
a nationally regulated private banking system, which would issue cheap credit to build industry;
the issuance of government legal-tender paper currency;
the sale of low-interest bonds to the general public and to the nationally chartered banks;
the increase of tariffs until industry was running at full tilt;
government construction of railroads into the middle South, promoting industrialism over the Southern plantation system.
Lincoln spelled out his underlying republican philosophy, and shot his barbs at the aristocratic bankers, in his Annual Address to Congress, Dec. 3, 1861:
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital, producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of the community exists within that relation. .... In most of the southern States, a majority of the whole people of all colors are neither slaves nor masters; while in the northern a large majority are neither hirers nor hired.... "Many independent men everywhere in these States, a few years back in their lives, were hired laborers. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all-gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty -- none less inclined to take, or touch, aught that they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which, if surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them, till all of liberty shall be lost .... " On Dec. 28, 1861, the New York banks suspended payment of gold owed to their depositors, and stopped transferring to the government the gold which they had pledged for the purchase of government bonds. The banks of other cities immediately followed suit.
James Gallatin headed a delegation of bankers who came to Washington to meet with the administration and Congress. His program contradicted the President's. First, the Treasury must deposit its gold in private banks, and let those banks pay the government's suppliers with checks, keeping the gold on deposit for the investment use of the bankers. Second, the government should sell high-interest bonds to these same banks, for them to resell to the European banking syndicate. Finally, a great deal of the war should be financed by a tax on basic industry.
Gallatin was shown the door. While Lincoln fought the Eastern bankers over the national banking system, the Treasury issued several hundred millions of the new green-colored currency. Banker Jay Cooke was hired to sell small government bonds to the average citizens; with 2,500 sub-agents Cooke sold over $1.3 billion worth of bonds from 1862 to 1865. President Lincoln pushed for his measure of control over the banking system, using more of his influence in Congress than on any other issue. The New England and New York bankers instructed their congressmen, such as New York's cynical Sen. Roscoe Conkling, to defeat the bill. But Lincoln's prestige and authority won out, and he signed the National Currency Act on Feb. 25, 1863, and the National Bank Act on June 3, 1864.
National Banking was, in truth, only a compromise with the old European oligarchs. But it was a bold and necessary stride toward national sovereignty.
The office of Comptroller of the Currency was established. No National Banking Association could start business without his certificate of authorization. He could at any time appoint investigators to look into the affairs of any national bank.
Regulations covered minimum capitalization, reserve requirements, the definition of bad debts, reporting on financial condition and identity of ownership, and other elements of safety to depositors.
Every bank director had to be an American citizen, and three-quarters of a bank's directors had to be residents of the state in which the bank did business.
Each bank was limited, in the interest rate it could charge, by the strictures of its state's usury laws; or if none were in effect, then to 7%. If it were caught exceeding this limitation, it would forfeit the loan in question and would have to refund to the victimized borrower twice what he had paid in interest.
Banks could not hold real estate for more than five years, aside from bank buildings.
A national bank had to deposit with the Treasury, U.S. bonds amounting to at least one-third of its capital. It would receive in return government-printed notes, which it could circulate as money. Thus the banks would have to lend the government substantial sums for the war effort, to qualify for federal charters, and a sound currency would be circulated to the public for an expanding economy.
Meanwhile, national banks could not circulate notes printed by themselves. In order to eliminate all competition with the new national currency, the notes of state-chartered banks were hit with a massive tax in the following year.
Most large commercial banks organized themselves according to the new system, and many new large banks were formed, as national banks. Despite historically unprecedented financing needs, the government raised, and printed, the cash to fight and win the Civil War. With the combination of banking, tariff, educational, and agricultural measures enacted under Abraham Lincoln, the United States began the greatest period of industrial development ever seen anywhere.
But the banking system was only a compromise, a truce between Lincoln and the Eastern bankers. The free-trade New York Times, whose owner Leonard Jerome was closely identified with the British and Austrian oligarchies, publicly supported the passage of the National Banking Act. As part of the bargain, an open enemy of the new system, Hugh McCulloch, was appointed first Comptroller of the Currency! The Times printed a letter from McCulloch on May 21, 1863:
"Dear Sir: From what you may recollect of the opinions I have heretofore expressed to you upon the subject of the currency, you may be surprised at my acceptance of the office of 'Comptroller' under the National Banking law enacted by Congress at their last session...."
In a position similar to that of Salmon Chase at Treasury, McCulloch enforced the regulations as the National Banks came into the system, all the while blasting "paper money as evil" in public reports. Lincoln appointed McCulloch as treasury secretary in March, 1865. The following month the war ended, and Lincoln was assassinated. McCulloch and his international banking allies quickly went on the offensive against Lincoln's entire economic program. Secretary McCulloch called for the greenbacks to be retracted, so that only gold would once again be legal tender -- and so that farm prices and other values would fall so fast that the country could be bought for a song by the British banking syndicate. (McCulloch later helped the syndicate destroy the patriotic banker Jay Cooke, and took over Cooke's company when it failed.)
The calling-in of greenbacks, and the redemption of Civil War bonds for gold, were fiercely debated until 1879. The growing power of the British banking syndicate finally passed Specie Resumption over the dead body of Lincoln's chief financial adviser and teacher, Henry Carey. Tariffs and government-sponsored development of the West survived longer, until Teddy Roosevelt's presidency. The American industrial system was never allowed to spread to the tropical countries, as Lincoln and his allies had planned.
Today, 125 years after President Lincoln's inauguration, the world is divided between a slave-system -- the Soviet bloc -- and the Western area dominated by a lawless banking system, a system more criminal and unstable than that of the King Cotton era of the 1850s. Illegal narcotics profits pour through the system as its major prop of liquidity. Over 100 major American banks have been found guilty of "money laundering" for the dope mob. Speculation increases in hot Eurodollars and in the worthless debts of starving tropical countries, while industrial plant construction is simply not funded. Since the Kennedy administration, debt-service payments have climbed from 6% to about 30% of the national income. In this destructive work the de facto privately controlled Federal Reserve Board is complicit.
The present, chaotic tyranny of unregulated international banking creates, in Lincoln's words, a "great volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns there, belching forth the lava of political corruption." Have we the courage, and can we revive the cultural and political heritage of Lincoln's day, to restore freedom to our country?
Well you're just too damn ignorant of history to know that all your talk of secession being Constitutional is nothing but Calhoun. He was the first to claim so, he argued in the Senate that it was so, was refuted and stuffed in his debate with Webster on the subject, and James Madison wrote the letter you refuse to acknowledge, agreeing with Webster and further stuffing Calhoun. Andy Jackson also agreed and for all intents and purposes told Calhoun and the other whining slaveocrats in Charleston he would hang them if they didn’t back down.
Just like your guru D-Lie-renzo, claiming that Jackson backed down from South Carolina (that is a laughable as his saying Jefferson and Tocqueville were "good friends") you rattle on with no idea what you are talking about. But you emotional investment in the fantasy of the Lost Cause forces your mouth to keep running --- CORKY.
So you stick with mad-man slaveocrat john Calhoun, and I'll stick with James Madison.
I assume that you are speaking of the same James Madison who, at the constitutional convention, opposed the inclusion of a provision to allow the federal government to suppress a seceding state, saying:
"A union of the states containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force agaunst a State would look more like a declaration of war, than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound."
And the first chattel slave owner in the colonies was a black Virginia freeman.
History is full of these telling tidbits isn't it?
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