[WhiskeyPapa]

An Abolitionist would have published the Emancipation Proclamation the day after the first battle of Bull Run.

And resistance to the rebellion would have collapsed the same day.

Even after three years of war Lincoln said that giving up the support of the blacks would cause the loss of the war within three weeks.

Part of Lincoln's genius was in knowing what the country would accept, and another part was helping to guide it where it needed to go.

Walt

[aruanan]

and so leave him a mere moral apparition, a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost.

Sounds as though he didn't know much about John Wesley who went into more situations of personal peril than Lincoln ever did (and saved England from a civil war rather than causing one), though both of them did have demented wives. It is said that some men waylaid Wesley one night and said, "We be the devil's brothers" to which Wesley was to have replied, "Well, then, you know me. I'm married to his sister."

[TheDon]

My favorite quote from another thread:

It's time for another exciting episode of "The Tyrant Lincoln, Who Cut Down My Great-Great Grandma's Magnolias."

[Ditto]

The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.

Well, actually only about 66% of the people in the south had the right to govern themselves but Mencken, being a professional curmudgeon, never allowed facts to slow him down when he was on a good rant.

[Marianne]

His early speeches were mere empty fire-works-the hollow rodomontades of the era.
Rodomontade n [MF fr. lt Rodomonte character in Orlando Innamorato by Matteo M. Boiardo
1 a bragging speech
2. vain boasting or bluster

[stainlessbanner]

herewegoagain....

[parsifal]

Mencken was great. I love hum. Great post! parsy.

[shuckmaster]

America's tyrant ping!

[nicollo]

Your still want to turn me on to Mencken?

Yet, this is damned good writing:

and it is a matter of unescapable record that his career in the State Legislature was indistinguishable from that of a Tammany Nietzsche.

Sophism is a joy to behold. (I should know.)

[cgbg]

H.L.Mencken wrote better columns and had more wisdom on a bad day than all of the liberal establishment could hope to manage in a lifetime.

His shadow hovers over all of them laughing at their self-deception and stupidity.

[Aurelius]

BUMP

[537 Votes]

The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost gem-like perfection—the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it.

Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address is actually better, even though teachers don't require their students to memorize it.