Posted on 07/05/2015 3:24:11 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
GETTYSBURG, Pa. — “Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson.” That is not exactly what we expect to hear about the president who spoke of “malice toward none,” referring to the president who wrote that “all men are created equal.”
Presidents have never been immune from criticism by other presidents. But Jefferson and Lincoln? These two stare down at us from Mount Rushmore as heroic, stainless and serene, and any suggestion of disharmony seems somehow a criticism of America itself. Still, Lincoln seems not to have gotten that message.
“Mr. Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson as a man,” wrote William Henry Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner of 14 years — and “as a politician.” Especially after Lincoln read Theodore F. Dwight’s sensational, slash-all biography of Jefferson in 1839, Herndon believed “Mr. Lincoln never liked Jefferson’s moral character after that reading.”
True enough, Thomas Jefferson had not been easy to love, even in his own time. No one denied that Jefferson was a brilliant writer, a wide reader and a cultured talker. But his contemporaries also found him “a man of sublimated and paradoxical imagination” and “one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in all America.”
Lincoln, who was born less than a month before Jefferson left the presidency in 1809, had his own reasons for loathing Jefferson “as a man.” Lincoln was well aware of Jefferson’s “repulsive” liaison with his slave, Sally Hemings, while “continually puling about liberty, equality and the degrading curse of slavery.” But he was just as disenchanted with Jefferson’s economic policies.
Jefferson believed that the only real wealth was land and that the only true occupation of virtuous and independent citizens in a republic was farming. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
that's simply not true. Every northern state - including those five that you keep referring to - had defined paths to eventual emancipation and the end to slavery within their own borders. It's just that they recognized this fruitlessness of trying to drag the south out of the dark ages. They knew that they lacked the votes to amend the constitution so they focused on cleaning up their own states.
Given the choice between believing you and your convolutions or believing the clear written words of those who actually seceded, I’ll go with the latter, thanks.
So, South Carolina's seceding a mere six weeks after Lincoln was elected was a coincidence? Do people normally meet on Christmas Eve to ratify a declaration if it's not for an immediate urgency.
The South was no worse than the North on the issue of slavery.
Maybe the dumbest thing I've ever read.
The North was going to let it keep going indefinitely,
Really? The complaints about not adhering to the fugitive slave act indicate that it's going to continue indefinitely?
Why do you sort constantly focus on slavery? It's the only moral claim you have, and you simply ignore the fact that it is a false claim.
It's the ONLY moral claim that's necessary.
You take away your slavery "fig leaf" and you are left with a very horrible and immoral act by the North against the South.
So, slavery is a "fig leaf"? What was the United Stated doing that was immoral when they were fired on at Fort Sumter?
The fact that you think you can argue about the Civil War and NOT discuss slavery is the height of absurdity.
THAT is why you keep trying to force the conversation into a referendum on the wickedness of slavery. It is the slender thread upon which all your moral justification hangs, and even then your argument is a lie.
So, slavery wasn't wicked?
Slavery is a "slender thread"?
What EXACTLY is the "lie" I am guilty of?
Alexander Stephens must have been very confused when he gave his infamous Cornerstone Speech""Cornerstone Speech" just prior to the start of the War:
he constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
So, Stephens understood that the Constitution was built upon the equality of the races and that the Confederacy was founded upon the OPPOSITE principle.
Do you think that slavery is sufficiently wicked that its elimination justifies 600K of your countrymen dead and half of your nation in ruins? If it were extant today, would you be willing to sacrifice your life or that of your sons/brothers to put an end to it?
And what of DiogenesLamp's other point: when Islamists commit acts of terror against the US and other Western nations, they often use our perceived moral decadence, blasphemy, and wickedness as an excuse. How is this any different from saying that a bloody civil war is justified on account of the "wickedness" of slavery?
After reading that letter in its entirety, I do not agree with your assessment that Lincoln was “perfectly willing” to leaves slaves in bondage. The last paragraph seems to refute that fantasy.
So it was okay to let it go on in their own states until they were ready to let it go? Sounds like it wasn't the moral imperative everyone wants us to believe it was.
It certainly wasn't the reason the Union tried to Invade Richmond.
You mean you can't put up a valid argument so you will trust in your faith.
Again, your citation of the Declaration as intending to abolish slavery is utterly dishonest.
Sounds like you have basic reasoning dysfunction. Pity that.
He had "many" top cabinet appointments who were Federalists?
Again, you need to check your history. Washington did not even have "many" cabinet positions to appoint in the first place. I'll concede your argument if your definition of "many" is ... THREE. [And actually, it's more like TWO.]
Edmund Randolph, though nominally a "Federalist," was probably closer to Madison's "Federalism" than he was Hamilton's. He was certainly no Anglophile -- one of the darker marks of the Federalist tribe -- and he did not support Virginia's ratification of the Constitution. His role in the Constitutional debates in Virginia was largely to insert language much more favorable to the anti-Federalists in both tone and substance to Virginia's position. Eventually, he voted for ratification, but ONLY because eight other states had already done so. And he made that reason plain in casting his vote. He remained very deeply suspicious of Federal power; much more so than Madison, who was not a Federalist. Randolph is difficult to claim as anything but a FINO.
But this is all wide of my original point. The OP attempted to draw Washington into my criticisms of Alexander Hamilton. There is no doubt that Hamilton was a Big Government "conservative." Simply because Washington was susceptible to Hamilton's influence in some areas, that does not make Washington a Hamiltonian Federalist.
Asserting the synedoche "Hamilton equals all founding conservatives" is like asserting "George W. Bush equals all contemporary ones."
Like the claim that Jefferson was a "liberal," this argument is hogwash.
The Federalist Party, as Randolph's counterpoint to Hamilton clearly shows, admitted of a fairly broad range of ideology, and it is wrong to claim its adherents marched in lock step, even with as important a Federalist as Hamilton.
Yes, I believe that freedom is worthy dying for.
And what of DiogenesLamp's other point: when Islamists commit acts of terror against the US and other Western nations, they often use our perceived moral decadence, blasphemy, and wickedness as an excuse. How is this any different from saying that a bloody civil war is justified on account of the "wickedness" of slavery?
Islamofascists "perceive" us to be wicked or immoral, slavery IS wicked and immoral.
Unless we can agree that slavery was inherently evil and morally indefensible, there really is nothing further to discuss.
If you believe that your pet moralizing hobbyhorses justify the deaths of 600K of your countrymen (the equivalent of 6 million today if you account for US population size) and the economic ruin of half of our nation, we have nothing to talk about.
I wasn't describing faith. I was describing simple reading comprehension. You have to be either stupid or willfully blind to miss the clear meaning of the secession documents.
Again, your citation of the Declaration as intending to abolish slavery is utterly dishonest.
Actually, it's you who is being dishonest, setting up straw men and knocking them down as you do.
The simple timeless words of the Declaration and slavery could not possibly long co-exist. One or the other had to eventually go.
Folks like me sided with "all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." Folks like you must, of necessity, do away with all that, to defend your beloved enslavement of other human beings, made in God's image and likeness.
Like the claim that Jefferson was a "liberal," this argument is hogwash.
Jefferson wouldn't be perceived as a "liberal" today simply because the issues he dealt with aren't the ones that define the political spectrum today. His positions WERE perceived as liberal and radical by late 18th century standards: among them, his support of the French Revolution, which was the very source of the terms Left vs. Right wing.
I will grant you, however, that those who retroject contemporary issues back into time say ludicrous things (e.g. "Jefferson would have supported gay marriage"). However, it's no more absurd than those who claim that Alexander Hamilton was a proto-Obama simply because he believed in implied powers rather than the compact theory.
Much of the ratification debate centered on the extent to which the proposed new government was not constrained strictly enough, which has always been a paramount concern in the eyes of Americans.
Saying that conservatives would support "constitutional government" that was limitless in its authority or executive is pure bollocks. The purpose of The Constitution [as opposed to a constitution] is to limit the government. It is integral to its nature.
Do you believe that 3.5 MILLION lives are worth fighting for?
Can you tell me EXACTLY how many lives are worth fighting for?
I do find it quite odd that you dismiss opposition to slavery as "moralizing hobbyhorses", that sounds like something one would here at Stormfront or a Ron/Rand Paul rally.
Let me ask you this, is slavery inherently evil and morally indefensible? YES or NO.
As for the rest, Jefferson wrote the whole of The Declaration of Independence himself. The committee and Congress made minor corrections, except for the removal of one entire tract. It reads as follows:
"He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."
Jefferson evidently believed it, since he signed the first law outlawing the slave trade permissible under the Constitution.
But its primary purposes are spelled out at the very beginning of the document itself, so there's no mystery about their intent, unless you choose to close your eyes to it.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."-- Statement of Purpose of the United States Constitution
You are deliberately conflating what people THOUGHT he would do with what he himself later said he would do. Lincoln himself said that he would continue slavery. I take it that South Carolina was not interested in trusting him one way or the other.
Maybe the dumbest thing I've ever read.
You mean objectionable to your world view. No, it isn't dumb. The Union had no intention of stopping slavery. Thinking it did is what is dumb.
It's the ONLY moral claim that's necessary.
To you, and only because it fits your preference to believe that your team was the good guys. That the facts don't agree is just so much worse for the facts.
So, slavery is a "fig leaf"? What was the United Stated doing that was immoral when they were fired on at Fort Sumter?
Occupying land that belonged to another sovereign nation. Refusing to negotiate on the relinquishment of that land.
The fact that you think you can argue about the Civil War and NOT discuss slavery is the height of absurdity.
From the perspective of someone who desperately needs to talk about slavery to distract from the misery and death caused by forcing the rule of Washington D.C. on an unwilling populace, yeah, "Slavery" becomes a pretty important issue. What other possible argument could you advance to justify the violent suppression of another people's Independence?
So, slavery wasn't wicked?
Of course it was wicked, but to abolish the wickedness of slavery was not the reason the Union invaded. You keep wanting to MAKE it the reason the Union invaded, because this deliberate lie suits your desperate need to justify invading and killing so many people.
Your argument that "they were bad people" ignores the fact that your people were just as "bad" but you refuse to focus on that because it hurts both your argument and your conscience.
What EXACTLY is the "lie" I am guilty of?
The lie that the Union fought the war to abolish slavery. That the Union had any intention of doing anything at all about slavery. That it was the primary goal of the war, or even any sort of goal at all for the first two years.
This is the constant lie. It is virtually impossible to discuss this topic without someone insisting on justifying the Union on the basis of abolishing slavery, all the while completely ignoring the fact that the eradication of slavery had nothing to do with the reason an Army invaded the Southern States July 21, 1861.
It is a LIE to say it did. That is your lie. That is the lie you persist in telling, and I suppose insist on believing, though how a rational man could believe such a thing in view of all the contradicting evidence is a testament to the effectiveness of propaganda and herd mentality.
According to the article, the gist of the debate between Lincoln (heir to the Federalist tradition) and the Jeffersonian anti-Federalist tradition is whether the US would be a commercial/manufacturing economic power or an agrarian nation. I agree that ultimately it's THIS question, rather than tariffs/free trade or slavery/anti-slavery was the fundamental divide between Federalist and Anti-Federalists, and the ideological difference between Union and Confederacy.
Agreed. He’s my favorite president and an insanely intelligent man.
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