What Did Lincoln Really Think of Jefferson?

New York Times ^ | 07/05/2015 | By ALLEN C. GUELZO

[x]

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.

Except that an awful lot of farmers fought for the Union, and some aspiring industrialists supported the Confederacy.

[DiogenesLamp]

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?

Exactly. They keep trying to use modern sentiments about slavery to opine on how wicked were the people who supported it, completely ignoring the fact that it was not so very much earlier that all the states supported it, while five Union states of the time still did.

"Slavery" was another example of North Eastern Socialites finding a new "morality" and deciding everyone else should be made to feel exactly as they do regarding the issue.

Nowadays it is "Gay" marriage, "Global Warming" and "Equality for Transgenders", but in 1860, the latest moral urgency was the abolition of slavery, especially since slavery was no longer useful to the financial interests of those social circles.

Lincoln was not really joking when he told Harriet Beecher Stowe "So, you're the little lady who started this war."

Nowadays, people constantly use extemporaneous moral judgements to malign people who lived in a different time. They look at events through an anachronistic prism and in complete ignorance of the zeitgeist of that era.

They lack objectivity. They don't even understand the concept as it would apply to the civil war.

[DiogenesLamp]

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.

Stop lying to yourself. You certainly won't get away with lying to me.

Lincoln never made any bones about his personal opinion on the topic. Yes, he was personally against slavery. We all get that.

That is all the last sentence says. It is simply a reiteration of his personal opinion on the subject. It does not, however, refute his very clear statement that he would not impose his personal feelings on the rest of the country. It does not refute his very clear statement that he would continue allowing slavery if it was necessary to "preserve the union." He said this 1 1/2 years after the war had started.

Any interpretation that Lincoln would not consent to the continuation of slavery is simply a lie and a distortion of his clearly enunciated words.

Lincoln would have continued slavery (at this point) if the South had stopped fighting and submitted to rule from Washington.

It is an unpleasant truth (from your perspective) but I urge you to accept it and deal with it.

[DiogenesLamp]

Sounds like you have basic reasoning dysfunction. Pity that.

Rather than deal with the dichotomy of what you wish to believe, your rebuttal is a potshot.

Well what else have you got? I guess you have to work with whatever ammunition you have.

[wagglebee]

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.

We're in agreement here, South Carolina and the other states THOUGHT that Lincoln was a threat to slavery and they acted upon that thought.

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.

So, they seceded because of Lincoln but believe that the North would preserve slavery?

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.

Then let's make it easy, do YOU believe that slavery was evil?

Occupying land that belonged to another sovereign nation. Refusing to negotiate on the relinquishment of that land.

Federal military installations DO NOT belong to the states in which they are located. Under your theory, Cuba would be justified in invading our base at Guantanamo Bay.

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?

ONE THIRD of the people living in the South were enslaved, what about THEIR independence?

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.

So, you don't believe that a government has the right to defend property that IT owns?

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.

If the United States had no intention of ending slavery, why did the Southern states make such an issue about it? Why did Alexander Stephens declare it to be the "Cornerstone" of the Confederacy?

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.

So, the United States didn't have the authority to protect federal lands?

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.

Would this "contradicting evidence" include the declarations of secession which ALL spoke of slavery or the Confederate Constitution which also vowed to protect slavery?

I will admit that a great many southerners are very passionate about the Confederacy, and it is normal to focus on whatever noble facets of it are available, but NONE of you have offered any real evidence to show that the Civil War wasn't about slavery.

[FredZarguna]

Oh Good Lord. Not a "conservative" who thinks the prologue to the Constitution is part of it.

The Constitution is a legal instrument. The blather at the beginning of it is nice sounding, and completely non-binding. Madison himself specifically and vocally repudiated that it had anything to do with the privileges or immunities of the Federal Government.

If you accept the prologue as part of the operating instrument, there is no limit to the power of the state.

And by the way, that makes you NOT a conservative. In which case, what are you doing on this forum?

[DiogenesLamp]

Yes, I believe that freedom is worthy dying for.

No you don't, else you'd be in the middle east fighting against slavery which is currently going on there. You believe it is worth 600,000 OTHER people dying for.

I also note the vast bulk of the slave trade was with Brazil, yet I hear of no great moral imperative for invading Brazil, or even the close by Caribbean islands to free the slaves.

I would think if the cause is so great and noble to devastate your own country, and kill 600,000 of your own people, that at least a little effort could have been expended eradicating the abomination in your nearby neighbors?

Why it's almost as if they didn't really give a rat's @ss about slavery, and were more interested in forcing submission to Washington D.C. or something.

So how about it anti-slavery crusaders? Why no action on Brazil or the Caribbean Islands?

[wagglebee]

"Slavery" was another example of North Eastern Socialites finding a new "morality" and deciding everyone else should be made to feel exactly as they do regarding the issue.

Nowadays it is "Gay" marriage, "Global Warming" and "Equality for Transgenders", but in 1860, the latest moral urgency was the abolition of slavery, especially since slavery was no longer useful to the financial interests of those social circles.

So, you are equating the abolitionist movement with the homonazis?

It's one thing to argue that the Confederacy wasn't about slavery, but it's quite another to dismiss the abolitionist movement as some sort of social experiment.

Nowadays, people constantly use extemporaneous moral judgements to malign people who lived in a different time. They look at events through an anachronistic prism and in complete ignorance of the zeitgeist of that era.

No, the Founding Fathers were well aware that slavery was immoral, they just couldn't figure out how to deal with it.

[EternalVigilance]

It’s a constant amazement to me how many have to completely dispense with the Declaration of Independence, our free republic’s statement of principle, and the Preamble, the stated purposes of the Constitution, in order to attempt to defend their positions.

The statement of purpose of the Constitution IS the Constitution. Everything that follows is simply the means to fulfill those purposes.

[EternalVigilance]

And by the way, that makes you NOT a conservative. In which case, what are you doing on this forum?

Sorry. Defending the principles of the Declaration and the stated purposes and requirements of the Constitution is definitively conservative, in the American sense of that word.

Tossing them aside like rubbish is revolutionary, ie NOT conservative.

[BlackElk]

Ummm, especially for those who care about facts. Dishonest Abe saw his neo Whig, neo Federalist, Hamiltonian opportunities and used them to maximum advantage to advance those discredited and hated agendas.

NOTHING IN THE CONSTITUTION authorized:

1) A military draft;

2) A federal income tax;

3) A military invasion of South Carolina and other states;

4) The ridiculous claim that a state, having joined the Union voluntarily, could not secede from the Union just as voluntarily as eleven states did;

5) The jailing of state legislators in Maryland who were believed to be intending to vote for secession;

6) The suspension of the constitutional right to petition the courts for writs of habeas corpus;

7) The jailing without trial of opposition newspaper editors, see the SCOTUS decision in Ex Parte McCardle;

8) The smashing of the presses of the New York Daily News for opposing Lincoln's tyranny and policies;

9) The US Naval bombardment of the civilian population of New York City's Manhattan.

10) It took SCOTUS years to clean up Lincoln's constitutional mess after he was shot under the remarkably candid and honest leadership of Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase of Ohio who had been Lincoln's Secretary of Treasury before Lincoln appointed him to succeed Roger Taney in the middle of the war to resurrect Hamiltonianism.

More available on request.

What's YOUR only purpose?

[FredZarguna]

Take it up with James Madison, who knows a lot more about the Constitution than you do:

"But may it not be asked with infinitely more propriety, and without the possibility of a satisfactory answer, why, if the terms were meant to embrace not only all the powers particularly expressed, but the indefinite power which has been claimed under them, the intention was not so declared? why, on that supposition, so much critical labour was employed in enumerating the particular powers, and in defining and limiting their extent?"

"The obvious conclusion to which we are brought is, that these terms, copied from the Articles of Confederation, were regarded in the new as in the old instrument, merely as general terms, explained and limited by the subjoined specifications, and therefore requiring no critical attention or studied precaution.

It's a constant amazement to me that liberals like you think they can take the Constitution to mean whatever they want it to mean, when the actual Framers clearly expressed otherwise.

[DiogenesLamp]

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.

You have to be either stupid or willfully blind to miss the clear fact that the vast bulk of the fighting was done by men who cared more about protecting their homeland from invasion than those who gave a crap about the secessionist documents.

You also have to be either stupid or willfully blind to focus on someone's reasons for wanting independence, and place it above that of their God given and Natural right to have it.

Their reasons are none of your concern. The side you champion didn't object to them before the South sought independence, so therefor they have no moral authority to object to them after they sought independence.

What is actually being objected to is the Independence, and their reasons for seeking it are just used as an ex post facto excuse to rationalize the brutal suppression of their Independence effort.

Actually, it's you who is being dishonest, setting up straw men and knocking them down as you do.

Pointing out that the Declaration of Independence didn't free any slaves, and that it was never intended by it's authors and signatories to do such a thing, is a straw man?

What is a straw man is the argument that a document who's primary purpose was to justify a God given right to Independence for 13 slave holding colonies must somehow be interpreted to abolish slavery, four score and seven years after the fact!

Stop lying to yourself! Quit making up crap that is as strong as intellectual tissue paper.

The Declaration didn't manumit any slaves. It was not created to abolish slavery. It was created to declare the natural right to separation for any people dissatisfied with their governance, and for whatever reason, including reasons that don't fit your own personal morality.

The simple timeless words of the Declaration and slavery could not possibly long co-exist. One or the other had to eventually go.

Now this, I will agree with you, is true. Those flowery words eventually triggered all the abolitionist movements in the United States. The Declaration of Independence did in fact trigger a moral awakening, and that is a tribute to the cleverness of Jefferson for putting those words in there. He sneaked them past others who would have objected to them had they realized the eventual effect they would have.

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.

And this is an actual strawman argument. You keep misattributing my arguments as supporting slavery when they do not. I merely point out that Abolishing slavery was not the reason the Union invaded.

It was the after the fact rationalization for getting so many people killed in what was actually a war of subjugation of people seeking independence.

I personally think the same moral forces that abolished it in the Northern states, would eventually work to abolish it in all the remaining states, it would have just taken longer. In the South, it was a far more integral component of their financial assets and economy.

It would have taken a lot longer to shed it's necessity for them, but I think the social forces would have eventually destroyed it anyways.

[ek_hornbeck]

No, the Founding Fathers were well aware that slavery was immoral, they just couldn't figure out how to deal with it.

If they felt it was so intolerably immoral, they wouldn't have owned slaves themselves (in some cases) and they would have written an article abolishing slavery into the US Constitution. They didn't, because even those who were strongly anti-slavery recognized that the social disruption abolition would cause would damage the nation far more than the institution of slavery did.

So, you are equating the abolitionist movement with the homonazis? It's one thing to argue that the Confederacy wasn't about slavery, but it's quite another to dismiss the abolitionist movement as some sort of social experiment.

Abolitionism was indeed the trendy hobbyhorse cause of every 19th century radical. That doesn't mean that slavery is right as an institution, but it does mean that the same political impulses that lead inspire people to socially engineer today's trendy causes by force were pushing for war over the slavery issue. And as I said before, you don't have to approve of slavery in the slightest to recognize the fact that throwing a nation into Civil War and sacrificing so much blood and treasure is far worse than the institution of slavery as such.

[FredZarguna]

Tossing aside what the authors of the Constitution said about it makes you Anthony Kennedy, not a conservative. In case you still don't get it, here's Madison, demolishing your ridiculous premise, yet again:

That the terms in question were not suspected in the Convention which formed the Constitution of any such meaning as has been constructively applied to them, may be pronounced with entire confidence; for it exceeds the possibility of belief, that the known advocates in the Convention for a jealous grant and cautious definition of Federal powers should have silently permitted the introduction of words or phrases in a sense rendering fruitless the restrictions and definitions elaborated by them.

Consider for a moment the immeasurable difference between the Constitution limited in its powers to the enumerated objects, and expounded as it would be by the import claimed for the phraseology in question. The difference is equivalent to two Constitutions, of characters essentially contrasted with each other--the one possessing powers confined to certain specified cases, the other extended to all cases whatsoever; for what is the case that would not be embraced by a general power to raise money, a power to provide for the general welfare, and a power to pass all laws necessary and proper to carry these powers into execution; all such provisions and laws superseding, at the same time, all local laws and constitutions at variance with them? Can less be said, with the evidence before us furnished by the journal of the Convention itself, than that it is impossible that such a Constitution as the latter would have been recommended to the States by all the members of that body whose names were subscribed to the instrument?

I suggest you go here. They believe in what you do. And keep your libtard ideas off a conservative forum.

[rockrr]

And as I said before, you don't have to approve of slavery in the slightest to recognize the fact that throwing a nation into Civil War and sacrificing so much blood and treasure is far worse than the institution of slavery as such.

Which serves as an indictment against the insurrectionists but not the north, who responded defensively. As an indictment against the north it would be akin to saying that it is far worse for a policeman to shoot back at bank robbers firing upon them for fear that they may hit a bystander.

[FredZarguna]

Nobody said he was 0bama. What was said was that he was on the wrong side of the Big Government divide as it was known in his time, and he was.

[EternalVigilance]

Nothing in any of your long screeds refutes that the stated purposes of the Constitution are what they are, or that the explicit requirements and processes laid out thereafter are to fulfill the document’s purposes.

Madison decried the misuse of the statement of purpose, but never its legitimate use.

Because he wasn’t stupid.

[DoodleDawg]

What's YOUR only purpose?

Lately? Watching people like you post the stuff that you post. I get a lot of laughs out of it, if nothing else.

[FredZarguna]

You've got a reading comprehension problem.

I said the purpose of the Constitution was to LIMIT the power of the Federal Government, and it was.

Anybody who refers to Madison's reflections on the meaning of a limited Government with strictly enumerated powers as "screeds" betrays himself as a moron; as such, I won't respond any further to you. [You're self-refuting and you haven't offered anything other than your own opinions here, which, like the opinions of any other lib/prog are complete bollocks.] I'm content to let anyone following our thread determine who is correct: you or James Madison.

Madison regarded the legitimate use of the instrument as the sections specifically defining its powers, and brushed aside the preamble as window dressing. He clearly states that in "the screeds." Because, unlike libtards posting on this forum, he wasn't stupid, and he understood that a Constitution granting limitless power was no Constitution at all.