Posted on 03/19/2017 9:14:52 AM PDT by MtnClimber
By 1860, there had been at least a decade of unrest among the silent majority – mostly farmers, Christians, and family people living outside the major urban areas. They were angry with the political establishment and wanted serious changes in the federal government. But they mostly sat silent because they had no political leader who accurately expressed their frustration with the system.
Then an outsider emerged who captured all of the common folks' attention, who promised to change Washington and how it worked and make America a more just country. Nobody gave this outsider a chance to win the presidency! He didn't know anything, they said. All of the established media predicted he would lose big against his well known, established, and well financed opponent.
Well, a funny thing happened. That outsider in 1860 won! And in 1861, all of the established politicians, the power brokers, and their followers decided to secede from the Union and start a civil war.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Too funny! Lincoln was the quintessential big-government insider. Don’t let that “log-splitter” swill fool you, because he had been an attorney for railroads, and played quite a role in setting the stage for getting tax-payer funded subsidies for railroad ventures. He was quite vocal in his argument that the federal government should reign supreme, and that the individual states should be relegated to subordinate vassal status, existing primarily to serve the interests of the federal government.
“That didn’t happen until the Wilson admin.”
Nope, it began with Lincoln. But certainly Wilson eagerly took the handed-off federal baton and ran with it, doing incredible damage to the constitutional republic, with FDR taking the baton and running on steroids.
Same here bro.
Yes. First, look at our endnotes in our chapter on Jackson in “A Patriot’s History of the United States” for more, but the key sources are Robert Remini, “Andrew Jackson and the Birth of the Democrat Party,” an article by Brown on Missouri and the secession crisis (terrific article), an article we cite on the “rise of the nominating convention.”
Almost any of the bios of Martin Van Buren will have this, too but our chapter is pretty succinct.
You are incorrect. Lincoln won an absolute majority of the votes in enough states to win the election even had the Democrats run a single candidate. The only states that Lincoln won with less than 50% vote were California and Oregon.
Total rubbish & nonsense.
Lincoln served one term in Congress, ending in 1849 after his opposition to Democrat President Polk's Mexican war had cost him much support in his Illinois district.
Between 1849 and the election year of 1860, Lincoln made no notable trips outside Illinois, until invited to speak at Cooper Union, New York, in February, 1860.
That speech to powerful Republican leaders won Lincoln much praise, but there is no evidence he had suddenly become beholden to "big government insiders".
In fact, before 1861, all those "big government insiders" were, as now, Democrats, who had ruled in Washington, DC, almost uninterrupted since the Founding.
Yes, Lincoln did support building the transcontinental railroad, which began while he was President and was completed in 1869.
But the Federal government didn't build it and didn't even pay for it, except through granting a strip of Federal lands to build it through.
That hardly qualifies as "big government."
Lincoln's administration in Washington was shaped by the needs of Civil War and is responsible for the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, but at war's end Washington returned to basically the same government it had been in 1860 -- especially after the presidential election & compromise of 1876 which resulted in Union troops withdrawal from Confederate states and the return of white rule there.
So the era of "Big Bad Government" you decry really began with the Progressive years, especially under another Southern Democrat President, Woodrow Wilson.
Lincoln-1865908 Republican
Douglas-1380202 Northern Democrat
Breckinridge-848019 Southern Democrat.
Remember I am looking at it as if ONLY the public votes counted without an Electoral College (a Democrat dream).
If ONE Democratic candidate ran and got this many votes, he beats Lincoln with a total of 2228221.
Probably more if South Carolina didn’t have a real weird election process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860
Next you’re gonna be trying to tell me that the parties switched sides.
(SMH)
Freed all their slaves? Or just the slaves of those in enemy territory?
Today's Democrats have played the race card so effectively against conservatives that conservatives now have a hankering to play the race card back - wrongly thinking the race card can be played both ways. It doesn't seem to work that way.
Popular votes don't elect a president. Electoral votes do.
I don't know what gets into you folks, who think you have some kind of argument to make here, when the truth of the 13th, 14th & 15th amendments should be plenty enough proof that's ridiculous.
The facts are that Lincoln during the Civil War did first what he constitutionally could do, which is emancipate slaves in states then in rebellion against the United States.
At the same time Republicans in congress debated various proposals for nationwide abolition, proposals which ended up as the 13th, 14th & 15th amendments.
And yet you people want to twist that all around, making it sound like Republicans didn't really care about emancipation, but the fact is they did, and also unlike Democrats then & now, Republicans cared about the US Constitution.
So what exactly is your problem with that?
I have long argued that Democrats could have won in 1860 the same way they won in 1856 -- by remaining united in the face of split opposition parties.
In 1856 Pennsylvania's Doughface Democrat James Buchanan easily defeated the now split candidates of the old Whig party: Northern Republican Fremont and Southern American ("Know Nothing") Millard Fillmore, even though combined they received more popular votes.
In 1860 a united Democrat party would receive more popular votes than Republicans, but also benefit from a band-wagon effect to help it reach majorities in Border South & North states (i.e., Kentucky, Virginia, Illinois, Indiana)
But none of that happened because Deep South Fire Eaters engineered a split-up of Democrats making Southern Democrats now a minority within the minority Democrat opposition.
That's how Southern Democrats went from the cat bird's seat in 1856 to out of left field in 1860.
But I say: it didn't have to be that way.
***Popular votes don’t elect a president. Electoral votes do. ***
And WHO today is screaming for an end to the Electoral College, and Presidential elections decided by ONLY the Popular vote? The Democrats!
Lincoln still won, Slaves were freed and today still grovel at the feet of their Democratic masters.
If you ever get the chance to hear Dinesh D'Souza speak on this subject, he gives multi-points comparing of how slaves lived antebellum to their descendants lives as Democrat voters today.
Someday if I get the chance, I'll copy his points down and post them here -- very revealing.
Not an issue, the issue, regardless of how much our pro-Confederate friends wish to emphasize the Morrill Tariff & other matters.
Republicans like Lincoln were abolitionist enough to infuriate Southern Fire Eaters, even though the Republican platform only called for restricting the expansion of slavery into western territories which didn't want it.
The fact is that Lincoln was the first openly anti-slavery candidate to be elected President, and that was enough to drive Fire Eaters to first declare secession then war on the United States.
You and I disagree and that's fine. You feel Lincoln's War, which killed about 600,000 Americans, was a necessary first step to passing the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments in late 1865.
My belief is that the U.S. should have passed the three amendments in 1861 and that the war and all the killings should have been skipped.
To the larger point of the story - many conservatives today want to play the slavery/race cards in political debates because they resent the success that the Democrat party has had playing the slavery/race cards. That strategy is doomed to fail if wrapped in the mantle of Lincoln - because he was a very vocal white supremacist, a fact that is generally known.
Which is neither here nor there. My point in responding to you to begin with is to disagree with your claim that had the Democrats united behind a single candidate then Lincoln would have been defeated and would be no more remembered than men like John Davis, Lewis Cass, or John Floyd are.
It's possible, I guess. The only states that Lincoln carried with less than a majority were California and Oregon. Add their electoral votes to the states Lincoln lost and throw in the four electoral votes he got from New Jersey, a state he lost to Douglas, and it's still not enough to win.
To win, a Democrat would have to carry the whole South and the Border States and a big state -- New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, or a combination of Indiana and Illinois. You could say that the party split hurt Democratic morale to the point where many Northerners who usually went Democrat voted for Lincoln or stayed home, giving their states to Lincoln.
But who Could the Democrats have run? Douglas was the strongest candidate in the North but he was hated in the Deep South. The other candidates were weak and unknown. Is it possible that a dark horse, an unknown Democrat could have kept the party united and defeated Lincoln, who was also a little-known figure at the time? It's possible, but a weak candidate might not have been able to unite the party.
There's another possibility. Horatio Seymour, the governor of New York, refused to run. If he had, maybe he could have carried New York and won the election. But he didn't. Maybe he's responsible for the Civil War happening when it did.
There's two wild cards, though. One is the Constitutional Union ticket, the old Whigs. Democratic unity wouldn't have kept them out of the race. They wouldn't have done as well as they did in a four party contest, but could still have taken a state or two from the Democrat.
The other wild card is the Southern fire eaters who already wanted secession. They would have found reasons not to support any Northern Democrat. A candidate that they would support would be unacceptable to many Northern Democrats.
If John Wilkes Booth had had a twitter account, would he have killed anybody? Maybe just having an emotional outlet would have been enough. If it wasn't he'd end up on a watch list and wouldn't have been allowed to get close to a president.
Plus, think about it: we can monetize and get a profit out of so many things nowadays. If you could make a fortune out of getting people to tell what they are doing 24 hours a day every day, who'd bother with cotton and slaves?
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