Posted on 02/05/2005 6:30:51 PM PST by quidnunc
OK guys. I'm gonna pop some popcorn and sit back while Ditto proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that once again no lie is too big for stand watie to puke up so long as it supports his agenda. Have at it, guys.
I mention neo-confederate lunitics, and look who shows up.
I am not aware of the "off-switch" that lincoln found to the Constitution. In many acts, he ignored Constitutional restraints on federal power. How so? And to further that egregious behavior, though this is not lincoln's fault per se, modern-day power hungry Centralizers and Collectivists use lincoln's extra-constitutional acts as precedent!! Some will argue that subsuming the Constitutional restraints on central power is exactly what lincoln was about.
His actions formed a nation in the process of destroying a Constitutional Republic.
Like?
Example?
Declaration by the Slave Owning People of the Cherokee Nation of the Causes Which Have Impelled Them to Unite Their Fortunes With Those of the Confederate States of America.
Yes. Many Cherokee owned slaves and yes, it was about their "Fortunes." And after siding with the Rebels, they went after the "uncivilized" Cherokee who sided with the Union and killed a lot of them who were trying to escape to Kansas.
In 1861, Principal Chief John Ross tried desperately to keep the Cherokee Nation out of the whiteman's war. By the end of the summer, events in the Indian Territory and Confederate victories at Wilson's Creek MO and in the East made alliance with the Confederacy the only rational course of action. A treaty was negotiated, the terms of which give much insight on the issues that were important to the Cherokee Nation before and long after the Civil War.
In spite of the alliance, many Cherokee had no affection for the Southern States who had forced them from their homeland in the East. In December, many of the full bloods in Col. John Drew's 1st Cherokee Mtd Rifles had deserted to avoid fighting against Opothleyahola's Loyal Creeks on their exodus to Kansas.
In July 1862, Union troops occupied the capital city of Tahlequah and, after some negotiation, Chief Ross was voluntarily captured. In August 1862, The Southern Cherokee elected Stand Watie as their Principal Chief.
Ross traveled to Washington to try to convince President Lincoln that the Confederate Treaty was signed under duress and the majority of Cherokee were loyal to the Union. The National Council rescinded the Confederate Treaty and emancipated slaves in the Cherokee Nation. However, it was another year before Federal Troops effectively controlled the Cherokee Nation.
The Nation was essentially a no-man's land. While thousands of Loyal Cherokee refugees were starving in Kansas, the families of the Southern Cherokee were refugees in Texas and Arkansas.
I don't have a stack of references beside me, but it is common knowledge that lincoln arrested many newspeople for doing nothing but writing negatively about his war actions. Oh, and there's that little matter of "invading" certain sovereign states. There is also the matter of lincoln's veneration of Henry Clay a well known advocate of government/business partnerships for the "common good"(whatever that means). There has been, since the beginning of this grand experiment called America, a natural tension between centralizers and decentraiizers(Hamilton vs. Jefferson). My contention is that lincoln falls on the side of the centralizers in a big way. One need look no further than what exists today to appreciate lincoln's legacy. I, for one, object to paying over 50% of my income to lincoln's legacy.
You don't have any references because what you say is not true. There was plenty of negativity in the Democrat newspapers about Lincoln and his actions. Worse than anything Bush has had to endure from the likes of Michael Moore or the New York Times. Much of it was quite harsh both concerning his policy and very personally hateful toward him. Those papers and editors were not disturbed. They published without interruption throughout the war.
The papers and editors who were shut down were the Copperhead (pro-Confederate) sheets who practiced sedition by encouraging soldiers to desert or called for support for the Rebel Cause. Sedition in a time of war is an actionable offense, then and now. Since Vietnam, we have been too damn "sensitive" to enforce those laws.
None, of course. He violated the Constitution after he took office. Here is some pre-secession opinion of the time on the threat posed to Texas [Source State Gazette, Austin, Texas, November 24, 1860, letter from Judge P. W. Gray]:
It is not the mere election of the man that is dangerous, but it is the fact that he is the representative of a triumphant party, whose principles and aims are hostile to our institutions, and which, if carried out, must be fatal to them. His election is the endorsement of a dominant sectional majority, of the declaration of "irrepressible conflict" between the Northern and Southern institutions. It is the approval of the past violations of the Constitutional compact between the States, and an avowal to persist in the same course of aggression. It is denial of the equality of the equality of the States in the Union, a denunciation of their institutions, and a proclamation that all the powers and agencies of the federal Government will be exercised for the immediate restriction and ultimate extirpation of those institutions. It is the triumph of the fanatical anti-slavery sentiment that has been increasing for years; and it is now abolitionism arrayed against the rights and property of fifteen sovereign States, denouncing hostility and war, to be carried on under the aegis and forms of the Constitution whch itself guarantees them, and which was formed and based on principles of harmony and fraternity.
The "laws higher than the Constitution" attitude of the Republicans did not auger well for the future. "Laws higher than the Constitution" could have well come from today's liberal judges who interpret the Constitution however they want to further their own political beliefs.
Here is an example of what the Judge was concerned about [Source: , November 17, 1860, reporting an article from the New York Tribune that reported a speech by Stanton]:
According to Mr. Stanton, the present organization of the Supreme Court is to be changed under Lincoln's administration, and New England, New York, and the Middle States, Missouri and the Northwest, and the Pacific coast are to have six or eight additional Judges.
"Then," says the Lincoln orator, "repudiating the novel and dangerous heresies of Taney and Catron, and returning to the faith of Jay and Marshall, it would embrace the earliest opportunity to entomb the political pronunciamento uttered in the Dred Scott case [loud cheers] and pile upon it an imperishable monument, inscribing thereon, as an appropriate epitaph, 'Died of the will of the American people!'
This was after a summer where a number of Texas towns were burned by abolitionists and where the federal government was not doing a good job protecting the state from Indians and invasions from Mexico. The state had had enough and was on edge.
But you know anyway.
...that lincoln arrested many newspeople for doing nothing but writing negatively about his war actions...
But you can't name any.
My contention is that lincoln falls on the side of the centralizers in a big way.
And yet Jefferson Davis, who nationalized industries, instituted a draft, seized private property without compensation, enacted confiscatory income taxes, ignored his constitution, and led the south into a bloody and, in the end, unsuccessful civil war, gets off scott free. I think you need to take another look at our history and quit blaming every ill on Lincoln. And while you're at it, count your blessings. The south could have won, and you could have wound up under a larger, more intrusive government.
"Therefore it is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions-- nothing less than an open declaration of war-- for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans." -- Letter of S.F. Hale, Commissioner of Alabama to the State of Kentucky, to Gov. Magoffin of Kentucky
Of course that didn't happen, did it? Just like the court packing didn't happen and the "laws higher than the Constitution" didn't happen and any of the other multitude of lame excuses cooked up by the southerers as an excuse for their rebellion.
I see it's already brought out the tiny brigade of idolaters who believe that Saint Abe can do no wrong and treat any factual criticism of his record as a blasphemy upon their false religion.
It's members tend to be the types who are "deeply moved" upon visiting temples dedicated to beings other than the real God.
PSST! He doesn't like competition in the "noxious bilge" market, which he seems to have cornered on his own.
Not that you've given any reason to think that he's got a competitor, but people in that business tend to exhibit paranoias of that sort.
But in a confederacy the people, without exaggeration, may be said to be entirely the masters of their own fate. Power being almost always the rival of power, the general [federal] government will at all times stand ready to check the usurpations of the state governments, and these will have the same disposition towards the general government. The people, by throwing themselves into either scale, will infallibly make it preponderate. If their rights are invaded by either, they can make use of the other as the instrument of redress. How wise will it be in them by cherishing the union to preserve to themselves an advantage which can never be too highly prized!It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the State governments will, in all possible contingencies, afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority. Projects of usurpation cannot be masked under pretenses so likely to escape the penetration of select bodies of men, as of the people at large. The legislatures will have better means of information. They can discover the danger at a distance; and possessing all the organs of civil power, and the confidence of the people, they can at once adopt a regular plan of opposition, in which they can combine all the resources of the community. They can readily communicate with each other in the different States, and unite their common forces for the protection of their common liberty.
Alexander Hamilton, 'The Same Subject Continued (The Idea of Restraining the Legislative Authority in Regard to the Common Defense Considered)', Federalist No. 28, 26 Dec 1787
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