Posted on 11/01/2016 3:06:02 PM PDT by GoldenState_Rose
By the President of the United States of America.
A Proclamation.
Whereas, the Senate of the United States, devoutly recognizing the Supreme Authority and just Government of Almighty God, in all the affairs of men and of nations, has, by a resolution, requested the President to designate and set apart a day for National prayer and humiliation.
And whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.
And, insomuch as we know that, by His divine law, nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole People? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!
It behooves us then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.
Now, therefore, in compliance with the request, and fully concurring in the views of the Senate, I do, by this my proclamation, designate and set apart Thursday, the 30th. day of April, 1863, as a day of national humiliation, fasting and prayer. And I do hereby request all the People to abstain, on that day, from their ordinary secular pursuits, and to unite, at their several places of public worship and their respective homes, in keeping the day holy to the Lord, and devoted to the humble discharge of the religious duties proper to that solemn occasion.
All this being done, in sincerity and truth, let us then rest humbly in the hope authorized by the Divine teachings, that the united cry of the Nation will be heard on high, and answered with blessings, no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.
Done at the City of Washington, this thirtieth day of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty seventh.
By the President: Abraham Lincoln William H. Seward, Secretary of State.
Mr. Lincoln often bragged to his law-firm partners as
being an “Infidel” as it pertains to the G_d of Abraham, Isaac, and Jaacob.
Mr. Lincoln’s “god talk” was about a sincere as Bush’s, Bush’s, Clinton’s, Roosevelt’s, Roosevelt’s, Nixon’s, ad nauseum.
duplicates are not in error.
Lincoln made this phony proclamation in the midst of his attacks on the Confederate States.
Lol.
Liberal loser.
The mature Lincoln believed in God, though he wasn't theologically Orthodox.
The Calvinist in him found it hard to believe that God could be merciful and loving.
Some of those other gentlemen also believed in God.
Whatever else you could say against George W. Bush, he certainly believed in God.
Same thing about the Roosevelts.
I smell the odor of a handful of sour grapes here. LOL
Mr. Lincoln was tantamount to the modern day Goldman Sachs.
Mr. Lincoln was owned by said establishment.
80% of federal taxers were paid by:
Virginia
North Carolina
South Carolina
Georgia
90% of taxes collected at the federal level were for infrastructure improvements in northern states.
Never since Mr. Lincoln’s “tenure” have the Crony Capitalists been so ever threatened.
Clinton.
Obama.
Comey.
Zuckerburg.
Wall Street.
Bezos.
It doesn’t stop..
This was the consequence.
When the South became independent, Most of the incoming trade represented by that pile of coins on New York would have moved to Southern States. New York would have been financially wrecked in the subsequent years.
Fortunately for them, they had a bought and paid for agent of their interests at the head of the government in Washington D.C. ( Sorta like now, if you know what I mean.)
Would like to participate in this thread longer and in more detail, but I have plans to spend time with my friends this evening, so I will just have to check back in tomorrow.
The war was started because the South was a cash cow for New York and the Federal Government, and they weren't going to let it go without a fight.
Money and connections have always played a role in government and politics.
And no, the slave states didn't pay most of the taxes. Tariffs were passed on to the consumers and there were more people -- and therefore more consumers -- in the free states.
The war was going to happen anyway. Lincoln did a great job as commander in chief.
So you're saying that out of a $66 million budget in 1859, the federal government spent $59 million of that on infrastructure improvements in the North? Really? What did they build?
Sorry, but that's total fantasy, no facts anywhere support it.
In fact, merchants in large seaport cities like New York, Philadelphia & Boston paid at least 80% of Federal tariff revenues.
Those cities then shipped their imports all over the country, more than 80% of which was not Deep South, future Confederates.
As for Federal expenditures in those days, roughly half went to the military then mostly scattered in small posts out West.
Of non-military Federal spending, according to this site:
Percentages of Federal spending in Southern states:
Sorry, but regardless of how often you repeat it, that's still nonsense.
In fact, Deep South cotton & rice accounted for roughly half (not 3/4) of US total exports, including specie.
And roughly 80% of Southern exports shipped directly from large Gulf Coast ports like New Orleans, Galvaston & Mobile, not through New York.
We know this, in part, because the Panic of 1857 affected the Deep South relatively little, since they could directly barter cotton for imports with their European customers.
DiogenesLamp: "When the South became independent, Most of the incoming trade represented by that pile of coins on New York would have moved to Southern States.
New York would have been financially wrecked in the subsequent years. "
More nonsense.
In fact, when cotton exports did end in 1861, the net result was a reduction in Federal revenues of only 26%, after which they grew 19%, 37% and 51% in the following years.
As for your ideas about rerouting commerce from, say, New York to, say, Charleston, that would never happen so long as 80% of the US voting population lived in Union states.
No merchant would pay two tariffs to get imports from Europe to Charleston and then ship by rail to Northern states.
That could make no sense, just like the rest of your argument.
DiogenesLamp: "The war was started because the South was a cash cow for New York and the Federal Government, and they weren't going to let it go without a fight."
No, war started when Jefferson Davis ordered a Confederate military assault on Union troops in Union Fort Sumter.
Fort Sumter amounted to the Confederacy's attack on Pearl Harbor, period.
US economy in 1860:
Trade must roughly balance over time. You can't have imports without exports to create the money to buy the imports.
3/4ths of that money was created by Southern Exports. Raw numbers of people have nothing to do with it. These "consumers" weren't producing but 25% of what Europe wanted to buy, so unless they were stealing the money which the South produced from exports, they had nothing with which to purchase European goods.
Ergo, the South was supporting 3/4ths of the budget of the federal government. That is, 1/4th of the US Citizenry, was paying 3/4ths of US Government expenses.
They -- Northerners -- provided goods and services that your beloved Southern planters bought and used.
That's how Northerners got the money to buy imports and pay the taxes on them.
You want your darling slave drivers to use the money they "earned" to buy things and still have the money (or some kind of moral claim to the money) they'd already spent.
It doesn't work that way. You can't simply dismiss the value of the goods and services produced by Northerners and provided to Southerners, no matter how in love you are with the Old South.
I suggest you look up the physiocrats and their fallacious belief that land and agricultural labor was the chief and only source of wealth, since you seem to be in thrall to their discredited ideas.
About the tariff: If you were a poor Appalachian farmer and were largely self-sufficient, tariffs wouldn't affect you much. You could make most of what you needed.
If you were a Southern artisan who made nails or barrels or buckets or broadcloth, you might not mind cheap mass-produced European manufactures being kept off the market.
And of course, Southerners who grew hemp or sugar benefited from the tariff on those goods.
Even the cotton planters who objected to the tariff weren't as mad about it as you seem to be today.
They had another, more pressing interest which they regarded as more threatened.
Can you guess what that was?
They are not beloved to me. My family didn't arrive until the 1900s and we didn't settle in any of the Southern States. I don't have a dog in this fight, and for that reason I can be objective regarding what I see. I don't have any emotional baggage associated with the one side or the other.
That's how Northerners got the money to buy imports and pay the taxes on them.
Well you are somewhat right about this, but it is not exactly as you describe it. Southerners were steered into buying Northern products because the jiggered laws made it much more expensive to buy European products. Without that artificial manipulated market condition, the South would have been buying a lot more directly from Europe.
The loss of revenue to Northern industries would have been huge had the South been allowed to remain independent.
You want your darling slave drivers to use the money they "earned" to buy things and still have the money (or some kind of moral claim to the money) they'd already spent.
You really do have some emotional attachment going on there. We can all agree that Slavery is immoral, but you seem to be unable to acknowledge that it was legal at the time and acknowledged by all parties to be legal. At the time, it was just as much legally the South's money as was the 40% siphoned off by New York became New York's money.
It doesn't work that way. You can't simply dismiss the value of the goods and services produced by Northerners and provided to Southerners,
I'm not dismissing it. I'm noting that much of it was going to disappear and cause severe financial upheaval in the North if the South was allowed to remain independent. I am arguing that these huge financial losses to the North were the real reason there had to be a war. An independent South upended the rice bowls of very powerful men in the North.
...no matter how in love you are with the Old South.
Geeze, will you give it a break? I've never lived in a Southern State. I have little knowledge of the South and I have no particular affinity for it. I imagine it is hot and I probably wouldn't like it.
Even the cotton planters who objected to the tariff weren't as mad about it as you seem to be today.
It is unfortunate that these discussions always get steered to talking about the "tariff" and thereby tend to ignore the far larger pile of money being contested which was the bulk of the European Trade itself, the shipping, insuring, banking, warehousing and other assorted industries that would have shifted Southward with the newly capitalized Confederacy.
Talking about the "tariffs" is a case of the tail wagging the dog. The mountain of wealth that would have shifted Southward is magnitudes greater than costs of the tariffs.
Had the South been allowed to exercise it's right to independence, We would now be bitching about the Wealthy Plutocrats of Charleston instead of bitching about the Wealthy Plutocrats of New York.
Moreover, the federal government spent a lot of money dredging Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and Baltimore harbors and removing obstacles to navigation. Plans to federally fund roads or canals or railroads didn't come to much in the antebellum period, but there was always money for harbor projects, mostly in slave states.
I think they just made up the idea that the vast majority of federal improvement projects were in the North. Maybe Southerners assumed all that work on harbors was just their due, and "internal improvements" were something different and a Northern plot to take away their hard-earned money.
I am arguing that these huge financial losses to the North were the real reason there had to be a war.
And non-material reasons count for nothing? Love of the union. The theft and destruction of federal property. The insult to the American flag. The threat to Southern unionists. Maybe all that counts for nothing in your world, but they certainly mattered in 19th century America.
But it's a moot point. Any president who didn't want to be regarded as a complete failure would have to take a firm stand against the secessionist wave -- would have to hold out for at least a while. So it was up to the secessionists whether or not there would be war. They made the choice for war, and after that, no US President could back down and simply ignore Davis's decision to fight.
Maybe if material questions were completely absent (they never are) things might have turned out differently. That would have applied to both sides, though. Your very notion of vast wealth coming to the South could have been the sort of thing that inspired violence among the secessionists. But you didn't need a big pot of money up for grabs to explain why Northerners didn't simply roll over and play dead before the secessionists. Pride and self-respect were at stake.
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