Posted on 08/21/2010 7:17:45 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
Today, the U.S. Treasury released a $1 coin commemorating former President James Buchanan. And people aren't happy about it.
To understand why, some background is helpful. In 2007, thanks to a bill promoted by then-Senator John Sununu of New Hampshire, the Treasury began minting $1 coins with the likenesses of former Presidents, starting with George Washington.
The coins -- which have been appearing ever since, featuring a new President every three months -- are meant to improve use and circulation of America's dollar coins, which are often seen as an awkward misfit among currency, neither fish nor fowl.
Sununu's initiative drew inspiration from the 50 State Quarters Program, which launched in 1999. The runaway success of that effort, according to his legislation, "shows that a design on a U.S. circulating coin that is regularly changed... radically increases demand for the coin, rapidly pulling it through the economy."
The bill also suggested that a program wherein Presidents are featured on a succession of $1 coins, and First Spouses commemorated on gold $10 coins, could help correct a state of affairs where "many people cannot name all of the Presidents, and fewer can name the spouses, nor can many people accurately place each President in the proper time period of American history."
So the bill passed, and the Washington dollar coin appeared not long after. It was followed by Adams, Jefferson, et al., with the First Spouse coins minted alongside.
Now we're up to Buchanan, the fifteenth President, who took office in 1857 and turned things over to Abraham Lincoln in 1861, and whose coin (produced at the Philadelphia and Denver Mints and purchasable through the U.S. Mint website) has occasioned the aforementioned grousing. Here's where some feel the coin program is falling short:
1. The coins aren't circulating.
Many Americans have never gotten into the habit of using $1 coins, and as a result, over a billion commemorative Presidential coins are sitting around in a stockpile at the Federal Reserve. As BBC News reports, if these coins were stacked up and laid on their side, they'd stretch for 1,367 miles, or the distance from Chicago to New Mexico.
2. They don't seem to be educating people, either.
In February 2008, a year after the first presidential coins were minted, The New York Times reported that a survey had found large numbers of American teens to be woefully ignorant of their country's history. It was far from the first time Americans had gotten a dismal grade in history, suggesting that Sununu's commemorative-coin campaign isn't having much of an effect in that arena, either.
3. James Buchanan was kind of a crappy president.
In fairness, this is a grievance with a specific president, not the presidential coins program as a whole. Still, it seems to come up in all the coverage of the new coin: Buchanan wasn't very good at his job.
That's the consensus of historians, anyway, who have traditionally censured Buchanan for his failure to prevent the Civil War. Last year, a C-SPAN survey of historians granted Buchanan the dubious distinction of worst president ever.
Still, all of this isn't reason enough to declare the commemorative-coins program a total failure. If more coin collectors start avidly pursuing the presidential coins, it could have the effect of pushing down the national debt, thanks to the way the value of the coins fluctuates with their availability. And if the dollar coins were to catch on and replace paper $1 bills entirely, it could save the country between $500 and $700 million each year in printing costs.
Plus, if things stay on track, 2012 will see the release of the Chester A. Arthur dollar coin -- marking the first time that long non-commemorated president's face has ever appeared on any nation's currency. And who are we to deprive him of that?
Looks as if you've already taken care of that.
This continual garbage about the Civil War does NOTHING to advance conservatism which is what I THOUGHT this place was all about.
Then go away, boy.
Read "Gettysburg" by Stephen Sears, "Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage" by Noah Andre Trudeau and "Retreat from Gettysbug: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign" by Kent Masterson Brown for detailed accounts of what Lee's troops really behaved like. With Lee's blind eye if not full support.
For all pratical purposes he was in Sherman's place when he went into Pennsylvania, you dolt, and the only people that he waged war on were you stinking yankees!!
I'm going to check those books out. You have to wonder what mayhem Lee's hordes would have committed had Lincoln and Meade abandoned Pennsylvania to the rebs like the glorious defenders of Dixie did to South Carolina. If you're going to presume to call yourself an independent nation, you do not march away from a large enemy force invading your heartland. I think people upset about SC need to blame Jeff and Hood instead of Sherman.
Lee in PA wasn’t in Sherman’s place. Meade didn’t let Lee disperse his army for a long campaign of widespread destruction.
But it's a diversion from more immediate and unpleasant happenings.
Actually there is one famous Sherman order for murder. General Sherman to U.S. Brigadier General Louis Douglass Watkins at Calhoun, Georgia, on Oct. 29, 1864:
Can you not send over to Fairmount and Adairsville, burn 10 or 12 houses of known secessionists, kill a few at random and let them know it will be repeated every time a train is fired upon from Resaca to Kingston.
Trains were legitimate targets of war.
Well, somebody in Sherman's army tolerated rape. From William Gilmore Simms:
We have been told of successful outrages of this unmentionable character being practiced on women dwelling in the suburbs. Many are understood to have taken place in remote country settlements, and two cases are described where young negresses were brutally forced by the wretches and afterwards murdered -- one of them being thrust, when half dead, head down, into a mud puddle, and there held until she was suffocated. ... Regiments, in successive relays, subjected scores of these poor women [rb: black women in this case] to the torture of their embraces ...
"Our men did very bad in MD and Penn...The robed(sic) every house about such battlefield not only of eatables but of everything they could lay their hands on. They tore up dresses to bits and broke all the furniture..." - North Carolina soldier.
"The wrath of southern vengeance will be wreaked upon the Pennsylvanians & all property belonging to the abolition horde that we cross..." - Virginia soldier.
What you provided was davis's "FU" to the union on his way out of town. He isn't saying, "Let's try to find a way to work out things equitably", he's saying, "Via condios putas"
"For a great many years the South had been fighting against unconstitutional Northern state laws that blocked the return of fugitive slaves. How much longer should they have put up with the North on this issue?"
As long as it took. That is, if they were to act honorably.
"The North had just passed a tariff law that greatly increased the transfer of wealth from the South to the North. The South had been fighting tariff battles for years, and they were about to take one on the chin."
Unlike the circumstances of the Revolutionary War days, all the states in the Union had representation, the states that comprised the southern region included. And those southern states also had considerable influence. Had they not been so pig-headed they would have used that influence to their advantage.
I bet that put a damper on the train snipers.
Obviously they did not. Perhaps you meant that they had a legal right to do so, which seems not to be totally without dispute. If they had the power they would have won.
The 10th Amendment speaks of powers remaining with the states or the people. And the statements clarifying what the Constitution meant voted for by Hamilton and Jay in the New York ratification said, "... every power not granted thereby remains with them and at their will ..." It was in that sense that the South had the power. But you knew that.
Yes, it must suck having had the opportunity to toss it around with those guys and now be stuck with a POS like pokie...;-)
Keep the faith. Things will be looking up after November.
I bring to your attention that we (me, myself and I) got involved.
We moved this thread to the smokey backroom which means y'all (guess where I hail from) may proceed to rip each others guts clean out.
Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.