Posted on 06/12/2003 5:58:28 AM PDT by Aurelius
Over the years I've heard many rail at the South for seceding from the 'glorious Union.' They claim that Jeff Davis and all Southerners were really nothing but traitors - and some of these people were born and raised in the South and should know better, but don't, thanks to their government school 'education.'
Frank Conner, in his excellent book The South Under Siege 1830-2000 deals in some detail with the question of Davis' alleged 'treason.' In referring to the Northern leaders he noted: "They believed the most logical means of justifying the North's war would be to have the federal government convict Davis of treason against the United States. Such a conviction must presuppose that the Confederate States could not have seceded from the Union; so convicting Davis would validate the war and make it morally legitimate."
Although this was the way the federal government planned to proceed, that prolific South-hater, Thaddeus Stevens, couldn't keep his mouth shut and he let the cat out of the bag. Stevens said: "The Southerners should be treated as a conquered alien enemy...This can be done without violence to the established principles only on the theory that the Southern states were severed from the Union and were an independent government de facto and an alien enemy to be dealt with according to the laws of war...No reform can be effected in the Southern States if they have never left the Union..." And, although he did not plainly say it, what Stevens really desired was that the Christian culture of the Old South be 'reformed' into something more compatible with his beliefs. No matter how you look at it, the feds tried to have it both ways - they claimed the South was in rebellion and had never been out of the Union, but then it had to do certain things to 'get back' into the Union it had never been out of. Strange, is it not, that the 'history' books never seem to pick up on this?
At any rate, the Northern government prepared to try President Davis for treason while it had him in prison. Mr. Conner has observed that: "The War Department presented its evidence for a treason trial against Davis to a famed jurist, Francis Lieber, for his analysis. Lieber pronounced 'Davis will not be found guilty and we shall stand there completely beaten'." According to Mr. Conner, U.S. Attorney General James Speed appointed a renowned attorney, John J. Clifford, as his chief prosecutor. Clifford, after studying the government's evidence against Davis, withdrew from the case. He said he had 'grave doubts' about it. Not to be undone, Speed then appointed Richard Henry Dana, a prominent maritime lawyer, to the case. Mr. Dana also withdrew. He said basically, that as long as the North had won a military victory over the South, they should just be satisfied with that. In other words - "you won the war, boys, so don't push your luck beyond that."
Mr. Conner tells us that: "In 1866 President Johnson appointed a new U.S. attorney general, Henry Stanburg. But Stanburg wouldn't touch the case either. Thus had spoken the North's best and brightest jurists re the legitimacy of the War of Northern Aggression - even though the Jefferson Davis case offered blinding fame to the prosecutor who could prove that the South had seceded unconstitutionally." None of these bright lights from the North would touch this case with a ten-foot pole. It's not that they were dumb, in fact the reverse is true. These men knew a dead horse when they saw it and were not about to climb aboard and attempt to ride it across the treacherous stream of illegal secession. They knew better. In fact, a Northerner from New York, Charles O'Connor, became the legal counsel for Jeff Davis - without charge. That, plus the celebrity jurists from the North that refused to touch the case, told the federal government that they really had no case against Davis or secession and that Davis was merely being held as a political prisoner.
Author Richard Street, writing in The Civil War back in the 1950s said exactly the same thing. Referring to Jeff Davis, Street wrote: "He was imprisoned after the war, was never brought to trial. The North didn't dare give him a trial, knowing that a trial would establish that secession was not unconstitutional, that there had been no 'rebellion' and that the South had got a raw deal." At one point the government intimated that it would be willing to offer Davis a pardon, should he ask for one. Davis refused that and he demanded that the government either give him a pardon or give him a trial, or admit that they had dealt unjustly with him. Mr. Street said: "He died 'unpardoned' by a government that was leery of giving him a public hearing." If Davis was as guilty as they claimed, why no trial???
Had the federal government had any possible chance to convict Davis and therefore declare secession unconstitutional they would have done so in a New York minute. The fact that they diddled around and finally released him without benefit of the trial he wanted proves that the North had no real case against secession. Over 600,000 boys, both North and South, were killed or maimed so the North could fight a war of conquest over something that the South did that was neither illegal or wrong. Yet they claim the moral high ground because the 'freed' the slaves, a farce at best.
"Despite the mist and haze that surrounded him; despite the tumult, the hurry, and confusion of the hour, we were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position. We saw him, measured him, and estimated him; not by stray utterances to injudicious and tedious delegations, who often tried his patience; not by isolated facts torn from their connection; not by any partial and imperfect glimpses, caught at inopportune moments; but by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had some- how met in the person of Abraham Lincoln. It mattered little to us what language he might employ on special occasions; it mattered little to us, when we fully knew him, whether he was swift or slow in his movements; it was enough for us that Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States.
When, therefore, it shall be asked what we have to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, or what Abraham Lincoln had to do with us, the answer is ready, full, and complete. Though he loved Caesar less than Rome, though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood; under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we saw that the handwriting of ages, in the form of prejudice and proscription, was rapidly fading away from the face of our whole country; under his rule, and in due time, about as soon after all as the country could tolerate the strange spectacle, we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rags of bondage, and being clothed all over in the blue uniforms of the soldiers of the United States; under his rule we saw two hundred thousand of our dark and dusky people responding to the call of Abraham Lincoln, and with muskets on their shoulders, and eagles on their buttons, timing their high footsteps to liberty and union under the national flag; under his rule we saw the independence of the black republic of Hayti, the special object of slaveholding aversion and horror, fully recognized, and her minister, a colored gentleman, duly received here in the city of Washington; under his rule we saw the internal slave-trade, which so long disgraced the nation, abolished, and slavery abolished in the District of Columbia; under his rule we saw for the first time the law enforced against the foreign slave-trade, and the first slave-trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer; under his rule, assisted by the greatest captain of our age, and his inspiration, we saw the Confederate States, based upon the idea that our race must be slaves, and slaves forever, battered to pieces and scattered to the four winds; under his rule, and in the fullness of time, we saw Abraham Lincoln, after giving the slave-holders three months' grace in which to save their hateful slave system, penning the immortal paper, which, though special in its language, was general in its principles and effect, making slavery forever impossible in the United States. Though we waited long, we saw all this and more."
-- Frederick Douglass, 1876
Walt
free dixie,sw
The Douglass material you desperately use to change the subject is taken from more than ten years after Lincoln was dead. Here is some more contemporary material.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Frederick Douglass said:
Illogical and unfair as Mr. Lincoln's statements are, they are nevertheless quite in keeping with his whole course from the beginning of his administration up to this day, and confirm the painful conviction that though elected as an anti-slavery man by Republican and Abolition voters, Mr. Lincoln is quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred and far more concerned for the preservation of slavery, and the favor of the Border States, than for any sentiment of magnanimity or principle of justice and humanity"
The Life and Writing of Frederick Douglass,
edited by Philip S. Foner, 4 Vols, New York, 1955, vol 3, page 268
Frederick Douglass said:
With the single exception of the question of slavery extension, Mr. Lincoln proposes no measure which can bring him into antagonistic collision with the traffickers in human flesh, either in the States or in the District of Columbia .... Slavery will be as safe, and safer, in the Union under such a President, than it can be under any President of a Southern Confederacy"
The Life and Writing of Frederick Douglass, edited by Philip S. Foner,
4 Vols, New York, 1955, vol 2, page 527
Frederick Douglass charged Clay, and by implication, Lincoln with "the most revolting blasphemy," saying "You would charge upon God the repsonsibility of your own crimes, and would seek a solace from the pangs of a guilty conscience by sacrilegiously assuming that in robbing Africa of her children, you acted in obedience of the great purposed, and were but fulfilling the decress of the most high God" (FD 1:289)
Lincoln never met a Black law he didn't like. Referring to the Illinois Exclusion law, Douglass expressed his outrage for an act which "cooly" proposed to "sell the bodies and souls of the blacks to increase the intelligence and refinement of the whites [and] to rob every black stranger who ventures among them to increase their literary fund."
Douglass's indictment of Lincoln: "The treatment of our poor black soldiers -- the refusal to pay them anything like equal compensation, though it was promised them when they enlisted; the refusal to insist upon the exchange of colored prisoners when colored prisoners have been slaughtered in cold blood, although the President has repeatedly promised thus to protect the lives of his colored soldiers -- have worn my patience threadbare. The President has virtually laid down this as the rule of his statesmen: Do evil by choice, right from necessity" (FD 3:404, 406-7)
Frederick Douglass attacked Lincoln's logic and his racism, saying that "a horse thief pleading that the existence of the horse is the apology for his theft or a highway man contending that the money in the traveler's pocket is the sole first cause of his robbery are about as much entitled to respect as is the President's reasoning at this point."
"Mr. Lincoln takes care in urging his colonization scheme to furnish a weapon to all the ignorant and base, who need only the countenance of men in authority to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people of the country." (FD 3:267)
Frederick Douglass told Charles Sumner: "If slavery is really dead in the District of Columbia ... to you, more than to any other American statesman, belongs the honor of this great triumph of Justice, Liberty, and Sound Policy" (FD 3:233-4)
On July 4, 1862, Douglass said: "our weak, faltering and incompetent rulers in the Cabinet ... and our rebel worshipping Generals in the field" were "incomparably more dangerous to the country than dead traitors like former President James Buchanan..." (FD 3:250)
August 1862, "...ABRAHAM LINCOLN is no more fit for the place he holds than was JAMES BUCHANAN, and that the latter was no more the miserable tool of traitors and rebels than the former is allowing himself to be."
Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was preeminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of the white people of this country."
Lincoln was "scrupulous to the very letter of the law in favor of slavery, and a perfect latitudinarian as to the discharge of his duties under a law favoring freedom."
In a January 25, 1865 speech, Douglass said that the system of forced labor inaugurated in Louisiana by General Banks, with Lincoln's approval, "practically enslaves the Negro, and makes the Proclamation of 1863 a mockery and delusion."
[Wlat] Yes it is.
It is Lincoln QUOTING HIMSELF from four years earlier. He must have held those cherished opinions for at least the four years from 1854 thru 1858.
"I was impressed with his entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race. He was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself."
-- Frederick Douglass on Lincoln
Walt
In 1862 President Lincoln said he would adopt new views as soon as they could shown to be true views. That is why he advocated voting rights for black soldiers.
Walt
I presume you think you can irritate me with your irrelevant nonsense. I only provide this to irritate you back. Can I have a squack! squack! please? If you could, please make it a nice, high pitched squack! squack! If you have time, throw in a tu quoque. Thanks. Here is a poster you can get for your wall.
[civil rights] What Lincoln said about integration reprinted by popular request. Shreveport Journal, Shreveport. no date, the 60s, Single leaf on lightweight stock, 8.5 x 6.5 inches, reproduces the editorial page masthead with six lines specific to this handbill, then the brief "editorial" --about 300 words. Edgeworn, a little scorched, by age or heat uncertain.
The Shreveport Journal is pleased to reprint--by popular request--its recent editorial.. the demand for extra copies has been so great that our supply of Journals for that date has been exhausted.. Lincoln quoted as "not in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes .. physical difference .. no greater calamity than assimilation..
Price: $10.00 Cat.No: 67544
In 1862, he appointed James Mitchell as Agent of [Black] Emigration after being presented with the following which was then sent to the Government Printing Office and produced as an official document pamphlet at taxpayer expense. After you, as Brigade Commander, were provided with this and the complete document from which it came, you pronounced James Mitchell a "very loyal and capable Union man" and a "true patriot."
THE LINCOLN GAMEPLAN DRAFTED BY JAMES MITCHELL
[Image file from the Library of Congress]
Transcript of Lincoln Gameplan drafted by James Mitchell
[Wlat 1785] Now, Mitchell was a very loyal and capable Union man. If President Lincon would go out of his way to help rebels, what would he do for true patriots?
LINK
Let us then, earnestly and respectfully recommend as a remedy for our present troubles and future danger, the perfecting the proposed plans of the administration in regard to those two conflicting races, and the careful and gradual removal of the colored race to some desirable and convenient home.
Some affect to fear that the man of color will not remove to a separate locality. It is not to be expected that a race, which has hardly attained a mental majority, will rise in a day to the stature of the men who found empires, build cities, and lay the ground work of civil institutions like ours; nor should they be expected to do this unaided and alone. They should receive the kind attention, direction, and aid of those who understand such things; nor will the world condemn a gentle pressure in the forward course to overcome the natural inertia of masses long used to the driver's will and rod. Let us do justice in the provision we make for their future comfort, and surety they will do justice to our distracted Republic.
If they should fail to do this, there would then be more propriety in weighing the requirement of some to remove without consultation, but not till then.
We know that there is a growing sentiment in the country which considered the removal of the freed man, without consulting him, "a moral and military necessity" -- as a measure necessary to the purity of public morals and the peace of the country; and this unhappy war of white man with white man, about the condition of the black, will multiply this sentiment.
But we cannot go further now than suggesting, that the mandatory relation held by the rebel master should escheat to the Federal government in a modified sense, so as to enable his proper government and gradual removal to a proper home where he can be independent.
Lerone Bennett's remarks came before the Chicago City Council. The particular quote I posted was from Jet Magazine online and is located here .
I presume you think you can irritate me with your irrelevant nonsense.
Nonsense? This is your champion, your soul mate so to speak. Bennett is a strong supporter of reparations and a fellow member of Lincoln Loather's, Inc. I'm giving you a chance to support him in his other, related positions. My original purpose wasn't to irritate you. That just seems to be an added side benefit of calling you on your crap.
I only provide this to irritate you back. Can I have a squack! squack! please? If you could, please make it a nice, high pitched squack! squack! If you have time, throw in a tu quoque. Thanks. Here is a poster you can get for your wall.
Still posting that bullshit 'assimilation quote I see? And that's supposed to irritate me? Hmmm...nope, sorry, no irritation. Better luck next time.
American money or confederate?
"We're not talking about welfare. We're taking about back pay," he said. "It's time to repay it with interest."
That one's from Newsmax.com.. Carl Limbacher to be precise.
Speaking of 'cheap politicians, your man Lerone Bennett seems to run with a pretty cheap crowd.
"Among the many political strategists and thinkers were: Kweisi Mfume, Ex. Dir., NAACP, Kim Gandy, Pres. NOW; Tavis Smiley, Talk Show Host and Black Think Tank founder, Rev. Al Sharpton, Ebony Magazine Executive Editor and author Lerone Bennett, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX); Mannie Jackson, owner of the Harlem Globetrotters, Stella Obasanjo, First Lady of Nigeria, Mrs. Mildred Aristide, First Lady of Haiti, Judge Greg Mathis, Economist Julianne Malveaux, Mayor Lindzey Jones of Olympia Fields, a delegation of 80 women from various African countries, former President Bill Clinton, syndicated columnist and newly elected President of the Chicago Assn. of Black Journalist, Vernon Jarrett."
Mr. Bennett was speaking at a Rainbow-Push conference on, among other things, the reparations movement. That's from blackmeninamerica.com, an S. Brandi Barnes column to be precise. So does Mr. Bennett suffer any in your eye by the company he keeps?
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