Posted on 12/08/2019 6:35:40 PM PST by bitt
Time, and history, will tell if Donald Trump is “better” or “greater” than Abraham Lincoln. But if he is re-empowered in 2020 to actually make great Republican principles work, Trump would be the Lincoln we deserve.
recent poll, widely reported, found that a slight majority of self-described conservatives say Donald Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln. God only knows what such a response means, in an age when our mass media considers it their democratic duty to dox and fire ordinary people for their opinions, and when most historians regard it as unprofessional to teach American history in a way that leaves students with a favorable impression of America.
As a university teacher of American politics and American history, I wouldn’t say that Trump is a better president than Lincoln. More useful would be to ask how the principles Lincoln stood for and the policies the Republicans of his era favored can be adapted to the United States of today. After all, it is more than a century and a half after a Democrat and celebrity actor decided to sacrifice his life and career to star before a D.C. audience in actual assassination porn.
The Republican Party—from Lincoln to Ford—had a constitutional vision and a policy agenda. Republicans in Congress enacted pro-growth, pro-equality, domestic policy: civil rights for African-Americans, the Morrill Land Grant that subsidized higher education for the children of farmers and workers, fiat money, and the Homestead Act. Republicans enacted tariff and antitrust protection of American industries, and immigration restriction to protect American workers, so that “cheap goods” did not make “cheap men.”
(Excerpt) Read more at amgreatness.com ...
And why would they not believe this? The vast majority of the evidence indicates they could, and beyond that, most of the people believed they had the right to leave if they wanted.
Though there were many southerners that wanted to stay in the Union.
This is true, but in most of the Southern states, they were a minority. Missouri went the other way, but i've read this was because of physical interference by military officers, and if given a fair chance to vote on it, might have voted to leave.
Many in north did not believe that a state (not just the southern states but any state) could just vote itself out of the Union.
Very likely they believed this because they were told this by people they respected, though I don't know on what basis they could believe this from any historic documents or evidence. (Other than that letter from Madison.)
Though there were some northerners who wanted to let them go.
Horace Greeley, for example.
Neither side would budge, so the war came. However, you have to ask yourself why the fire-eaters seceded? What was it about the election of a Republican to the presidency that cause this.
I can only speculate. Discerning the truth when everyone is out to mislead you is not always easy. No doubt some of them (wealthy elite) worried about the possibility their slaves would eventually be taken from them, but more likely they were worried about a loss of power and influence. Most of the time, I have always found it useful in analyzing people's motives to look at the money situation.
Why do people support big government? Because they are getting money out of it.
There were social reasons as well. Many people in the Northern states had been haranguing them for being "evil people" because of the slavery issue, and this spilled over into a lot of other interactions between the two groups. They came to mock each other and hate each other for reasons beyond just their respective social environments.
I think if you research why the southerners called Republicans “black Republicans” or called Lincoln “Ape Lincoln” you might find out why they seceded.
I've read some of that, and I think they did it because they thought it was effective. Most people today remain unaware that the white people of the Northern states hated blacks equally, if not more so than did the white people in the South. Illinois "black" laws are horrifying and completely unfair. The same is true of other black laws in other Northern states.
Worst massacre of blacks in this era took place in New York city during the draft riots.
Or you could just read there secessionist declarations.
I have. Out of all of them, only three, perhaps four cite slavery as a significant reason for their secession. Should they be taken at their word? I don't know.
A few weeks ago I read an idea from Paul Craig Roberts of which I had never previously heard. His explanation asserts that they wanted out because of the taxes, but had no legal justification for leaving on the basis of taxes levied by the Federal government. Taxes were completely within the power of the Federal government under the US Constitution, and so long as they remained part of the Union, they had no choice but to pay them.
But on the other hand, the Federal government was not enforcing constitutional provisions regarding slavery. Roberts asserts that they were using this as a strictly legal argument that the Northern states had violated the constitution and therefore broken the compact because they refused to recognize or enforce constitutional protections for slavery. His reasoning is that by arguing that the Northern states had broken the compact, they had the legal right to abrogate the entire compact.
To sum it up, Taxes were their real bitch, but slavery was their legal argument to justify secession.
I don't know if this is correct, but I'm not quite ready to throw it out as nonsense. It sounds too conspiratorial and unwieldy, but who knows what the movers and shakers of a society discuss among themselves when they get together.
I see evidence of collusion between the "Deep State" of Washington DC, and the Media elite of New York, and so stranger things have happened. I should not be surprised if powerful Southern men engaged in collusion in the 1860s.
The Corwin Amendment was intended to entice the seceded states back into the Union. I think there is general agreement even among the people on your side that this was it's primary purpose.
More importantly, it took the decision out of the hands of the Central Government, and thence, the Confederacy had no reason to be........... unless they had other plans.
Other plans, of which concerns about slavery were not among them. Exactly. They wanted out for the money, but were claiming slavery as the reason for leaving.
If their concerns were only about the legality of slavery, than the Corwin Amendment should have mollified them, but clearly it did not.
This makes it clear they wanted something else, and what they wanted was that huge windfall that would occur when they handled their own trade with Europe instead of allowing 60% of it to be siphoned off by New York and Washington DC.
You are making it out to be that Slavery would be permanent throughout the nation by passage of the Corbin Amendment.
D@mn close to it. With the Corwin Amendment ratified, slavery would continue until the very last state gave it up voluntarily, and when was that going to happen?
It was going to happen eventually, but only when the economic pressure coupled with the social pressure became too great to resist, and that could have taken another 80 years or so.
We both know that Major Anderson moved out of Moultrie due to increased reconnaissance by the Confederates in the channel between Moultrie and Sumter. You and I both know that the garrison, for all intent and purposes, was under siege for months. On the day that President Lincoln took office he received a telegram informing that Anderson was running out of food. And that by the time hostilities in the Harbor reached a head, Anderson informed Beauregard that he had only a couple of more days of supplies left and could only hold out that long. It was at that point that Beauregard decided to attack the fort!? Davis needed to attack Sumter to get Virginia to join the Confederacy. His hand was forced when Anderson announced he would soon abandon it. Stop making stuff up.
It was at the point the Harriet Lane arrived in the channel that Beauregard decided to attack the fort.
The higher ups in the Confederate government decided to attack it when they learned that the ships being sent were really coming for a confrontation with them over the Fort, but Beauregard had the final say, and he did not attack until after the Harriet Lane had been sighted in the channel.
Davis needed to attack Sumter to get Virginia to join the Confederacy.
That's an oft repeated theory, but do not mistake it for persuasive. How would Davis know that Virginia would join after Sumter was attacked? Virginia did not in fact join until Lincoln announced the call up of forces to subdue them. Virginia was in fact leaning the other way before that happened.
Delegates from Virginia went to Lincoln and told him they could give assurances that Virginia would remain in the Union if he abandoned the fort, and he is said to have told them "too late." (Before the fort was even attacked.)
His hand was forced when Anderson announced he would soon abandon it. Stop making stuff up.
You're repeating this rather far fetched theory, and at the same time telling me to stop making things up?
That's rich.
Davis couldn't see them losing the war from an enraged Union, despite one of his cabinet officials explicitly telling him this was going to happen, yet he had the foresight to predict that if he attacked Sumter, this would bring Virginia over to their side?
So he's both a genius and an idiot at the same time, depending on which argument you want to justify?
No, I don't think he had a secret plan to bring Virginia or the other states over to his side by attacking Sumter. I think his thinking was that this was a confrontation, and if he backed down, he would lose face, and then the other states might have second thoughts about secession.
I think he just figured that at some point a man has to take a stand, and that was the point at which he committed to doing so. I don't think he could predict what Virginia or the other states would do, I think he just hoped for the best.
Does a cash prize come with that?
I guess this is your substitute for an actual rebuttal.
A saying comes to mind; "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
I'm glad you take that to heed, and I suppose I should credit it with why I don't hear from you much.
:)
Yes I do take heed of it. And it is readily apparent that you don’t...
I’m curious. In your opinion what would have been the correct constitutional action President Buchanan should have taken when South Carolina seceded.
“We” know nothing of the sort. That is purely your own unique total distortion. There are seven lies in this one statement. You have outdone yourself. The more you twist the Corwin Amendment, the more lies you add. Just stop.
The war is the this way Poindexter: THE SOUTH STARTED IT AND LOST!!
I have no need, mostly because I don’t obsess on other people’s opinion of me. They think I’m a fool? I don’t care.
Bullshit.
You obsess more than any other poster I’ve ever encountered at FreeRepublic. And you know it.
He mostly did what he should do, which was nothing. The only thing he did wrong was to issue such strict orders to hold Federal installations in Southern territories.
I would not have ordered those men to abandon them, but I would also not have made those orders so strong about holding them. Stanton's order to Anderson is more along the lines Buchanan should have used.
He should have called for negotiations on their disposition, and the payment of any owed debts to the Union. The Confederates should have got those delegates into Washington much earlier than they did. They should have done it while Buchanan was still President. They would have had a lot more responsive man to deal with.
Charles Dickens put it better.
Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and until it was convenient to make a pretense that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the Abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale. For the rest, there's not a pins difference between the two parties. They will both rant and lie and fight until they come to a compromise; and the slave may be thrown into that compromise or thrown out, just as it happens."
It is not hard to better than the biggest butcher in American history.
And everyone lost in that war. The United States lost greatly in that war, and precedents were set that had terrible consequences in future years.
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