[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird: "and I'm saying I disagree.
Lincoln started the war unconstitutionally, deliberately targeted civilians, ran POW camps that were extermination camps (again deliberately), committed ethnic cleansing and genocide against native peoples and trampled on Americans' civil liberties to a vastly greater extent than was done in the CSA."

All of that is 100% lies and nonsense, fact-free fantasizing and redefining words to suit your own nefarious purposes.

1. Lincoln didn't start the war.
   By his own confession, that was Jefferson Davis.

2. There was nothing "unconstitutional" about Lincoln's actions at Forts Sumter or Pickens, but Confederate actions there were 100% illegal.

3. Lincoln didn't "target civilians", that's just crazy-talk.
   Indeed, there were remarkably few civilian casualties compared to any other civil war in history.

4. Union POW camps were no more "extermination camps" than were Confederate camps, and Union camp overall death rates were less than in Confederate run POW camps.
   Survival rates averaged over 85% in Union camps, slightly more than in Confederate camps.
   Those are not "extermination" level numbers.

5. There is no evidence whatever that Lincoln himself had anything to do with, or knowledge of, abuses of Native Americans in Minnesota.

6. The fact is that Unionists in Confederate states were treated no better than Copperhead Democrats in Union states.
   Indeed, there is no Union equivalent to the Shelton Laurel Confederate army massacre of Unionist civilians in January of 1863, among other examples.

So it's all just nonsense, Lost Cause fantasies, nothing more.

FLT-bird: "This is just pure speculation on your part.
We know there were far more jailed without charge or trial - or at best trial before military tribunals only in the Union.
There were multiple congressmen jailed or banished in the Union but none in the CSA.
The censorship regime was far more extensive in the Union.
There have been multiple allegations from people at the time as well as historians of ballot box stuffing in the Union - none in the CSA. etc."

Nearly all of which is explained by the absence of a political opposition party in the Confederacy.
There were no Confederate political equivalents of Northern Copperhead Democrats even legally allowed.
So, from Day One, levels of political oppression within the Confederacy were vastly greater than in the Union.

As for total numbers jailed, relative to population sizes, they seem to be roughly the same.

FLT-bird on historian Mark Neely: "Yes I disagree with them about that.
I don't find him the least bit credible."

I see, so, are you telling us that you've actually read Neely's books, both of them, all the way through?
That would be pretty amazing.

FLT-bird: "So what?
The 38,000 estimate for the high end of the range is a number you see from many historians because there is evidence to support it."

And you can name these alleged historians and cite the evidence they used for their estimates?

FLT-bird quoting the Quarterly Review in Britain on the USA: "She has become a land of passports..."

Well, if your Quarterly Review in Britain said it, then how can it not be true?
The Quarterly Review was known for its harsh and often unfair criticisms, one most notably charged as responsible for the death of young British poet John Keats in 1821.

Here's the truth: there is no evidence confirming the British Quarterly Review's implication that internal passports were required of citizens in Union states.
They were, however, required in Confederate states for citizens and slaves alike.

FLT-bird: "LOL!
No it doesn't.
Taney ruled against some of Lincoln's more tyrannical actions as he should have.
His job as a Supreme Court Justice was to uphold the Constitution after all."

SCOTUS never ruled on Lincoln's "more tyrannical actions".
Crazy-Roger Taney, expressing his personal opinions as a circuit court judge with zero authority, then attempted to physically enforce his own crazy opinions.
That was law-fare then, just as it is today.

FLT-bird on the CSA declaration of war: "And yet it does not.
It recognizes there is a war going on.
It does not declare war on the US."

Of course, it does because it's the same thing -- there is no legal or practical difference between "recognizing" war and "declaring" war.
Such documents, under whatever words are used, give a country's political leaders extraordinary powers to wage war against their identified enemies.

"In modern international law, a declaration of war signifies the recognition between countries of a state of hostilities."

Therefore, logically, a recognition of hostilities is, by definition, a declaration of war.
Now, can we stop with the absurd nonsense?

FLT-bird: "No it is not which is why you are all alone in making this claim.
Even the vast majority of PC Revisionists in Academia do not support this claim."

Then you can quote examples of valid historians who claim that "recognition" is not effectively the same thing as "declaring" war?

FLT-bird: "Gee, in 3 years of law school and in passing the bar I never read the constitution.
News to me!"

You've obviously failed in everything.

FLT-bird: "Obviously I did read it and noticed it said "THEM"....to wit: the states.
The CSA did not declare war against them and was not seeking to impose its rule upon them.
The CSA would have been quite happy to live and let live.
It was the Lincoln administration which needed war, started the war and which waged a war of aggression."

Every word of that is lies... lawyerly lies or course, but why else hire a lawyer except to invent plausible sounding lies?

FLT-bird: "You realize all of that happened AFTER Lincoln started the war and started waging a war of aggression against them right?
They left and made no claims to any US territory.
They were quite happy to depart in peace.
It was Lincoln who insisted on war.
Once he started the war all bets were off.
At that point the CSA was willing to do whatever it would take to win just as any other country would."

And the pro-Confederate lawyer-lies just never stop...

The truth is that secessionists were waging war against the Union from Day One in December 1860, and most notably on January 9, 1861, with firing on, and striking, the Union civilian steamer Star of the West.
Secessionists' warfare included threats and illegal seizures of dozens of Federal properties -- forts, ships, arsenals and mints -- some even before secessionists had formally declared themselves.

FLT-bird: "The CSA did not threaten the Union.
They were quite happy to leave in peace and made every effort to do so.
They even offered to establish good trade relations with the Union and offered free passage of the Mississippi."

Nooooo... from Day One in December 1860, secessionists began threatening Union officials and seizing Union properties.
As early as January 20, 1861, Jefferson Davis himself threatened civil war in a letter to his close friend, Copperhead Democrat former Pres. Pierce:

"When Lincoln comes in he will have but to continue in the path of his predecessor to inaugurate a civil war"
[Jefferson Davis to Franklin Pierce, 20 Jan 1861]"

There is simply no doubt that, from Day One, secessionists - Confederates intended to start war.

FLT-bird: "Also your "Democrats always and at all times bad, Republicans always and at all times good" mantra is laughable....what one would expect of a kindergartner.
The political parties are broad coalitions which shift and change over time.
The Democrats used to be the party of limited government, balanced budgets and decentralized power.....ie"

My formula for parties (not people!) is this: Democrats = 100% evil, Republicans = 51% good.
In reality, Democrats were never, ever, what you claim here.
Democrats only ever posed and pretended to be such when they were the minority party in opposition to majority Federalists, Whigs or Republicans.
Whenever Democrats came to political power, they almost immediately threw off their pretenses of "small government" and "strict construction" and got on with the serious business of oppressing their political opponents.

A perfect example -- the only Democrat president between Buchanan (1857-61) and Wilson (1913-21) was former NY Governor Grover Cleveland, whose reputation is as the epitome of "conservative Democrat".
And maybe he was, in some respects, but in 1894 he supported a Democrat majority bill in Congress, and then signed into law, an unconstitutional peacetime income tax, which was struck down by SCOTUS the following year.
Democrats were never truly conservative.

FLT-bird: "They used to be the ones who insisted on preventing illegal immigration whereas now they facilitate it.
They used to be the ones who were staunchly free speech now they're the biggest fans of censorship.
They used to be anti war.
Now they support constant Deep State meddling abroad. etc."

Sorry, but still no: Democrats were never truly any of those things in principle, because Democrats have no principles, only the politics of winning.

1. Democrats always supported immigration, legal or otherwise, because those are their voters, going all the way back to the election of 1800, when NY Tammany Hall Democrats helped elect Thomas Jefferson president over Federalist John Adams.

2. Democrats' alleged opposition to illegal immigration was strictly for public consumption of their labor union supporters, which seems to be a non-factor today.
   Democrats never made a serious effort to even slow down illegal immigration.

3. "Free Speech" for 1960s hippy Democrat protesters was strictly a slogan they used while not in total power over government and academia.
   Once in power, they began shutting down free speech -- beginning with "political correctness" -- just as they always did historically, most notoriously with "Gag rules" in Congress from 1836 to 1844.

4. Democrats were never, ever, truly "anti-war", and we can see that with a list of wars, military operations and "meddling" under Democrat presidents:
   • Barbary Wars (Jefferson & Madison)
   • War of 1812 (Madison)
   • Monroe Doctrine (Monroe's meddling abroad)
   • Trail of Tears (Jackson)
   • Mexican War (Polk)
   • Ostend Manifesto on Cuba (Pierce meddling abroad)
   • Paraguay Expedition (Buchanan)
   • Civil War (Davis)
   • Hawaii and South America (Cleveland)
   • First World War (Wilson)
   • Second World War (FD Roosevelt)
   • Korean War (Truman)
   • Vietnam War (Kennedy-Johnson)
   • Iran Revolution (Carter meddling abroad)
   • Former Yugoslavia (Clinton)
   • Isis, Libia & Ukraine (Obama meddling abroad)
   • Ukraine (Biden)

   The saddest part of this legacy is that since WWII, while Democrats are just as eager as ever to go to war, they've been utterly unable to figure out how win our wars and end up skedaddling disgracefully, most notoriously from Vietnam and Afghanistan.

FLT-bird: "You yourself already listed one.
Go back a few posts and read."

Then you misread my words, and your obfuscations here tell us you know perfectly well you're telling us just another lawyerly lie.

FLT-bird: "It was Lincoln's choice to invade South Carolina's territory so as to provoke war.
He did so for reasons he himself confessed to - Money.
"If I do that, what would become of my revenue?
I might as well shut up housekeeping at once!"
~ Lincoln, in response to the suggestion by the Virginian Commissioners to abandon the custom house of Fort Sumter.
(Housekeeping is a euphemism for federal spending.)"

Pro-Confederate lies confirmed by nobody without an anti-Lincoln ax to grind.

FLT-bird: "There are no quotes of Taney making such immoderate public statements about Blacks though yes, it can safely be assumed he too would be quite racist by modern standards.
Even by the standards of the day however, Lincoln was a flaming racist."

Crazy-Roger Taney was in a class by himself, along with every other Southern slaveholder.
They weren't just "racists", because the word "racist" doesn't do them justice.
What Crazy Roger expressed in his 1857 Dred Scott decision was his fantasy that Africans were, in effect, not human beings and therefore did not need to be considered as "all men are created equal".
From this, Crazy decided that Africans, enslaved or free, could never be citizens -- that's the worst of his Dred Scott nonsense.

FLT-bird: "And yet I've cited two such sources."

You cited only one primary source, a bodyguard who first reported it 25 years later.
There are no other primary sources.

FLT-bird: "Sorry but your denial is a flat out lie.
I've provided sources which absolutely do confirm he shut down over 100 opposition newspapers."

It's not what your source said, and you can simply prove me wrong by quoting where it says exactly what you here claim.

[FLT-bird]

All of that is 100% lies and nonsense, fact-free fantasizing and redefining words to suit your own nefarious purposes.

Nope! Your denials are lies and nonsense, fact-free fantasizing and redefining words to suit your own nefarious purposes. There's no question Lincoln did all that I just listed and more.

Lincoln didn't start the war.,/p>

Yes he did.

By his own confession, that was Jefferson Davis.,/p>

Nope! Davis did not send warships to invade another sovereign country's territory. Lincoln did - with the purpose of starting a war.

There was nothing "unconstitutional" about Lincoln's actions at Forts Sumter or Pickens, but Confederate actions there were 100% illegal.,/p>

Dead wrong. Lincoln deliberately started a war without the consent of Congress. That is unconstitutional. The Confederates merely defended themselves - which is and has always been legal.

Lincoln didn't "target civilians", that's just crazy-talk. Indeed, there were remarkably few civilian casualties compared to any other civil war in history.

Examples of the union army targeting civilians are too numerous to list. Here's but one instance:

General Sherman also wrote 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."

Brigadier General Edward M. McCook, First Cavalry Division of Cavalry Corps, at Calhoun, Georgia, on October 30, 1864, reported to Sherman, "My men killed some of those fellows two or three days since, and I had their houses burned....I will carry out your instructions thoroughly and leave the country east of the road uninhabitable."

Randomly murdering civilians is a war crime. This is in fact more evidence than existed against several who were convicted and executed at Nuremburg. That such incidents were so widespread - and went unpunished - indicates they had the approval of their commander in chief.

Union POW camps were no more "extermination camps" than were Confederate camps, and Union camp overall death rates were less than in Confederate run POW camps.

One of the Union Army's own doctors described Camp Douglas as an "extermination camp" which you would have known had you bothered to read the link and quotes I provided about Camp Douglas. Union camp death rates were significantly higher than in Confederate run POW camps as I previously showed - AND there was no shortage of food or medicine in the North unlike in the South during the war.

Survival rates averaged over 85% in Union camps, slightly more than in Confederate camps.

Wrong as previously demonstrated.

Those are not "extermination" level numbers. There is no evidence whatever that Lincoln himself had anything to do with, or knowledge of, abuses of Native Americans in Minnesota.

Another lie. Lincoln refused to provide the money the Sioux were owed under their treaty with the US...money needed to alleviate their starvation. He then sent General Pope who ran kangaroo courts which "convicted" and sentenced to death and executed 38 Santee Sioux after "trials" (before military tribunal) that averaged 10 minutes each. This was the largest public execution in American history. The Lincoln administration then ethnically cleansed the Santee Sioux and the peaceful Winnebago nearby from Minnesota and stole their land. Just for added vindictiveness, the Santee Sioux were then deliberately starved again by the US Army.

The fact is that Unionists in Confederate states were treated no better than Copperhead Democrats in Union states. Indeed, there is no Union equivalent to the Shelton Laurel Confederate army massacre of Unionist civilians in January of 1863, among other examples.

Au Contraire. The fact is that civilians were more likely to face arrest, trial if at all by military tribunal, and torture while imprisoned in the Union than in the Confederacy. For example:

One of those imprisoned for fourteen months for simply questioning the unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus was Francis Key Howard, the grandson of Francis Scott Key and editor of the Baltimore Exchange newspaper. In response to an editorial in his newspaper that was critical of the fact that the Lincoln administration had imprisoned without due process the mayor of Baltimore, Congressman Henry May, and some twenty members of the Maryland legislature, he was imprisoned near the very spot where his grandfather composed the Star Spangled Banner. After his release, he noted the deep irony of his grandfather's beloved flag flying over "the victims of as vulgar and brutal a despotism as modern times have witnessed" (John Marshall, American Bastile, pp. 645—646).

After his release, Francis Key Howard wrote a book about his experiences entitled Fourteen Months in American Bastilles in which he described daily life as "a constant agony, the jailers as modified monsters and the government as an unfeeling persecutor which took delight in abusing its political prisoners" (Sprague, p. 284). In his defense and whitewashing of Lincoln's civil liberties abuses even Lincoln apologist Mark Neely, Jr., author of The Fate of Liberty, noted that in Fort Lafayette (aka “the American Bastille”) and in other dungeons where political prisoners where held, "Handcuffs and hanging by the wrists were rare [but not nonexistent], but in the summer of 1863 the army had developed a water torture that came to be used routinely" (p. 110) Repeatedly, whenever Congress asked for information on the arrests, he replied that it was not in the public interest to furnish the information (p. 302).

So it's all just nonsense, Lost Cause fantasies, nothing more.

So its all just PC Revisionist lies - nothing more.

Nearly all of which is explained by the absence of a political opposition party in the Confederacy. There were no Confederate political equivalents of Northern Copperhead Democrats even legally allowed. So, from Day One, levels of political oppression within the Confederacy were vastly greater than in the Union.

Completely false. President Davis was if anything criticized more harshly in Southern newspapers than President Lincoln in Northern newspapers. There were plenty who advocated remaining in the union and negotiating an end to hostilities, etc who were never subject to arrest. The fact is the political oppression, random arrests without trial and torture while imprisoned were far more common in the Union.

As for total numbers jailed, relative to population sizes, they seem to be roughly the same.,/p>

No they weren't. As has already been demonstrated the estimates of those imprisoned in the Union run from 13,000 to 38,000. That is much higher than in the CSA where Habeas Corpus was suspended on a much more modest scale than in the Union - and that's even according to PC Revisionist James McPherson.

I see, so, are you telling us that you've actually read Neely's books, both of them, all the way through? That would be pretty amazing.

I don't need to read his propaganda in total to see that its propaganda. He's a Lincoln apologist - always has been.

And you can name these alleged historians and cite the evidence they used for their estimates?

I've already provided you 5 or 6 links listing that range. Time for you to do your own homework now.

Well, if your Quarterly Review in Britain said it, then how can it not be true? The Quarterly Review was known for its harsh and often unfair criticisms, one most notably charged as responsible for the death of young British poet John Keats in 1821.

LOL! You're just whining about them because they rightly called out the Lincoln administration for its oppression.

Here's the truth: there is no evidence confirming the British Quarterly Review's implication that internal passports were required of citizens in Union states. They were, however, required in Confederate states for citizens and slaves alike.

Here's the truth: that's pure BS - which is typical of you.