“If you are referring to Kansas, I hope you know that both sides contributed to the bloodshed there, both sides came across the borders of their states to fight it out.”
Now that is one truly lame and discreditable argument. See:
“Tu quoque...;[1] Latin for “you, too” or “you, also”) or the appeal to hypocrisy is an informal logical fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent’s position by asserting the opponent’s failure to act consistently in accordance with that position. It attempts to show that a criticism or objection applies equally to the person making it. This attempts to dismiss opponent’s position based on criticism of the opponent’s inconsistency and not the position presented.[2] It is a special case of ad hominem fallacy, which is a category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of fact about the person presenting or supporting the claim or argument.[3] To clarify, although the person being attacked might indeed be acting inconsistently or hypocritically, such behavior does not invalidate the position presented.” (Wikipedia)
No, I am not referring just to the “Bloody Kansas” assault by Democrats upon the individual and state or territorial rights of U.S. Citizens. There are innumerable instances over a period of decades where the Democrats instigated violent armed conflict in contempt for individual and states rights. Readers can get a taste of this Democrat contempt for constitutional and God-given rights by reading about such topics as the Ostend Manifesto, the Knights of the Golden Circle, the Copperheads, William Walker filiusters, Guano Islands Act, the failed assassination attempt upon President-Elect Abraham Lincoln, and much much more.
“Oh really? So that is the Republican party was always in favor of higher taxes and tariffs?”
That was impossible, because the Democrats started the Civil War before the first ever Republican Administration came into existence in 1861 with the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. Naturally, the Southern Democrat armed attacks upon the United States armed forces compelled the U.S. Government regardless of who was in office to make huge expenditures that would never have been necessary but for the unlawful rebellion.
“It was because they cared about the individual that Lincoln, almost as soon as he gets in office, passes the first income tax laws which define taxable income as that “derived from any kind of property, or from any professional trade, employment, or vocation carried on in the United States or elsewhere or from any source whatever.””
The U.S. Constitution quite plainly obligated President Lincoln and the U.S. Government to suppress the unlawful armed rebellion. The taxes required to fund the U.S. Government’s efforts to suppress the armed rebellion as obligated by the U.S. Constitution are a direct consequence of the unlawful acts of the Southern Democrats waging war upon the United States and extinguishing the constitutional rights of U.S. Citizens.
“And it was because they cared so much about the rights of the states that they fought a bloody war to deny eleven states the right to self-determination, the right to leave and create their own government just as the Founders did?”
The states were obligated to seek secession from the United States by the exact same means by which they sought accession to the United States, and that is by a vote of the Congress and ratification by each member state of the United States. Instead, a cabal of spies, filibusterers, and criminals schemed to induce elite Southern Democrats to conspire in fomenting a rebellion and secession using unconstitutional and unlawful means falsely masquerading as a states rights issue.
What is particularly heinous is the continued attempt to falsely equate the American Revolution to the utterly fraudulent, illegal, and immoral War of the Rebellion.
King George III instigated the American Revolutionary War by his breaches of the colonies’ Royal Charters, seizures of their colonial governments authorized by the Royal Charters, and then by making armed attacks upon the colonial government’s colonial militias. Even after King George initiated the hostilities, the colonial governments and their Congress made every effort to negotiate a peaceful settlement of their dispute and remain member colonial governments of the British Empire. King George refused to honor the Royal Charters and refused all efforts to negotiate peace. Consequently, the colonial governments joined together in self-defense and achieved the only remaining course of action left to them short of capitulation and surrender of their rights under the Royal Charters, and that was their own sovereign independence as the United States of America.
By contrast, the Knights of the Golden Circle, slaveholders and slave traders, filibusterers, adventurers, British Crown spies seeking once more to disunite the United States and dominate American slave produced cotton for British textile mills, and an assortment of other conspirators induced Southern democrats to repeatedly attack the United States until a rebellion could be provoked in the Southern states. Having provoked a rebellion in the Southern States, these conspirators incited attacks upon the U.S. Government’s armed forces and engaged in a conspiracy to assassinate and murder the President-Elect of the United States. Despite all of these prior major provocations to war, the new Lincoln Administration made extensive efforts to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the growing unlawful rebellion, but the conspirators sabotaged every effort by Southern moderates to conclude such negotiations for peace. Finally after months of conducting armed seizures of Federal fortifications, armaments, naval stations, and other assets, the rebels attacked Ft. Sumter while knowing full well that president Lincoln and the U.S. Government would have no other choice but to bring armed force against the rebels and their rebellion. Such acts by these rebels were aggressive and not comparable to the defensive acts of the patriots in the American Revolutionary War.
“And I suppose it was because they cared about individual rights so much that Lincoln suspended habeus corpus and imprisoned thousands of people (including hundreds of members of the press) without telling them what crime they were charged with, and how long they would be imprisoned?”
The U.S. Constitution obligated any U.S. President to suppress the rebellion by the use of martial law, and the Constitution explicitly provides for the suspension of the writ of habeus corpus under martial law. The Confederate Congress and the Confederate state governments also suspended the writ of habeus corpus, yet you do not disclose that fact with a hypocritical attack solely upon the U.S. Government you are criticizing. You also failed to note the fact of how the right for a writ of habeus corpus was ignored by the Southern Democrat aggressors in the years before the Civil War.
“I suppose it was because the republicans loved small government that Lincoln’s war stripped the states of much of their rights and left the United states not as a republic of republics as the founders had created, but one in which the Federal government was supreme and you had better not disagree with it.”
You are living in your own fantasyland with that comment, because the Founding Fathers created and wrote the Constitution specifically to make the Federal government the supreme law of the land with respect to those limited enumerated powers delegated by the state governments and by individual U.S. Citizens to the Federal Government.
“I guess it was because the Democrat party loved big government so much that they were always fighting for lower taxes and tariffs and less Federal intervention in state matters.”
Of course that is a false statement and misrepresentation of reality. The Antebellum Democrat administrations came to power with Andrew Jackson and his administration just in time to benefit from the final payments of the long-term debts incurred during the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The Republicans and their presidential administrations, by contrast, did not yet exist in this time period, so they naturally had nothing they could do about such taxation. Even before President-Elect Abraham Lincoln could be inaugurated, the Democrats tried to assassinate and murder him on his way to being inaugurated as President, so the Republicans had no opportunity to formulate and administer tariff policies before the Democrat rebels caused the U.S. Government and the Confederate Government to incur vast debts requiring the heaviest tariffs and other taxation measures. These debts incurred by the Democrat rebels were not repaid until 1916, so every President until President Woodrow Wilson was obligated to maintain higher tariffs and other taxes until those civil War debts could be retired. Once those Civil War debts were retired, Republican President Warren G. Harding and President Calvin Coolidge were able to complete their administrations with budgetary surpluses while also lowering the income tax rates initiated by President Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats.
So, your accusations are based on misleading omissions of the actual taxations and their causes and are therefore false deceptions.
Regarding tariffs...Yes Lincoln was the first republican president and the republican party had not actually passed any tariff laws yet. But they were big supporters of higher tariffs. Just look at the republican platform. Lincoln even campaigned on the tariff issue in Pennsylvania, which stood to benefit from the protectionist nature of the tariffs. And one of the first things they did when Lincoln was elected was pass tariff laws.
Don't cite the Constitution as a reason for Lincoln to go to war. The Southern states were doing the same thing that the American colonies did. They seceded and formed their own new government, just like the Declaration of Independence declares is a right of mankind. Constitutionally, Lincoln could do nothing about it. After all, it was the States that created the Constitution and the Union. In creating it they were all parties to the compact. The Federal government was not a party to this compact, being created by it. In cases regarding compact where there is no common judge the parties are all free to judge for themselves whether the compact is being held to and whether such union remains beneficial tot hem or not. And regards your claim that the Southern states did not leave in a constitutional way, it is clear that you do not understand the constitutional ratification process. The Constitution and the Union created by it was ratified by the various legislatures of the various states at various times over the course of a few years. The State legislatures, having brought their states into the Union in this manner, were free to leave it in the exact same manner, which is what they did.
Your ignorance of history is showing. The attack on fort Sumter was the result of broken promises by Lincoln. Lincoln had promised to relieve the garrison and turn over the fort to South Carolina by a certain time. South Carolina took him at his word and kept the men in the fort supplied with fresh food. Lincoln meanwhile kept saying he would relieve the fort by a certain time and then failing to do so. This made South Carolina annoyed. And when finally they heard that Lincoln was at last sending ships to the fort, but not with the intention of relieving the fort but rather with men and arms to resupply it, the bubble burst and they fired on the fort and took it before the ships could arrive. The patience they showed in this case before attacking the fort shows they were hardly war-mongering like you suggest. In fact many southern generals at the time of hearing of the attack wished that more time had been given Lincoln to keep his promises (which "Honest" Abe had clearly no intention of keeping however).
Founding Fathers created and wrote the Constitution specifically to make the Federal government the supreme law of the land with respect to those limited enumerated powers delegated by the state governments and by individual U.S. Citizens to the Federal Government.
They did no such thing! Make the Federal Government supreme in the land?!?! BS! They made the Constitution the supreme law of the land, and if you actually read the constitution, you will see that the rights delegated by the states to the federal government are actually very few, in comparison to those reserved by the states (which are practically unlimited). The States, having created the Federal government and delegated rights to it, are superior to it. You don't delegate rights to your superiors, only to your inferiors. But the Civil War made the Federal government superior to the states, and showed what big government with no respect for limited self government looks like.
By the way, if the Republican party is so conservative like you are trying to paint it, then please explain to me why so many socialists were members of it? Why did nearly all the refugees from the socialist revolutions of 1848 that came to American join the Republican party (one of whom started a newspaper called the Red Republican? Why did Horace Greely (a republican and good friend of Lincoln) have Karl Marx writing articles for his paper the New York Tribune? Why did Lincoln have many socialists in his armies, including one general who published the first American version of the Communist Manifesto? Why did Engels say the civil war provided the preliminaries for a communist revolution? Why did Karl Marx write Lincoln congratulatory letters upon his election? Seriously, if the communists ere for it, it is NOT conservative.