Posted on 07/05/2015 3:24:11 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
GETTYSBURG, Pa. — “Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson.” That is not exactly what we expect to hear about the president who spoke of “malice toward none,” referring to the president who wrote that “all men are created equal.”
Presidents have never been immune from criticism by other presidents. But Jefferson and Lincoln? These two stare down at us from Mount Rushmore as heroic, stainless and serene, and any suggestion of disharmony seems somehow a criticism of America itself. Still, Lincoln seems not to have gotten that message.
“Mr. Lincoln hated Thomas Jefferson as a man,” wrote William Henry Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner of 14 years — and “as a politician.” Especially after Lincoln read Theodore F. Dwight’s sensational, slash-all biography of Jefferson in 1839, Herndon believed “Mr. Lincoln never liked Jefferson’s moral character after that reading.”
True enough, Thomas Jefferson had not been easy to love, even in his own time. No one denied that Jefferson was a brilliant writer, a wide reader and a cultured talker. But his contemporaries also found him “a man of sublimated and paradoxical imagination” and “one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in all America.”
Lincoln, who was born less than a month before Jefferson left the presidency in 1809, had his own reasons for loathing Jefferson “as a man.” Lincoln was well aware of Jefferson’s “repulsive” liaison with his slave, Sally Hemings, while “continually puling about liberty, equality and the degrading curse of slavery.” But he was just as disenchanted with Jefferson’s economic policies.
Jefferson believed that the only real wealth was land and that the only true occupation of virtuous and independent citizens in a republic was farming. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people,” Jefferson wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
You really are a one trick pony, aren’t you.
Jefferson and Madison were pro-Jacobin France.
Lincoln had no intention of interfering with slavery where it already existed. Had the Southern states not seceded and fired on Union forces they could have had their slavery. But they wanted to spread it through every state and territory in the Union regardless of the moral objections of the local population (sound familiar?) and had a hissy fit simply because a non-extentionist was elected President in 1860.
I guess that makes the Father of our Country a "conservative" in quotation marks, since he was a Federalist.
I am pointing out that the founders did not impart the Moral meaning to it that you are intent on claiming.
Let us please be precise and accurate.
Thank you for stating this.
Words mean what words mean.
Thank you for stating this.
Thank you for stating this.
This seems relevant.
"On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
— Thomas Jefferson-
I urge you not to be intellectually dishonest. Accept what is meant by it, not what has been invented for it after the fact. The Declaration of Independence was not intended to address the issue of slavery, and to assert that it was is being intellectually dishonest. It may comfort you to believe such a thing, but it is the opposite of the truth.
Let us insist on the truth.
The cause for which they fought and died was the right of self determination. That is not a bankrupt cause.
One of the reasons Edmund Burke gave for his opposition to the French Revolution was the increasingly anarchic tendencies of the Revolutionaries. He correctly saw the conflict between radicals and conservatives as one between those who want to tear down social order and those who want to maintain and restore it. By Burkean standards, the advocates of limited government in post-Revolutionary America were the radicals, while the Federalists were the conservatives.
Nor did anyone consider the bomb-throwing anarchists "conservative" a century later, even though they too advocated limited government. The false equation of big government = liberal, small government = conservative is basically an artifact of modern day America, where the power of the Federal government is being used solely to achieve radical aims. If the Supreme Court ruled to outlaw abortion nationwide rather than to legalize it, would conservative advocates of small government attack this on principle as federal overreach?
It's like when they claim that secession wasn't about slavery even though ALL of the declarations of secession mention slavery throughout (ironically, they don't mention "states rights" or tariffs) and the Confederate Constitution stated: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."
I've read the secession documents, all of them. The cause they fought for was to preserve the infernal institution that allowed them to enslave their fellow man.
To your second point, I agree that both extreme libertarianism/minarchism stems from the same Romantic notions of human nature as many radical ideologies. Leftwing anarchists and Marxists believe that human beings are innately altruistic and "good" and will return to that state once the corrupting influence of capitalism (and the laws/governments that support it) are destroyed. "Conservative" minarchists seem to think that human beings are innately decent and freedom-loving, and if only we can eliminate the corrupting influence of the state, we'd go back to a world of law-abiding citizens working in the free market economy. It's just another variation on Rousseau's noble savage view of humanity, and a model of human nature that has nothing in common with reality.
Did Lincoln not intend to accommodate slavery, you would have a point. But since he did, you are just being hypocritical.
The South was no worse than the North on the issue of slavery. The North was going to let it keep going indefinitely, and indeed, it existed in five Union states all throughout the war.
Why do you sort constantly focus on slavery? It's the only moral claim you have, and you simply ignore the fact that it is a false claim.
You take away your slavery "fig leaf" and you are left with a very horrible and immoral act by the North against the South.
THAT is why you keep trying to force the conversation into a referendum on the wickedness of slavery. It is the slender thread upon which all your moral justification hangs, and even then your argument is a lie.
There was no intent to do anything about slavery when the Union invaded.
Overstated. Lincoln probably respected “the other Jefferson” — the one who wrote the Declaration of Independence — enough so that he didn’t hate Thomas Jefferson. Lincoln’s hero, Henry Clay, had started out in Jefferson’s party, and that — and the Louisiana Purchase — would also have helped save Lincoln from complete contempt for Jefferson. I get that we like to view American political history in a binary Jefferson vs. Hamilton way, but it really does oversimplify our past.
Techically true, Washington did not joint any political party. But many of his top cabinet appointments were Federalists, and his policies (including the charter of a First National Bank) were clearly Federalist and opposed by Democratic-Republicans like Jefferson and Madison.
I know you desperately want to believe that, but only 1.7% of the population owned slaves, and I assure you the vast bulk of them had no input on the "secessionist" documents.
While that 1.7% of the population and it's supporters who may have written those documents might have been fighting for slavery, that other 98.3% of the population was fighting because this massive army tried to invade them.
People defend their homeland, even when their homeland has immoral policies.
If a Muslim army successfully invaded, a hundred fifty years from now people like you would be justifying their invasion because the US supported "Gay Marriage". They know this because they can read it in your Supreme Court Documents.
Not an accurate picture at all. It is, in fact, a deliberate distortion of the truth.
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