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 ...
Exactly, and the Declaration of INDEPENDENCE outlined the God given right to leave a government which no longer suited the interests of it's people, nor held the consent of those it governed.
And you keep trying to make it about abolishing slavery, which was not it's purpose at all.
Now, learn to read.
I didn't say it wasn't part of the document. I said it was not part of the instrument. And it is no more part of the legal instrument than the list of signatories at the end. George Washington's signature is part of the document. It isn't part of the instrument. And neither is the Preamble. It is completely without legal effect of any kind.
For something that isn't part of the instrument the preamble certainly got quoted a lot, both in case law and in studies of the Constitution itself.
Abortion destroys every single clause of the stated purposes of the Constitution, as well as violating the explicit, imperative equal protection requirements in more than one Amendment.
Ask yourself, would the sixty million or more innocent little children who have been slaughtered in the last four decades have lived to enjoy the Blessings of Liberty if the Supreme Court had given due regard to the stated purposes of the supreme law of the land which they swore to support and defend?
“Gay marriage” makes the fulfillment of the stated purposes of the Constitution impossible as well. Do you think perhaps this lawless court should have considered that?
Your provocation is some damaged rocks, which the Southern States threatened to pay for, but which the Union wouldn't accept.
No blood was shed in the effort to evict unwanted foreigners from a fort within another nation's boundaries.
Threatened to pay for????
Ah, the US Constitution. Ever read this bit?
Section. 9.
The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.
In case you can't read between the lines, this section is specifically about slaves. They didn't like using that word because it's all icky and stuff, so they spoke of it in euphemisms.
It explicitly says that Congress cannot prohibit the importation of slaves until 1808, which Congress promptly did after that date was reached. The point is, Slavery was tacitly incorporated into the US Constitution and therefore condoned by it until it was amended.
You need to get a better understanding of the ugly aspects of US history and stop listening to all the beautiful propaganda people wish to believe.
Burke's support for the American Revolution was nice to have but the revolution would occur in any event with or without him. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence adopted unanimously by the thirteen colonies is by far the better guide to our revolutionary principles. After two terms of national icon George Washington and one of John Adams (who did not much care for Hamilton), the voting public put a reasonably prot end to Mr. Hamilton's upper class, elitist. know-it-all Federalist Party and, by electing Jefferson, Madison and Monroe to six terms, reclaimed their heritage and our country.
Our revolution was based on a refusal to be governed and abused by an arrogant royalist elite in England. When you call Federalists "conservatives," you are suggesting that tyranny by an American elite was OK and that the peasants had better get used to it. Actual conservatives will tell you that such an American tyranny of, by and for bankers and manufacturing elites and landed gentry just won't do: then, now and forever.
Burr put Hamilton out of Hamilton's and our misery.
The Preamble isn't the foundation, it's the pretty decorative stone work on the front of the building.
It was never another nation.
Perhaps the word "lying" was too strong. Perhaps "deluding yourself" is more appropriate.
How you can read that letter and conclude that Lincoln fully intended to Abolish slavery is either an issue of reading comprehension or a willful determination not to understand it.
Lincoln plain out says so.
I’m quite familiar with that section.
It was the original sin, the awful compromise, of our usually brilliant founders, completely out of character with our national charter and the stated purposes of the Constitution they wrote and ratified.
A sin for which the founders’ grandchildren paid a horrible price in blood, treasure, and destruction, and one which we continue to pay in some degree today.
Thomas Jefferson could already see that destruction coming decades before it arrived. His words to that effect are inscribed on his memorial in Washington, DC.
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
He was talking about the awful institution of slavery.
No more than the Colonies are not still part of the English Union.
Wrong. You could remove the rest of the document and still have a perfect starting place for devising of a decent form of republican, representative self-government.
Remove the natural law moral principles of the Declaration and the Constitution's stated purposes and all you've got are a bunch of arbitrary rules and processes, with no grounding or foundation in principle or purpose. No matter how grand the edifice you devise, it would be erected on shifting sand.
I find it interesting that you take this position. Without that "awful compromise", the Southern states would have retained their independence, and for you to give them their independence so easily is tantamount to saying the war to force them back into the Union was fought for no good reason.
A sin for which the founders’ grandchildren paid a horrible price in blood, treasure, and destruction, and one which we continue to pay in some degree today.
But which would have been prevented if the founders hadn't made that compromise. The Southern States would be Independent of the Union, and the Union would have respected and probably still traded with them.
And again, I marvel that you would give them their independence and let them keep slavery so easily, almost as if it wasn't the moral imperative that you would have us believe.
Indeed, you cannot appeal to the document itself as providing its own self-sufficient authority. That would make it God. [I should not have to point it out, but on the basis of the astonishing claims made by some people here, let me state unequivocally: "The Preamble to the Constitution is not God."]
You're already out, but I'll spot you another strike. Unfortunately, your second "case" is even weaker than your first.
Here, Justice Chase argues for the indissolubility of the Federal union on the basis of: history, culture, tradition and geography, the "necessities of war," The Articles of Confederation and The Preamble.
So now, according to your alleged argument, the history, tradition, culture, and geography of the United States are part of the Constitution, as are "the necessities of war," The Articles of Confederation, and The Preamble.
None of that is in the least bit convincing [or even interesting] and is not actually part of the decision anyway. Texas made laws which, under the actual Articles of the Constitution [not The Preamble], it was not entitled to do, without any regard whatsoever for how the Union was created or how Texas got to where it was. [Note, as a matter of fact, that Chase's opinion for the majority would have been reached just as easily under The Articles of Confederation, which he specifically admits.]
The essence of the case law created here was that in violating the Article I and Article II powers granted by the Constitution, in particular the powers delegated exclusively to the Federal Government, various laws made by Texas were nullities.
There is no finding here that Texas violated part of The Preamble.
Sorry. Four strikes, and you have still found nothing in the case law which asserts a positive dispensation with respect to The Preamble. And, you will also not find that the history, tradition, culture, and geography of the United States are part of the Constitution. Nor are "the necessities of war," nor are The Articles of Confederation.
They all have the same relation to the instrument: they are foundationally important, but not the least bit a part of its instrumental legal powers.
No comparison whatsoever. You’re trying too hard.
Personally, I think the southern states would have eventually folded on the question of slavery if faced with a united principled stand against that infernal institution.
But whether they would have or not, the institution’s incompatibility with the first principles of the republic was and is obvious, and it should have been opposed, no matter the short term political cost.
Each generation should deal with its own sins, not leave the inevitable fruit of their sins to be borne by their grandchildren.
Aha! Progress!
Nobody said they weren’t. I said they are not part of the legally binding instrument. And they aren’t.
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