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 ...
If the Union had temporarily moved its capitol to New York they would have freed up about 30k troops. But symbolism won over common sense.
Go back and reread #346 - you've just set the gold standard for incomprehensibility.
Both of your idiotic idioms more appropriately suit the actions of the southron slavers, not the north. The slavers were impetuous, petulant, aggressive, and confrontational. A lot of that may have been due to the feckless Buchanan encouraging their misbehavior but only a tiny bit.
Most of the blame, and most of the onus rests squarely on the slavers.
It did, but not in regards to slaves. That was a moral oversight which people eventually came to realize, but NOT AT THE TIME THEY WROTE IT! For some states, not even for decades afterwards.
But stop trying to put the cart before the horse. You are deliberately getting the history backwards to suit what you wish to believe instead of to acknowledge what was actually true.
Actually, you didn’t miss it. You simply choose to ignore it, which means you throw out the foundations of the American claim to self-government in liberty.
Blah blah blah. Spare me the attempts at flowery and noble sounding sentiments. The Ugly fact is that the Declaration was not intended by it's authors or signatories to apply to slaves or slavery... that was a later day "Living Declaration" claim by subsequent Liberals of those later time periods.
For that matter, neither was the constitution. It incorporated a tacit acceptance of slavery right in it, in that clause I showed you, and in the 3/5ths portion of it with which i'm sure you're aware.
Just stop with your attempts to rewrite history. Nobody is buying them, and I expect you don't even believe them yourself.
Right. But the confederate troops were no threat. hah.
Except when the Union does it. When THEY do it, it's perfectly fine. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Do you know what ex post facto means? If not, please do look it up.
Oh give me a break. Everyone knew the question of slavery impinged on any moral claim to liberty. Even Jefferson. Look at his words that were expunged from the Declaration’s final product.
They compromised away the unalienable rights of their fellow man. They knew it. They did it anyway out of political expedience, because of the strident demands of the slave masters of the South.
And the grandchildren of both sides paid the price for it in blood.
I am sorry that I am involved in a conversation with someone who does not know how to get to the point. I am likewise sorry that I am involved in a conversation with someone who looks at history through a dreamy fog of anachronistic noble sentiment instead of a clear lens of reality.
Richmond could not afford a continuously manned set of fortifications. They didn't have the troops for it.
Lincoln was a long winded gas bag.
Yeah, sure. The ring of forts and thousands of troops around the national capital were put there for no reason at all.
Okay, I see your problem. You are a time traveler and you can't keep your historical events in the proper order. You've got this happening before that, and this subsequent thing in front of that other triggering event.
Your sequence is all out of whack.
At the time the Union invaded, the South was not posing any threat to them. The South was not going to invade. Later? Yeah, it's sort of what you have to do when you go on an offensive in a f***ing WAR.
No, you haven't made any progress... if anything you seem to be getting worse.
jeff davis was wrong - and his arrogance cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
God-given, unalienable, individual rights precede and supersede all man made laws and constitutions. This has been a bedrock principle of western civilization going back through Blackstone, and Locke, and Aquinas, all the way to Cicero. Surely you know that.
If anything is "ex post facto," in the truest sense, it is the illegitimate claim to a "right" to commit the gross wrong of man-stealing and then robbing generations of those who have been stolen of their lives, their liberty, and their marriage, family, and property rights.
Why wasn't he tried and hung after the war. Were was the "wrong" done?
Did you get off on burning the CBF over the weekend? Did you burn a little effigy of Lee also?
The disparity of forces obviously didn’t make any difference to the insurrectionists when they started the war. I never said they were smart - just aggressive.
Without who's support they could have never made it work anyways. So they made a devil's bargain, and then cheated.
That sound about right?
And the grandchildren of both sides paid the price for it in blood.
Not for slavery. For daring to think they could be free and independent while a Fanatic who thought otherwise was intent on sending the biggest army on the continent to stop them from leaving.
Once again, he wasn't going to stop them from slaving, just from leaving. After they put up such a vicious fight, he decided to go further, but it certainly wasn't his intention when he started the fight.
So how many American flags did you burn general?
Well, other than the fact that they were in rebellion against the duly constituted government, and were trying to rip away nearly half of the republic's territory, and had raised a substantial army to attack the legitimate government.
The South was not going to invade. Later? Yeah, it's sort of what you have to do when you go on an offensive in a f***ing WAR.
It's what you do when you're an insurrectionist who is losing the insurrection and you're getting desperate, so desperate that you're willing to throw all the chips on the table for a final roll of the dice.
You've gone back around the circle.
But you can't fool me. Again, I've read the secession docs, all of them. The those who seceded made it abundantly clear that it was for slavery.
Yeah, give that a rest for a moment. Ex Post Facto is referring to "After the Fact", as in making something a law, (Or suddenly morally outrageous) "after the fact."
Before the war? Slavery was A-OK with the Union. After the war? Slavery was an abomination and justified the deaths of 600,000 men and the devastation of vast swaths of populated areas.
Pushing this argument actually makes good financial sense. By declaring it an abomination, they didn't have to pay anyone for what they took away. Billions of dollars in financial assets just evaporated as punishment because the Southern states fought back.
The FedZilla didn't have to pay any claims, because they retroactively made a previously legal thing into an illegal thing. Now that worked out just swell for them, didn't it?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.