Posted on 12/22/2019 4:23:47 AM PST by Bull Snipe
"I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition and about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton." General William T. Sherman's "March to the Sea" was over. During the campaign General Sherman had made good on his promise d “to make Georgia howl”. Atlanta was a smoldering ruin, Savannah was in Union hands, closing one of the last large ports to Confederate blockade runners. Sherman’s Army wrecked 300 miles of railroad and numerous bridges and miles of telegraph lines. It seized 5,000 horses, 4,000 mules, and 13,000 head of cattle. It confiscated 9.5 million pounds of corn and 10.5 million pounds of fodder, and destroyed uncounted cotton gins and mills. In all, about 100 million dollars of damage was done to Georgia and the Confederate war effort.
FAIL. If the the margin went up a whopping 20% ( on top of the existing profit margin! ) because of the tariff then there is plenty of room for new domestic production. So you still don't get it. Tariffs are what EVERY OTHER COUNTRY DOES TO US. It only in America where economic stupidity reigns and other nations take advantage..
The more I learn of this period of history when Jackson killed the national bank, the more I realize that Jackson was a lot smarter than I had previously given him credit for being.
Jackson rightfully recognized the threat that these manipulators of money could represent. The shame is that the National Bank didn't stay dead.
Where there is an opportunity to make unearned money, the corrupt will always find a way to exploit it.
Your claim would have Lincoln as Davis' puppet. I think he was not. I think Davis was his.
[New York, July 8, 1788]My Dear Sir
I felicitate you sincerely on the event in Virginia; but my satisfaction will be allayed, if I discover too much facility in the business of amendment-making. I fear the system will be wounded in some of its vital parts by too general a concurrence in some very injudicious recommendations. I allude more particularly to the power of taxation. The more I consider requisition in any shape the more I am out of humour with it.
We yesterday passed through the constitution. To day some definitive proposition is to be brought forward; but what we are at a loss to judge. We have good reason to believe that our opponents are not agreed, and this affords some ground of hope. Different things are thought of—Conditions precedent, or previous amendments; Conditions subsequent, or the proposition of amendments upon condition, that if they are not adopted within a limited time, the state shall be at liberty to withdraw from the Union, and lastly recommendatory amendments.
In either case constructive declarations will be carried as far as possible. We will go as far as we can in the latter without invalidating the act, and will concur in rational recommendations. The rest for our opponents.
We are informed, There has been a disturbance in the City of Albany on the 4th of July which has occasioned bloodshed. The antifœderalists were the aggressors & the Fœderalists the Victors. Thus stand our accounts at present. We trust however the matter has passed over & tranquillity been restored.
Yrs; Affecty
A Hamilton
The letter clearly shows that Hamilton believed that some people at the New York constitutional ratification will try to adopt conditions, that if not met, would allow them to “withdraw from the Union.” Madison response is clear; adoption of the constitution is “for ever”.
You need to get out more. Lincoln arrested most everyone who disagreed with him. That is not exactly republicanism.
This comes from a Lincolnite:
"The simple fact that one man was the government of the United States in the most critical period in all its 165 years, and that he acted on no precedent and under no restraint, makes this the paragon of all democratic, constitutional dictatorships. For if Lincoln was a great dictator, he was a greater democrat… This amazing disregard for the words of the Constitution, though considered by many as unavoidable, was considered by nobody as legal." [Rossiter, Clinton, "Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies." Princeton University Press, 1948, pp.224, 226]
Rossiter was more than gracious in his words, "considered by many as unavoidable," by leaving out the part that identifies the "many."
Rossiter not only knew a dictator when he saw one, but he also could tell a democrat from republican. Now watch his sleight of hand on this one:
"In all this suspension of civil liberty [Lincoln] had the acquiescence of Congress and the overwhelming support of the loyal population. This does not mask the fact that he was exercising dictatorial power. It was not until the Act of March 3, 1863 that Congress itself authorized the President to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and incidentally ratified his past actions in this regard. As far as Lincoln was concerned, this statute was simply an expression of congressional opinion, having no effect on his past or future activities." [Rossiter, Clinton, "Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies." Princeton University Press, 1948, p.236]
Democrats love majority rule, even when it is the majority of a small "loyal" minority under a dictator. Marx personally espoused the virtues of democracies. Republicans, on the other hand, despise democracies, as Madison expounded:
". . . it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions." [James Madison, in Bill Bailey, "The Complete Federalist Papers." The New Federalist Papers Project, FP No. 10, p.56]
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>>Kalamata wrote: "You are pretending the Constitution actually existed at the time of the secession. It didn't. Otherwise, the legacy of Lincoln, his merry gang of thugs, and the rubber-stamp Congress, would have been: "They hung by ropes until dead." A survivor would have been Chief Justice Taney, who ruled against Lincoln's tyranny regarding habeas corpus."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "And when pinned down you resort to more nonsense. The Constitution did indeed exist throughout the war and Lincoln did abide by it throughout his administration, unlike Jefferson Davis."
I cannot believe I am reading this.
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: "Historians claim otherwise."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Not really, no."
>>Kalamata wrote: "The South sought to negotiate financial settlements for the reclaimed property, before the attack on Fort Sumter; but Lincoln refused to either see or acknowledge them."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Not really, no.
YES! REALLY!
****************
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "If you read Jefferson Davis's letter to Lincoln there is no offer to pay for anything. Just a call that Lincoln surrender to Confederate demands on recognizing independence, and a vague offer to negotiate but only if the subject was of interest to Davis."
That is an astonishingly ignorant interpretation. The TRUTH is, the Confederacy tried to negotiate with Lincoln, and pay for their loss of former federal land, as well as any debts of the Confederacy. Lincoln would not even recognize them. He couldn't recognize them and maintain his LIE about the the Confederacy being an insurrection:
"As a further illustration of the insurrection theory, the meticulous care on the part of the Union Government to avoid any act remotely suggestive of a recognition of the "Confederate States of America," will be recalled. When the commissioners appointed by the Confederate President in conformity with a resolution of the Confederate Congress, sought audience with Secretary Seward in March, 1861, in order to settle "all matters between the States forming the Confederacy and their other late confederates of the United States in relation to the public property and the public debt," they were neither received in person nor officially recognized by the Secretary of State (not even as representatives of a de facto government), and the intercourse which took place between them and the administration consisted of memoranda placed "on file" for their perusal, or of indirect and misleading interchanges through unauthorized go-betweens." A wholly unreasonable resentment was felt against England at the time of the Queen's proclamation of neutrality, because the view prevailed at Washington that foreign powers ought to regard the struggle as merely domestic and the Southern "insurgents" should not be given the dignity of belligerents. When Napoleon III of France formally proposed "mediation" between the United States and the Confederate States, Secretary Seward uttered an indignant though respectful protest, while Congress echoed his sentiments in a resolution which denounced such mediation as foreign "interference," and declared that any further attempt in the same direction would be deemed "an unfriendly act" Concerning the exchange of prisoners, as in all matters suggesting official relations with the Confederate States, there was an excessive wariness on the part of the Union Government which left this important question in an unsatisfactory shape. On those occasions during the war when the question of negotiating for terms of peace with the Southern Government presented itself, President Lincoln, while manifesting generosity on collateral points, carefully avoided any recognition of the Confederacy and invariably imposed a condition which amounted to surrender—i.e., the complete reunion of the warring States with the North. It was for this reason that these attempted negotiations, notably the Hampton Roads Conference, ended in failure. Thus throughout the war, all recognition of authority was denied to the Confederacy, and in the Northern official view it remained the "pretended government" of the "so-called Confederate States of America."
[James G. Randall, "Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln." University of Illinois Press, Rev Ed, 1961, pp.63-65]
However, the dictator Lincoln was in "fashionable" company in those days.
"The North's determination to preserve the Union was simply the form that the power drive now took. The impulse to unification was strong in the nineteenth century; it has continued to be strong in this; and if we would grasp the significance of the Civil War in relation to the history of our time, we should consider Abraham Lincoln in connection with the other leaders who have been engaged in similar tasks. The chief of these leaders have been Bismarck and Lenin. They with Lincoln have presided over the unifications of the three great new modem powers. If one happens to belong to a class or to live in a part of the world which has reason to honor the memory of one of these statesmen but has been injured by the policies of another, one may find this grouping unexpected. Bismarck was detested by the French whom he defeated and humiliated; Lenin is widely detested by old regime Russians, by political heretics who have been outlawed by the Soviet government and by everyone who has been frightened by "Communism" as the enemy of old-fashioned laissez-faire (which can hardly be said now to exist in any of the so-called "capitalist" countries); Lincoln is detested by the American Southerners against whom he waged a four years war and whom he reduced to unconditional surrender. But each became a hero for the people who gave their allegiance to the state he established…
"All three [Lincoln, Bismarck, and Lincoln] were solitary men, who lived with their concentration of purpose. None liked to deal in demagogy and none cared for official pomp: even Bismarck complained that he could not be a courtier and assured Grant and others — as he must have believed quite sincerely — that he was not really a monarchist but a republican. Each established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples. Lincoln kept the Union together by subordinating the South to the North; Bismarck imposed on the German states the cohesive hegemony of Prussia; Lenin — though contemptuous of bureaucracy, since he could not himself imagine that, once the old order was abolished, any decent person could want to be a bureaucrat — began the work of binding Russia, with its innumerable ethnic groups scattered through immense spaces, in a tight bureaucratic net."
[Edmund Wilson, "Patriotic Gore: studies in the literature of the American Civil War." Oxford University Press, 1962, pp.xvi-xvii]
Wilson is absolutely correct that those three dictators are heroes to statists – the state worshippers. But, ironically, both Lincoln and Bismarck pretended to be republicans, the complete opposite political theory to statism.
One of Hitler's speeches, while praising Bismarck's consolidation of power, sounded eerily similar to parts of Lincoln's first inaugural:
"In practice this theoretical formulation does not apply entirely to any of the federated states existing on earth today. Least of all to the American Union, where, as far as the overwhelming part of the individual states are concerned, there can be no question of any original sovereignty, but, on the contrary, many of them were sketched into the total area of the Union in the course of time, so to speak. Hence in the individual states of the American Union we have mostly to do with smaller and larger territories, formed for technical, administrative reasons, and, often marked out with a ruler, states which previously had not and could not have possessed any state sovereignty of their own. For it was not these states that had formed the Union, on the contrary it was the Union which formed a great part of such so-called states. The very extensive special rights granted, or rather assigned, to the individual territories are not only in keeping with the whole character of this federation of states, but above all with the size of its area, its spatial dimensions which approach the scope of a continent. And so, as far as the states of the American Union are concerned, we cannot speak of their state sovereignty, but only of their constitutionally established and guaranteed rights, or better, perhaps, privileges."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf: Manheim Translation." Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999, p.566]
"[T]he Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution, was "to form a more perfect Union." But if [the] destruction of the Union, by one, or by a part only, of the States, be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity."
[First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861, in Roy P. Basler, "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln Vol 4." Rutgers University Press, 1953, pp.253-254]
Both Hitler and Lincoln had dictator-speak down to a science
Face it. Lincoln, your hero, was a power-hungry psychopath who despised the constitution and liberty.
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>>Kalamata wrote: "You are misleading the readers. This is Lincoln:"
>>Kalamata quoting: "So is this: ". Where hostility to the United States in any interior locality shall be so great and universal as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people for that object. While the strict legal right may exist in the Government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating and so nearly impracticable withal that I deem it better to forego for the time the uses of such offices. The mails, unless repelled, will continue to be furnished in all parts of the Union."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "He said nothing about mail in that warning. Well maybe if you had read the next paragraph you would have seen it.
I am through with debating a "mail box," or rather drywall. Bother someone else.
Mr. Kalamata
If by getting out more you mean look into the crackpot sources that claim things like "Lincoln arrested most everyone who disagreed with him" then I think I'll stay where I'm at.
This comes from a Lincolnite...
LOL! How you determine who is a "Lincolnite" and who is not if baffling, but at the same time very amusing.
I cannot believe I am reading this.
The very same reaction I had when I read your post.
YES! REALLY!
No, not really.
That is an astonishingly ignorant interpretation.
That is an accurate interpretation of the Davis letter to Lincoln as written. Maybe if you read it?
The TRUTH is, the Confederacy tried to negotiate with Lincoln, and pay for their loss of former federal land, as well as any debts of the Confederacy.
The TRUTH is that any talk about doing so early on died out quickly until by the time Davis sent his crew to demand Lincoln's surrender there was no mention of it in the letter.
Lincoln would not even recognize them. He couldn't recognize them and maintain his LIE about the the Confederacy being an insurrection:
Except there was no lie there. The Southern rebellion was a fact. It's in all the history books.
Both Hitler and Lincoln had dictator-speak down to a science
You do have a particularly warped view of the world, I'll give you that.
Aw and I thought we were really developing something special here. A real bond. Now you're throwing a hissyfit and storming off.
Really, quoting Hitler? I should just invoke Godwin’s law. However, since you played that card first I’ll go ahead with a rebuttal. The Confederates were much more aligned with Nazi ideology than Lincoln and the US were.
Confederate ideology was just Nazism lite. How so? The Nazi leaders believed that certain people were sub-humsn and needed to be exterminated. The confederate leaders believed that certain people were sub-human and needed to be enslaved.
Just as the German Army rounded up Jews to be sent to extermination camps. The confederate army rounded up black Americans and sent them to be enslaved. Just as the US army liberated the Jews in WW2 the US Army liberated the slave in the civil war. By the end of the war 4 million men, woman, and children had been freed from the chains of bondage.
Here’s proof that Jefferson Davis would have been right at home in the SS.
“My own convictions as to negro slavery are strong. It has its evils and abuses...We recognize the negro as God and God’s Book and God’s Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him - our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude...You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be.”
~Davis
For us, this is not a problem you can turn a blind eye to-one to be solved by small concessions. For us, it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover its health, whether the Jewish spirit can ever really be eradicated. Don’t be misled into thinking you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus. Don’t think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis. This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst.
Source: D Irving, The War Path: Hitler’s Germany 1933-1939. Papermac, 1978, p.xxi
Don’t forget that both Jeff Davis and Hitler ran countries whose wartime economies were dependent on slave labor.
“Don’t forget that both Jeff Davis and Hitler ran countries whose wartime economies were dependent on slave labor.”
And yet, the CSA was only the second most powerful slave nation in North America.
Both a good point and true. I will say I’m shocked on a pro-American site that someone would compare Lincoln to Hitler. It’s not that I haven’t seen those comparisons before, but they have been almost exclusively on white supremist sites like the league of the south.
Depends on how you define "most powerful". It was the largest, most powerful economy in North America completely dependent on slave labor.
At least these thugs are recognizing the CSA as a separate independent country.
We're just playing along. If we refer to it as 'rebellion' some of y'all get cranky.
There is a huge moral difference on basing your society on slavery, and forming a nation that happened to have slavery when it was founded. Of course you seem blind to that and relentlessly try to establish some kind of moral equivalency between America and the confederacy. I suppose you think the internment Of Japanese Americans during world war 2 was equivalent to the Nazi concentration camps? If you do your even more delusional than I had thought.
And let’s not forget that the founding fathers passed the northwest ordinance in 1787 that prohibited slavery in those territories. They also created the Constitution that allowed states to outlaw slavery. In fact from my knowledge of history our country was the first to outlaw slavery anywhere within its borders. Heck Vermont abolished slavery in 1877, before the constitution was even ratified. Then followed Pennsylvania (1870), Massachusetts(1781), New Hampshire(1783), Connecticut(1784), New York(1799), and New Jersey in 1804.
So the founders created a Constitution that allowed for slavery to be ended. In fact they were so embarrassed by slavery they wouldn’t even use the word in the Constitution!
Not so the confederate constitution. They used the word many times and did the exact opposite of what our founders did. They made it impossible to end slavery.
Article I Section 9(4)
No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
And further made it impossible for any new state in the confederacy to outlaw slavery. Again, the direct opposite of what our founders did.
Article IV Section 3(3)
The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several states; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form states to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government: and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories, shall have the right to take to such territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the states or territories of the Confederate states.
But you keep peddling that snake oil that America was morally the same as the confederacy. I’m sure you’ll find some suckers to buy it. I mean you did.
Also please don’t be offended by my use of our founders. From your replies on these threads I get the impression that you might not think of them as yours, heck, you might not think of yourself as an America even. It seems you’d be much happier identifying as a confederate and that might be why your so upset that the Republicans took away your chance to have slaves.
That is an interesting comment.
Here's what one admirer of Confederate leadership wrote:
Dear Dr. Scott:
Respecting your August 1 inquiry calling attention to my often expressed admiration for General Robert E. Lee, I would say, first, that we need to understand that at the time of the War between the States the issue of secession had remained unresolved for more than 70 years. Men of probity, character, public standing and unquestioned loyalty, both North and South, had disagreed over this issue as a matter of principle from the day our Constitution was adopted.
General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.
From deep conviction, I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s calibre would be unconquerable in spirit and soul.
Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation’s wounds once the bitter struggle was over, we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.
Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.
Sincerely,
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Your unambiguous claim that General Eisenhower was an admirer of “Nazism lite” is unfortunate, but perhaps inevitable because of what people see today on the electric television and are taught in government schools.
I'm not saying that you deliberately maligned General Eisenhower. I do think you probably read something on the board that upset you emotionally and, rather than brandish an M-4 carbine, you lashed out in anger.
Isn't that what happened?
Who knows what these mouth foaming knuckle dragging state-ist thugs really think. I’ll bet it’s very dark in there.
“So the founders created a Constitution that allowed for slavery to be ended.”
The founders did something much more important than that: they created a Constitution that allowed for slavery to be ended peacefully - through an amendment process that would not spill one drop of blood.
And yet, Lincoln “fought to free the slaves.” Before the war, Northern congressmen to my knowledge, never introduced an amendment to end slavery in the United States.
They never even tried. And that includes Lincoln when he served in Congress.
Let me anticipate your response: they did not introduce an abolition amendment only because it was not in their own economic and political best self interest.
How about they never introduced such an amendment because prior to the rebellion such an amendment would have needed 46 states to ratify it assuming the 15 slave states all voted the ratification down? Do the math.
This from the "(*ugh*) Lincoln Bad, Confederacy good (*grunt*)" crowd.
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