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.
“But nowhere in his speech does he advocate a violent solution.”
This relates, of course, to my post 919 when I tried to accommodate your arguments and to see where it would all lead.
I wrote: “For the purpose of this post, let’s stipulate Lincoln could not get the necessary votes to amend the United States Constitution and abolish slavery peacefully.”
About voting to abolish slavery from the U.S. Constitution peacefully you have emphatically stated: “The answer is that it was mathematically impossible, and everyone knew it.”
If everyone knew it, then Mr. Lincoln must have known it at the time he gave the House Divided speech.
If Lincoln knew it could not be done peacefully, then to what was he alluding in his House Divided speech?
I know you don’t know the answer so I ask Brother Bull Snipe (who is knowledgeable about these things) to restate his reaction to the possibility that Lincoln used the military to violently overthrow the constitution and its slavery provisions.
Said he: “Always admired a man of action.”
I see launching a violent war that kills 750,000 people and caused vast destruction as being the bigger problem than trying to pass a law the people didn't actually want.
This is more like tyranny than democracy.
Not all of them:
"We are a peculiar people, sir! You don’t understand us, and you can’t understand us, because we are known to you only by Northern writers and Northern papers, who know nothing of us themselves, or misrepresent what they do know. We are an agricultural people; we are a primitive but a civilized people. We have no cities—we don’t want them, have no literature—we don’t need any yet. We have no press—we are glad of it. We do not require a press, because we go out and discuss all public questions from the stump with our people. We have no commercial marine—no navy—we don’t want them. We are better without them. Your ships carry our produce, and you can protect your own vessels. We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from those nations with which we are in amity, and to lay up money besides." - Louis Wigfall to William Howard Russell
Then it was kind of dumb for Davis to go and do that I guess.
When you are willing to lock up a man for writing a song, it's pretty easy to win at the ballot box. Who would speak out against you?
I heard lots of dictators won at the ballot box all the time.
Controlling it to where it existed peacefully. Limiting its expansion peacefully. Allowing states to outlaw slavery peacefully. You would know that if you read the speech. Nowhere in that speech is there a call to force an end to slavery where it existed, much less a call for violence.
“Of course this was clearly not a rebellion. It was an effort to attain independence. Lincoln just called it a “rebellion” to unlock the powers he needed to stop it.”
I believe you are correct in every detail.
Jeff Davis for example?
And that's even if Jeff Davis did a wrong thing. It certainly doesn't justify Lincoln if Jeff Davis didn't do a wrong thing.
Did Jeff Davis lock someone up and accuse them of "treason" for writing a song praising a general he dismissed?
I hadn't heard of this.
I know Lincoln had a man arrested just for making a speech about Lincoln behaving like a King.
And as Lincoln himself said. "Just because you call a tail a leg, doesn't make it so."
:)
I'm sure there were loudmouths and crackpots in all the states in those days.
And so it still is today.
In the introduction of the House Divided speech Lincoln said:
“In my opinion, it (slavery agitation) will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.”
Clearly in this speech, Lincoln wanted listeners to believe he was for “ultimate extinction.”
Later in the speech Lincoln termed his political opponents enemies.
But Lincoln knew what you have acknowledged repeatedly: he didn't have the votes to do it peacefully with a lawful constitutional amendment. You have gone so far as to say it could never happen until the United States had 61 states.
What Lincoln needed was the predicted crisis - real or imagined. And his navy found that crisis in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
I meant to say the Fort Sumter Incident.
“To say that any state may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States are not a nation, because it would be a solecism to contend that any part of a nation might dissolve its connection with the other parts, to their injury or ruin, without committing any offense. Secession, like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right is confounding the meaning of terms, and can only be done through gross error or to deceive those who are willing to assert a right, but would pause before they made a revolution or incur the penalties consequent on a failure.
Disunion by armed force is treason. Are you really ready to incur its guilt? If you are, on the heads of the instigators of the act be the dreadful consequences; on their heads be the dishonor, but on yours may fall the punishment. On your unhappy state will inevitably fall all the evils of the conflict you force upon the government of your country. It cannot accede to the mad project of disunion, of which you would be the first victims. Its first magistrate cannot, if he would, avoid the performance of his duty. . . .
Andrew Jackson Proclamation to the People of South Carolina 1832.
If you read all of the proclamation and then read Lincoln’s first inaugural it certainly appears he drew from it. Though he used much softer language.
I think what George Washington wrote speaks volumes-
I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery. George Washington, Jared Sparks (1835). “The Writings of George Washington: Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private”, p.159
Not only do I pray for it, on the score of human dignity, but I can clearly forsee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle. “Retrospections of America, 1797 - 1811”. Book by John Bernard, p. 91, 1887.
I wish from my soul that the legislature of this State could see the policy of a gradual Abolition of Slavery. George Washington, Stephen Lucas (1999). “The Quotable George Washington: The Wisdom of an American Patriot”, p.90, Rowman & Littlefield
Upon the decease [of] my wife, it is my Will and desire th[at] all the Slaves which I hold in [my] own right, shall receive their free[dom] . . . . The Negroes thus bound, are (by their Masters or Mistresses) to be taught to read and write; and to be brought up to some useful occupation, agreeably to the Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, providing for the support of Orphan and other poor Children. And I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever. George Washinton’s will.
I never mean, unless some particular circumstances should compel it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted, by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.George Washington, Jared Sparks (1835). “The Writings of George Washington: Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private”, p.159
The scheme, my dear Marqs. which you propose as a precedent, to encourage the emancipation of the black people of this Country from that state of Bondage in wch. they are held, is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your Heart. I shall be happy to join you in so laudable a work. George Washington, Thomas J. Fleming (1967). “Affectionately Yours, George Washington: A Self-portrait in Letters of Friendship”, New York : Norton
If you read these quotes, and the others from founding fathers I have posted on this thread, you can see the Republican Party and Abraham Lincoln were the conservatives of their era. Trying to get back to what the founding fathers desired, an end to slavery.
I thought you were looking for examples of dictators who rigged elections.
Did Jeff Davis lock someone up and accuse them of "treason" for writing a song praising a general he dismissed?
He had a newspaper writer arrested a day or two after Sumter for writing something Bragg didn't like.
I know Lincoln had a man arrested just for making a speech about Lincoln behaving like a King.
Davis had people arrested for disloyal comments throughout the rebellion.
He's an example. You give a vague 'they'.
he clearly had no respect for it, and acted as though he had a right to keep slaves in that state
Washington complied with the law of state of Pennsylvania. What he believed is immaterial. His actions complied with the Law in the State of Pennsylvania.
I meant to say the Fort Sumter Incident.
Good for him, Jefferson Davis believed he had a logical reason for his actions. Little did he know, or maybe realized, that he had been smarted by the smartest man in the United States.
I meant to say the Fort Sumter Incident.
Yep, he pegged Davis correctly. No brains, little common sense. He convinced Davis to fire on for Sumter. Lincoln was the smartest man in the room. Davis, a mindless pawn in Lincoln’s scheme to control the Continent.
“What document did he replace it with?”
I will attempt to answer your question if it is not rhetorical.
But first, I’d like to savor a little longer your acknowledgement that Lincoln did, in fact, use the military to violently overthrow the United States Constitution.
You haven’t been forced to walk that back yet have you?
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