Replies

Lincoln was the aggressor and self-appointed dictator.

Nonsense on both counts.

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.

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.

Historians claim otherwise.

Not really, no.

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.

Not really, no. 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.

You are misleading the readers. This is Lincoln:

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."

He said nothing about mail in that warning.

Well maybe if you had read the next paragraph you would have seen it.

Nothing Lincoln did was subject to judicial review.

You really need to read up on the history of the rebellion some time. The Supreme Court operated openly throughout and numerous Lincoln decisions were reviewed by the court. In most cased those decisions were upheld. In other cases the court struck them down. Unlike the Confederacy.

He ignored Justice Haney's opinion about his abuse of habeas corpus...

Issued from the circuit court bench and not the Supreme Court.

...and he even had his Congress pass a banana republic "law" to place Lincoln above the law, which included making it a criminal act for state judges to prosecute federal authorities (Lincoln's thugs) who made arbitrary arrests.

Now you're just being silly.

You certainly don't want to hear what happened at the ballot boxes.

Oh go ahead. This should be funny.

Secession is not rebellion; and as long as you insist on lying about it, we may as well drop the subject.

Well yes it is when done illegally. But let's keep the subject going so you can lie about the legality some more.

That is not a source. This is a source:

That's a single instance. But since you chose that one I'll point out that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government could not suspend habeas corpus in areas that were not threatened by the war, striking down the governments decision to do so. Jefferson Davis also suspended habeas corpus throughout the Confederacy even in areas hundreds of miles from the fighting, and there was no supreme court to tell him he was wrong.

No Southern newspaper was ever suppressed by the Confederate government for its opinions, however critical or demoralizing.

LOL! As Mark Neely details in "Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism" the first political prisoner arrested in the war was a newspaper reporter who printed something that Braxton Bragg didn't like. In Brayton Harris's "Blue & Gray in Black & White: Newspapers in the Civil War" he notes "Censorship was more easily implemented in the South, and more readily accepted. A censorship of sorts had been in place in some Southern states, where the press was forbidden to publish, for example, any material advocating the abolition of slavery." He went on to detail the threat to their independence printed in the Richmond Whig: "We beg to suggest to all Southern papers the propriety of omitting all mention of troops within our borders. A word to the wise." Harris does note that there were little need to suppress papers in the Confederacy because there were few papers who opposed the Southern rebellion. Those who did had their editors fired (Richmond Whig), their owners forced to sell(Alabama Beacon, Athena Union Banner, Galveston Union), or were just shut down by the Davis regime and their owner jailed (Knoxville Whig). Even with all that, the press was threatened. The Richmond Examiner was threatened with shut down for printing something General Winder didn't like in 1862. In "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era" James McPherson quotes a Richmond diarist who noted that several newspaper editors "have confessed a fear of having their offices closed, if they the sentiments struggling for utterance. It is, indeed, a reign of terror."

Let's try this one more time:

Let's do. I am not talking about tariffs making imports more expensive for consumers, North and South. I'm not talking about tariffs impacting Northerners to a much greater extent since the vast majority of imports were consumed by Northerners. I'm talking about your claim in Reply 594 and elsewhere: "They worried about both loss of sales and further losses due to possible British retaliation."

Was there any British retaliation against their cotton imports as a result of the U.S. tariffs, in 1861 or in the years prior? It's a simple question and one you should be able to answer. Assuming you're not making this stuff up as you go along, of course.

Ms. DoodleDawg

>>Kalamata wrote: "Lincoln was the aggressor and self-appointed dictator."
>>DoodleDawg wrote: "Nonsense on both counts."

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.

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>>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!

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>>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