>>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
You need to get out more. Lincoln arrested most everyone who disagreed with him. That is not exactly republicanism. 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.
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
It's estimated that, all told, about 70,000 books have been written on the US Civil War, 15,000 on Lincoln alone.
Of those, in his post #665 Kalamata regales us with quotes from three.
Looking those three up, we can find basic information on them:
- James Randall, "Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln" -- 1926 (Revisionist School)
"Randall argued in Civil War and Reconstruction that the war "could have been avoided, supposing of course that something more of statesmanship, moderation, and understanding, and something less of professional patrioteering, slogan-making, face-saving, political clamoring, and propaganda, had existed on both sides."
But such had not been the case.
In Randall's view, extremists in both sections emerged as villains, the abolitionist radicals worst of all.
"Reforming zeal, in those individual leaders in whom it became most vociferous and vocal, was often unrelieved by wisdom, toleration, tact, and the sense of human values.... It was a major cause of the conflict itself."
That is, minority elements inflamed sectional passions to a point where compromise, which might have been brought about by sensible and responsible men, became impossible. "
- Clinton Rossiter, "Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies" -- 1948 (Revisionist)
"In particular, following the events of 9/11, Rossiter's first book, the 1948 Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (reissued in 1963 with a new preface), was reprinted for the first time in nearly forty years.
In that germinal study, Rossiter argued that constitutional democracies had to learn the lesson of the Roman Republic to adopt and use emergency procedures that would empower governments to deal with crises beyond the ordinary capacities of democratic constitutional governance but to ensure that such crisis procedures were themselves subject to constitutional controls and codified temporal limits."
- Edmund Wilson, "Patriotic Gore: studies in the literature of the American Civil War" -- 1962 (literature, Lost Causer)
"The book begins with a controversial 23-page introduction in which Wilson presents his own understanding of the Civil War -- and of all modern wars -- as well as of Abraham Lincoln.
Even though he was born and raised in New Jersey, Wilson saw the Civil War as an imperialistic war of conquest on the part of the North, hypocritically justified by the "rabble-rousing moral issue" of slavery.
In his view, Lincoln was an "uncompromising dictator" comparable to Lenin and Bismarck."
With help from these scholars, Kalamata claims that Lincoln was a dictator and tyrant.
Beginning with
Clinton Rossiter, who in 1948 argued positively that "Constitutional Democracies" must in emergencies act like the ancient Roman Republic and appoint dictators to rule temporarily.
He cites Lincoln as his example.
The problem for both Rossiter and Kalamata is that Lincoln's actions were not those of a "dictator", but rather were built into the President's job description by the Constitution (i.e., habeas corpus), Federal Laws (i.e, 1792 Militia Act, 1807 Insurrection Act) and Founders' historical precedents against rebellion, secession & treason, etc.
1926 classical Revisionist (meaning blames "hot heads" on both sides) James Randall gets quoted by Kalamata complaining that Lincoln refused in 1861 to even recognize or negotiate with Jefferson Davis' Confederate emissaries.
Even at Hampton Roads in 1865, Lincoln offered Confederates only surrender terms, never independence.
But that Randall quote does not mention Democrat President Buchanan, who also refused to recognize or negotiate with Confederate envoys.
And, it doesn't report that Lincoln believed Congress is constitutionally assigned disposition of Federal properties.
Indeed, this is yet another example where all those who claim "Lincoln the dictator" ignored the Constitution, in this case they want Lincoln to have ignored Congress's Constitutional authority over Federal properties.
Finally, Kalamata quotes from Edmund Wilson's (d. 1972) 1962 Lost Cause literary compilation.
Edmund Wilson was a Big Deal in the world of literature -- editor of Vogue and New Republic, a prolific author and critic of other writers:
- On Hemmingway: "But for reasons I cannot attempt to explain, something dreadful seems to happen to Hemingway as soon as he begins to write in the first person."[8] "
- On H. L. Mencken: "The striking thing about Mencken's mind is its ruthlessness and rigidity... Though one of the fairest of critics, he is the least pliant..."[14]
- On Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings, which Wilson referred to as "juvenile trash", saying "Dr. Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form."[5]
Wilson was big into Marx & Freud, an anti-Cold Warrior, he was fined by the IRS and rewarded by President Kennedy.
Wilson's book, Patriotic Gore:
"Wilson almost entirely ignores writers who are African-American, with Forten as an exception, notably lacking mention of Frederick Douglass.[2]
The book's analysis of the Civil War borrows heavily from now-discredited Lost Cause ideology, using "language no diehard Lost Cause advocate of the turn of the 20th century nor neo-Confederate of the early 21st could improve upon," and that "Wilson simply took no interest in black literature, and seemed completely unaware of slave narratives" reveals almost as "much about Wilson’s own moral blindness [as] about the state of knowledge in elite white circles of African-American history and letters in the 1950s and even early 1960s."[3] "
Wilson was a leftwing racist. ![]()