Sic Semper Tyrannis!
I don't know what DiLorenzo's agenda is, but it has nothing to do with a fair reading of historical events.
Walt
I guess DiLorenzo thinks he is being clever, but it's in any general text on Lincoln or the war that his bedrock position was that slavery not be allowed to into the national territories. That was enough to set off the slave power, and the war came.
Walt
The Supreme Court unanimously agreed that secession was outside the law in The Prize Cases (1862). The president's powers were adequate to put down the rebellion under the Militia Act of 1792, which was cited by the Court in the majority ruling.
DiLorenzo is just preying on the ignorant by incompletely rehashing events, the history of which are readily available in the record.
Walt
The Republican Party had a political monopoly before the war too, because the slave power made sure to split the Democratic Party to ensure the election of Lincoln.
They did this to facilitate a destruction of the United States. Their aim was a slave empire stretching into South America and encompassing all the Carribbean.
For example:
" Senator A. G. Brown said September 4, 1858, that he wanted Cuban, Mexican, and Central American territory for slavery; "I would spread the blessings of slavery . . . to the uttermost ends of the earth." Such utterances treated slavery as permanent, and assumed that it must be defended at every point."
---- "The Coming Fury" by Bruce Catton
See also "Battle Cry of Freedom", by James Mcpherson, especially Chapter 3, "An Empire for Slavery".
Walt
My emphasis
See what a convenient little lie this is?
DiLorenzo is -surely- familiar with Lincoln's second inagural address:
"One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war."
DiLorenzo's interpretation can only stand with out of context, flawed data, and it can only sway the ignorant and hateful.
Walt
As President of the Declaration Foundation, I take the chance to say that we are honored to be mentioned, even with malice by the writer, with the Claremont Institute.
This latter group consists of people who have spent their careers spreading lies about Lincoln and his war in order to support the political agenda of the Republican Party.
Freepers who know anything about Alan Keyes, the Chairman of DF, and me, its president, will no doubt be amused at the ignorance of this remark. In the recent controversy over affirmative action, I have both praised and criticised the administration's actions, as I do regularly. I praise them when I think them faithful to American Principole, and criticise when they are not, as was notably the case in the stem cell matter.
They are not about to let the truth stand in their way and are hard at work producing "educational" materials that are filled with false but politically correct history.
To judge this for yourself, go and order our book.
Having fought political correctness for over a decade, served as vice-chair of the anti-race preferences California Civil Rights Initiative, labored against the establishment ... and partly Republican "School-to-Work" scheme, and even published in Journals on the debased idea of "multi-culturalism" I find DiLorenzo's remarks more comical than offensive.
Finally, as to being unwilling to let the selected facts cited by DiLorenzo be spread, I will, as I usually do with his silly writings, post them at the DF website.
I'll also post there Jaffa's latest piece criticising the notion of Diversity, as embodied in the Republican Administration's brief in the Michigan affirmative action cases ... from the Claremont website.
Cheers,
Richard F.
I guess one could claim Lincoln and the Congress were doing all they could to "protect Southern slavery", if you ignore the fact that the Republican Party was totally opposed to any expansion of slavery.
I guess that's protection of a sort.
A more reasonable interpretation than DiLorenzo's is that Lincoln and the Congress were willing to tolerate slavery where it already existed, but they were adamant (at least Lincoln was) that slavery remain on a path to ultimate extinction.
Whatever Lincoln thought, it was vastly more advanced that what some southerners were saying:
It was because the free Negro menaced the institution, because manumission undermined it, because all self-help systems for the slave corroded It, that pro- slavery men urged new legislation. Their object was not to surround slavery with an atmosphere of terror. It was to shore up an institution built on quick- sand and battered bv all the forces of world sentiment and emergent industrialism.
Ruffin was personally the kindliest of masters. The unhappy fact was that it had become impossible to safeguard slavery without brutal violence to countless individuals; either the institution had to be given up, or the brutality committed.
The legislators of Louisiana and Arkansas, of Alabama and Georgia, with humane men like Ruffin and the Eastern Shore planters of Maryland, had faced this alternative. They had chosen the institution. The Richmond Examiner stated their choice in unflinching language:
It is all an hallucination to suppose that we are ever going to get rid of slavery, or that it will ever be desirable to do so. It is a thing that we cannot do without;that is righteous, profitable, and permanent, and that belongs to Southern society as inherently, intrinsically, and durably as the white race itself. Southern men should act as if the canopy of heaven were inscribed with a covenant, in letters of fire, that the negro is here, and here forever—is our property, and ours forever—is never to be emancipated—is to be kept hard at work and in rigid subjection all his days.
This has the ring of the Richmond publicist Fitzhugh, and would have been repudiated by many Southerners. But Jefferson Davis said, July 6, 1859, "There is not probably an intelligent mind among our own citizens who doubts either the moral or the legal right of the institution of African slavery." Senator A. G. ' Brown said September 4, 1858, that he wanted Cuban, Mexican, and Central American territory for slavery; "I would spread the blessings of slavery . . . to the uttermost ends of the earth." Such utterances treated slavery as permanent, and assumed that it must be defended at every point."
-- "The Coming Fury" by Bruce Catton
Very true. But every southern state that seceded made it abundantly clear that they were doing it to protect slavery.
BTW. DiLorenzo is a twisted propagandist.
Mr. Guthrie proposed the following:
"The Union of the States under the Constitution is indissoluble, and no State can secede from the Union, or nullify an act of Congress, or absolve its citizens from their paramount obligation of obedience to the Constitution and laws of the United States."Mr. Field offered:
"The Union of the States, under the Constitution, is indissoluble."And this:
"No State shall withdraw from the Union without the consent of all the States, given in a Convention of the States, convened in pursuance of an act passed by two-thirds of each House of Congress."Mr. Goodrich proposed:
"And no State can secede from the Union, or nullify an act of Congress, or absolve its citizens from their paramount obligations of obedience to the Constitution and laws of the United States."Lucius E. Chittenden, Report of the debates and proceedings in the secret session of the conference convention, for proposing amendments to the Constitution of the United States, held at Washington, D.C., in February, A.D. 1861, New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1864, pp. 396-398.
There is much more in the book, it's several hundred pages.
For what it is worth, I live in Pittsburgh, but am a great admirer of Lee and the bravado of the Confederate soldiers. Robert Lee, even recently, appears on postage stamps.
What seems to be happening is an effort by politically entrenched people (like the Jacksons and the reparations crowd) to use the parks to paint the CSA as Nazis.
The focus of the battlefields should be about the battles. Why else do they think people visit them?
As someone else said, the legacy of slavery is much better suited to a museum in DC.
I would hope even Walt would want to preserve the battlefields as battlefields. I used to like to drive to Gettysburg and bike around. The workers telling the events of Pickett's men charging fearlessly into a wall of gunfire was always riveting. I hope this will not change, but from what I have read, the 3 leftist professors decided this was "Southern Bias".
PC is a cancer upon our nation.