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To: GOPcapitalist
In the case of ...Lincoln, coercion was initiated on a scale unparalleled by any action of the confederates.

Yes. As President Lincoln said, the nation's resources "are unexhausted, and are as we think, inexhaustible."

That puts me in mind of what Bruce Catton says:

"Secession itself had involved a flight from reality rather than an approach to it....Essentially, this was the reliance of a group that knew little of the modern world but which did not know nearly enough and could never understand that it did not know enough. It ran exactly parallel to Mr. Davis's magnificent statement that the duration of the war could be left up to the enemy--the war would go on until the enemy gave up, and it did not matter how far off that day might be.

The trouble was it did matter. It mattered enormously."

--The Coming Fury, p. 438-439, by Bruce Catton

Or this:

"Alone in the south, Baltimore had the capital, expertise, and tooling to remake the southern rails as fast as they wore out (or were blown up). So too, alone in the South, Baltimore had the resources to create ironclad vessels up to Yankee standards. Instead, this pivotal slave-holding city boosted the Union's powerful advantage....In contrast, under the crushing Civil War tasks of moving gigantic quantities of food, troops and military equipment, Confederate railroads succumbed faster than Confederate troops. By midwar, an aid to the Confederacy's western commander lamented that, "locomotives had not been repaired for six months, and many of them lay disabled." The colonel knew "not one place in the South where a driving-wheel can be made, and not one where a whole locomotive can be constructed."

--The South vs. The South, p. 63-64 by William W. Freehling

Walt

372 posted on 01/28/2003 10:33:22 AM PST by WhiskeyPapa (To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men)
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To: WhiskeyPapa
Yes. As President Lincoln said, the nation's resources "are unexhausted, and are as we think, inexhaustible."

The Lincoln also described the very same act he later took as both coercion and invasion.

"The words ``coercion'' and ``invasion'' are in great use about these days. Suppose we were simply to try if we can, and ascertain what, is the meaning of these words. Let us get, if we can, the exact definitions of these words---not from dictionaries, but from the men who constantly repeat them---what things they mean to express by the words. What, then, is ``coercion''? What is ``invasion''? Would the marching of an army into South California, for instance, without the consent of her people, and in hostility against them, be coercion or invasion? I very frankly say, I think it would be invasion, and it would be coercion too, if the people of that country were forced to submit." - Abraham Lincoln, February 11, 1861

375 posted on 01/28/2003 10:38:17 AM PST by GOPcapitalist
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