Posted on 08/20/2004 5:43:21 AM PDT by TexConfederate1861
Imagine that America had a Chief Justice of the United States who actually believed in enforcing the Constitution and, accordingly, issued an opinion that the war in Iraq was unconstitutional because Congress did not fulfill its constitutional duty in declaring war. Imagine also that the neocon media, think tanks, magazines, radio talk shows, and television talking heads then waged a vicious, months-long smear campaign against the chief justice, insinuating that he was guilty of treason and should face the punishment for it. Imagine that he is so demonized that President Bush is emboldened to issue an arrest warrant for the chief justice, effectively destroying the constitutional separation of powers and declaring himself dictator.
An event such as this happened in the first months of the Lincoln administration when Abraham Lincoln issued an arrest warrant for Chief Justice Roger B. Taney after the 84-year-old judge issued an opinion that only Congress, not the president, can suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Lincoln had declared the writ null and void and ordered the military to begin imprisoning thousands of political dissenters. Taney’s opinion, issued as part of his duties as a circuit court judge in Maryland, had to do with the case of Ex Parte Merryman (May 1861). The essence of his opinion was not that habeas corpus could not be suspended, only that the Constitution requires Congress to do it, not the president. In other words, if it was truly in "the public interest" to suspend the writ, the representatives of the people should have no problem doing so and, in fact, it is their constitutional prerogative.
As Charles Adams wrote in his LRC article, "Lincoln’s Presidential Warrant to Arrest Chief Justice Roger B. Taney," there were, at the time of his writing, three corroborating sources for the story that Lincoln actually issued an arrest warrant for the chief justice. It was never served for lack of a federal marshal who would perform the duty of dragging the elderly chief justice out of his chambers and throwing him into the dungeon-like military prison at Fort McHenry. (I present even further evidence below).
All of this infuriates the Lincoln Cult, for such behavior is unquestionably an atrocious act of tyranny and despotism. But it is true. It happened. And it was only one of many similar constitutional atrocities committed by the Lincoln administration in the name of "saving the Constitution."
The first source of the story is a history of the U.S. Marshal’s Service written by Frederick S. Calhoun, chief historian for the Service, entitled The Lawmen: United States Marshals and their Deputies, 1789–1989. Calhoun recounts the words of Lincoln’s former law partner Ward Hill Laman, who also worked in the Lincoln administration.
Upon hearing of Laman’s history of Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and the mass arrest of Northern political opponents, Lincoln cultists immediately sought to discredit Laman by calling him a drunk. (Ulysses S. Grant was also an infamous drunk, but no such discrediting is ever perpetrated on him by the Lincoln "scholars".)
But Adams comes up with two more very reliable accounts of the same story. One is an 1887 book by George W. Brown, the mayor of Baltimore, entitled Baltimore and the Nineteenth of April, 1861: A Study of War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1887). In it is the transcript of a conversation Mayor Brown had with Taney in which Taney talks of his knowledge that Lincoln had issued an arrest warrant for him.
Yet another source is A Memoir of Benjamin Robbins Curtis, a former U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Judge Curtis represented President Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial before the U.S. Senate; wrote the dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case; and resigned from the court over a dispute with Judge Taney over that case. Nevertheless, in his memoirs he praises the propriety of Justice Taney in upholding the Constitution by opposing Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus. He refers to Lincoln’s arrest warrant as a "great crime."
I recently discovered yet additional corroboration of Lincoln’s "great crime." Mr. Phil Magness sent me information suggesting that the intimidation of federal judges was a common practice in the early days of the Lincoln administration (and the later days as well). In October of 1861 Lincoln ordered the District of Columbia Provost Marshal to place armed sentries around the home of a Washington, D.C. Circuit Court judge and place him under house arrest. The reason was that the judge had issued a writ of habeas corpus to a young man being detained by the Provost Marshal, allowing the man to have due process. By placing the judge under house arrest Lincoln prevented the judge from attending the hearing of the case. The documentation of this is found in Murphy v. Porter (1861) and in United States ex re John Murphy v. Andrew Porter, Provost Marshal District of Columbia (2 Hay. & Haz. 395; 1861).
The second ruling contained a letter from Judge W.M. Merrick, the judge of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, explaining how, after issuing the writ of habeas corpus to the young man, he was placed under house arrest. Here is the final paragraph of the letter:
After dinner I visited my brother Judges in Georgetown, and returning home between half past seven and eight o’clock found an armed sentinel stationed at my door by order of the Provost-Marshal. I learned that this guard had been placed at my door as early as five o’clock. Armed sentries from that time continuously until now have been stationed in front of my house. Thus it appears that a military officer against whom a writ in the appointed form of law has first threatened with and afterwards arrested and imprisoned the attorney who rightfully served the writ upon him. He continued, and still continues, in contempt and disregard of the mandate of the law, and has ignominiously placed an armed guard to insult and intimidate by its presence the Judge who ordered the writ to issue, and still keeps up this armed array at his door, in defiance and contempt of the justice of the land. Under the circumstances I respectfully request the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court to cause this memorandum to be read in open Court, to show the reasons for my absence from my place upon the bench, and that he will cause this paper to be entered at length on the minutes of the Court . . . W.M. Merrick Assistant Judge of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia
As Adams writes, the Lincoln Cult is terrified that this truth will become public knowledge, for it if does, it means that Lincoln "destroyed the separation of powers; destroyed the place of the Supreme Court in the Constitutional scheme of government. It would have made the executive power supreme, over all others, and put the president, the military, and the executive branch of government, in total control of American society. The Constitution would have been at an end."
Exactly right.
August 19, 2004
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, (Three Rivers Press/Random House). His latest book is How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold Story of Our Country’s History, from the Pilgrims to the Present (Crown Forum/Random House, August 2004).
Copyright © 2004 LewRockwell.com
I appreciate that. Now if we could just get you to give up SHOUTING. Do you believe that makes your arguments more compelling?
unfortunately for you/the damnyankee loonies (like heyworth), the FACTS are that BOTH the steam-driven & animal-powered machines WORKED just FINE (both here in the USA & abroad. the FUNNIEST thing that any of the loonies said was that the steam-powered machines wouldn't "work here in America, even though they did work OK in England". i darn near fell out of my chair laughing AT him, for that particular piece of STUPIDITY!) & the machines would have KILLED chattel slavery (MY GUESS within 5-10 years) absent the WBTS.
the reason you & the other unionists will NOT accept this, is that it means that the WBTS was NOT necessary/wise/SMART as a northern response to freeing slaves.
ALSO, i have numerous times posted ORIGIONAL documentation that PROVES that neither the lincoln coven of thugs OR the general public in the north "cared a damn about the plight of the slaves".
so the REAL reason that the north failed to let the south leave the union PEACEFULLY is simply that the north wanted us under their boot, and subservient, PERMANENTLY. (the damnyankees are still, a century & 1/2 later,trying to keep us under their boot heel.).
free dixie,sw
sorry, but that is just true. i've on SEVERAL OCCASIONS asked some of your group to tell me ANYTHING that the damnyankees did that wasn't smart/honest/perfect. not a single person responded with anything except more (ad hominum) attacks.
therefore i must assume that they have ZILCH except LIES & INVECTIVE to offer this forum.
free dixie,sw
It's his accompanying speech to the House of Representatives on the mexican war.
And why shouldn't they? Curtis did not write a Taney biography. Those were his memoirs, and it would seem to me that the commentary of a leading participant in the case who had written about the case and its other participants at great length would be prime material for inclusion in a later history book on the same case. In fact, I will suggest that any historian who does NOT include Curtis' work is guilty of neglecting one of the main original sources of material, thus rendering the remainder of his history suspect.
Okay, then one more time, I'll ask you to explain. You claim that the south's impoverishment after the war delayed the mechanization of cotton, even though the machines already existed. Why, then, wasn't cotton mechanized in California until the 1940s? Why wasn't cotton mechanized, in fact, anywhere in the world until the 1940s? And why are the Rust Brothers credited all over the place with inventing the first practical cotton picker in the late 1930s?
As for the tractors, as Dr. Pete Daniel pointed out (the REAL agricultural curator at the Smithsonian, and author of real, published books on mechanization of southern agriculture), that the early steam tractors weren't used for plowing. They were heavy, expensive and required trained crews to run them. When they were used, they were generally used to power belt driven machines like threshers. The simplest way of dismissing your argument is merely to point out that the north (supposedly enriched at southern expense by the war) didn't have tractors doing the plowing until the 1910s, at the earliest. Curiously, that's the same time tractors starting appearing in the south, too. Go figure.
So, have you contacted Lubar to prove your accusation that I've lied about what he said denying your arguments yet? What are you afraid of?
i neither fit, nor intend to fit, the "rules". i know them (i was ONCE an English lit major as an undergrad), but i find MOST of the "accepted rules" SILLY in the extreme, especially since it ANGERS the "lunatics" on these threads. they attack my spelling/punctuation/format/etc,etc,etc as they cannot SUCESSFULLY challenge my facts/research/etc.
free dixie NOW,sw
he hasn't changed his mind/answers,UNlike HANOI-john kerry & his band of DIMocRATS, according to who is asking.
thus, there is no reason to ask/bother him a second time, NEEDLESSLY.
face it, you are wrong & making yourself look ever more foolish.
why not head over to DU & peddle your drivel & lunatic theories there. they will, i predict, welcome you with open arms.
free dixie,sw
I'll give you one: Rutherford B. Hayes accepting the 1876 Compromise in order to get himself the presidency. Here's another: failing to find a decent general to lead the US troops until they got to Grant (by process of elimination). Hell, I could go on all day about the imcompetence of the Union, about the excesses and mistakes.
Now it's your turn. Name something the south did that wasn't perfect. You've already defended Lawrence, I'm not sure there's much of anyplace for you to go after that one.
If there is a problem in dating the case from 1818, you can blame Carl Swisher, Taney's most literate biographer. The footnote for that citation reads: "FN19 ... On Taney's manumissions and defense of the abolitionist minister, see Swisher, [Roger B.] Taney, 94-98; Lewis, Without Fear or Favor, 44, 76-79."
"Fehrenbacher obviously missed school the day they taught that "actions speak louder than words". Taney had inherited 10 slaves, freed 7 in 1818, another in 1821. The remaining two were old and feeble, and received pensions until their deaths. Taney freed eight slaves he could have sold, and cared for the two elderly slaves until they passed. What a racist!"
I'm sure Taney was just warm and fuzzy all over.
"ROTF! Taney can't INVENT law as Fehrenbacher wishes him to do. We've already proven that Fehrenbacher can't even distinguish between citizens, aliens, non-citizens, and naturalization."
The problem was that Taney could not honestly reconcile his racist attitudes with American history and the enlightenment of the founding principles. So he dishonestly created an alternative history in the Dred Scott case to support his personal prejudices.
With respect to your contentions regarding Fehrenbacher, your observations and so-called proofs are laughable. You are strictly "Amateur Hour" material.
Wrong. The Mexicans were divided into more than one anti-Santa Anna faction. There were those who aligned with his xenophobic policies against anglos in Texas but found him to be an inept leader at times of convenience while rallying behind him at other times (remember - he returned to power a few years later and certainly didn't make good on his part of the contract then!). These persons were not in revolt against Santa Anna, but merely cast him off at times when he did something they didn't like (e.g. lose a battle) only to embrace him again when he was on the rise.
On the other side of things were the old federalists and constitutionalists who were highly supportive of the Texan cause and were revolting against Santa Anna and his cohorts for the exact same reason Texas was. Their revolts continued throughout the 1830's, though they were not in power on a national level. After Texas became independent it even sent its navy down to the yucatan to help some of these factions out. Mexican politics were truly a mess in the 1830's and oddly your sympathies seem to be flowing toward the one guy who was most responsible for it all.
As long as we're guessing my guess is that slavery would have ended in the South in the near future (5 or 10 years is as good as any guess) without the CW, not because of farm machinery but just because world opinion was rapidly changing on the matter. (Brazil was the last to free its slaves in this hemisphere, in 1890, and it had a huge slave population). Many of the Confederate leaders knew this and welcomed it (including Lee and Davis).
The Founding Fathers expected slavery to die out in a generation in this country. That's why they didn't deal with the problem. It was the cotton gin and the spinning jenny which made cotton so valuable and it was very labor intensive to plant and pick.
England deserves most of the credit for the anti-slavery movement (Wilberforce, et al,) but the US was not far behind. Until this movement gained force slavery had the approval of religion and law. There had always been slavery. It was an accepted social phenomenon. That changed during the mid-19th Century.
then, we could have been FREE. (that was our BIGGEST/FATAL mistake. the south HAD to win quickly;the CSA coundn't win a prolonged war against the damnyankee war machine, as we had neither the cannon-fodder or the industrial infrastructure to do so.)
free dixie,sw
You were wise to change fields.
You were wise to change fields.
in point of fact, my people had kept slaves in this country for at least 10,000 YEARS (perhaps 25-30,000 years MAY be closer to the REAL number.), so the American Indian culture certainly accepted the "peculiar institution".
as for the clout of the anti-slavery movement in the 1800-1860 period in the USA, a former chair of history at Tuskeegee University said (during a seminar i attended in grad school daze)that, "there was in 1860, not 10,000 people in the whole country who cared a damn about the plight of the slaves. they should have;they did not."
free dixie,sw
How can you say that? You claim he told you something. I wrote and asked him the question and he told me the opposite. So there are only a couple of possibilities. He's wrong, I'm lying, or you're wrong. Now, as for the first, he is a curator at the Smithsonian and you're the guy who named him in the first place, so his credentials should be beyond questioning by you. As for the second, my challenge stands. The e-mail address and the entire exchange is up the thread. Anyone can verify. You might not want to bother Dr. Lubar, but believe it or not, historians don't mind being respectfully approached with questions. It's what they do. Look at the lengthy response Dr. Daniel (the REAL agricultural curator) sent. That only leaves the third possiblity--that you're wrong.
face it, you are wrong & making yourself look ever more foolish.
Face it, I nailed your hide to the wall with that one and no amount of bluster is going to change the fact that the main source you relied on ("don't talk to me. talk to the agricultural curator at the Smithsonian" I believe you said), refuted you.
And the membership of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society alone numbered that many. Maybe he just meant Ohio.
First Bull Run was a Confederate victory--no doubt of that. The result of the battle, though, was that the North realized it had to get serious and build an army while the Army of Northern Virginia continued strutting around, putting plumes in their hats, and loudly proclaiming that any southron boy could whup 10 Yankee shoe clerks.
Meanwhile, in the West (and I don't mean Texas--no one cared about Texas), where the decisive battles would take place, the South was consistently losing.
Your post caused me to look up some contemporary information about the West Texas country the troops passed through. From the diary of Confederate soldier A. B. Peticolas about the spring runoff of the Rio Grande during the trip back to San Antonio after the invasion of New Mexico. The river is too dammed up to flood like that any more. [Source: Rebels on the Rio Grande by Don E. Alberts]:
"The Rio Grande river well deserves its name. In places it is nearly a mile wide, and the water runs far out into the bottoms through the natural sacos that abound in the valleys. ... We had to push and pull our wagon this morning 2 or 3 miles through the heavy sand..." [June 10, 1862]
Here is a another description of this trip, the part after the troops had to move away from the Rio Grande. [Source: The Confederate Invasion of New Mexico and Arizona by Robert Lee Kerby]:
"Short of rations, scattered in detachments, lacking in mounts and arms, the remnants of Sibley's brigade marched from water-hole to water-hole, desperately trying to find wells which had not been polluted with dead sheep by the Indians."
From Civil War in Texas and New Mexico Territory by Steve Cottrell:
"The Californians reclaimed abandoned Fort Bliss and Fort Quitman for the Federal Government. Finally, 200 miles into Texas, they rode into Ft Davis and found one Confederate soldier. Long dead, his remains were pin-cushioned with arrows.""All during the summer of 1862, groups of ragged, starving soldiers straggled into San Antonio's dusty streets."
Now a personal observation. My parents drove us through West Texas in August in the 1940s. Our car radiator boiled over from the heat. We pulled over at what had been an old stage coach station. We were stranded miles from anywhere in the broiling heat. Fortunately, another driver appeared. He told us that there was a spring a couple of hundred yards down the hill. It made sense, of course, that a stage coach station would need a water supply. We carried everything we could that could hold water down the hill and found the spring. After a couple of trips through the yucca and cactus, we succeeded in refilling the radiator.
Ah, those were the days.
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