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
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
United States of America
Notice the similar form?
Let's try this dictionary thing again, for your enlightenment:
Great Britain: 1. An island off the western coast of Europe comprising England, Scotland, and Wales. It is separated from the mainland by the English Channel and from Ireland by the Irish Sea. (American heritage dictionary)
Great Britain: 1. the main island of the United Kingdom, off the coast of France, occupied by England, Scotland, and Wales, and including some adjacent islands. (Cf. United Kingdom.) (Wordsymth Online dictionary)
My usage was both precise and correct.
In 1776, New York, as a participant and member in the Continental Congress was party to the acts of Congress, whether they approved of them or not. They were then a part of the Union, as they are now.
Here is the Klos website to which I specificially referred, with regard to the Resolution image:
http://www.thedeclarationofindependence.org/
Wrong. It simply means that those who are interested in such things thought Sandburg's work was of greater value or importance than Masters'. I, for one, am not interested in Masters' or Sandburg's poetry, so frankly Scarlet, I don't give a damn.
We have 50 "republics" now, if by "republics" you mean political entities with a republican form of government. But none of them are fully sovereign.
FWIW, Robert M. Lovett was formerly connected with Hull House and Elizabeth Seton in Chicago, and was later a faculty member for many years at the University of Chicago. He was mentioned by name by Louis F. Budenz in his 1954 decalogue against Communist infiltration of American education in the 1930's. Link here (see the eighth graf):
The Techniques of Communism, Louis F. Budenz, 1954.
Budenz's article is worth a read. What the Communists did in the 1930's, the New Left did in the 1970's; and their infiltration never completely failed them, although now you have a few specimen exponents of the Old Left still wandering around, like Eric Foner (notice that Columbia University and NYU both figure very prominently in Budenz's article) and Susan Sontag.
Jefferson was most definitely a slaver. That is unassailable historical fact.
My Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (published pre-PC) defines a slaver as a person or a ship engaged in the slave trade. Jefferson held slaves, and he was indisputably a slavemaster, but whether he was also a slaver is not in doubt. He wasn't. Robinson used the word as a slur on Jefferson, his better.
As to whether Jefferson was a rapist may depend on whether one conceives that a slave has the power to consent.
Whether one believes that one depends on whether one accepts the more extreme theories offered in justification of slavery through natural law, viz., that slaves were ontologically incompetent and subhuman. A bondwoman may still withold consent, even if she is forced to submit to the unwanted attentions of a master.
Furthermore, Robinson's statement is in the form of preterition, a hit-and-run rhetorical technique ideally suited to delivering a slur like, in this case, Robinson's imputation of rape.
It is known that not only was Jefferson movin' on up, he was also gettin' on down. There is a family, descended from former Jefferson slaves named Hemings, with Jefferson DNA.
At least three male Jeffersons in Thomas Jefferson's grandfather's line are candidates for that DNA contribution. It is not conclusive that Thomas Jefferson was the donor. It's idle to wonder whether Robinson knew that; given his other two slurs, even if he knew his statement to be factually challenged, he'd have uttered it anyway.
What entities have the "full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do"? Nation-states, right?
I don't think a discussion of 18th century grammar would be worthwhile.
The singular and plural meanings of words haven't changed much since then. "Congress" used to be a plural word because of its two houses, but most other words retain their 18th century singular and plural meanings. Of course, there was the "United States are..." before the war and the "United States is..." after the war, but we know the reason for that change.
Possibly a more telling exhibition of 18th century grammar is found in the Preamble to the Constitution, where "We the People" is written in reference to all of the people of the nation, rather than "We the Peoples," in reference to the people of the several states.
Where the rubber hit the road, it was the people of the individual states, not the lumpen We-the-People of the nation, who ratified the Constitution. If we were already a Union, it would have perhaps been the lumpen We-the-People who ratified the Constitution, but we weren't and it wasn't.
The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union did not create the Union - it already existed. The Articles provided a framework for the operation of confedral government.
Then why did the Articles say that the states retained their sovereignty and independence?
"Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled."
If the states retained their sovereignty and independence (which they did), then this mythical preexisting Union you assert existed was a meaningless concept. If they were sovereign and free before the Articles were ratified, they could have decided to not approve the Articles. Indeed, Maryland did approve them for several long years, preventing the Articles from taking effect.
We fought World War II with the British. Are we now amalgamated into a Union with them?
The quotation you provided speaks to the dangers of disunion.
True. In that quotation, Congress acknowledged that the states were sovereign and independent and free to do whatever they wanted. Congress had less enforcement powers than my neighborhood association and no "Mythical Union" agreement to enforce in the first place.
[Dickinson]: "Article II The said Colonies unite themselves so as never to be divided by any Act whatever ..."
What were the colonies uniting themselves for if they were already united in the Mythical Union?
From the Treaty of Paris: "There shall be a firm and perpetual peace between his Brittanic Majesty and the said states..." We saw how perpetual that was.
You quote from Franklin's early proposed version of articles of Confederation, drafted in 1775. Apparently the great statesman recognized the inevitability of a greater Union even then.
Yes, I realized the 1775 date. I should have said "his" instead of "the". I don't think Franklin would have agreed with your Mythical Union. What Franklin was proposing were Articles that had the colonies reverting back to their former arrangement with Britain if Britain agreed to certain terms. If not, the Union proposed by his Articles, if approved by the colonies (which they weren't), would become perpetual. The clause having the colonies revert back to British rule was a carrot Franklin proposed to dangle before the British along with the threat of losing the colonies permanently if Britain did not agree to the Article's terms.
In Lincolnian mythology and Hamiltonian whiffenspeak only.
The Constitution is the relevant document. The States owe one another nothing further under the old Articles of Confederation; they are null and void. The Union dates from ratification of the Constitution.
Lincoln's theory is spurious and fictive. We've been over that, and you've been refuted -- how many times? Maybe we refuted someone else on some other thread. Anyway, it was an invention of the Federalists and the Whigs -- Jay and Marshall trying to rewrite the Constitution in dicta from the bench, Lincoln doing it literally on the battlefield, with the Gettysburg Address. All buncombe.
The Declaration gave the Union a legal basis as an independent polity.
No, it didn't. The Declaration of Independence was a vision statement and manifesto, only. It did not provide a legal basis for anything. That was supplied by the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.
It also gave expression to the redefinition of colonies as states, and subject colonists as citizens of the new entity.
Operative word is "expression". It wasn't a contract or a legal document. It was a resolution, a bill of grievances, and a manifesto, not a law, not a compact, not a contract. If there were any language in the Declaration that amounted to a contract or compact, you'd quote it. You don't, there isn't, and you're woofing.
First the Articles, and then the Constitution, provided an operating agreement between the nation's semi-sovereign states. [Weasel-words underlined.]
They were, and are, sovereign.
No state ever existed outside of the Union. This includes Texas, Hawaii, and other area thay may have as part of other sovereignties, or as sovereign entities themselves, as they were not part of the Union at that time.
You contradict yourself because your wilful, buncombious refusal to face the fact of State sovereignty has led you to twist yourself into a pretzel of self-contradiction. I think I'll let your words blaze forth their inadequacy by themselves, and confine myself to noting the obvious -- that you are definitively, ontologically, and comprehensively wrong.
LG - "Quite so. This is one of the classic fallacies, demonstrated in a way amenable to exemplification in a collegiate-level course on logic."
[capitan_refugio, squirting squid ink] What we have hear is a case of one poster dishonestly misrepresenting the original statement and the other continuing on in blissful ignorance of the first part.
Please show by exposition and argument how nolu chan's statement misrepresents your posted position.
This could be an interesting discussion. So far, I haven't seen any Red flags on Masters's essays (perhaps you can point me to some), except for his vaguely Marxian-sounding statements, posted above, generalizing about means of production and control of the economy. But inasmuch as he is describing the world Marx and the Millocracy alike all knew, the fact that the Millocracy acted in concert with other business interests to obtain legislation like the Morrill Tariff and the Warehouse Act that might redound to their business advantage is polemically neutral as regards capitalism/socialism and unrevealing, in itself, of either a prejudice or an agenda. Particularly when you consider that if he were a canonical Red in his scholarship, he should have followed Marx in supporting Lincoln's initiatives.
Which doesn't mean he wasn't a Red. It means, I agree with GOPcapitalist that it doesn't show strongly in Masters's argument.
Is there possibly an operational reason for Masters's appearing to side with the Jeffersonians and the South? Communists were always interested in working the black community, the labor unions, and Hollywood -- was this another field some of them had decided to work, as a line of natural cleavage in the society ruled over in the 30's and 40's by the New Deal and industrial America?
The Union pre-dated the Constitution of 1787. It pre-dated the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union (the first constitution of the country). It even pre-dated the Declaration of Independence.
This is Reification. “Union” in this sense is an abstract concept, not a physical existence. It is dependent upon the willing agreement of the participants. The Union could not have predated the existence of the Declaration of Independence, by definition, since there could not have been a Union of States until there was a separation from England. All these are intellectual abstract concepts, not physical entities. The implication that “Union” could predate the choice to join commits this fallacy. The Declaration gave the Union a legal basis as an independent polity. It also gave expression to the redefinition of colonies as states, and subject colonists as citizens of the new entity.
A “legal basis” is an abstract construct and refutes the earlier assertion, “It even pre-dated the Declaration of Independence.” Further illustrated by the concept of “citizens of the new entity,” which means, if it was a “new entity” it did not have prior existence to the Declaration. This is an admission that there was no previous, mystical, “Union.” No state ever existed outside of the Union
Then, who and what existed to vote themselves “into” the Union? Logically, this statement is impossible since it is impossible to “Prove a Negative.” Prove that Delaware, “didn’t exist” outside the Union. Cannot be done. It can be proven that it existed, (or especially in the case of Virginia) long before the Union in order to exist to join, but it cannot be proven it didn’t exist.
This argument is utterly fallacious. What were the 13 entities, which called themselves states, that ratified the Articles of Confederation, that formed the basis of the emerging government? If they didn’t exist as states, then they didn’t exist prior to the federal government that conferred that existence upon them. Then by what right did they choose to join, since they didn’t exist yet. It is logically absurd.
Only provisionally, as long as the most powerful empire and only thalassocracy on earth insisted on her claim, and continued to demand we acknowledge our sovereign in the person of George III.
The official formal name of the UK is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland." The "Great Britain" part of that refers to the original three ancient kingdoms of Cymru, Alba, and Loegria, or Wales, Scotland, and England.
The effect was that a non-unanimous document (meaning it lacked one of the 13 colonies) became unanimous.
In 1776, New York, as a participant and member in the Continental Congress was party to the acts of Congress, whether they approved of them or not. They were then a part of the Union, as they are now.
They could not be a party bound to what had not been created yet, namely the union. The continental congress was little more than a joint forum for representatives of the separate and individual colonies to convene and address the pressing situations. One colony could not bind another nor could the majority of them bind a minority without its consent.
Well then. I've already stated my interest in such things and concluded differently, thus your assertion cannot encompass all views.
You're just full of it, aren't you? Your table-pounding sounds positively totalitarian: Credere! Obeddere! Combattere! You can still read it on Roman manhole covers and sidewalks.
Madison, in his letters, refers directly to the term secession and uses it to describe what would happen as each State ratified the Constitution, thereby seceding from (in preference to violating outright) the AoC.
Ratification of the Constitution did NOT create a new country.
Sure it did. New contract, new deal, new government, new United States of America, new Union. Out with the old, in with the new.
[You, quoting me] "That you should continue to insist, with Hamiltonian and Lincolnian deceptiveness, that the United States was and is a unitary political monolith governed by a runaway national government of "inherent [and usurpatory] authority", is completely revealing of your bias -- and of your factional interest."
[You, dissembling and insinuating again] There is nothing deceptive about it. Within its sphere of authority, the federal government of the nation is supreme. The framers created a "composite republic" (to use Madison's term). In it the states had a limited, semi-sovereingty.
This is such a whopper, I'll just let the reader compare your version of the federal sphere with Madison's, from Federalist 45:
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.[Emphasis added.]The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the State governments, in times of peace and security. As the former periods will probably bear a small proportion to the latter, the State governments will here enjoy another advantage over the federal government. The more adequate, indeed, the federal powers may be rendered to the national defense, the less frequent will be those scenes of danger which might favor their ascendancy over the governments of the particular States.
(This last passage refers to an event late in 1776 during which, while the Continental Army and the Congress were in disordered retreat before the British, the Congress actually decreed dictatorial powers to the army commanders for a limited period, to meet the emergency.)
It is very clear from this passage that the Constitution is a restricted grant of power from the States' store of sovereign power, and that every Power and Right not granted to the federal government remained with the States.
Your self-interested and casuistical slighting of the States notwithstanding.
Get over yourself. "Residuary sovereignty" is a waffle. Sovereignty is like being pregnant, or unique: you can't be "just a little".
"Residuary sovereignty" refers to the reserve of sovereignty or authority not delegated to the United States by the constituent States. If the constituent States assemble their People in convention and dissolve the Union, they resume the delegated Powers -- but they don't "become" sovereign, or become "more" sovereign. They were sovereign all along.
You yourself have conceded the point above, you and your running buddy Non-Sequitur, by specifying (generously, thank you massa!) a method by which, in your overweening and non-humble opinions, States might actually leave the Union and "become" fully sovereign -- with the "permission" of the other States of the Union. (Which is like my asking my neighbor for permission to mow my own yard!)
So saying, you conceded the whole enchilada -- that the States have reserved powers and the capacity to resume all their delegated powers. Your fiction about "recovering" them, or somehow being retroceded such powers by equals in the Union, notwithstanding (but how would they retrocede me powers which none of us possesses alone, according to your theory?), you have conceded that the States are indeed, and always were, sovereign.
Think about it. Get your arms around the girth of your error in argument. Then get back to me.
You're off in your POS post. I'm the 'boy', remember? Ya'll are so fond of directing it to me. That makes you the 'massa'. Don't it boss?
There does seem to be a tent-revival of constitutional Pentecostalism going on around here. I wonder if any of the celebrants will, in their transports, attempt to kiss a Copperhead?
Ping to my last about the sovereignty argument, which would appear to be mutually exclusive of any inspiriting theoretical paracletes.
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