Posted on 04/19/2010 8:18:35 AM PDT by erod
Hi FRiends,
I have two brothers who I love very much, they’re young and libertarian Ron Paul supporters, sigh. We get along and I’m hoping that one day they’ll come back to conservatism, but they have bought into a theory that I don’t think makes much sense:
Abe Lincoln was a dictator.
There are many websites dedicated to this nonsense you can Google "Abe Lincoln dictator" and get some weird stuff, if you want to check it out.
I need your help in busting this myth are there any books I can read on this subject to dispel this stuff? Do you know any of the arguments to combat this nonsense? Ie. Lincoln did not want to free the slaves.
Thanks for taking time out of your day to help me out, -Erod
To HistorianDorisKearnsGoodwad, are NS and Soothingdave one in the same people?
How would it know?
Ahh, the grammarian, the last redoubt of the troll. Too many diet sodas today?
Now the troll label. You are offically a full fledged member in good standing of the Lost Cause Brigade.
I can't get a one of you to admit there were any Southern racists at all, much less ones worse than Lincoln.
When? In 1858? Not hardly. More advanced than southern abolitionists? Don't think so. Lincoln was a colonizer, remember.
As was Robert Lee. But I rather than dealing with mythical Southern abolitionists how about a quote from some Southern leader who believed blacks were in any way their equal, much less that they had any rights at all?
The fact that the Constitution is silent on who may suspend it leaves the question of whether only Congress can suspend it or if the President may suspend it under the allowed conditions open to question.
The power to suspend is located in Article I, which is about the powers of Congress.
And also powers denied to the states, in Section 10.
Let's all just take some initiative here and go around suspending habeas all over the place, because Non-Sequitur claims that the Framers forgot to forbid the practice to presidents, judges, enterprising ambulance-chasers and private citizens.
Now you're just being silly. Again.
I will recognize them as valid Supreme Court decisions, which I disagree with. But as much as I may disagree with the court's decision that doesn't make abortion illegal just because I proclaim the decision bogus. Likewise you can howl and rage all you want about Texas v. White and claim it's bogus until you're blue in the face. That doesn't change the fact that unilateral secession as practiced by the Southern states is illegal and will remain illegal until the Constitution is amended or a future court overturns the decision.
As for Scott v. Sandford, defending that one is a Southern thang.
The Richmond Dispatch of February 9, 1865 reported about the peace conference and said:
Over topics of a kindly and pleasant character, a significant inquiry was made by Stephens how nearly the extension of the capitol was completed, and the expression of a desire to go to Washington to see. Mr. Seward told him of the condition of the work, and invited him to come and look at the capitol of the reunited Republic. The terms of peace were thus gradually approached. When fully reached on the rebel side, Stephens took the parole, and surpassed all his old exhibitions of persuasiveness, shrewdness, force, tact and courage, in putting the demands and the rights of the Confederacy. In the midst of them, and at the conclusion of one of his points, Mr. Lincoln swung forward on the lower hinge of his back and interrupted: "That reminds me of a story of a man in Illinois!" Stephens, Hunter and Campbell instantly jumped up in a roar of merriment.
The interruption caused by this characteristic outbreak, and the apt story which followed being through with, the rebel Vice President resumed, and pursued to the end of his statement of the rights of the Confederate States and the terms on which he thought they would be willing to stop the war. Recognition was the first of them. The proposition for an armistice was, of course, a logical sequence.
First, thank you for your earlirer corrections RE: my misinformation regarding Delaware and DC, etc.
Secondly, since I was taught the “10% of southerners were slaveholders” figure in school, and since you have deemed that to be incorrect, I am wondering if you can enlighten me as to approxiimately what percentage of southerners ACTUALLY owned slaves in the year 1861; providing the source of your figure, of course.
Finally, I thought you might enjoy these words, from the final verse of the official State Song of Maryland (”Maryland My Maryland”):
“I hear the distant thunder-hum,
Maryland, My Maryland!
The Old Line’s bugle, fife, and drum,
Maryland, My Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb-
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she’ll come! she’ll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!”
To the best of my knowledge there were no minutes taken during the Hampton Roads conference, so we’re going by individual recollections. Stephens implies concern only for the freed blacks. Lincoln’s story make it clear that the interest was for the white population. The Richmond story doesn’t say that the question of the fate of blacks or whites was even mentioned.
Okay, in the interest of peace, here goes: I think many southerners were more racist than Abraham Lincoln.
How's that?
I will also say that think Abraham Lincoln was more rcist than I.
But, for pure, hateful, vicious, vile, stomach-turning racism, in my own experience, the MOST racist people I have ever met in my entire life were from Boston, Massachusetts.
But, for pure, hateful, vicious, vile, stomach-turning racism, in my own experience, the MOST racist people I have ever met in my entire life were from Boston, Massachusetts.
Dittos, when the red headed peckerwoods of Boston get going, get out.
Claiming that 10%, or 3% or 5% or 8%, of all Southerners owned slaves may be true but it is also a misleading statistic. It implies that since only a tiny fraction of Southerners owned slaves then only a fraction of Southerners drew benefit from them. But it ignores the fact that virtually all the slave owners had spouses and children. Take your 10% figure and add a wife to each and suddenly it becomes 20% who directly benefit from slave ownership. Add children and the figure grows.
A slave had a single owner, that much we can accept. The more accurate statistic would be to compare the number slave owners with the number of registered families in as tallied by the 1860 census, and those results are available on line. If you look at that figure then you see that in Mississippi, for example, 49% of all families were slave owning families. In South Carolina that figure was 46%. In Georgia it was 35%. In all of the original 7 seceding states 36.7% of all families owned slaves. Suddenly slavery goes from the institution of a tiny fraction to one that a sizeable minority drew direct benefit from. And which many more people took an indirect benefit from.
Now I know that not every slaveholder had a wife and children. But the number that did not would not be great enough to throw off these figures by any significant amount. So while it may be easy to ask why the South would rebel over an institution that only 5 or 6 percent of the people engaged in, it's easy to see how they could do so to defend an institution which half the people or more drew direct or indirect benefit from.
Finally, I thought you might enjoy these words, from the final verse of the official State Song of Maryland...
I'm well aware of the lyrics to "Maryland, My Maryland". I also know that the powers that be that run the state dropped those lyrics years ago. Bunch a wimps.
It's a start.
I will also say that think Abraham Lincoln was more rcist than I.
Judge Lincoln by the standards of today and every one from that period fails your racism test. Judge Lincoln by the standards of the period and he comes off very well in comparison, especially to men like Davis or Lee or Jackson who believed blacks were suited for slavery and nothing else.
But, for pure, hateful, vicious, vile, stomach-turning racism, in my own experience, the MOST racist people I have ever met in my entire life were from Boston, Massachusetts.
They probably just mistook you for a Yankees fan.
Some people will tell you that "everyone" in 1860 believed states had the right to secede, and Lincoln came along and squashed that right. But that's not true and it doesn't make much sense. How could one person change things so much?
In fact, there was disagreement about whether or not a state could secede and whether or not the federal government could do anything about it. Some did believe in a unilateral right of state secession, but very many people -- including experts -- disagreed. Some thought secession unconstitutional but also didn't believe that the federal government could do anything about it. That was James Buchanan's stance.
Other people believed that whether or not secession was constitutional, it wouldn't do to hold states in the union against their will. And there were those, who believed that secession was unconstitutional and that the federal government had the right to take steps against a secessionist rebellion.
If you believed that states had no right to unilaterally leave the union, it wasn't hard to believe that the federal government could defend its rights and the Constitution. There was no explicit mandate for unilateral secession in the Constitution, and the practice goes against the Constitution's pattern of checks and balances, thorough deliberation, careful weighing and deliberation of policies and their consequences.
"Unilaterally" is an important word here. Had the union been dissolved by mutual consent in Congress or by constitutional amendment, things would have been different. The idea that some part of the country could simply walk out on the obligations of union went counter to the understanding of many constitutional experts of the day.
Also, some Southerners really believed that what happened in 1860-1 was the Second American Revolution, a righteous uprising against tyranny. The idea of a right to secede was less important to them than striking a blow, by force if necessary (even preferably), against the enemy. After the Civil War the idea of a pro-slavery revolution looked repellent, so the "right" of states to secede came to be stressed, rather than the revolution argument.
Secession wasn't exactly an orderly process, either. The atmosphere was one of panic, pressure, rumors, threats, and fraud. It was hard to tell if secession really did represent the "will of the people" in the Southern states. To some degree that question still hasn't been entirely resolved. Under other circumstances different results would have come about, and the circumstances were manipulated by secessionist leaders to get the results they wanted.
Lincoln, who had served with Southerners in Congress and grown up with transplanted Southerners in Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois, didn't want to believe that secession had wide support, so he gambled that a strong stand would rally Southerners to the defense of the union. That was a mistake in judgment, but it was not worse morally than Davis's gamble that war would bring the remaining slave states under his rule.
Of course, Davis wasn't at the conference, but I'm sure he would have gotten first hand reports of the proceedings immediately after the conference.
ping to #592
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