As for Lincoln personally, what other President in American history had a greater excuse to suspend the Constitution and the upcoming election? Yet he did neither.
Abraham Lincoln was merely a Federalist--Federalism being one of the two great traditions of Constitutional interpretation we've had from the beginning. He was the heir of Washington, Hamilton, the Adams's, Fisher Ames, Noah Webster, Paul Revere, (the post-ratification) Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Zachary Taylor. If he was a "dictator," then so were all the above. But try prying that into the thick head of a "palaeo" aristocratic Jeffersonian libertarian.
"After the duel, gentlemen are invited to brandy and cigars on the veranda!" I am a native and lifelong product of the Upper South, and this whole political tradition is totally alien to me.
As for Lincoln personally, what other President in American history had a greater excuse to suspend the Constitution and the upcoming election? Yet he did neither.
He didn’t suspend the Constitution but rather ignored it whole cloth. He didn’t suspend the 1864 elections, but made damn sure the casualty figures from Cold Harbor were not made public. Yea, he was a great all around guy. After imprisoning over 13,000 of his fellow Americans who disagreed with him politically, how much real competition was their to him.
ZC, hey look, you and I are on the same side for once. LOL
The colonists did not have a single representative in Parliament.
The Confederacy and the pro-slavery border states, with less than 30% of the voting population, had 28 out 66 seats in the Senate (42%) and 83 out of 237 House seats (35%).
Moreover, the Confederates and their border state sympathizers engineered the greatest intrusion of the federal government into the states in the history of the Union: namely the armies of federal marshals who raided Northern homes without warrants on suspicion of harboring "fugitives."
Like the famous case where 300 armed federal marshals tore up an entire Boston neighborhood searching for one elderly escaped slave who had gone missing almost 20 years before.
The Confederacy came into existence in 1860 because the racket was at an end: the 1860 census would have reapportioned the House more fairly, reducing the pro-slavery caucus to a permanent minority. The slavery lobby would no longer possess the balance of power in the Congress.
Instead of being grownups and accepting the Constitutional reality, the Confederacy armed itself and immediately began its strategy of illegally seizing the federal territory it desired.