If Secession Was Illegal - then How Come...?

Over the years I've heard many rail at the South for seceding from the 'glorious Union.' They claim that Jeff Davis and all Southerners were really nothing but traitors - and some of these people were born and raised in the South and should know better, but don't, thanks to their government school 'education.'

Frank Conner, in his excellent book The South Under Siege 1830-2000 deals in some detail with the question of Davis' alleged 'treason.' In referring to the Northern leaders he noted: "They believed the most logical means of justifying the North's war would be to have the federal government convict Davis of treason against the United States. Such a conviction must presuppose that the Confederate States could not have seceded from the Union; so convicting Davis would validate the war and make it morally legitimate."

Although this was the way the federal government planned to proceed, that prolific South-hater, Thaddeus Stevens, couldn't keep his mouth shut and he let the cat out of the bag. Stevens said: "The Southerners should be treated as a conquered alien enemy...This can be done without violence to the established principles only on the theory that the Southern states were severed from the Union and were an independent government de facto and an alien enemy to be dealt with according to the laws of war...No reform can be effected in the Southern States if they have never left the Union..." And, although he did not plainly say it, what Stevens really desired was that the Christian culture of the Old South be 'reformed' into something more compatible with his beliefs. No matter how you look at it, the feds tried to have it both ways - they claimed the South was in rebellion and had never been out of the Union, but then it had to do certain things to 'get back' into the Union it had never been out of. Strange, is it not, that the 'history' books never seem to pick up on this?

At any rate, the Northern government prepared to try President Davis for treason while it had him in prison. Mr. Conner has observed that: "The War Department presented its evidence for a treason trial against Davis to a famed jurist, Francis Lieber, for his analysis. Lieber pronounced 'Davis will not be found guilty and we shall stand there completely beaten'." According to Mr. Conner, U.S. Attorney General James Speed appointed a renowned attorney, John J. Clifford, as his chief prosecutor. Clifford, after studying the government's evidence against Davis, withdrew from the case. He said he had 'grave doubts' about it. Not to be undone, Speed then appointed Richard Henry Dana, a prominent maritime lawyer, to the case. Mr. Dana also withdrew. He said basically, that as long as the North had won a military victory over the South, they should just be satisfied with that. In other words - "you won the war, boys, so don't push your luck beyond that."

Mr. Conner tells us that: "In 1866 President Johnson appointed a new U.S. attorney general, Henry Stanburg. But Stanburg wouldn't touch the case either. Thus had spoken the North's best and brightest jurists re the legitimacy of the War of Northern Aggression - even though the Jefferson Davis case offered blinding fame to the prosecutor who could prove that the South had seceded unconstitutionally." None of these bright lights from the North would touch this case with a ten-foot pole. It's not that they were dumb, in fact the reverse is true. These men knew a dead horse when they saw it and were not about to climb aboard and attempt to ride it across the treacherous stream of illegal secession. They knew better. In fact, a Northerner from New York, Charles O'Connor, became the legal counsel for Jeff Davis - without charge. That, plus the celebrity jurists from the North that refused to touch the case, told the federal government that they really had no case against Davis or secession and that Davis was merely being held as a political prisoner.

Author Richard Street, writing in The Civil War back in the 1950s said exactly the same thing. Referring to Jeff Davis, Street wrote: "He was imprisoned after the war, was never brought to trial. The North didn't dare give him a trial, knowing that a trial would establish that secession was not unconstitutional, that there had been no 'rebellion' and that the South had got a raw deal." At one point the government intimated that it would be willing to offer Davis a pardon, should he ask for one. Davis refused that and he demanded that the government either give him a pardon or give him a trial, or admit that they had dealt unjustly with him. Mr. Street said: "He died 'unpardoned' by a government that was leery of giving him a public hearing." If Davis was as guilty as they claimed, why no trial???

Had the federal government had any possible chance to convict Davis and therefore declare secession unconstitutional they would have done so in a New York minute. The fact that they diddled around and finally released him without benefit of the trial he wanted proves that the North had no real case against secession. Over 600,000 boys, both North and South, were killed or maimed so the North could fight a war of conquest over something that the South did that was neither illegal or wrong. Yet they claim the moral high ground because the 'freed' the slaves, a farce at best.

Contemporaries, as in people who actually knew him while he was alive.>

Consider:

"...in the wake of the assasination, editors, generals and public officials across the South voiced the opinion that the region had lost its best friend. Indignation meetings, so-called, were convened in many places. Lincoln stood for peace, mercy, and forgiveness. His loss, therefore, was a calamity for the defeated states. This opinion was sometimes ascribed to Jefferson Davis, even though he stood accused of complicity in the assasination....He [Davis] read the telegram [bringing news of Lincoln's death] and when it brought an exultant shout raised his hand to check the demonstration..."He had power over the Northern people," Davis wrote in his memoir of the war," and was without malignity to the southern people."...Alone of the southern apologists, [Alexander] Stephens held Lincoln in high regard. "The Union with him in sentiment," said the Georgian, "rose to the sublimnity of religious mysticism...in 1873 "Little Elick" Stephens, who again represented his Georgia district in Congress, praised Lincoln for his wisdom, kindness and generosity.

in a well-publicized speech seconding the acceptance of the gift of Francis B. Carpenter's famous painting of Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation."...[in 1880] a young law student at the University of Virginia, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, speaking for the southern generation that grew to maturity after the war, declared, "I yield to no one precedence in love of the South. But because I love the South, I rejoice in the failure of the Confederacy"...the leading propenent of that creed was Henry W. Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution. In 1886 Grady, thirty-six years old, was invited to address the New England Society of New York, on the 266th anniversary to the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. General Sherman, seated on the platform, was an honored guest, and the band played [I am not making this up] "Marching Through Georgia" before Grady was Introduced. Pronouncing the death of the Old South, he lauded the New South of Union and freedom and progress. And he offered Lincoln as the vibrant symbol not alone of reconciliation but of American character. "Lincoln," he said, "comprehended within himself all the strength, and gentleness, all the majesty and grace of the republic." He was indeed, the first American, "the sum of Puritan and Cavalier, in whose ardent nature were fused the virtues of both, and in whose great soul the faults of both were lost."

--From "Lincoln in American Memory" by Merrill D. Peterson P. 46-48

The Death of Lincoln
        When Lincoln and his Cabinet met on the morning of April 14, everyone was anxious to hear news of Sherman. Grant, who was present, expected to receive some word at any moment. Lincoln was sure it would be favorable. That night, he told the Cabinet (and Gideon Welles reported), he had "the usual dream which he had preceding nearly every great and important event of the war. Generally the news had been favorable which preceded this dream, and the dream itself was always the same ... [he said that] he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and that he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore; that he had this dream preceding Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Stones River, Vicksburg, Wilmington, etc."
        At this point Grant broke in, rather oddly, to say, "Stones River was certainly no victory, and he knew of no great results which followed from it." Stones River, better known as Murfreesboro in Tennessee, was generally taken to include Hallecks advance on Corinth as well as Braggs invasion of Kentucky. Lincoln took Grants cavil in good spirit. However that might be, he replied, his dream preceded that fight. "I had," the President continued, in a curiously abstracted way, "this strange dream again last night, and we shall, judging from the past, have great news very soon. I think it must be from Sherman." It was the Friday preceding Easter Week.
        That night Welles had just dozed off when his wife woke him with word that someone was at the door with a message for him. Sitting up in bed, Welles heard a voice from the street outside calling to his son, John, whose bedroom was on the floor below. Welles opened the window, and the messenger, James Smith, called up to him that Lincoln had been shot and that Seward and his son Frederick, the assistant secretary of state, had also been assassinated. Welles could not believe the story. "Where was the President when shot?" he asked. At Fords Theater. Alarmed by Smiths urgency, Welles dressed and accompanied him to Sewards house on Fifteenth Street. A crowd had gathered outside, and Welles had to push his way through. The frightened servants confirmed Smiths story and conducted Welles to Sewards bedroom. "The Secretary," Welles wrote later in his diary, "was lying on his back, the upper part of his head covered with a cloth.... His mouth was open, the lower jaw dropping down." Stanton came in soon after Welles.
        The two Cabinet members decided it was their responsibility to go to the bedside of the desperately wounded President. Lincoln had been carried across the street from the theater to the house of a Mr. Peterson. The two men rode in Stanton s carriage through streets already filled with crowds of quiet, anxious people who had heard the news, most of them hurrying in the direction of the theater. At the Peterson house they climbed a flight of stairs to the room where Lincoln lay surrounded by doctors. One of them, whom Welles knew, told him that the President was in practical fact dead, although he might linger for a few hours. "The giant sufferer," Welles observed, "lay extended diagonally across the bed, which was not large enough for him. He had been stripped of his clothes. His large arms, which were occasionally exposed, were of a size which one would scarce have expected from his spare appearance. . . . His features were calm and striking. I had never seen them appear to better advantage than for the first hours, perhaps, that I was there. After that his right eye began to swell and that part of his face became discolored." Soon Sumner appeared, and then Schuyler Colfax, the Speaker of the House, and other members of the Cabinet filed into the small room until it was crowded to the point of discomfort. Mrs. Lincoln came and went, weeping and distraught, and Robert Lincoln lingered in the hallway.
        The night was gloomy and dank. Some of those present drifted away. Others kept the death watch. At six oclock of a dreary, overcast morning, Welles, feeling faint, took a short walk. Small clusters of people stood about in the somber streets. It began to rain. Here and there a person, recognizing Welles, stopped him to ask the condition of the President. "Intense grief was on every countenance," Welles noted, "when I replied that the President could survive but a short time. The colored people, especially--and there were at this time more of them, perhaps, than of whites--were overwhelmed with grief." Back at the Peterson house, Welles took a seat in the parlor with the other Cabinet members, some of whom were asleep in their chairs. Around seven he returned to the room where Lincoln lay. The death struggle had begun. Robert stood by his fathers bed, half supported by Sumner. At twenty-two minutes past seven on the morning of Saturday, April 15, the labored breathing stopped. Stanton pronounced the dead Presidents most enduring epitaph: "Now he belongs to the ages."
        The Cabinet members then assembled in the parlor once more and drafted a letter to the Vice-President informing him that the duties of president had devolved on him. James Speed, the attorney general, took the communication to Johnson. Salmon Chase was summoned and administered the oath of office in front of a handful of Johnsons friends.
        After breakfast Welles went to the White House in the "cheerless rain." On Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the Executive Mansion were several hundred colored people, mostly women and children, weeping and wailing their loss." Through the cold, wet day, they kept the vigil; "they seemed not to know," Welles wrote, "what was to be their fate since their great benefactor was dead, and their hopeless grief affected me more than almost anything else, though strong and brave men wept when I met them."
        At twelve oclock, by Welless arrangement, the Cabinet met with the new President. Someone raised the question of whether Johnson should give an inaugural address, and he replied that "his acts would best disclose his policy. In all essentials it would . . . be the same as that of the late President."
        Sidney George Fisher, hearing of Lincolns assassination, wrote: "I felt for some time a mere dull & stupified sense of calamity. What disasters, what wide-spread misfortune may not these events produce." A vague feeling of coming ill & real sorrow for Mr. Lincoln, deprived me of the power to think & reason on the subject. I felt as tho I had lost a personal friend, for indeed I have & so has every honest man in the country. . . Mr. Lincolns character was so kind, so generous~ so noble, that he inspired personal attachment in those who can appreciate such qualities.... He was indeed the great man of the period. On his integrity, constancy, capacity~ the hopes of the country rested. He possessed the entire confidence of the people. His perfect uprightness & purity of purpose were beyond all doubt. His ability to comprehend all the questions before the country & to deal with them in an efficient, practical manner, his firmness & purpose & strength of will, were equally well known, whilst his frank, easy, animated manners and conversation, his entire freedom from vanity, or pride, or self seeking or apparent consciousness of his position, except as to its duties, won all hearts. His death is a terrible loss to the country, perhaps an even greater loss to the South than to the North, for Mr. Lincolns humanity & kindness of heart stood between them and the party of the North who urge measures of vengeance & severity."
        An Illinois soldier, who had known Lincoln in Springfield, said to Walt Whitman, "The war is over, and many are lost. And now we have lost the best, the fairest, the truest man in America. Take him altogether, he was the best man this country ever produced. It was quite a while I thought very different; but some time before the murder, thats the way I have seen it."
        "I have been expecting this," George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary; ". . . I am stunned, as by a fearful personal calamity, though I can see that this thing, occurring just at this time, may be overruled to our great good. . . . We shall appreciate him at last." And so the country felt--as if a beloved relative or a dear friend had been suddenly struck down. "Above all," Strong wrote, "there is a profound, awe-stricken feeling that we are, as it were, in immediate presence of a fearful, gigantic crime, such as has not been committed in our day and can hardly be matched in history."
        Whatever feelings of compassion Strong may have felt at the news of Lees surrender were quickly dissipated by the assassination of Lincoln, which was widely believed to be the consequence of a conspiracy supported and encouraged by the leaders of the Confederacy. "Let us henceforth deal with rebels as they deserve," he wrote. "The rose-water treatment does not meet their case. I have heard it said fifty times today: 'These madmen have murdered the two best friends they had in the world!" (It was incorrectly thought that Seward could not survive his wounds.) A feeling began to emerge that "Lincoln had done his appointed work; his honesty, sagacity, kindliness, and singleness of purpose had united the North and secured the suppression of the rebellion," Strong wrote, adding, "Perhaps the time has come for something besides kindliness, mercy, and forbearance, even for vengeance and judgment. Perhaps the murdered Presidents magnanimity would have been circumvented and his generosity and goodness abused by rebel subtlety After the first great wave of anguish passed, Strong wrote: "What a place this man, whom his friends have been patronizing for four years as a well-meaning, sagacious kind-hearted ignorant old codger, had won for himself in the hearts of the people! What a place he will fill in history! I foresaw most clearly that he would be ranked high as the Great Emancipator twenty years hence, but I did not suppose his death would instantly reveal--even to Copperhead newspaper editors--the nobleness and glory of his part in this great contest. . . . Death has suddenly opened the eyes of the people (and I think the world) to the fact that a hero has been holding high place among them for four years, closely watched and studied, but despised and rejected by a third of this community, and only tolerated by the other two-thirds."
        When Strong heard that Lincoln had dreamed the night before his assassination of "a fine ship entering harbor under full sail," he wrote in his diary: "A poet could make something out of that." A poet did. Whitman wrote:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weatherd every rack, the prize
    we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all
    exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel
    grim and daring;
But 0 heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
    Fallen cold and dead.

        It was all too much to take in, too sudden, too traumatic. Charleston had been occupied by Federal troops at the end of February; Lincolns inauguration followed a week later. On April 3 Richmond was abandoned. Lincoln visited Richmond on the fourth and fifth. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9. Five days later, on the anniversary of the surrender of Sumter, Lincoln was assassinated.
        That same day the Union flag was raised once more over the ruins of that fort by none other than Major (now General) Robert Anderson, who had four years earlier been forced to strike those same colors. William Lloyd Garrison was there as one of the official guests of honor, and Henry Ward Beecher gave the principal address. Having been met at the Charleston docks by a crowd of some three thousand blacks and carried on their shoulders to his hotel, Garrison visited Calhouns grave and pronounced slavery to be buried deeper than its famous champion. A week later, in Boston, one of his sons reported that "father has [not] quite 'come to himself yet, his trip was so crowded with delightful wonders. It was like dreamland."
        The city and indeed the country were meanwhile given over to mourning for their leaders death. Almost every house displayed some piece of black cloth as a mark of the grief of its occupants. Such signs were especially noticeable on the houses of the poor. To Welles "the little black ribbon or strip of black cloth from the hovel of the poor negro or the impoverished white" was most moving. From Sunday through Tuesday of Easter Week, the dead Presidents body lay in state in the rotunda of the Capitol while thousands of citizens filed by to look for the last time on that strangely beautiful face. The funeral was on Wednesday, the nineteenth, "imposing, sad and sorrowful." As the procession formed in front of the White House to move down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, all businesses were closed, and the streets were thronged with silent, often weeping people, black and white, sharing a common sorrow. The procession took two hours and ten minutes to pass a given point and was estimated to be more than three miles long. Welles and Stanton rode together, two not very congenial men, wrapped in their own thoughts. The casket, now sealed, was placed once more in the rotunda. Mr. Ralph Gurley gave a brief prayer, and, Welles wrote in his diary, "we left the remains of the good and great man we loved so well."
        The Joint Resolution of Congress upon Lincolns death dated April 17, 1865, contained a paragraph that read: "Whereas Abraham Lincolns originality of manner, his humor, wit, sarcasm, and wondrous powers of ridicule, were weapons peculiarly his own, which no one else could imitate. Add to these qualities courage, will, and indomitable persistence of purpose, which never flagged or faltered, and he was a power felt and acknowledged by the nation. Take him all in all, it will be long ere we look upon his like again;
        "Whereas he is dead; but the days of his pilgrimage, although in troublesome times, were full of honor, love, and troops of friends. The nation mourns. Peace be with him."
        Jack Flowers, a Sea Island black, told a Northern teacher, "I 'spect its no use to be here. I might as well stayed where I was. It 'pears we cant be free, nohow." A community of blacks at Hilton Head held a meeting and resolved: "That we. . . look upon the death of the Chief Magistrate of our country as a national calamity, and an irrepressible loss beyond the power of words to express, covering the land with gloom and sorrow, mourning and desolation." It was "Almighty God" who had chosen Lincoln for the work of liberation and "crowned the career of this great and good man with a blessed immortality, sealed by his blood, and embalmed in the memory of future generations."
        Edgar Dinsmore, a black soldier from New York stationed in South Carolina, wrote: "Humanity has lost a firm advocate, our race its Patron Saint, and the good of all the world a fitting object to emulate.... The name Abraham Lincoln will ever be cherished in our hearts, and none will more delight to lisp his name in reverence than the future generations of our people."
        Charles Sumner wrote his English reformer friend John Bright: "Family and friends may mourn but his death will do more for the cause than any human life, for it will fix the sentiments of the Country--perhaps of mankind. To my mind few have been happier." George Templeton Strong noted in his diary: "No prince, no leader of a people, was ever so lamented as this unpolished Western lawyer has been and is. His name is Faithful and True. He will stand in history books beside Washington, perhaps higher."
        There was a curious appropriateness in James Russell Lowells Harvard commemoration "Ode," delivered three months after Lincolns death. It was in praise of Lincoln, most un-Harvard like of men, a new human type, "Not forced to frame excuses for his birth, / Fed from within with all the strength he needs." The nation had "Wept with the passion of an angry grief" at his death. In him Nature had shaped a "hero new," / "Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true / How beautiful to see / Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed." It was presumptuous to praise him.

He knew to bide his time,
And can his fame abide,
Still patient in his simple faith sublime,
Till the wise years decide.

Our children shall behold his fame.
The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American.

        "The first American" had been a phrase reserved for Washington. At least Washington had been praised as "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." So different in so many ways, the two men were perhaps most alike in their patient enduring-ness; their courage and perseverance in the face of what often seemed insurmountable adversities. It is difficult to doubt that America would not have, in time, won its independence from Great Britain if there had been no Washington or if he had been mortally wounded in his first major engagement with the British forces--say, at the Battle of Kips Bay, where he so recklessly risked his life, trying to rally his fleeing soldiers. Certainly it is as safe as any historical generalization to say that the nation which would have emerged from a Washington-less revolution would have been very different from the one that did, indeed, it might well not even have been a single nation. By the same token it is very hard to believe that the North could have won the Civil War, restored the Union, and ended slavery without Lincolns leadership. Washington was as essential to the nations birth as Lincoln to its rebirth. Seen in another perspective~ Lincoln finished the work that Washington had begun in the sense that, as we have argued, the nation could not truly "begin" until the cruel paradox of slavery in "the land of the free" had been eradicated.
        How much Lincoln bore! Foremost, the Army of the Potomac. That was his cross. One thinks of the Peninsula campaign alone, of McClellans arrogance and insolence, his numerous dispatches implying that Lincoln had sabotaged his efforts and that the lives of thousands of men had been sacrificed in vain by a heartless and indifferent government. The hours of waiting for news, so often bad, from one battlefield or another were undoubtedly the most wearing hours of his presidency. In addition to the incompetence of successive commanding generals of the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln had to endure the petty rivalries and bickerings in his own Cabinet, disputes that set Chase against Stanton and Welles against both, and the intrigues within his own party as congressional leaders attempted to undermine his authority and usurp his powers; the remorseless venom of the Democratic press, the subversive activities of the Copperheads, and the angry clamors of the abolitionists at his dilatoriness in proclaiming emancipation. Horace Greeley set himself up as the publicly proclaimed conscience of the President, and even such staunch supporters as Carl Schurz burdened him with their doubts and criticisms. It is probably not too much to say that at one time or another during the course of the war virtually every American living north of the Mason-Dixon Line questioned either Lincolns motives or his ability to discharge the vast and complex duties of his office, sometimes both.
        In addition to the tribulations that fell upon him in consequence of his formal political responsibilities, Lincoln suffered in his personal life, first and most acutely in the death in 1862 of his adored son Willie and then in the erratic behavior of his wife. Mary Todd, always a difficult and demanding woman, became increasingly eccentric after the death of her son. Her eccentricity took the form, among others, of running up wildly extravagant bills for her personal wardrobe and for furnishings for the White House, bills that exceeded Lincolns ability to pay. His wifes state of mind was more distressing to the President than the embarrassment of the bills themselves, which were given wide publicity by his political enemies.
        Finally, it has been often noted how much Lincoln suffered over the terrible casualty lists that followed every major battle. They perhaps took the most terrible psychic toll of all. Not surprisingly his health was often bad, and he was frequently troubled by nightmares. Indeed, his dreams were a special source of interest to him, and as we have seen, he often reflected on their meaning. Undoubtedly his humor, so often criticized as coarse or inappropriate, preserved his life and sanity. It was an essential antidote to the strain of morbidity in his nature.
        There is no end to the telling of Lincolns greatness (the Library of Congress catalogue lists five thousand books about him); it is woven into the fabric of our history. It is palpable: in the ground beneath our feet; in the air we breathe. He was the Whitmanesque hero, feeling the greatness of the land, the power of common labor, the surge of humanity across the inconceivable landscape. His words are evocations of our dearest dreams and best aspirations. He was Father Abraham, the Lords anointed, who stirred the profoundest memories of the race, who elicited with an unerring touch those "mystic chords of memory" that he promised would reunite all Americans when we were at last moved "by the better angels of our nature." Patient and enduring, compassionate, suffering, and at the same time as rough and unfinished as the famous rails he split, he promised a deeper and wiser humanity. He was the paschal lamb, the sacrifice, the bearer of the manifold sins of America, the leader of an "almost chosen people." He was, with all that, an unblinking realist. John Hay spoke of his looking through a fraud "to the buttons on the back of his coat," and his law partner. William Herndon, who knew him perhaps better than anyone else, stressed his "cold" intelligence. "To some men," Herndon declared, "the world of matter and of man comes ornamented with beauty, life, and action, and hence more or less false and inexact. No lurking illusion--delusion--error, false in itself, and clad for the moment in robes of splendor, woven by the imagination, ever passed unchallenged or undetected over the threshold of his mind. . . . He saw all things through a perfect mental lens. There was no diffraction or refraction there. . . . He was not impulsive, fanciful, or imaginative, but cold, calm and precise." Herndons analysis is one of the most remarkable that we have of Lincoln. It has the ring of truth about it; it confirms what we already know. Such men as Herndon describes are typically cynics; Lincolns greatness was that seeing the world as he did, utterly without illusion, he loved it and its odd inhabitants with a remarkable passion.
        The fact was that no simple idealist could have made his way through the quagmires of provincial Illinois politics to the presidency of the United States. The extraordinary strategic sense with which Lincoln mapped the campaign that was to carry him to the highest office in the Republic and the implacable will with which he made poor Douglas carry him there tell volumes about the quality of his mind--about, as we used to say, his character.
        Whitman celebrated him in one of the most moving and mysterious of American poems--"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd":

For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands--
    and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant
    of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars
    dusk and dim.

        And what of the strange company of conspirators who, it appeared, had plotted the deaths of Lincoln, Seward, Stanton, Grant, and Johnson? John Wilkes Booth was the youngest son of the famous tragedian Junius Brutus Booth. His older brother, Edwin, was one of the most admired actors of the day, famous for his Shakespearean roles. John Wilkes Booth was twenty-six when he assassinated Lincoln. He was a Marylander by birth and an ardent secessionist. Lincoln appeared to him (as he did, of course, to hundreds of thousands of Southerners) as the most malevolent of tyrants, and in his sentimental and romantic imaginings, Booth came to see himself as a modern-day Brutus, freeing the country from an evil dictator, becoming, in consequence, the hero of a real-life drama. A charismatic and compelling figure, with hot, luminous eyes, Booth was able to assemble and dominate as odd a bag of conspirators as ever plotted. Their headquarters in Washington was the home of Mary Surratt. Mrs. Surratt was a member of a well-known family and owned, in addition to her Washington house, a tavern at Surrattsville. In addition to Mary Surratt, those most directly involved in the plot were her own son, John, David Herold, George Atzerodt, Lewis Powell (Paine), Samuel Arnold, Michael O'Laughlin, and Edward Spangler. Ben: Perley Poore later described them as follows: "Samuel Arnold was of respectable appearance, about thirty years of age, with dark hair and beard and a good countenance. Spangler, the stage-carpenter, was chunky, light-haired, rather bloated and whisky-soaked looking man. Atzerodt had a decidedly lager beer look, with heavy blue eyes, light hair, and sallow complexion. OLaughlin might have been mistaken for a native of Cuba, short and slender, with luxuriant black locks, a delicate moustache and whiskers, and vivacious black eyes. Payne [Powell] was the incarnation of a Roman gladiator, tall, muscular, defiant, with a low forehead, large blue eyes, thin lips... with much of the animal and little of the intellectual. Davie Herrold was what the ladies call a pretty little man with cherry cheeks, pouting lips, an incipient beard, dark hazel eyes, and dark, long hair." Mrs. Surratt was a stout middle-aged woman with, again the phrase is Poores, "feline gray eyes."
        After shooting Lincoln, Booth, his leg broken, hobbled to the stage door, where a horse chosen for speed and endurance awaited him. Herold, who had been acting as a lookout, joined him, and the two men rode ten miles to Surrattsville with Booth in great pain. At Surrattsville they stayed at the tavern owned by Mrs. Surratt, where they picked up two carbines left for them, and then made their way to the home of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who set Booths leg. For nearly a week Booth and Herold hid in the vicinity while a dragnet of detectives and U.S. Cavalry closed in on them. Booth, dismayed to discovered that far from being hailed as a deliverer, he was almost universally execrated, confined his feelings to a diary. "Until to-day," he wrote, "nothing was ever thought of sacrificing to our countrys wrongs. For six months we had worked to capture; but our cause being lost, something decisive and great must be done. But its failure was owing to others, who did not strike for their country with a heart. I struck boldly, and not as the papers say. I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends, and was stopped~ but pushed on. A colonel was at his side. I shouted, "Sic semper!" before I fired. In jumping, I broke my leg. I passed all his pickets, rode sixty miles that night with the bone of my leg tearing the flesh at every jump. I can never repent it, though we hated to kill. Our country owed all our troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. . . . I care not what becomes of me. I have no desire to outlive my country." Booth deplored the fact that despite his brave and noble act, he was "hunted like a dog through swamps, woods . . . wet, cold, starving, with every mans hand turned against me. ... And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made Tell a hero. And yet I, for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew, am looked upon as a common cut-throat. My action was purer than either of theirs. . . . God can not pardon me if I have done wrong. Yet I cannot see my wrong, except in serving a degenerate people. . . . So ends all. For my country I have given up all that makes life sweet and holy; brought misery upon my family, and I am sure there is no pardon in Heaven for me, since man condemns me so. I have only heard of what has been done, except what I did myself, and it fills me with horror. God, try and forgive me, and bless my mother." Abandoned by the world, he "felt the curse of Cain upon --" The sentence was unfinished as though he could not bear to add the ''me."
        On April 25, Booth and Herold were run to ground in a tobacco barn near Port Royal, Virginia. With the barn surrounded, the two men were called on to surrender. Herold came out, but Booth refused, calling that he only wanted "fair play." The barn was set on fire, and as Booth tried to escape, he was shot by Sergeant Boston Corbett. He was carried out of the flaming barn still conscious. He asked for water, and when it was given to him, he murmured, "Tell mother I died for my country." lie fainted, revived, and said, "I thought I did for the best." Then he asked that his hands be raised so that he could see them and said, "Useless! Useless!"
        As Booth was making his assault on Lincoln, Powell had gone to Sewards house, forced his way in, rushed up the stairs, and, when Sewards son Frederick tried to intercept him, fractured his skull with a blow from his pistol, and, drawing a knife, began stabbing at the already injured Seward. Sewards attendant, a convalescent soldier named Robinson, grappled with Powell, while Sewards daughter threw open a window and screamed, "Murder!" Powell broke away from Robinson and fled, heading for Mary Surratts house. There he was intercepted by the police, who had already arrested Mrs. Surratt and her daughters.
        John Surratt, Mary's son, escaped to Canada and then to Italy and finally to Egypt, where he was arrested and returned to the United States for trial.
        Atzerodt's assignment was apparently to kill Johnson. He had taken a room at Kirkwood House, where Johnson was staying, and a loaded pistol and several bowie knives were found in his bedroom, but he evidently lost his nerve and fled to Middlesburg, Maryland, where he was captured several days later. The conspirators were tried by a military commission and sentenced on July 6. Atzerodt, Herold, Powell, and Mrs. Surratt were hanged. Dr. Mudd, O'Laughlin, and Arnold were given life sentences, and Spangler was sent to prison for six years. There remains a question of the degree of the complicity of the defendants. Several of the accused insisted that the assassination had been Booths own scheme and that they had not even known of his intention until a few hours before the act. Powell had clearly tried to kill Seward, and though he had failed, he was deeply implicated in the plot. Mudd had done little more than set Booths leg, but the court was not in a frame of mind to make such distinctions. With Booth dead, public sentiment demanded some severe measures of revenge.
Source: "A People's History of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Volume 5, Trial by Fire" by Page Smith

RETURN TO CIVIL WAR POTPOURRI PAGE

RETURN TO ABRAHAM BIOGRAPHY PAGE

I take this as yet another admission of your failure.

Whatever.

I don't post for you.

Here's the thing. You cite some people who clearly didn't much like Lincoln. That's okay, a lot of people didn't.

What you are getting me to do is dive into my pedant's bag of quotes to prove again what has been known for 138 years. Abraham Lincoln was a great and good man.

Whoever would understand in his heart the meaning of America will find it in the life of Abraham Lincoln...

-- Ronald Reagan , first inaugural address, January 20, 1981

A hundred and twenty years ago the greatest of all our Presidents delivered his second State of the Union Message in this chamber. "We cannot escape history," Abraham Lincoln warned. "We of this Congress and this Administration will be re membered in spite of ourselves." The "trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation." Well, that President and that Congress did not fail the American people. Together, they weathered the storm and preserved the union. Let it be said of us that we, too did not fail ; that we, too, worked together to bring America through difficult times. Let us so conduct ourselves that two centuries from now, another Congress and another President, meeting in this chamber as we're meeting, will speak of us with pride, saying that we met the test and preserved for them in their day the sacred flame of liberty this last, best hope of man on Earth.

-- Ronald Reagan , State of the Union Address -January 26, 1982

We knew then what the liberal Democrat leaders just couldn't figure out....I heard those speakers at that other convention saying "we won the Cold War" -- and I couldn't help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by "we"? And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves." If we ever hear the Democrats quoting that passage by Lincoln and acting like they mean it, then, my friends, we will know that the opposition has really changed. Until then, we see all that rhetorical smoke, billowing out from the Democrats, well ladies and gentlemen, I'd follow the example of their nominee. Don't inhale.

---Ronald Reagan, 1992 Republican Convention Speech

It was this spirit that helped black folks in America to survive and even begin to move toward prosperity during the years of legalized oppression after the Civil War and well into the 20th century . It was also this spirit, when it came to light in the Civil Rights movement of the late 50's and 60's, that had the power to transform the hardened conscience of America. Surprised and edified by the quiet dignity of black Americans seeking justice, the people of this country were called back to some respect for the first principles of America's life. For the Civil Rights movement followed the example of the American Founders, and of Lincoln, who had proclaimed that every single human being had a worth that comes not from laws and constitutions, but from the hand of God. With quiet determination the freedom marchers insisted that every government, every law and every power whatsoever is obliged to respect that worth....the temptation to succumb to worldly judgment about the dignity of individuals, particularly those not favored by fortune with wealth, position and beauty, can be overwhelming. Black Americans have faced this temptation, and defeated it. Lincoln led the public battle against the doctrine of human inequality, but countless anonymous others have steadfastly done their work over the decades to keep the flame alive and to spread it

--Alan Keyes, Februrary 17, 2001 Restoring the mantle of Lincoln to the Republican Party is a noble goal and, indeed, an essential one. But it is not enough to adopt the slogan. To lead the party in the footsteps of Lincoln requires that we understand clearly and deeply the soul of Lincoln's own deepest ambition

-- the wellsprings of the sometimes heartbreaking and, ultimately, healing acts of political and presidential leadership that constitute the legacy of Lincoln. What was the real purpose that animated the striving of that great man, for which he spent the last resources of his noble soul and ultimately paid with his life? The answer occurring readily to most Americans would probably be that Lincoln's career, and his presidency, were devoted to the task of freeing the slaves. How then are we to understand the following words, written by Lincoln during the war, to one of the foremost abolitionists of the day? "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it."This quotation can seem almost scandalous in its apparent disregard for the abolitionist cause, particularly for those who are perceptive enough to realize that not all "unions" justify such devotion -- the Soviets, after all, had a "union" and freely accepted the necessity of slavery in their attempt to perpetuate it. Soviet acceptance of slavery in the cause of its union was, of course, deeply wrong. Was Lincoln wrong as well? If we wish to understand, to wear again, the mantle of Lincoln, we must follow his thought deeper, and ask what it was about the Union that could move such a man -- whose deepest moral sentiments were outraged by the institution of slavery -- to defer the cause of abolition if it meant allowing the end of the political union of the American Republic.At stake was the survival of a community of free men still devoted, however imperfectly, to the attempt at just self-government. Lincoln understood the Founders to have formed a Union dedicated to vindicating the possibility of such a community. He believed that the Founders had understood that the institution of slavery, although it ultimately contradicted the principles of the republic, did not vitiate the solemn founding commitment to the pursuit of just self-government.

Accordingly, Lincoln argued, the Founders had placed the institution of slavery "in the course of ultimate extinction" partly through a series of practical political concessions such as the constitutional time limit on the slave trade. Far more important, however, was the fact -- as Lincoln argued in scholarly depth -- that the founding generation universally understood that they were committing the country to a perpetual struggle to conform their lives and political institutions to the principles stated in the Declaration that gave birth to the Union itself. They, and Lincoln, knew that slavery could not survive such a commitment.A Union that had formally broken its commitment to the Declaration, Lincoln believed, would no more be the Union of the founding. It would in fact be no less broken than the divided polity which the secession of the Southern states threatened to cause. Preserving the Union meant preserving the national commitment to the pursuit of justice in self-government, a goal never perfectly attained, but most definitely not to be abandoned because of any dispute about the manner of its accomplishment. This, I believe, is what Lincoln meant in the famous words at Gettysburg, when he identified the "great task remaining before us." That task, he said, was "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.".....or save the Union on the basis of the Declaration, Lincoln knew, required that slavery be returned to its condition at the Founding -- namely, that it be put firmly on the course of ultimate extinction. The delay in its extinction might be painfully long. But if it was necessary to endure that delay rather than admit that we could not govern ourselves under the principles of the Declaration, Lincoln was prepared to do so.....The resolve to evoke from his fellow citizens their assent to the eventual triumph of justice was Lincoln's greatest ambition, and his failure to do it without war was his greatest sorrow. In our time, the mantle -- the burden -- of the Declaration remains the source of what must be our own greatest ambition. The Republican Party must indeed reclaim the mantle of Lincoln -- we must highly resolve, as Lincoln said, to lead the nation to a renewed determination to seek justice according to the principles of the Declaration

. --Alan Keyes, August 12, 2000

Walt

[Walt] Here's the thing. You cite some people who clearly didn't much like Lincoln. That's okay, a lot of people didn't.

You have been singularly unsuccessful in finding one contemporary of Lincoln who praised his alleged virtues while he was alive. I have been quoting from Lincoln's own administration, hand-picked by Lincoln. Lincoln's Secretary of War, Lincoln's Secretary of State, Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury and appointee to the Supreme Court. I have quoted military leaders Lincoln selected for their positions of leadership.

[Walt] What you are getting me to do is dive into my pedant's bag of quotes to prove again what has been known for 138 years. Abraham Lincoln was a great and good man.

You cannot prove Lincoln was great and good by quoting Reagan. I note your pedant's bag of quotes contains not a single one of his contemporaries praising him before his assassination. You are unlikely to find one where he ever preached Black equality either. But he did use the N-word and he called Mexicans "mongrels."

You may continue to worship at the altar of your lord god abraham. I will continue to quote the gospel according to Abraham.

Quoting from James McPherson, "Frederick Douglass believed that Lincoln was 'allowing himself to be ... the miserable tool of traitors and rebels."

More McPherson:

The president asked the black leaders to recruit volunteers for a government-financed pilot colonization project in Central America. If this worked, it could pave the way for theemigration of thousands more who might be freed by the war.
Most black spokesmen in the North ridiculed Lincoln's proposal and denounced its author. "This is our country as much as it is yours," a Philadelphia Negro told the president, "and we will not leave it." Frederick Douglass accused Lincoln of, "contempt for negroes" and "canting hypocrisy." The president's remarks, said Douglass, would encourage "ignorant and base" white men "to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people."
. . .
Two-thirds of the Republicans in Congress became sufficiently convinced of the need to conciliate this sentiment that they voted for amendments to the District of Columbia emancipation bill and the confiscation act appropriating $600,000 for colonization. As a practical matter, said one Republican, colonization "is a damn humbug. But it will take with the people."

In the August 1862 issue of Douglass Monthly, Frederick Douglass said, "that ABRAHAM LINCOLN is not more fit for the place he hold than was JAMES BUCHANAN, and that the latter was no more the miserable tool of traitors and rebels that former is allowing himself to be."

Frederick Douglass said:

Illogical and unfair as Mr. Lincoln's statements are, they are nevertheless quite in keeping with his whole course from the beginning of his administration up to this day, and confirm the painful conviction that though elected as an anti-slavery man by Republican and Abolition voters, Mr. Lincoln is quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and Negro hatred and far more concerned for the preservation of slavery, and the favor of the Border States, than for any sentiment of magnanimity or principle of justice and humanity"
The Life and Writing of Frederick Douglass, edited by Philip S. Foner, 4 Vols, New York, 1955, vol 3, page 268

Frederick Douglass said:
With the single exception of the quesiton of slavery extension, Mr. Lincoln proposes no measure which can bring him into antagonistic collision with the traffickers in human flesh, either in the States or in the District of Columbia .... Slavery will be as safe, and safer, in the Union under such a President, than it can be under any President of a Southern Confederacy"
The Life and Writing of Frederick Douglass, edited by Philip S. Foner, 4 Vols, New York, 1955, vol 2, page 527

Wendell Phillips said Lincoln was "not an Abolitionist, hardly an anti-slavery man."

Liberal Republicans said Lincoln's policies prolonged the war and increased the cost and casualties.

Said Charles Sumner:
It is hard to read of all this blood & sacrifice, & to think that it might have been averted -- which I most solemnly believe"
The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, edited by Beverly Wilson Palmer, Vol. 2, Boston, 1990, page 124

Said Sumner, Lincoln's "delays tended to prolong the war" and "if ever the account is impartially balanced he & the Secy of State must answer for much treasure & bloodshed"
The Selected Letter of Charles Sumner, edited by Beverly Wilson Palmer, Vol. 2, Boston, 1990, page 306

Senator Trumbull said a better president might have won the war "in half the time, and with half the loss of blood and treasure."
Quoted in The Life of Lyman Trumbull, Horace White, New York, 1913, page 428. To Judge Stephen Douglas, the lord god abraham said:

When we shall get Mexico, I don't know whether the Judge will be in favor of the Mexican people that we get with it settling that question for themselves and all others; because we know the Judge has a great horror for mongrels, and I understand that the people of Mexico are most decidedly a race of mongrels. I understand that there is not more than one person out there out of eight who is pure white, and I suppose from the Judge's previous declaration that when we get Mexico or any considerable portion of it, that he will be in favor of these mongrels settling the question, which would bring him somewhat into collision with his horror of an inferior race.

The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, 11 vols, Rutgers, 1955, vol. 3, page 235
[italics added]

In a Carlinville speech, according to the Carlinville Democrat, Lincoln started thus:
"He said the question is often asked, why this fuss about n-----s?"
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, 11 vols, Rutgers, 1955, vol. 3, page 77

The answer, according to the lord god lincoln:
"Sustain these men and Negro equality will be abundant, as every white laborer will have occasion to regret when he is elbowed from his plow or his anvil by slave n-----s"
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, 11 vols, Rutgers, 1955, vol. 3, pp. 77-8 [elision added to the N-word which Lincoln used like Mark Fuhrman.]

In Elwood, Kansas, a year later, the great lincoln said:
"People often ask, why make such a fuss about a few n-----s?"
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, 11 vols, Rutgers, 1955, vol. 3, page 495

Lincoln saw fit, to the dismay of Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, to interrupt a White House discussion of the tragically high union mortality rate to tell a group of English visitors a story about "darky" arithmetic.
Reminiscenses of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguised Men of His Time, Allen T. Rice, New York, 1888, pp. 286-8

The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln are available at:

http://www.hti.umich.edu/l/lincoln/

For the below letter, just search on the N-word.
This is Lincoln, the lawyer, at work.

Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865.: Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 2.

To Newton Deming and George P. Strong [1] Springfield, May 25, 1857.

Messrs. N.D. & G.P. Strong

Gentlemen
Yours of the 22nd is just received. The admiralty case now stands on appeal to the circuit court and consequently, can only be tried by Judge McLean; and I understand he will remain here only one week, commencing the first Monday of June. Of course, the other side will press for a hearing during that week.

I have just been to see Stuart & Edwards and they suggest that you see the plantiff's lawyer in St. Louis (I forget his name) and make an arrangement with him as to a day of taking up the case, and notify us.

I do not think any defence has been presented based on the fact of Messrs Page & Bacon [2] having purchased under the Deed of Trust. Quere. Does not the Libellants right, attach to the specific thing---this case---regardless of who may own them?

There is no longer any difficult question of jurisdiction in the Federal courts; they have jurisdiction in all possible cases, except such as might redound to the benefit of a ``n****r'' in some way.

Seriously, I wish you to prepare, on the question jurisdiction as well as you can; for I fear the later decisions are against us. I understand they have some new Admiralty Books here, but I have not examined them.

Yours truly
A. LINCOLN

Annotation
[1] ALS, IHi. Newton D. Strong married Matilda R. Edwards, eldest daughter of Hon. Cyrus Edwards, Alton, Illinois. Strong later moved to St. Louis and set up a law practice.
[2] Daniel D. Page and Henry D. Bacon were bankers and merchants in St. Louis.

[elision of N-word added]

On January 5, 1836 the Honorable Abraham Lincoln, then a 26-year old representative, voted for a resolution which stated in part:

"Resolved, That the elective franchise should be kep pure from contamination by the admission of colored votes."

That's Abe preventing pollution of the ballot box.

Lincoln at Worcester, Massachusetts, September 1848, referring to the killing of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy in Illinois:

"I have heard you have abolitionists here. We have a few in Illinois and we shot one the other day"
Herndon's Informants, edited by Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, Urbana 1998, p. 681

Said Congressman John B. Alley of Massachusetts:

"many of the most distinguished men of the country, who were in daily intercourse with him [Lincoln], thought but little of his capacity as a statesman. And while entirely true, it is hardly to be believed that those in both houses of Congress who knew him best had so little confidence in his judgment and ability to administer the government that few of the members of the Senate and of the House were in favor of his renomination for the Presidency in 1864"
Reminiscenses of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguised Men of His Time, Allen T. Rice, New York, 1888, pp 573-4

Lincoln's "I Have a White Dream"
Seventh and Last Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois
October 15, 1858

Now irrespective of the moral aspect of this question as to whether there is a right or wrong in enslaving a negro, I am still in favor of our new Territories being in such a condition that white men may find a home---may find some spot where they can better their condition---where they can settle upon new soil and better their condition in life. [Great and continued cheering.] I am in favor of this not merely, (I must say it here as I have elsewhere,) for our own people who are born amongst us, but as an outlet for free white people everywhere, the world over---in which Hans and Baptiste and Patrick, and all other men from all the world, may find new homes and better their conditions in life. [Loud and long continued applause.]

Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865.: Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 3, p. 312

[bold face added, italics in original]

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