Openly, you seldom do. But you treat him as if he were infallable on a daily basis around here and venerate him as if he were a deity. It is impermisable in your mind to ascribe any ammount of error or wrong to him. You are presented with irrefutable evidence of his flaws yet deny and excuse away each and every one of them no matter how small. You do so because you will not permit a presentation of Lincoln that is anything less than perfect.
Do you dispute me on any of this, Walt? If so, please post an admission of any specified error or flaw in the person of Abe Lincoln. I dare you.
Openly, you seldom do.
Well, Dr. Farber's analysis, which as you can guess I respect a lot, shows that President Lincoln clearly did go outside constitutional grounds on several particulars.
Dr. Farber can find no constitutional justification for Lincoln's spending money in the treasury between March and July, 1861. The Constitution plainly says no money will be disbursed without appropriation.
President Lincoln also went further than he should have in declaring martial law throughout the country even where the courts were open. So he wasn't perfect.
Dr. Farber's book finds that the president clearly has the power to arrest and detain insurrectionists with no appeal to habeas. He finds that the Supreme Court --unanimously-- held that the Militia Act gave the president plenty of power to put down the rebellion, thus showing conclusively that unilateral state secession is outside the law.
Like the vast majority of Americans' he finds that President Lincoln was a great and good man.
It's a great book. You should read it.
Walt