Posted on 02/23/2014 6:39:53 PM PST by grumpa
Few people understand how lawless Abraham Lincoln was in propagating our country’s biggest nightmare—the Civil War. And not enough people sense the parallel of Obama’s emerging lawlessness.
Lincoln achieved his political aims by bullying—rather than effective, innovative solutions and negotiations. Here are some facts:
• Lincoln closed more than 300 newspapers that disagreed with him.
• He arrested members of state legislatures, preventing them from debating the secession issue.
• He ordered military trials for citizens when civilian courts were available. Many of these trials resulted in hangings.
• Operating as a military dictator, Lincoln spent millions not authorized by the Congress.
• He suspended the writ of habeas corpus, a law that prevents people from being imprisoned without due process. This suspension, along with the military tribunals, resulted in the imprisonment of 14,000 war opponents illegally. (For comparison, Mussolini is reported to have jailed around 2,000 people.)
• When Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney ruled Lincoln’s suspension of the writ unconstitutional, amazingly, Lincoln ordered Taney arrested! But the United States Marshal’s office refused to make the arrest without a valid arrest warrant. However, due to the political situation at the time, the writ was never officially restored until Andrew Johnson’s tenure.
• The cruelty of the Northern generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan was authorized by Lincoln. The wanton cruelty toward civilian life and property made Lincoln clearly guilty of war crimes.
• His dishonorable prosecution of the war is responsible for the failure to re-assimilate the South after the war, and left bitterness for a hundred years. The Ku Klux Klan is certainly a result of this bitterness.
• Lincoln signed the order approving the hanging of 39 Sioux Indians, for dubious reasons. This was the only mass hanging in American history.
• Lincoln was a liar, changing his message to suit the audience and his political objectives.
This is all presented in an amazing book by Charles Adams entitled, When in the Course of Human Events. Adams concludes, as any reasonable man would, that Lincoln should have been impeached. The war would thus have not progressed to its devastating conclusion. And slavery, which was clearly on its way out anyway, would have ended without the loss of 630,000 American lives.
So, how is this relevant today? Is it not ironic that a black president is potentially taking us down a path of a constitutional crisis not seen since Lincoln? History never repeats itself exactly. But the parallels should be apparent to anyone willing to see them.
“saving the union “
Saving the railroads, really. They need the union together to make money and Lincoln was their attorney.
But not all at once. 16 were the biggest group.
I think you’re forgetting that the recent difficulties in the Balkans stemmed from the attempt by the Serbs and former Yugoslav army to prevent certain peoples and regions from seceding. It’s the same as what Lincoln did, except the “union” lost that particular bloody war. But the analogy is bad for another reason: You simply assume the inevitability of a Balkan type split rather than a peaceful separation like that between the Czech and Slovak republics. Separation can work out just fine without a tyrant grasping to hold dominion over those who reject his claim to rule over them. You can speculate whatever makes you happy, but the course of alternate history is unknowable.
“Lincoln was universally admired after the war “
By who??
“sake of the “union”.”
Sake of the railroads. Lincoln, himself, said the States have the right to leave. It wasn’t until his railroad buddies, for whom he was their lawyer, demanded the union stay together did he even run for office.
His inaugural address was all about not stopping slavery.
“fighting to save the union. His whole life was a monument to honesty and hard work.”
BS. It was ALL about railroad money. He was a tyrant.
6 States of the north also had slavery and all of them had Jim Crowe laws. So don’t come around here claiming anyone not liking Lincoln is pro-slavery. That’s just retarded.
It's always funny when the Lost Causers accuse Lincoln of being a dictator, then ding him for not being more dictatorial. For the record, the Emancipation Proclamation was a military measure that could only apply to areas in rebellion against the United States. For areas not in rebellion, either the states would have to end it on their own, as several did during the war, or an amendment to the Constitution would have to be passed, an amendment that Lincoln was able to get passed after the 1864 elections gave him the needed votes.
"The First Battle of Bull Run, also known as First Manassas (the name used by Confederate forces), was fought on July 21, 1861, in Prince William County, Virginia, near the city of Manassas. It was the first major land battle of the American Civil War."
The only soldiers invading the other side's land were Northern soldiers invading Virginia.
BTW, I picked "rustbucket" as a handle because I'm older than dirt.
Why do you think we would have only ended up as 2 countries? Why not 5 or 6?
Then there’s the Great Hanging at Gainesville, where the confederates hanged 40 unionist Texans who were trying to escape the state.
This was done by various officials and offices. Such censorship didn't all originate with Lincoln. Both the US and the Confederates did it, and I'm not sure Lincoln was any worse an enemy of press freedom than Davis.
In times of civil war or revolution things like this happen. The standards set in peacetime are rarely held to when there are armed struggles for power going on in the country.
But they are retarded. To re-fight the War of Secession all over again is stupid. You go ahead and dream of your South and its slavery, its segregation afterwards then that Separate but equal nonsense. Have your bronze busts of George Wallace and Huey Long on a mantle with candles so you can pray to have the way things were. You people keep trying to say “well you did it so we could too” doesn’t work. I personally am dammed sick and tired of people like you trying to support a life style that existed over a hundred and fifty years ago. You want to make yourself happy and feel good about the way things were in like the 1920’s and earlier? Go find some like minded friends and have a lynching party..
A couple of years back I engaged in a discussion of the War of Secession and it got heated to the point of "what's the use" and I quit. The people supporting the South had their arguments and there were those of us that had ours. All it did was incur a lot of animosity amongst people here at FR and as far as I'm concerned it's over. A hundred and fifty years over. And done.
A couple of years back I engaged in a discussion of the War of Secession and it got heated to the point of "what's the use" and I quit. The people supporting the South had their arguments and there were those of us that had ours. All it did was incur a lot of animosity amongst people here at FR and as far as I'm concerned it's over. A hundred and fifty years over. And done.
Article III of the Constitution.`The courts are to decide controversies between the states .... and the United States’.
We may have. I guess we need one for Hispanics. Maybe one for homosexuals but it wouldn’t last long.
Stupid, over the top reply. Lynchings? You aren’t to be taken seriously.
The Union ship trying to carry supplies in to Fort Sumter was also carrying 200 Union troops hiding below decks. Some peaceful resupply.
Before that ship came, Major Anderson's men overcame a ship's captain by force and hijacked his ship to take Union soldiers to Fort Sumter in violation of Anderson's orders from Washington. Anderson's troops also bayonet charged the workers in Fort Sumter to take control of the fort.
FYI, I have two sources for the hijacking of the ship. I first found a report of the hijacking in an excellent book, "The Siege of Charleston, 1861-1865," by the director of the Charleston Museum, E. Milby Burton. I bought it at a US Park Service book store in Charleston. The seizure of the schooner is mentioned on page 11 (paperback) of Burton’s book. A more extensive description of the various aspects of the move to Sumter is given in David Detzer's book, "Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War." The hijacking incident is described on page 119 (paperback). Detzer says Lt. Hall and a sergeant shoved the captain into a hold on his ship then took off for Sumter. I bought “Allegiance” at the extensive Strand bookstore in New York City a few years ago.
Oh yeah, here's what Buchanan said after being informed of Anderson's move to Fort Sumter [from "Days of Defiance" by Maury Klein]:
Buchanan slumped into a chair. "My God!" he cried wearily. "Are calamities ... never to come singly! I call God to witness -- you gentlemen better than anybody else know that this is not only without but against my orders. It is against my policy."
“Lincoln was universally admired after the war “
By who??
By North and South. Do you not know what a heavy blow it was for the South when Lincoln was assassinated and the radicals took over? Shoot even a Birchite like the late Rep. Larry McDonald praised Lincoln in We Hold These Truths, and "palaeo-cons" used to claim he was a currency reform hero who was assassinated by the "international bankers."
I have laid out my position at length in previous posts. Your terse and meaningless (and thoughtless) little jab shows me that you've never even read a word I said.
There are idiots who believe everyone in the North was on one side and everyone on the South in the other. Not true. The North was full of Copperheads and outside South Carolina there were Unionists in every seceded state. My own ancestors were Southern Unionists in the War. The hill people of Appalachia were especially true to the Union.
The notion that until the arrival of Lincoln everyone agreed that the United States was a mere "compact" among sovereign "nations" is a lie. I repeat . . . that is a lie. There were always people who held that interpretation but there was also a loose constructionist, pro-implied powers interpretive tradition going all the way back to Washington and Hamilton. Neo-Confederates who claim George Washington was a Jeffersonian compact theorist are lying. There is also the uncomfortable fact that, whatever you basement keyboard Dixiecrats like to pretend, the US Constitution explicitly invests all the marks of sovereignty in the federal government.
This anti-Lincoln, anti-Republican, anti-Federalist, and anti-Whig sentiment that has cropped up on the Right of late is ridiculous.
You twelve year old Paulestinians who spout ignorant nonsense about a period of history about which you know not the slightest thing aren't worth anyone's time. And it's not like you're interested in making an actual point anyway. Attacking Lincoln and supporting the Confederacy is just another juvenile way to shock, like shouting the "f-word" in public.
I'm sure my ancestors knew what to do with the likes of you.
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