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.
If Sarah was president, we wouldn’t need to divide the country. But she isn’t.
Not only that, but many Southerners were looking to expanding Slavery into Cuba, Mexico, and other areas South of our border. If slavery was still around in North America, it'd be out in the fruit orchards presently manned by Migrant Workers. So, no, Slavery was NOT going away.
Lincoln wasn't an Abolitionist, but was anti-Slavery. Anti-Slavery folks could be VERY racist- they knew slaves took jobs from white folks earning a living.
Abe Lincoln was correct in sending America to war against the Rebels.
I still think Lincoln was far too soft on the south.
Davis/Lee/Stephens/Toombs and the rest of the Confederate cabinet should have been hanging from the gallows for their acts of treason. All other southern collaborators should have been shot at the conclusion of the war, the bullet used charged to their families.
Why do you think there would only have been 2 countries result?
My dad has been a Civil War buff for many years and has attended round table events with other enthusiasts as well as number of re-inactments at various battle field sites. He opened my eyes to Lincoln years ago.
It is NOT as we were taught in school. There was a whole lot more going on than just the growing hatred toward slavery. I see Lincoln as more of an imperialist who conquered, ravaged and occupied a newly self proclaimed nation for the sake of the “union”. He laid waste to the South and Texas for instance suffered the punishment of military occupation for something like a decade after the end of the war. They didn’t call it the war of northern aggression for nothing. Lincoln is not my hero.
My dad, incidentally, is not a southerner, but a Missourian. Missouri had a lot of people on both sides.
Nonsense,he was only trying to save the union and in his own words he really didn’t care about slavery vs. the union.The union came 1st on his agenda even though he was really trying to destroy states rights.Today,the states are so divided it would had been better to split up and let the states go their own way.
MLK was no Saint either.
How did your Dad deal with Article Three ?
That’s your opinion, lots of others would say he ruined it.
Lincoln wupped ass and won. He was on the right side of the Slavery issue. He just like the men of the South grew up proud of being Americans. They all loved this Country.
Odumbi is not and does not.
Big difference.
otoh, we must make sure odumbi doesn’t win.
That’s pretty close to what my family said about the war and they were very involved and from Va.
Virtually by definition , a slave-holding society is a police state. For someone not to realize that 150 years later is a moral blindness greater that Obama’s. Lincoln’s promise to the slave -holding states, even though several had already seceded , made in his eloquent, well-reasoned first inaugural, was to scrupulously adhere to to the Constitution and its provisions regarding slavery. There would never have been two countries next to each other in peace in place of the Union, as the secession of West Virginia from Virginia demonstrates. Next likely would have been East Tennessee; then a balkanization leading to the invasion of European colonial powers, Great Britain from Canada already poised to pick up the spoils. And the arming of slaves in the South by abolitionists (What reason would the North have had to stop them?) would have led to the long feared slave revolt anyway. What was the Confederacy going to do to stop them ? Invade the North? Why, that would have been Civil War! Thank God Lincoln saw the consequences.
No sir, it was wrong to crush State’s rights and ignore the Constitution.
That war was never about slavery. The industrial revolution was taking care of that anyways. It was always about consolidating power in DC, and securing southern wealth.
I understand your thinking completely. Unfortunately, the Civil War set a bad precedent. The South should have been able to secede without bloodshed just as it should now if that should be the choice of the citizens of the individual States. I fear that Obama, or any liberal white house occupant, will treat it no differently than Lincoln did. If it comes to that, we are going to have a fight on our hands.
A blogger. A libertarian neo-confederate.
The book this blogger mentions When in the Course of Human Events has interesting negative comments on amazon.com
Lincoln oversaw the slaughter of 500k Americans. . And somehow history recorded that as success. People REFUSE to make an honest appraisal of this . . Can’t say what I know to be true.
“Lincoln signed the order approving the hanging of 39 Sioux Indians, for dubious reasons. This was the only mass hanging in American history:”
Went on the warpath during the civil war, killing not less than 800 people. We captured 1000 of them,, and hanged 39. Lincoln was a decent man, and a man of character, fighting to save the union. His whole life was a monument to honesty and hard work. When he took office, the slaveholding south forced a war. He finished it.
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