Posted on 07/26/2006 3:22:50 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) - July 19, 2006 - A University of Illinois researcher had discovered a fourth copy of a rare letter Abraham Lincoln had written by to the nation's governors in 1861.
The letter John Lupton found Tuesday in the Lehigh County Historical Society's holdings was one Lincoln wrote as part of an unsuccessful ratification process for a constitutional amendment Congress adopted during the term of his predecessor, President James Buchanan, that would have made slavery the law of the land.
The president remembered for abolishing slavery had been willing to push the amendment as "kind of a carrot to the Southern states" if that would preserve the union, said Lupton, associate director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency.
"But even by that point, it was too late. By that time, the Southern states felt Lincoln's election was an affront," Lupton said. In fact, the letter discovered in Allentown was addressed to "His Excellency the Governor of the State of Florida," which had seceded from the union two months earlier.
Until Tuesday, only three of the letters were known to have survived. "It's a very cool document," Lupton said.
Joseph Garrera, the historical society director, said he will consult with the society's board to determine the best way to display the document and try to figure out exactly who donated the letter.
How do you "break the bonds" as is reiterated constantly in the founders' literature and in the D of I and was the subject of Lincoln's 1948 speech? Do you repay your portion of the debt in the process?
All parties concerned negotiate a equitable settlement and part company. How's that for a novel idea?
Excellent idea. Since they saw eye to eye on so many other things that should be a walk in the park.
Some in the North recognized that the personal liberty laws were unconstitutional. I found the following in the Philadelphia Public Ledger of December 20, 1860:
THE CITIZENS OF MASSACHUSETTS AND THE PERSONAL LIBERTY BILLS
Chief Justice Shaw, B. R. Curtis, Joel Parker, and other citizens of Massachusetts equally distinguished, have addressed a letter to the people of that State on the Personal Liberty Bills, which they declare to be unconstitutional. They urge strongly the repeal of them and say:
We know it is doubted by some whether the present is an opportune moment to abrogate them. It is said -- We grant these laws are wrong, but will you repeal them under a threat? We answer no. We would do nothing under a threat. We would repeal them under our own love of right; under our own sense of sacredness of compacts; under our own convictions of the inestimable importance of social order and domestic peace; under our feeling of responsibility to the memory of our fathers and the welfare of our children, and not under any threat. We would not be prevented from repealing them by any conduct of others, if such repeal were in accordance with our own sense of right.
He who refuses to do a right thing meerly because he is threatened with evil consequences, acts in subjection to the threat. His false pride may enable him to disregard the threat, but he lacks the courage to dispise the wrong estimate of his own conduct, which conduct he knows would spring from his own love of duty. If every right-minded man must admit that he ought to govern his own conduct by these principles, are they applicable to the conduct of a great and populous State? On what ground can it be maintained that hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens are to be subjected to suffereing, because the false pride of their rulers refuses to do right? Mankind have been afflicted long enough and greviously enough by commotions and strifes and wars springing from such causes. We had hoped that the nature of our government would protect us from swelling the great sum of human misery, produced by the evil passions of rulers. We had hoped that, inasmuch as the masses of people can have no interest but to do right, they would have the discernment to perceive and the manlyness to do it, and would be too calm, too wise, too magnanimous intentionally to persevere in any wrong, and we hope so still.
But what is meant by the exhortation not to repeal these laws under a threat? Who threatens us if they should not be repealed?
Whatever may have been true in the past, whatever faults of speech and action may have been committed on the one side or the other, we firmly believe that the men from whom the worst consequences to our country and ourselves are likely to proceed, have no wish that these laws should be repealed, and no disposition to use any threats in reference to them. On the contrary, they desire to have them stand as conspicuous and palpable breaches of the national compact by ourselves; and as affording justification to themselves, to the world and to posterity, for the destruction of the most perfect and prosperous government which the Providence of God has ever permitted the wisdom of man to devise.
You seem to forget that before the south initiated hostilities there wasn't a whole lot of desire to make them stay. It wouldn't have been hard at all to work out division of property, settlement of debt, access to the Mississippi, and any other areas of possible disagreement. Lincoln may not have liked it but he didn't have a lot of political support to force the issue.
Well the Taney court had ruled personal liberty laws unconstitutional in 1842, I have no doubt that they would have found the later ones unconstitutional as well. State's rights was not apparently a universally respected concept.
Lemuel Shaw was Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
Benjamin R. Curtis was a former Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. He resigned from the Supreme Court in protest of its Dred Scott decision.
Joel Parker was professor of constitutional law at Harvard and former Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
Considering the Dred Scott decision I don't see how the judges could have ruled otherwise. Taney said that blacks were due no rights at all that had to be respected, so any laws meant to protect them or grant them any rights at all was bound to be found unconstitutional.
Horse sh*t! The South wanted to leave the Union, Lincoln didn't want them to leave because he would lose revenue ... you know ... INCOME ... TARIFFS! Lincoln weaseled his way into getting a war going, called it a rebellion to sell it to the dummies up north. If you view things with the eyes of an early 19th century invdividual, you would understand that the Bill of Rights was seen as a prohibition against the Fed abusing its power ergo, the 9th and 10th amendments gave the Southern States the RIGHT to secede. Lincoln waged a war of subjugation on the Southern States, then left them saddled with a debt after the war that still hasn't been paid off to this day. Not to mention the Northern hordes that raped, pillaged and torching their way across the South the way the SS troops would wage war 80 years later. AND ALL WITH LINCOLN'S TACIT APPROVAL! No sir, don't even try to play that "saintly" Lincoln crap here!
But then by your posts, you like Presidents who subvert the Constitution to limit your civil liberties and in effect make you a "slave" to the government.
for the unionists it was ONLY about preventing secession & preventing the south from achieving LIBERTY.
that was the ONLY real issue.
free dixie,sw
rotflmRao!
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Blah, blah..., tiresome. How do you expect this to be the case?
Excellent point and I find myself in deficiency for not posting that. You are correct.
Well that's all fine and good. But if your life, liberty and property was being threatened by a central power and you felt that that power was going to usurp your property and your slaves who represent part of that property then wouldn't you fight back?
To all lurkers and to all posters, I'm not in any way advocating slavery, I'm just saying that in the 1800's South and the 1800's North, slavery was an accepted thing.
If you feel that Northern states were simply exercising their state sovereignty by ignoring Article IV Section 2 of the Constitution, then you shouldn't be surprised that other sovereign states said to hell with this, if you're not keeping the Constitutional bargain you made, we're leaving.
That is what the Philadelphia Public Ledger article I posted warned about.
FYI, Massachusetts' personal liberty laws included the following:
Any person who shall act as counsel or attorney for any claimant of any alleged fugitive from service or labor, under or by virtue of the acts of congress mentioned in the ninth section of this act, shall be deemed to have resigned any commission from the Commonwealth that he may possess, and he shall be thereafter incapacitated from appearing as counsel or attorney in the courts of this Commonwealth...
It is no wonder that many Massachusetts attorneys and judges thought the law was unconstitutional.
Why would a nation born of slaves, built by slaves, freed by an upirsing of those very slaves, allow slavery in the very documents and laws that made it reality, made it a free nation, under the rule of no other nation, bond to serve no other nation?
Since you never answer the questions I put to you, I'll start answering them for you, slavery was never meant to be in this country, we could not maintain a country based upon freedom and liberty without all men being free.
That's why the real cause of the civil war will always be slavery, there came a point in time when those that had once been enslaved and their children and their children's children said all people must be free. And when their voices got loud enough and they held enough power to elect a president, The rich democrat slaveowners of the south decided to rebel against the very ideal of freedom for all, and lost everything in the end because they were no better then those that once enslaved americans for the sake of profit.
That you, "a republican party Official" are so at odds with the very reasons this party was founded upon, is while a testement ot the ignorance of history forced upon this country by years of democrat rule. The very democrats that forced a battle for civil rights are now falsely hailed as the champions of civil rights, and the republican party that fought for all to be free is now condemned from within and without as racist and treasonous for fighting for The constitution, That more prefect union our forefathers dreampt of creating.
Why is it so hard to believe that there were two sides to the secession question and it was only right for the issues of both sides to be addressed? You persist in believing that only the south's rights were to be respected and only the south had any protections. That's what I find so hard to believe.
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