Posted on 06/05/2013 7:52:32 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Decades ago, the distinguished Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald coined the phrase “getting right with Lincoln” to describe the impulse people feel to appropriate Lincoln for their own political agendas. Anyone who has watched Barack Obama, who as a senator wrote an essay for Time magazine entitled “What I See in Lincoln’s Eyes” and swore the oath of office as president on Lincoln’s Bible, will be familiar with the phenomenon. Democrats like to claim Lincoln as, in effect, the first Big Government liberal, while Republicans tout him as the founder of their party.
But the reflex identified by Donald isn’t universally felt. A portion of the Right has always hated Old Abe. It blames him for wielding dictatorial powers in an unnecessary war against the Confederacy and creating the predicate for the modern welfare state, among sundry other offenses against the constitutional order and liberty.
The anti-Lincoln critique is mostly, but not entirely, limited to a fringe. Yet it speaks to a longstanding ambivalence among conservatives about Lincoln. A few founding figures of this magazine were firmly in the anti-Lincoln camp. Libertarianism is rife with critics of Lincoln, among them Ron Paul and the denizens of the fever-swamp at LewRockwell.com. The Loyola University Maryland professor Thomas DiLorenzo has made a cottage industry of publishing unhinged Lincoln-hating polemics. The list of detractors includes left-over agrarians, southern romantics, and a species of libertarians — “people-owning libertarians,” as one of my colleagues archly calls them — who apparently hate federal power more than they abhor slavery. They are all united in their conviction that both in resisting secession and in the way he did it, Lincoln took American history on one of its great Wrong Turns.
The conservative case against Lincoln is not only tendentious and wrong, it puts the Right crosswise with a friend. As I argue in my new book, Lincoln Unbound, Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the foremost proponent of opportunity in all of American history. His economics of dynamism and change and his gospel of discipline and self-improvement are particularly important to a country that has been stagnating economically and suffering from a social breakdown that is limiting economic mobility. No 19th-century figure can be an exact match for either of our contemporary competing political ideologies, but Lincoln the paladin of individual initiative, the worshiper of the Founding Fathers, and the advocate of self-control is more naturally a fellow traveler with today’s conservatives than with progressives. In Lincoln Unbound, I make the positive case for Lincoln, but here I want to act as a counsel for the defense. The debate over Lincoln on the Right is so important because it can be seen, in part, as a proxy for the larger argument over whether conservatism should read itself out of the American mainstream or — in this hour of its discontent — dedicate itself to a Lincolnian program of opportunity and uplift consistent with its limited-government principles. A conservatism that rejects Lincoln is a conservatism that wants to confine itself to an irritable irrelevance to 21st-century America and neglect what should be the great project of reviving it as a country of aspiration.
The fundamental critique of Lincoln is that he was “the Great Centralizer,” as columnist and George Mason economist Walter Williams puts it. He earned this pejorative sobriquet, first and foremost, by resisting secession, which “remained a reserved right of the states,” in the words of Thomas Woods in his Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. In defending secession, Lincoln-haters often revert to the brilliant 19th-century South Carolina politician and thinker John C. Calhoun, although he’s a dubious source of wisdom about the Constitution. (I draw particularly on the excellent work of Thomas Krannawitter in his Vindicating Lincoln and Daniel Farber in his Lincoln’s Constitution in what follows.)
Calhoun didn’t want to preserve the constitutional order, but to change it to afford even more protections for the slave states. Historian Richard Hofstadter called him “The Marx of the Master Class.” He disdained the Federalist Papers. Believing that the Constitution represented only a loose “compact” between the states, he thought the country had gone wrong from the very first Congress, which had set the country on a nationalist path “from which it has never yet recovered.” He wanted to substitute his own constitutional scheme — involving nullification by the states under his doctrine of “concurrent majority” — for that of the Founders.
Calhoun’s theories got a test run in the Nullification Crisis of the early 1830s, when South Carolina “nullified” the so-called 1828 Tariff of Abominations before backing down in the face of President Andrew Jackson’s fierce reaction (a compromise was forged over tariff policy). Then came the South’s secession after Lincoln’s election in 1860, which was defended in Calhounite terms by Jefferson Davis himself. He said “that each State was, in the last resort, the sole judge as well of its wrongs as of the mode and measure of redress. Indeed, it is obvious that under the law of nations this principle is an axiom as applied to the relations of independent sovereign States, such as those which had united themselves under the constitutional compact.”
There is nothing in the text of the Constitution to suggest that it is a treaty among independent nations, and the right to secession shows up nowhere. You don’t need to embrace Lincoln’s robust nationalism — he thought the Union had existed prior to the Constitution and the states, and argued that “perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments” — to reject nullification and secession. You need only go to the Father of the Constitution, James Madison.
Madison held something of a middle position. He explained in Federalist 39 that we have “neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both,” or, as he said elsewhere, “a new Creation — a real nondescript.” That didn’t mean that the union wasn’t a nation. “What can be more preposterous,” Madison asked, “than to say that the States as united, are in no respect or degree, a Nation, which implies sovereignty; altho’ acknowledged to be such by all other Nations & Sovereigns, and maintaining with them, all the international relations, of war & peace, treaties, commerce, &c.” In the 1869 case of Texas v. White, the Supreme Court nicely stated a Madisonian view of the question: “The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States.”
Madison considered Calhoun’s views dangerous. If the states had the power to decide whether or not to abide by federal law, it would lead to clashes between state and federal officials “in executing conflicting decrees, the result of which would depend on the comparative force of the local posse.” It put “powder under the Constitution and Union, and a match in the hand of every party to blow them up at pleasure.” Secession was “the twin” of nullification, and Madison urged in 1832, “It is high time that the claim to secede at will should be put down by the public opinion.”
It hasn’t been entirely put down yet. In his anti-Lincoln tract The Real Lincoln, Thomas DiLorenzo argues that secession is as American as apple pie. “The United States were founded by secessionists,” he insists, “and began with a document, the Declaration, that justified the secession of the American states.” No. The country was founded by revolutionaries and the Declaration justified an act of revolution. No one denies the right of revolution. Madison said that revolution was an “extra & ultra constitutional right.” Even Lincoln, in his First Inaugural Address, concedes the point: “If, by the mere force of numbers, a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution — certainly would, if such right were a vital one.”
The friends of secession aren’t eager to invoke the right to revolution, though. For one thing, when a revolution fails, you hang. For another, the Declaration says a revolution shouldn’t be undertaken “for light and transient causes,” but only when a people have suffered “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” What was the train in 1860 and 1861? Seven southern states left the Union before Lincoln was inaugurated. The South had dominated the federal government for decades. Abuses and usurpations? It’s more like lose an election and go home.
As Thomas Krannawitter points out, the Founders thought revolution was justified in the case of a violation of natural rights. The Confederates, in contrast, wanted to wage a revolution to ensure no interference with their violation of the natural rights of slaves.
This gets to another element of the anti-Lincoln case, which involves denying or downplaying the role of slavery in secession and the Civil War. DiLorenzo says, for example, that Lincoln’s cause was “centralized government and the pursuit of empire.” Walter Williams addressed the issue in a column aptly titled “The Civil War Wasn’t about Slavery.” Charles Adams, author of When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, pins the war on “economic and imperialistic forces behind a rather flimsy façade of freeing slaves.” The pro-secessionists typically fasten on the tariff as the cause of all the unpleasantness.
This is laughable. The tariff wasn’t anything new, and in fact was the main source of revenue for the federal government. Tariff rates bumped up and down. When South Carolina got the ball rolling on secession in December 1860, the tariff was at its lowest level since 1816, thanks to southern and western success at dropping rates in 1857. The Morrill tariff, steeply hiking rates and supported by Lincoln, passed the House in May 1860. But it didn’t pass the Senate until early the next year, its cause aided by the departure of southern senators who were no longer there to vote against the measure that some of their chronologically challenged latter-day apologists would hold responsible for their exit.
There’s no doubt that the South had reason to be aggrieved by high tariff rates favoring northern manufacturers, and the issue came up in its justifications for leaving the Union. But it was decidedly secondary to the primary issue: slavery, slavery, and slavery. South Carolina’s declaration of secession complained, first of all, that northerners had become maddeningly lax about returning fugitive slaves to bondage. The second sentence of the Georgia declaration was: “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.” Mississippi avowed with refreshing frankness: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”
Even DiLorenzo concedes that slavery was the initial cause of secession, but he does it almost by way of an aside, so that he can keep his focus on the tariff and economics. But slavery was the South’s prism for everything. Some southerners worried that if the federal government could impose a tariff, it could interfere with slavery. The South’s commitment to federalism was highly situational. It insisted on a federal Fugitive Slave Act to tighten the screws on anyone in the northern states who was insufficiently zealous about returning runaways. Southern Democrats walked out of the 1860 Democratic convention when the party couldn’t forge a consensus on a platform demanding federal protection for slavery in the territories.
Lincoln’s forceful response to the dissolution of his country is another count against him for his critics. They, of course, call him a “dictator,” among other choice names. Economist Paul Craig Roberts called him “an American Pol Pot, except worse.” For DiLorenzo, he was “a glutton for tyranny.” These Lincoln-haters are real sticklers for the Constitution yet have no use for the admonition in Article II that the president take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
They come up with fanciful alternatives to military conflict. Ron Paul wonders why Lincoln didn’t forestall the war by simply buying up and freeing the slaves. With his usual sense of realism, Paul ignores the fact that Lincoln repeatedly advanced schemes for just such a compensated emancipation. Lincoln argued for these proposals as “the cheapest and most humane way to end the war.” But except in the District of Columbia, they went precisely . . . nowhere. The border states weren’t selling, let alone the South. Even little Delaware, which was selected as a test case because in 1860 it had only 587 slaveholders out of a white population of 90,500, couldn’t be persuaded to cash out of slavery. One plan proposed by Lincoln would have paid $400 or so per slave and achieved full abolition by 1893. A version of the scheme failed in the state’s legislature.
The bottom line is that the South created a national emergency, and, ever since, its apologists have excoriated Lincoln for responding with emergency powers. After the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Lincoln replied with every lever at his disposal — and then some. He called out the militia. He blockaded southern ports. He called for volunteers to increase the size of the regular army and expanded the navy. He directed that $2 million be forwarded to private citizens in New York for expenditures related to the national defense (he suspected the loyalty of the federal bureaucracy). He did all of this without consulting Congress, which wasn’t in session. Lincoln, who wanted to control the early response to the war, didn’t call it back until July 4.
There was no doubt about his power to call out the militia. For the rest, he fell back on the authority of Congress. “These measures, whether strictly legal or not,” he said in his July 4 message to Congress, “were ventured upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand, and a public necessity; trusting, then as now, that Congress would readily ratify them.” Expanding the military and appropriating funds without Congress can’t pass constitutional muster, but Congress did indeed bless all his military measures retroactively — in the bill’s language, “as if they had been issued and done under the previous express authority and direction of the Congress of the United States.”
Most controversial is Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus. He first suspended it between Washington and Philadelphia in April 1861 after troops heading to the undefended capital from the north were attacked by a mob in Baltimore, after which Baltimore railroad bridges and telegraph lines were cut. This was a genuine crisis of a government beset by enemies on all sides. Article I, section 9 of the Constitution says, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” The circumstances certainly justified suspension, but the placement of this provision in Article I suggests it is a congressional power.
Congress rendered the question moot in 1863 when it passed a law saying the president had the power to suspend. As the suspension covered the entire country, the military arrests and trials brought inevitable overreaching and abuses. They earned Lincoln a rebuke from the Supreme Court after the war, when it ruled against military trials where civilian courts were still open. Some high-profile arrests, most famously of the anti-war Democrat Clement Vallandigham of Ohio — in 1863, without Lincoln’s prior knowledge — have proven embarrassments for the ages. But in his careful, Pulitzer Prize–winning study of civil liberties during the war, Mark Neely gives a basically exculpatory though hardly uncritical verdict on the Lincoln record.
Overall, according to Neely, arrests “were of less significance in the history of civil liberties than anyone ever imagined.” He points out that even Lincoln-administration officials often used the term “political prisoner” for any civilian held by the military, a highly misleading label. “A majority of the arrests,” he writes, “would have occurred whether the writ was suspended or not. They were caused by the mere incidents or friction of war, which produced refugees, informers, guides, Confederate defectors, carriers of contraband goods, and other such persons as came between or in the wake of large armies. They may have been civilians, but their political views were irrelevant.”
Lincoln wasn’t a dictator; he was a wartime president operating at the outer limits of his power in dire circumstances when the existence of the country was at risk, and — inevitably — he made mistakes. Lincoln didn’t try to put off elections, including his own in 1864, which he was convinced for a long stretch of time that he would lose.
Yet another favorite count against Lincoln on the Right is that he was the midwife for the birth of the modern welfare state — a false claim also made by progressives bent on appropriating him for their own purposes. The war necessarily entailed the growth and centralization of the state, but this hardly makes Lincoln a forerunner to FDR or LBJ. The income tax required to fund the war, instituted in 1861 and soon made into a progressive tax with higher rates for the wealthy, was a temporary measure eliminated in 1872. Wars are expensive. In 1860, the federal budget was well under $100 million. By the end of the war, it was more than $1 billion. But the budget dropped back down to $300 million, excluding payments on the debt, within five years of the end of the war.
To see in any of this the makings of the modern welfare state requires a leap of imagination. In the midst of the war, the State Department had all of 33 employees. The famous instances of government activism not directly related to the war — the subsidies to railroads, the Homestead Act — were a far cry from the massive transfer programs instituted in the 20th century. The railroads got land and loan guarantees but were a genuinely transformational technology often, though not always, providing an economic benefit. The Homestead Act, as Lincoln historian Allen Guelzo argues, can be viewed as a gigantic privatization of public lands, which were sold off at a cut rate to people willing to improve their plots.
In the North during the war, historian Richard Franklin Bensel points out, the industrial and agricultural sectors ran free of government controls. The labor force, although tapped for manpower for the war, was relatively unmolested. The government became entangled with the financial system, but that system was also becoming more modern, sophisticated, and free of European influence. Given its vitality and wealth, the North could wage the war without subjecting itself to heavy-handed command-and-control policies. Compared with the overmatched Confederacy, it was a laissez-faire haven.
It was, rather, the southern political economy that came to depend most heavily on bureaucratic control and government expropriation, as Bensel notes. An extensive conscription law effectively subjected the entire labor force to centralized direction. The government had the discretionary power to exempt certain occupations and to detail men to civic duties deemed necessary; private concerns, therefore, depended on the government for workers. Despite a constitutional prohibition, the government subsidized the construction of railroads and by the end of the war assumed control of them and, by extension, the supply of raw materials.
The Confederacy “impressed” property from manufacturers, farmers, and railroads to supply the military. The system led to wide-ranging price controls. One Confederate congressman complained of the government agents who were “as thick as locusts in Egypt.” Under pressure from the Union blockade, the government eventually prohibited the importation of luxuries and took control of a vast array of exports. It imposed a more progressive income tax than the North did. In short, the Confederates pioneered a program of war socialism back when Woodrow Wilson — the progressive president who would run the country’s economy on a similar basis during World War I — was still in knee-pants.
Lincoln’s economics are hardly invulnerable to criticism. He was indeed a government activist, though at a time when government was different from what it is today — vastly less extensive and obstructive, with the wealth transfers of the modern welfare state nowhere in sight. Throughout his career he supported internal improvements (i.e., transportation projects), a protective tariff, and sound, duly regulated banking. These policies were associated with their share of waste and corruption. On the other hand, wherever canals and railroads touched, they brought the competitive pressure of the market with them; the tariff was a support to the growth of industry; the banks produced a reliable paper currency necessary for a cash economy. They all tended to create a vibrant, diverse economy open to men of various talents. Here is where Lincoln is guilty as charged: The agrarians are right that he sought to end the simpler, agricultural America in favor of a modern commercial and industrial economy.
There is one final indictment against Lincoln. It is said that he elevated the Declaration and the principle of equality that it enshrines over the Constitution. NR’s venerable senior editor Frank Meyer worried that he had loosed a free-floating, abstract commitment to equality throughout the land that supported the leveling tendencies of modern liberalism. But Lincoln’s equality was the equality of natural rights, not results. “I take it,” he said in 1860, “that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good.” He warned a delegation of workingmen during the war of the peril of a “war on property, or the owners of property”: “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself.”
Lincoln thought the purpose of the Constitution was to protect the inalienable rights enunciated in the Declaration; but this did not downgrade the Constitution. Despite his opposition to slavery, he honored the Constitution’s protections for it, even as his abolitionist allies bridled at them. In his final speech of the 1858 Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas, he said, “I have neither assailed, nor wrestled with any part of the Constitution. The legal right of the Southern people to reclaim their fugitives I have constantly admitted. The legal right of Congress to interfere with the institution in the states, I have constantly denied.” When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he did it as an inherently limited war measure. Allen Guelzo notes how he never lost sight of its prospective legal vulnerability once the war ended. He finally looked to the 13th Amendment — a completely constitutional measure — as the “King’s cure for all the evils.”
I think it is important to clear away the anti-Lincoln flotsam so that conservatives can appreciate what Lincoln has to teach them, especially in this moment when opportunity in America is under threat from stultifying and wrongheaded policies and from an ongoing cultural breakdown. Notwithstanding the Right’s ambivalence about Lincoln, he has always had friends in unexpected places. The great traditionalist Russell Kirk, despite devoting a chapter to Calhoun in his classic The Conservative Mind, admired Lincoln. “In his great conservative end, the preservation of the Union, he succeeded,” Kirk wrote, noting “the charity and fortitude of this uncouth, homely, melancholy, lovable man.” The formidable agrarian Richard Weaver also has a brilliant chapter on Lincoln in his book The Ethics of Rhetoric. He argues, “With his full career in view, there seems no reason to differ with [Lincoln law partner William] Herndon’s judgment that Lincoln displayed a high order of ‘conservative statesmanship.’”
Then there is William F. Buckley Jr., who didn’t always agree with his friend Frank Meyer. Buckley wrote a letter to the editor dissenting from one of Meyer’s anti-Lincoln blasts in the 1960s. “Some conservatives have a Thing on Lincoln, including, unfortunately, my esteemed colleague Mr. Frank Meyer.” Buckley especially regretted the charge that Lincoln was “anti-humanitarian”: “It seems to me that this is worse than mere tendentious ideological revisionism. It comes close to blasphemy.” So many decades later, tendentious revisionism and blasphemy are still favorite tools of the anti-Lincoln Right.
We should reject them now, as Buckley did then, and re-discover the Lincoln who told the 166th Ohio regiment during the war that it was “through this free government” that they had “an open field and fair chance for [their] industry, enterprise, and intelligence,” and “equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations.” He concluded, “The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.” That jewel still needs to be secured, and it is still worth fighting for.
– Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. Parts of this essay are drawn from his new book Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream — and How We Can Do It Again, coming out this month from Broadside Books.
September 8th, 1864, Camp Near Petersburg, VA. 4 pages in ink to his Mother by William J. Thompson, Co. B, 13th North Carolina Rgt. He relates in part, “I am glad your little Negro is getting well again, he discusses the wheat crop and corn crop, everything is quiet here except for the usual shelling and sharp shooting which is a regular business every day, we are so used to it we really do not notice. There has not been a fight here since the last fight on the railroad I told you about in my last letter [Ream’s Station]. Calvin Grier is getting along very well with his wound and if he has no bad luck he will get well now. His Father is here staying with him and when he gets well he will return home. As far as the war some think we will have peace by next spring. The papers say that some of the northern states say there must be peace at any terms - I hope they stick to what they say. I have not seen from John Jamison since I came to Petersburg but heard from him about 2 weeks ago and he is well. It is so true about him capturing a horse and a pistol. The Yanks hasn’t got to fool with him as he will take them in certain. They have taken up their last winter trade again that is shooting men for desertion. There was one man shot in our brigade yesterday and there will be another shot in our regiment tomorrow and another one from our brigade next week - all for deserting. It is hard to see them tied up and shot but they know the consequences before they ran away and they have no business going. One fellow was accidentally killed yesterday. He was out on a skirmish drill where they make out they were shooting and one fellow had a load in his gun and happened to sight a man and his gun went off and shot him through the head. Have seen Green and his wound is healing well. It was a slight wound but I reckon it was pretty sore. W. J.
http://www.historicalshop.com/sitecontents/confederate/document.htm
There is a big difference in making the claim around deserters (which both sides did, and you point out) and the statememnt that Lee created the military tactic to kill those not meeting miltary objectives in the field. Big damn differnce skippy, and you have been caught in a bald faced lie.
Lol
Imagine Skippy lies
Civil War Letter
To my beloved family,
Not a day goes by that I am not constantly reminded of my stupid decision to leave home, in search of a name for myself. People told me that joining the Confederate Army would be a grand adventure. Let me tell you, Father was right in more ways than one. I could have never have dreamt of such horrors that I have seen on the battlefield. Everywhere, I look is disaster. The skinny, pale eyes of dead men lying on the field, alongside enemy and assorted gored limbs in one mass grave, still haunts me to this day in my sleep. I no longer sleep for more than four hours without seeing those yellowed eyes of the dead.
Just the other day my good friend and wise mentor, Private Nathaniel Gordon passed away. He had received a horribly shocking letter from his wife and family. Not only had his youngest daughter, sweet Isabelle died from malnutrition, but the Almighty Lord also took the lives of his father, mother, and two sisters. To top it off, his charming wife Susana also vividly described the whole town in flames. Apparently some damned Yankee General by the name of Sherman had passed through and looted the city. As if that was not enough, when he left, he also torched the city. With no home, Susana was forced to move to Richmond where her sister took her in. The same very night Nathaniel read the letter, he ran away in hopes of seeing his suffering wife again. However, word spread quickly and General Robert E. Lee rode out and dragged the miserable private back and shot him. He told us that the same fate met all of those who tried to desert, because it was treason.
Now morale is at an all time low. All thoughts of desertion have been erased from our minds. Also lack of, well everything leaves us with no comfort. General Robert E. Lee has continually reassured us that a supply train filled with blankets, shoes, and new clothes was on the way. After days turned into weeks, and weeks slur into months, all hope... [continues]
http://www.studymode.com/essays/Civil-War-Letter-76392.html
I am also still waiting for one of them to tell me a real present day Washington conservative from the northeast.
The 64th North Carolina Regiment is an ill-starred unit suffering an epidemic of desertion. Once numbering 300 men, it scarcely fields a third of that number now....
Under Colonel Keith, with Colonel Allen complicit, the 64th goes on a tear. They torture women to make them give up the whereabouts of their husbands — in vain. They hang and whip Mrs. Unus Riddle, 85 years old. They hang two of the Shelton wives, Mary and Sarah, by their necks until nearly dead.
The Memphis Bulletin reports: “Old Mrs. Sallie Moore, seventy years of age, was whipped with hickory rods till the blood ran in streams down her back to the ground. … Martha White, an idiotic girl, was beaten and tied by the neck all day to a tree.”
Keith and Allen’s men knock down houses and burn them. They slaughter livestock wantonly.
Through no cooperation by Shelton Laurel women, the marauding force rounds up 15 men. Colonel Allen persuades them not to resist, promising a fair trial. He knows from the start that these men are unlikely to have had anything to do with the raid on Marshall — witnesses identified the raiders as mostly deserters from their own regiment.
But Colonel Keith detains them anyway and jails them for two days in Marshall. Two of the prisoners manage to slip their bonds and escape into the night. The remaining 13 are ordered to march up the valley.
As the Memphis Bulletin relates the story, “They bid farewell to their wives, daughters and sisters, directing them to procure the witnesses and bring them to the court in Tennessee, where they supposed their trial would take place. … The poor fellows had proceeded but a few miles when they were turned from the road into a gorge in the mountain and halted.”
Colonel Keith orders five of the men to their knees. A squad of soldiers with rifles files into line 10 paces in front of them and aims. Joe Woods, who at 60 is the eldest, cries out, “For God’s sake, men, you are not going to shoot us? If you are going to murder us, give us at least time to pray.” Keith responds that there’s no time for praying. The kneeling prisoners raise their hands to their faces, futilely trying to fend off bullets with flesh. For a long moment, the soldiers hesitate, moved by the pleas of mercy from the helpless men.
Colonel Keith can hardly contain his fury. “Fire or you will take their place!”
The soldiers fire. Four of the men fall lifeless. A fifth is gutshot and must be finished off with a bullet to the head.
Five more are made to kneel, including 13-year-old David Shelton. “You have killed my father and brothers,” he pleads. “You have shot my father in the face. Do not shoot me in the face.”
The soldiers fire, and again four men die instantly. But young Shelton is only wounded in both arms. He hugs the legs of one of the officers. “You have killed my old father and three brothers, you have shot me in both arms. … I forgive you all this — I can get well. … Let me go home to my mother and sisters.”
But they haul him back to the place of execution and shoot him again — eight times. Then they execute the remaining three men. The soldiers dump all the bodies into a shallow trench scored out of the snow. One of the soldiers, Sgt. N.B.D. Jay of Virginia, bounds onto the heap of bodies. He cries out to his fellows, “Pat Juba for me while I dance the damned scoundrels down to and through hell!”
http://www.ourstate.com/atrocity-at-shelton-laurel/
Not just NC, but also Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee, Georgia. Every rebel state except South Carolina provided regiments to the US Army.
Of course Thomas J. Jackson was known for shooting stragglers. They usually put it more kindly “A magnificant marcher of men.” one might say- “Jackson’s foot cavalry” another might say. Fact is, his men knew it was deadly to fall behind.
And of course, he was shot by his own soldiers.
So now you can appreciate why.
Actually, I am pro-southern heritage, and particularly for the southern heritage of resisting oppression under color of law, the southern heritage of telling the truth, the southern heritage of being opposed to rape, opposed to kidnapping, and opposed to torture.
Like making statments that General Lee developed military tactics of shooting soldies who didn't meet miltiary objectives? Keep on talking skippy, you are close to losing all credibility.
I am calling you out again. Provide proof and references. You have already been caught in one lie. Keep on digging.
So now you can appreciate why.
Yep, infering that Jackson's men shot him on purpose really helps your case too. /s. You are on a roll dude.
The procession thus formed…[and] marched slowly to the corner of 9th street, and turned towards Main, entering the Capitol Square by the gate on Grace street. The military having formed a line extending across the Square past Washington’s monument, the body was slowly conveyed down the line to the Governor’s mansion, and carried into the large reception room. The bells were tolled till sundown, till which time hundreds of people remained on the Square. We have never before seen such an exhibition of heartfelt and general sorrow in reference to any other event whatever as has been evinced by all since the announcement of the death of Stonewall Jackson. (Richmond Dispatch, 5/12/1863)
Jackson’s body was brought to the capitol rotunda to lie in state where thousands paid their last respects:
On arriving at the Capitol the coffin containing the remains of the lamented hero, borne by the bearers, was conveyed to the large hall in the Southern end of the building, and the doors thrown open to afford an opportunity to the eager crowd to look upon the features of one whose death they regarded as a great national calamity. Good order was observed, and the dense crowd slowly made its way through the rotunda into the large hall where the coffin laid, and as they passed gazed for the last time upon all that is mortal of the gallant dead. (Richmond Daily Dispatch, 5/13/1863)
After the public had a chance to say farewell, the coffin was removed and taken once again by train to Jackson’s home of Lexington, VA where he would be laid to rest. In an editorial, the Richmond Daily Dispatch lamented that Jackson could not be interred at Hollywood Cemetery near President James Monroe’s tomb, “that beautiful spot, so near the theatre of his glory, where every breeze wafts his renown, and the murmuring waters, as they roll solemnly by, seem to attune themselves to sweet yet mournful melodies of the grave.” While Hollywood would be the final resting place for several of the Civil War’s famous generals, it would not be the case for Jackson.
North of Richmond, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee still reeled from the loss of Jackson, but after his victory at Chancellorsville, he knew he must press forward to keep the initiative. The war would go on despite the loss of Jackson, as it had continued on without the thousands of other brave soldiers already lost to both sides.
Sewell Mountain, Harrisonburg, Lewisburg, Kanawha Salt-works, first four, forward and back, seemed to be the programme of that day. Rosecrans, that wiley old fox, kept Lee and Jackson both busy trying to catch him, but Rosey would not be caught. March, march, march; tramp, tramp, tramp, back through the valley to Huntersville and Warm Springs, and up through the most beautiful valley—the Shenandoah—in the world, passing towns and elegant farms and beautiful residences, rich pastures and abundant harvests, which a Federal General (Fighting Joe Hooker), later in the war, ordered to be so sacked and destroyed that a "crow passing over this valley would have to carry his rations." Passing on, we arrived at Winchester. The first night we arrived at this place, the wind blew a perfect hurricane, and every tent and marquee in Lee's and Jackson's army was blown down. This is the first sight we had of Stonewall Jackson, riding upon his old sorrel horse, his feet drawn up as if his stirrups were much too short for him, and his old dingy military cap hanging well forward over his head, and his nose erected in the air, his old rusty sabre rattling by his side. This is the way the grand old hero of a hundred battles looked. His spirit is yonder with the blessed ones that have gone before, but his history is one that the country will ever be proud of, and his memory will be cherished and loved by the old soldiers who followed him through the war.
Sounds like real hate to me....
One secret of Stonewall Jackson's success was that he was such a strict disciplinarian. He did his duty himself and was ever at his post, and he expected and demanded of everybody to do the same thing. He would have a man shot at the drop of a hat, and drop it himself. The first army order that was ever read to us after being attached to his corps, was the shooting to death by musketry of two men who had stopped on the battlefield to carry off a wounded comrade. It was read to us in line of battle at Winchester.
Ptvt Sam Watkins again:
The soldiers in the whole army got rebellious—almost mutinous—and would curse and abuse Stonewall Jackson; in fact, they called him "Fool Tom Jackson." They blamed him for the cold weather; they blamed him for everything, and when he would ride by a regiment they would take occasion, sotto voce, to abuse him, and call him "Fool Tom Jackson," and loud enough for him to hear. Soldiers from all commands would fall out of ranks and stop by the road side and swear that they would not follow such a leader any longer.
Pvt Sam Watkins Co. H First Tennessee Regiment
Nope. There’s a huge difference.
Not sure how he could be a tyrant, except maybe to his staff.
False argument. The Founders operated under the laws of logic and reason, and one cannot include everything in a document intended to LIMIT powers. Thus the used what was called the Rule of Exclusion, so everything not included was, by default, EXCLUDED.
• § 207. XIII. Another rule of interpretation deserves consideration in regard to the constitution. There are certain maxims, which have found their way, not only into judicial discussions, but into the business of common life, as founded in common sense, and common convenience. Thus, it is often said, that in an instrument a specification of particulars is an exclusion of generals; or the expression of one thing is the exclusion of another. Lord Bacon's remark, "that, as exception strengthens the force of a law in cases not excepted, so enumeration weakens it in cases not enumerated," has been perpetually referred to, as a fine illustration.
Justice Joseph Story on Rules of Constitutional Interpretation
Since the Founders did not see fit to include the subject of secession in the Constitution, it is therefore excluded from the authority of the federal government and, by the 10th Amendment, reserved to the States.
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But slavery was the South’s prism for everything.
Another attempt at self deflection. The writer's reach exceeds his grasp when he bypasses the fact the Constitution is a LEGAL document, not a moral one. It's true that the South's main focus was slavery simply because, as an agrarian economy, it could not survive without it at the time.
The writer also disregards a huge section of history by failing to acknowledge facts, since the Appeals Court to the Supreme court set the precedent on the subject of slavery and the recovery of slaves in the court's Jack v. Martin decison in 1835.....long before Lincoln even showed up!
You can't convince me that as a lawyer Lincoln was ignorant of this case OR its legal meaning
I cannot refrain, in conclusion, from expressing my full belief, if the doctrine contended for by the plaintiff in error is to be regarded as the established law of the land, and consequently that all the states in the union are to be permitted to legislate upon this subject, requiring as many modes of proceeding in cases of this kind, as there are states, that it will in the end lead indirectly to the abolition of slavery, and that the most fearful consequences in regard to the permanency of our institutions will ensue. I regard this as but the entering wedge to other doctrines which are designed to extirpate slavery; and we may find when it is too late, that the patience of the south, however well founded upon principle, from repeated aggression will become exhausted. These considerations would have no influence with me if I could satisfy myself of the unconstitutionality of the law of congress; but I can never contribute in any manner, either directly or indirectly, to the abolition of slavery, however great an evil it may be, in violation of the constitution and laws of the country, and in violation of the solemn compact which was made by our forefathers at the adoption of the constitution, and which their posterity are bound to preserve inviolate. I am sustained in this view of the case by the whole current of authority, in all the states where the question has been decided. The whole doctrine was investigated in Massachusetts, in a case reported in Pickering, and presenting as strong a case as can be imagined. A slave belonging to a person in Virginia fled to the state of Massachusetts; he resided in that state five years, and in the meantime had accumulated a considerable property. It was nevertheless decided, upon solemn argument, that the law of the United States was constitutional; that the slave was not entitled to trial by jury, or by any other mode different from that prescribed by the law of congress; and he was accordingly taken back to Virginia. This was the unanimous opinion of the court. Mr. Justice Thatcher dissented, but not on the ground of the unconstitutionality of the law of congress.
"This Government is acknowledged by all to be one of enumerated powers. The principle that it can exercise only the powers granted to it would seem too apparent to have required to be enforced by all those arguments which its enlightened friends, while it was depending before the people, found it necessary to urge; that principle is now universally admitted. But the question respecting the extent of the powers actually granted is perpetually arising, and will probably continue to arise so long as our system shall exist. In discussing these questions, the conflicting powers of the General and State Governments must be brought into view, and the supremacy of their respective laws, when they are in opposition, must be settled...Among the enumerated powers, we do not find that of establishing a bank or creating a corporation. But there is no phrase in the instrument which, like the Articles of Confederation, excludes incidental or implied powers and which requires that everything granted shall be expressly and minutely described. Even the 10th Amendment, which was framed for the purpose of quieting the excessive jealousies which had been excited, omits the word "expressly," and declares only that the powers "not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people," thus leaving the question whether the particular power which may become the subject of contest has been delegated to the one Government, or prohibited to the other, to depend on a fair construction of the whole instrument. The men who drew and adopted this amendment had experienced the embarrassments resulting from the insertion of this word in the Articles of Confederation, and probably omitted it to avoid those embarrassments. A Constitution, to contain an accurate detail of all the subdivisions of which its great powers will admit, and of all the means by which they may be carried into execution, would partake of the prolixity of a legal code, and could scarcely be embraced by the human mind. It would probably never be understood by the public. Its nature, therefore, requires that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objects designated, and the minor ingredients which compose those objects be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves. That this idea was entertained by the framers of the American Constitution is not only to be inferred from the nature of the instrument, but from the language. Why else were some of the limitations found in the 9th section of the 1st article introduced? It is also in some degree warranted by their having omitted to use any restrictive term which might prevent its receiving a fair and just interpretation. In considering this question, then, we must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding." -- Chief Justice John Marshall (McCulloch v Maryland, 1819)
If we accept Chief Justice Marshall's logic and look at the Constitution then it is not hard to see that a state needing approval to leave the Union is implied. Approval of the other states is needed for a state to join. Approval is needed for states to combine or split or change their border with other states. If approval is needed for these then why shouldn't approval be needed to leave?
Another attempt at self deflection. The writer's reach exceeds his grasp when he bypasses the fact the Constitution is a LEGAL document, not a moral one. It's true that the South's main focus was slavery simply because, as an agrarian economy, it could not survive without it at the time.
I don't think any rational person would believe that Slavery was illegal or unconstitutional. But there is a lot of effort expended by some on the Confederate side to portray slavery as irrelevant to the reasons for the rebellion. As you point out, slavery was the pillar on which the Southern economy rested on. It's not surprising that they would react badly to any perceived threat to it.
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