You don't think Northern Liberals were "Progressive" in 1860?
Of the two sides, which do you think better fits the pattern of "progressive"?
clearly not the Republicans. Try again Slo-Joe
“Abraham Lincoln was “a man of profound feeling, just and firm principles, and incorruptible integrity,” wrote Civil War general and politician Carl Schurz.”
Lincoln’s greatness must be sought for in the constituents of his moral nature,” wrote John Bigelow, a New York journalist who became the American consul in Paris during the Civil War. “He was so modest by nature that he was perfectly content to walk behind any man who wished to walk before him. I do not know that history has made a record of attainment of any corresponding eminence by any other man who so habitually, so constitutionally, did to others as he would have them do to him. Without any pretensions to religious excellence, from the time he first was brought under the observation of the nation, he seemed, like Milton, to have walks ‘as ever in his great Taskmaster’s eye.’
General William T. Sherman, no sentimentalist, wrote that he left “more than ever impressed by his kindly nature, his deep and earnest sympathy with the afflictions of the whole people, resulting from the war, and by the march of hostile armies through the South; and that his earnest desire seemed to be to end the war speedily, without more bloodshed or devastation, and to restore all the men of both sections to their homes.”
“Abraham Lincoln is the greatest of all interpreters of America’s moral meaning,” wrote Lincoln scholar William Lee Miller. “Lincoln was a particularly worthy interpreter of America’s moral meaning, in the first place, because he stated it with a rare eloquence. Secondly, he was the primary voice giving the American idea received from the founders its necessary reinterpretation and fresh critical application because he dramatized the centrality of equality – specifically racial quality – as part of the nation’s essence. And in doing those things, he was able, to an unusual degree, to avoid the bane, scourge, curse, and disease that threaten all human statements of moral claims and national ideals – self-righteousness, invidiousness, moral pride and condescension.”
“Mr. Lincoln believed in laws that imperiously ruled both matter and mind. With him there could be no miracles outside of law; he held that the universe was a grand mystery and a miracle,” wrote law partner William H. Herndon. “Nothing to him was lawless, everything being governed by law. There were no accidents in his philosophy. Every event had its cause. The past to him was the cause of the present and the present including the past will be the cause of the grand future and all are one, links in the endless chain, stretching from the infinite to the finite. Everything to him was the result of the forces of Nature, playing on matter and mind from the beginning of time and will to the end of it, play on matter and mind giving the world other, further, and grander results.”
“Any casual reader of Lincoln has to be struck by the consistency with which every argument, however technical or legal, or economic, took on moral dimension as well,” wrote Lincoln scholar Stewart Winger.”
“Historian James Oakes wrote that “for Lincoln there was nothing higher than the rule of law, without which there could be no real freedom.”
In his Lyceum speech of January 1838, Mr. Lincoln warned: ”I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgement of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country, from New England to Louisiana; – they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former, nor the burning suns of the latter; — they are not the creature of climate–neither are they confined to the slaveholding, or the non-slaveholding States. Alike, they spring up among the pleasure hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.”
The cure for the nation’s problems, advised Mr. Lincoln in the Lyceum speech, was respect for the nation’s law: “Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others. As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor;– let every many remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the [charter] of his own, and his children’s liberty. Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap – let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; – let it be written in Primmers, spelling books, and in Almanacs; – let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”
See Abraham Lincoln’s Values and Philosophy
William E. Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)
Between you and I, which better fits the pattern? Between Nimrod and Caesar and Pharoah, who better fits the pattern? If we aren't going to take progressives as they actually exist and instead try to cram square pegs into round holes based on our own personal preferences of who we do and don't like, again we come back to tilting at windmills.
This is why the ideology is everything. Progressives are progressives, why go elsewhere to search for ghosts? These guys are very real and very dangerous.
"You don't think Northern Liberals were "Progressive" in 1860?
They didn't. So why should I? The progressives explicitly rejected liberalism, that's why they invented a new name for themselves right around 1900. The early progressives didn't want anything to do with being called a liberal. They didn't want to be liberals. They didn't like liberals.
It wasn't until the 30s when after the progressives had so frightened the American people in the 1910's that they had to take over the word liberal because they had nowhere to go. FDR was the one who led the charge in this re-labeling connivance.(Hoover was furious at it, FWIW)
But realistically speaking, the progressives were never liberal and they've never accepted liberalism. For them it's just a throw away title. That's how we end up with the phrase "classic liberalism". They hate liberalism and want explicitly to be removed from it - even to this day. There is no other liberalism than "classic liberalism". That's it. Any progressive who claims to be a liberal is simply wearing a disguise.
Again, if you want to re-litigate the Civil War, have at it. You clearly have a passion for it. But you're making a huge mistake if you think you're taking on progressivism while doing so. It's a completely disconnected effort.
https://fee.org/articles/how-the-myth-of-the-robber-barons-began-and-why-it-persists
"Slavery was abolished and so was the income tax. Federal spending was slashed and federal budgets had surpluses almost every year in the late 1800s."
If the progressives had existed prior to basically 1900, they would not have allowed this to happen. They especially would not have allowed the civil war income tax to be abolished, because of how ideologically necessary the income tax is for progressives. For them the income tax is a hill worth dying on. Even TR couldn't make it out of his presidency without putting out propaganda for the income tax.
My point is to highlight the break in lineage, that is all. This next part is me ranting, because while the Civil War - that's your thing; progressivism - that's my thing.
"To some extent, during the late 1800s—a period historians call the "Gilded Age"—American politicians learned from the past."
Progressives will never learn from the past because ideologically(religiously if you prefer) they cannot. They don't even measure success the same way we do. The more the planning fails the more the planners plan - we didn't have that at the latter part of 1800s/end of the 1800s. What little planning at all happened in those decades they acknowledged their mistakes when it didn't work and walked away from it because they weren't ideologically driven by it.
The arrogance of progressives leads them to believe that their ideology is always correct and the only reason that the plan failed is because you didn't comply with their brilliance and sophistication. This was unseen in the 30-ish year period following the civil war and only shows up right as 1900 arrives. The ideology is everything.