Posted on 10/04/2019 11:30:12 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Sure, we revere Lincoln today, but in his lifetime the bile poured on him from every quarter makes todays Internet vitriol seem dainty. His ancestry was routinely impugned, his lack of formal learning ridiculed, his appearance maligned, and his morality assailed. We take for granted, of course, the scornful outpouring from the Confederate states...But the vituperation wasnt limited to enemies of the Union. The North was ever at his heels...
Yes, his sure-footed leadership during this countrys most-difficult days was accompanied by a fair amount of praise, but also by a steady stream of abusein editorials, speeches, journals, and private lettersfrom those on his own side, those dedicated to the very causes he so ably championed.
George Templeton Strong, a prominent New York lawyer and diarist, wrote that Lincoln was a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla. Henry Ward Beecher, the Connecticut-born preacher and abolitionist, often ridiculed Lincoln in his newspaper, The Independent (New York), rebuking him for his lack of refinement and calling him an unshapely man. Other Northern newspapers openly called for his assassination long before John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger. He was called a coward, an idiot, and the original gorilla by none other than the commanding general of his armies, George McClellan.
One of Lincolns lasting achievements was ending American slavery. Yet Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the famous abolitionist, called Lincoln Dishonest Abe in a letter she wrote to Wendell Phillips in 1864, a year after Lincoln had freed the slaves in rebel states and only months before he would engineer the Thirteenth Amendment. She bemoaned the incapacity and rottenness of his administration to Susan B. Anthony, worked to deny him renomination, and swore to Phillips that if he is reelected I shall immediately leave the country for the Fijee Islands.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Wow the progeny of NeverLincolners
And yet the Constitution survives.
If you say so.
The Atlantic is a rag...
And continued to do it from the grave. We get it.
On the other hand, do you think the Southern states did that voluntarily? I find that hard to believe, because the long standing narrative was that they fought a war or something to preserve slavery, so it strikes me as implausible that they would simply give up something they supposedly sacrificed so many people to protect.
Yes because in 1865 the Southern state legislatures that voted to ratify were made up primarily of Unionists. The former Rebs didn't begin to infest them until after the rebellion was over.
Quite true.
Bunch of jerques.
Lincoln was an anticonstitutional tyrant.
So the federal government abides by the enumerated powers clause today?
He destroyed the constitution.
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