Posted on 12/22/2019 4:23:47 AM PST by Bull Snipe
"I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition and about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton." General William T. Sherman's "March to the Sea" was over. During the campaign General Sherman had made good on his promise d “to make Georgia howl”. Atlanta was a smoldering ruin, Savannah was in Union hands, closing one of the last large ports to Confederate blockade runners. Sherman’s Army wrecked 300 miles of railroad and numerous bridges and miles of telegraph lines. It seized 5,000 horses, 4,000 mules, and 13,000 head of cattle. It confiscated 9.5 million pounds of corn and 10.5 million pounds of fodder, and destroyed uncounted cotton gins and mills. In all, about 100 million dollars of damage was done to Georgia and the Confederate war effort.
But someone considered an expert for his era.
Porter’s ships were within the range of the big guns at Fort Fischer. His ships pound the Fort to rubble.
58 ships? I think that's more of a reasonable force than five, don't you think?
As I said, five ships make it seem like they had no intention of really doing what they claimed they were going to do.
What was the experience of the gun crews at Charleston.
Could they hit a ship doing 7 or 8 knots. The gunners at Fort Fisher couldn’t do that with 58 targets.
What was the experience of the gun crews at Charleston.
Could they hit a ship doing 7 or 8 knots. The gunners at Fort Fisher couldn’t do that with 58 targets.
“But someone considered an expert for his era.”
No he wasn’t at the time. He wasn’t even eligible for command of a ship in the Navy at the time. His political dealings with Seward was the only reason Porter got command of a ship.
I think I am not accurately communicating my point. When Porter wrote that book he was an Admiral. He didn't write it when he was a lieutenant.
According to Admiral Porter, those ships would have been quickly sunk.
I think 58 ships shooting at you might throw off your aim a bit. Certainly more so than just 5.
:)
What was the experience level of the gunners in Charleston.
How much practice against moving targets.
What was the experience level of the gunners in Charleston.
How much practice against moving targets.
Joey's posts are always deceptive. In that post I simply reminded everyone that both Hitler and Lincoln sought to eliminate federalism (and States' rights,) and consolidate all power into a central government, which is the choice of all dictators.
That said, this is Hitler, again. The first paragraph could have been written by James Madison; the second by Lincoln, or some other dictator:
Mr. Kalamata"What is a federated state? By a federated state we understand a league of sovereign states which band together of their own free will, on the strength of their sovereignty; ceding to the totality that share of their particular sovereign rights which makes possible and guarantees the existence of the common federation."
"In practice this theoretical formulation does not apply entirely to any of the federated states existing on earth today. Least of all to the American Union, where, as far as the overwhelming part of the individual states are concerned, there can be no question of any original sovereignty, but, on the contrary, many of them were sketched into the total area of the Union in the course of time, so to speak. Hence in the individual states of the American Union we have mostly to do with smaller and larger territories, formed for technical, administrative reasons, and, often marked out with a ruler, states which previously had not and could not have possessed any state sovereignty of their own. For it was not these states that had formed the Union, on the contrary it was the Union which formed a great part of such so-called states. The very extensive special rights granted, or rather assigned, to the individual territories are not only in keeping with the whole character of this federation of states, but above all with the size of its area, its spatial dimensions which approach the scope of a continent. And so, as far as the states of the American Union are concerned, we cannot speak of their state sovereignty, but only of their constitutionally established and guaranteed rights, or better, perhaps, privileges."
[Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf: Manheim Translation." Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999, p.566]
Joey's statements are always deceptive. A few years later, Jefferson wrote this:
"On every question of [of the constitution,] carry ourselves back to the time when the constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
[Letter to William Johnson, from Monticello, June 12, 1823, in Appleby & Ball, "Thomas Jefferson: Political Writings." Cambridge University Press, 1999, p.455]
According to Jefferson, what matters is HOW the Constitution was "sold" to the people via the debates in the Federal and State Conventions. That is the ONLY original-intent there is. Everything said before and after is whimsical and/or arbitrary.
Mr. Kalamata
Joey's posts are always deceptive. I have exposed his progressive, central-planning, big-government ideology over and over again. Joey has even praised the ACLU and a rogue federal judge for meddling in a local school board ruling, which was none of their stinking business! The bottom line is, Joey is a bully and a control freak, and, accordingly, he admires other bullies and control freaks.
****************
>>Kalamata wrote: "I am the only conservative in this conversation. You don’t even know the meaning of the word. You really should study how to interpret history, rather than cherry-pick it."
>>BroJoeK wrote: "Our Dan-child is "conservative" only as defined by lunatic Democrats, meaning: anti-federalist, anti-Founders, anti-Constitution, anti-Republican, anti-American. What he wishes to "conserve" is the Old Confederacy -- not of course as it actually was, but rather as our Lost Causers fantasize it to have been."
Again, Joey's posts are always deceptive. He and all other modern Democrats despise the chains of the Constitution, exactly like Lincoln despised them. Rather they seek the praise of mere men above civic duty. Jefferson warned us to do the opposite:
"In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
[Resolutions Relative to the Alien and Sedition laws, 1789, in Thomas Jefferson, "The Writings of Thomas Jefferson Vol 17." Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903, pp. 385-390]
Lincoln was always trying to break those chains. He, like all modern Democrats, reinterpreted the Commerce Clause to mean anything and everything, in order to (one day) make way for his so-called "American System" (which was actually, the corrupt, crony British Mercantilist system.) James Randall, who was a devout Lincolnite, explained how it works:
"What Hamilton said about implied powers should always be read in the light of the fact that Hamilton wanted a national bank, and that, in general, he wanted a strong government for the stabilization of the particular economic system to which he was devoted. Not always do the words of a speech reveal the speaker's motive. True historical insight must penetrate through the statements, writings, and arguments of political leaders to the broad human purposes which they were seeking to accomplish. Viewed in this light, constitutional history becomes a part, and an important part, of social history."
"A familiar example showing how social motives control constitutional interpretation appears in connection with the tendency toward "rebuilding the nation on interstate commerce." As a social observer has written with some exaggeration, "Once... we had need of a Constitution with many sections... and clauses:... now one is sufficient... the power to regulate interstate commerce." The suppression of rebates and discriminating charges by railroads, the inspection of foodstuffs, the restriction of vice, the prevention of accidents—all these great social purposes have, so to speak, surged against the constitutional barriers until they have broken through; and the interstate commerce clause is the breach through which they have passed."
[James G. Randall, "Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln." University of Illinois Press, Rev Ed, 1961, p.4]
If a politician or judge has a complete and total lack of integrity, they can easily turn any unconstitutional activity into "interstate commerce," and, Presto – Instant Constitutionality!
Mr. Kalamata
This is Lincoln the same year:
"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."
[Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858, in Roy P. Basler, "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln Vol 3." Rutgers University Press, 1953, pp.145-146]
How is that different from slavery? And why is that statement being marginalized, even whitewashed? Let's ask this fellow:
"Lincoln said repeatedly in private and public, in Springfield and in the White House, that he was a White supremacist and that he wanted to deny Blacks equal rights because of their race and deport them to a tropical clime with people of their own color and kind. How do you hide such a man, and how do you make him a symbol of twentieth-century community? More importantly, and more dangerously, why would you want to make such a man a symbol of integration and the American Dream?"
"The answer, in part, is that Lincoln is theology, not historiology. He is a faith, he is a church, he is a religion, and he has his own priests and acolytes, most of whom have a vested interest in "the great emancipator" and who are passionately opposed to anybody telling the truth about him."
"Not only is Lincoln a church, he is also an industry. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men and women earn their living feeding the Lincoln machine, turning out the Lincoln slogans, hailing the proclamation that never was."
"Over and above this, the mythological Lincoln is a defining structure in the identity system of most Americans, who are hooked on Lincoln, as on a drug, and who need periodic fixes to reaffirm their sense of reality. Adlai Stevenson said once that "a man in public life can find no surer guide than Lincoln". It is a condemnation of the American educational system that an intelligent man like Stevenson could make such an uninformed statement. What did Stevenson hope to learn from Lincoln? How to deny Blacks equal rights, or how to ship them to Africa?"
"For all these reasons, and for others as well, Lincoln transcends the rules of logic and evidence, even in the academy. Barbara Burns Petrick said in the New York Times on February 9, 1986, that Lincoln is such a god that the rules of evidence do not apply to him. She might have added that things have reached such a pass that it is considered permissible to lie and to hide evidence in order to protect the Republic. "It might be said of Lincoln," Petrick said, "what Voltaire said of God: If there had been no Lincoln, it would have been necessary to invent him." It is no accident that Petrick compared Lincoln to God and that she failed to note that the evidence she and others cite indicate that there was no Lincoln or at least no great emancipator and that it was necessary to invent him."
"The fascinating question here is not how people have managed to hide Lincoln, but how they have managed to hide him while writing thousands of books about him. Whatever the answer, they never stop talking about Abraham Lincoln in America, and they never stop hiding him. And with rare exceptions, you can't believe what any major Lincoln scholar tells you about Abraham Lincoln and race."
[Lerone, Bennett Jr., "Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's white dream." Johnson Publishing Company, 2000, pp.113-115]
I'm glad I am not a "Lincoln scholar." However, after reading something that controversial, it is always good to get a second opinion:
"The fullest manifestation of this revisionism was the article "Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?" which Lerone Bennett, previously the author of two major works on African American history, published in Ebony in February 1968. His answer to the question was an emphatic "yes." Black veneration for Lincoln as a friend of African Americans and a champion of their rights had been a huge mistake, he concluded."
"For the next thirty years Bennett continued his investigation of Lincoln and race, and the result is a very long book that is meant to be the definitive treatment of the subject. Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream, published in 2000, is an angry and bitter assessment of what Bennett considered a great misunderstanding of Lincoln's character and motivations. The book gathers all or most of the racist or racially insensitive comments that Lincoln made that are in the historical record and takes them at face value, as statements of principle rather than of political expediency. Bennett presents a strong case for the contention that Lincoln shared some of the prejudiced beliefs about blacks that were prevalent among white Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. Some other historians have used the same evidence to reach a similar conclusion, at least about the pre-presidential years."
"What is most original and provocative about Bennett's account is his contention that Lincoln was not really opposed to slavery as an institution but rather defended and protected it until circumstances forced him to act against it. "Based on his record and the words of his own mouth," Bennett concludes, "we can say that the 'great emancipator' was one of the major supporters of slavery in the United States for at least fifty-four of his fifty-six years." Congress, he contends, attempted to free the slaves of disloyal masters through the Confiscation Act of 1862 but was stymied because of Lincoln's failure to enforce it. The Emancipation Proclamation was therefore a backward step, designed by Lincoln to preserve as much of slavery as possible. The preliminary proclamation of September 1862 in effect suspended the operation of the Confiscation Act, and the final one freed fewer slaves than were already entitled to liberty under the congressional legislation. Emancipating only those in areas still in a state of rebellion did not immediately free a single slave, whereas vigorously enforcing the Confiscation Act could have freed all except those whose masters had remained loyal to the Union. Lincoln's hesitant, vacillating, and limited emancipation policy was driven, Bennett contends, by the exigencies and circumstances of the war and by political pressure from the Radicals; it did not represent antislavery conviction. If Lincoln could have saved the Union without abolishing slavery, he would have happily done so. The title of the book expresses Bennett's thesis concisely: Lincoln was "forced into glory." One factor forcing his hand, which Bennett acknowledges but might have emphasized more than he does, was the mass desertion of blacks from Southern plantations. By crossing into Union lines, they made themselves available for service to the Northern cause. Some historians have argued that slaves did more to free themselves by voting against slavery with their feet than Lincoln did by proclaiming emancipation."
"The book's subtitle suggests a second main theme— Lincoln's dream of an all-white America. Bennett pays great attention to Lincoln's long-standing and persistent advocacy of the colonization of freed blacks outside of the United States. Despite verbal assurances that colonization would be voluntary, it would, Bennett believes, have inevitably involved coercion and would have amounted to a form of "ethnic cleansing." Sometimes Lincoln used the term "deportation" instead of "colonization." It was one thing to encourage individuals to emigrate voluntarily; it was quite another to promote and facilitate the departure of an entire racial or ethnic group. As for the assertion of Lincoln apologists that promoting colonization was a ploy to make emancipation more palatable to white supremacist Americans by alleviating their fears of the social consequences of freeing millions of blacks, Bennett counters what he calls this "fork-tongued argument" by contending that the propaganda for colonization exacerbated racial prejudice rather than mitigating it."
"Although most white historians who have reviewed or taken notice of Forced into Glory have criticized it rather severely as a tendentious and polemical work, they have found few factual errors in it and have acknowledged the validity of parts of the argument. Even James McPherson, in his generally unfavorable review in the New York Times, conceded that "this book must be taken seriously. Bennett gets some things right. Lincoln did share the racial prejudices of his time and place. He did support the idea of colonizing blacks abroad." Clearly the most debatable aspect of Bennett's thesis is not that Lincoln was a white supremacist (at least up to 1863), but rather that [Lincoln] never really opposed slavery in principle or tried to work against it."
[George M. Frederickson, "Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race." 2008, pp.18-22]
Bennett's words may sound like some form of heresy to many of you; but his words are not too far from those of Frederick Douglass:
"It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man."
"He was pre-eminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the States where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed constitutional guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave States. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government. The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a pre-eminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln."
[Douglass, Frederick, "Oration by Frederick Douglass: unveiling of the Freedman's monument in memory of Abraham Lincoln." Pathway Press, 1940, pp.12-13]
Sometimes you have to confront history, rather than hide from it.
Mr. Kalamata
“Sometimes you have to confront history, rather than hide from it.”
This is true. The history is by the time the Great Satan, racist, anti black, bigoted, crony capitalist, corporate lawyer, Whig, white man’s President Lincoln died about 3 million blacks were free people. The Southern Confederacy, that had kept them as slaves, was a crushed, defeated, smoldering ruin, forever extinct.
Joey's posts are always deceptive. He didn't tell you that Lincoln was possibly scheming for colonization up until his death:
"It is not clear that by his death Lincoln had abandoned his belief in colonization. "I am happy that the President has sloughed off that idea of colonization," Lincoln's secretary John Hay wrote in his diary on July 1, 1864. As late as November 30, 1864, Attorney General Edward Bates gave an affirmative answer to Lincoln's question of whether Mitchell could continue as "your assistant or aid [sic] in the matter of executing the several acts of Congress relating to the emigration or colonizing of the freed Blacks," even though Congress had embargoed funds for further experiments with colonization. General Benjamin F. Butler claimed that shortly before his death, Lincoln had told him in a meeting in the White House: "I wish you would carefully examine the question and give me your views upon it and go into the figures, and you did before in some degree, so as to show whether the Negroes can be exported..." According to Butler, he told Lincoln two days later: "Mr. President, I have gone very carefully over my calculations as to the power of the country to export the Negroes of the South, and I assure you that, using all your naval vessels and all the merchant marine fit to cross the seas with safety, it will be impossible for you to transport to the nearest place for them... half as fast as Negro children will be born here." Although some historians have questioned Butler's veracity, there is no reason to doubt his account in light of Lincoln's obsession with the colonization scheme."
"Lincoln was a colonizationist, as Jefferson, Madison and Henry Clay were," his old Illinois acquaintance Henry Clay Whitney recalled in 1892. Whitney speculated that Lincoln "would have made still more heroic efforts, looking to that end, had he completed his second term; and his policy of emancipation was adopted, against both his judgment, desire and conscience..."
"As president, Ulysses Grant revived the colonization scheme, promoting the annexation of the Dominican Republic as a new home for "the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate." In 1898 Samuel Gompers, the president of the American Federation of Labor, proposed protecting white labor by expatriating blacks to Liberia or Cuba. In the twentieth century the idea of colonization was kept alive by black nationalists and white supremacists such as the members of the Ku Klux Klan."
[Michael Lind, "What Lincoln Believed." Doubleday, 2005, pp.224-225]
It appears that both black nationalists and the Ku Klux Klan had the same goal: of colonizing the blacks. A good book on the black nationalist efforts is:
UnAfrican Americans: nineteenth-century Black nationalists and the civilizing mission
This links to more information on General Butler's claim about Lincoln's late colonization endeavors:
Mr. Kalamata
You got part of that right. I am not so sure about Lincoln being the Great Satan (the jury is still out,) but he was most certainly a racist, bigoted, anti-black, crony-capitalist who would sell out his mother (if he had one) to make a buck. He certainly sold out our country and the rule of law.
The hidden truth is, Lincoln was going to get HIS revenue, or else. He had a railroad to build, it was going to make him filthy rich, and those stinking Southerners were not going to redirect ships away from HIS ports to theirs and take away all of HIS revenue! With Lincoln, it was ALWAYS about Lincoln.
When you take a breather from worshiping your hero, try to remember the 800,000 (and counting) soldiers that were killed, and countless other soldiers that were mangled and disabled for life; and don't forget the countless women, children, old men, and blacks (free and slave) that were killed as your hero's swarm of blood-thirsty War Criminals looted, pillaged, raped, (yes, raped) and burned their way across the South, while intentionally trampling down crops and slaughtering livestock so that those who survived the onslaught from hell might starve or freeze to death (nice fellows, those Lincoln thugs.)
And what about the 3 million blacks? What was their plight after Northern carpetbaggers and corrupt ruling coalitions divided them and the Southerners, precipitating a century of hate?
Were the free blacks welcomed in the Northern States by the white occupants (they were not before the war,) or were they treated like 2nd, even 3rd-class citizens for a century, or more? We all know the truth. The sanctimonious post-war North was every bit as "Jim Crow" as the South, if not more so.
Like I said, sometimes you have to confront history, rather than hide from it.
By the way, are you familiar with this website?
Are you aware that you may have been worshiping the wrong fellow?
"The conversion of the Lincoln Memorial into an icon of antiracism by Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King, Jr., then, is misleading. Most of the white American opponents of slavery in his time, like Lincoln, had no intention of creating a color-blind, multiracial society in the United States. Among Lincoln's contemporaries, only a minority of white abolitionists and Radical Republicans such as Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Thaddeus Stevens, and Charles Sumner, together with black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, could envision an America in which citizens of all races formed a single community. They—not Abraham Lincoln—are the genuine patron saints of post-racist America, and it is an injustice to their memory to give credit for antiracist reforms to Lincoln rather than to them and their successors in movements for racial and sexual equality."
[Michael Lind, "What Lincoln Believed." Doubleday, 2005, p.19]
Amen to That! (although I would personally scratch Stevens from that list.)
Mr. Kalamata
I am very inclined to believe that the only reason they gave voting rights to blacks was because they had so few of them in the North. This law would only secure more power for Republicans, and that is the only reason they did it. In that regard it is exactly like Liberal Democrat support for illegal immigration.
It boosts their power, and this is the only reason they support it.
Sounds like the Nation elected the right man to win the Civil War.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3815960/posts
and this thread
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3815963/posts
Are just two other examples of my previous point. This is about the power to control congress, and not about concern for the people involved. They are just pawns and tools to be used to secure power.
And to cause it. :)
OK
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