Posted on 02/11/2026 10:47:43 AM PST by T Ruth
Director Steven Spielberg, whom I introduced last week [in 2012] at Gettysburg at ceremonies marking the 149th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s greatest speech, said he was deeply humbled to be delivering an address on that history-making spot.
***
… Daniel Day-Lewis gives the definitive portrayal of our time, perhaps ever, of Honest Abe.
For people like me, who have spent their lives studying Abraham Lincoln, the film is chilling — as if he’s really come to life.
Day-Lewis does it by avoiding the traps most Lincoln actors fall into, the stoic, “Hall of Presidents”-esque stereotype that probably most Americans imagine.
There are no moving pictures of Lincoln, no recordings of his voice. But after his death, everyone was Lincoln’s best friend, and there are descriptions of everything from his accent to his gait.
The most important thing is the voice. Far from having a stentorian, Gregory Peck-like bass, Lincoln’s was a high, piercing tenor. Those who attended his speeches even described it as shrill and unpleasant for the first 10 minutes, until he got warmed up (or his endless stories managed to cow them into submission).
***
Few great people are appreciated in their time. And it’s good to remember that, no matter how right the decisions seem now, they were hard-fought then.
“I wanted — impossibly — to bring Lincoln back from his sleep of one-and-a-half centuries,” Steven Spielberg said at Gettysburg, “even if only for two-and-one-half hours, and even if only in a cinematic dream.”
***
Harold Holzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln. ...
[At the end of the article Holzer gives thumbnail reviews of all prior Lincoln films, ranking them from worst to best, which Holzer considers to be Spielberg’s.]
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
That seems fair to me.
I already told you he was an abolitionist who hated slavery.
Not even going to look at it. I have long experience with BroJoeK's misleading information. I used to waste my time going through it, but I don't bother anymore.
Occasionally you can get him to admit to a nugget of truth that is contrary to what he is trying to present.
For example, ask him how much of the total trade with Europe came from the South. He usually says 50%, though I have on one occasion gotten him to admit it was closer to 60%.
Tell me again… how was it that the South paid 75% of federal taxes. Show me the data.
Tell me again… how was it that the South paid 75% of federal taxes. Show me the data.
But what Ditto fails to grasp is that with secession, all that money running through the system would get cut off from the North. The South would eventually run their own trade without the North making any profit from it.
No taxes. No profits. No Northern shipping, banking, insurance, "factors", or anything else would be making money from the Southern trade with Europe.
This is a *HUGE* incentive for the North to want a war with the South. Ditto doesn't understand yet that the war was never about the morality of slavery. It was *ALWAYS* about the greed of the Northern powerful men for the money they made from Southern trade products.
They weren't good people fighting for the rights of black people whom they almost universally hated, They were evil, greedy, bullies who decided to kill people to protect their wealth streams.
Then they made up all that bullshit about doing it for the slaves.
They did not care about the slaves at all. Not even slightly. That was all just a lie meant to justify their war for money after the fact.
Well my friend, secession happened and the economy in the North did very well, even grew during the war, all without “King Cotton”. Now what is I am failing to grasp? And how did the South pay 75% of Federal taxes. Show me the data.
Nope. He is correcting the lying Northern propaganda which paints a false picture of what happened.
The North started a war with the South for money. They didn't do it for "Union". They didn't do it for "Slavery." They did it only for money, because they knew they were going to be cut out of those revenue streams which had made them rich.
They were evil, corrupt, vicious men who saw Southern independence as a threat to their wealth, and they made up all their bullshit about why they decided to attack the South, but the truth is it was to protect their money.
Why ship all their stuff to New York when 3/4 of their customers were in the South.
Again, you don't know how the packet system worked in this era. Everything was set up to trans-ship from New York. It benefitted the Northern shipping industry the most to do it that way, and yes, *THEY* ran the packet shipping too.
Well we can tell you didn't actually go through it with a critical eye.
I won't bother. I've done it too many times in the past, and BroJoeK won't blink an eye when you find something wrong. He'll just put it out again later when he thinks you've forgotten.
So where did those evil Northerners make money by shutting down King Cotton. And please tell the class how the South paid 75% of Federal taxes. Show us the data.
He does not want to see the truth. He wants to believe the comforting lie we were all taught which justifies the war as a moral crusade. Nobody wants to see their heroes tarnished or revealed to be villains.
I had a bit of a problem with it myself when I first realized the direction the actual data was leading me, but I have never been able to lie to myself, so when I saw it was irrefutable, I just admitted to myself what really happened with the Civil War.
The "good guys" were not the good guys. They were actually the bad guys.
“Their philanthropy yields to their interests. Notwithstanding their professions of humanity, they are disinclined to give up the benefits they derive from slave labor…The idea of enforcing the laws, has but one object, and that is collection of the taxes, raised by slave labor to swell the fund necessary to meet their heavy appropriations. The spoils is what they are after – though they come from the labor of the slave.”
Is that irrefutable gospel truth pulled straight out of a burning bush too.....or is it all false and propaganda now that he said something very inconvenient for their argument?
Here is what Rhett said in his address which was attached to and sent out along with South Carolina's Declaration of Causes: And so with the Southern States, towards the Northern States, in the vital matter of taxation. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress, is useless to protect them against unjust taxation; and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit, exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British parliament for their benefit. For the last forty years, the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.
There is another evil, in the condition of the Southern toward the Northern States, which our ancestors refused to bear toward Great Britain. Our ancestors not only taxed themselves, but all the taxes collected from them, were expended among them. Had they submitted to the pretensions of the British Government, the taxes collected from them, would have been expended in other parts of the British Empire. They were fully aware of the effect of such a policy in impoverishing the people from whom taxes are collected, and in enriching those who receive the benefit of their expenditure. To prevent the evils of such a policy, was one of the motives which drove them on to Revolution. Yet this British policy, has been fully realized towards the Southern States, by the Northern States. The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected, three fourths of them are expended at the North. This cause, with others, connected with the operation of the General Government, has made the cities of the South provincial. Their growth is paralyzed; they are mere suburbs of Northern cities. The agricultural productions of the South are the basis of the foreign commerce of the United States; yet Southern cities do not carry it on. Our foreign trade, is almost annihilated…… To make, however, their numerical power available to rule the Union, the North must consolidate their power. It would not be united, on any matter common to the whole Union in other words, on any constitutional subject for on such subjects divisions are as likely to exist in the North as in the South. Slavery was strictly, a sectional interest. If this could be made the criterion of parties at the North, the North could be united in its power; and thus carry out its measures of sectional ambition, encroachment, and aggrandizement. To build up their sectional predominance in the Union, the Constitution must be first abolished by constructions; but that being done, the consolidation of the North to rule the South, by the tariff and slavery issues, was in the obvious course of things......."
A book I would recommend would be Complicity: how the North promoted, prolonged and profited from slavery written by 3 New England Journalists. They too point out like many others that it was actually the North
- via servicing exports
- via tariffs on imports (since it was Southerners doing the importing)
- via unequal federal subsidies for companies and infrastructure projects to benefit primarily the North
which was deriving the most economic benefit from slavery. Their comment was "this was slavery the way the North liked it - most of the profits and none of the screams."
As I already told you, "paid" is misleading. "Produced" is more accurate, because you don't have to get into the details of who got what for import products.
It is unquestionable that the South *PRODUCED* 75% of the material that was taxed, from which the tariff's produced the Federal revenue.
As I told you before, secession cuts off that money, because the CSA would trade directly with Europe and would no longer need, or be bound to, because of biased federal laws, to Northern shipping, banking, warehousing, insurance, etc companies.
The South would have taken over all the money making enterprises associated with their export trade. All of it. And they would have been buying European products with their dollars instead of Northern products which they were forced to buy because of protectionist laws.
The Northerners would not only have lost the Southern business in shipping products too and from Europe, their factories would have lost the South as customers, because without the Federal protectionist laws, the European goods were cheaper.
Peaceful Southern secession was an absolute financial disaster for the powerful men in the North.
And that's why there was a war.
Yes, I understand how the packet business worked. Foreign ships could enter any American port they wanted, but they could not sail from one American port to another American port. If I'm a British shipping company and I am shipping lots of goods to Southern customers, I would ship them directly to Charleston or New Orleans, unload those goods pay the tariffs and then load cotton and take it back to jolly ol’ Liverpool. I wouldn't ship all of those goods destined for Southern customers to New York unless I really didn’t have that much Southern business and the vast majority of my customers were in the North.
So tell us how the South paid 75% of Federal taxes.
Borrowing. Inflating. Blockading trade from the South. Creating fake money. None of this deals with what *WOULD HAVE* happened if they had not started a war with the South.
They forced all shipping into Northern ports, when those ships would have rather gone to Southern ports at that time.
Now what is I am failing to grasp?
You are failing to grasp what would have happened in the absence of a war. The South would have continued to gain wealth, and the North would have been suffering a massive economic decline.
I long ago accepted the truth that most wars are about money. Taxes, access to a river or the sea, trading rights, rich farmland, oil, minerals, it comes down to money. Are we to believe it was somehow magically different 165 years ago? That people weren't just as greedy and venal back then? There is a reason none of this is taught in the government schools. I got all the way through college and didn't realize any of the financial aspects of ante bellum America. It simply was not taught. Once you understand it was the South that was generating the vast majority of the exports and thus carrying out the vast majority of the imports....that it was actually the South which was the MUCH richer region of the country when it was founded....suddenly it starts to make a whole lot more sense.
Reading the often scathing commentary of the English - who were real abolitionists - is especially enlightening. They saw right through the BS and propaganda about how the North was supposedly fighting to free the slaves (even though they openly said they weren't and offered slavery by express constitutional amendment which was also never taught in the government schools).
An 1862 editorial in an English journal commented, “They (the Northern white men) do not love the Negro as a fellow-man; they pity him as a victim of wrong. They will plead his cause; they will not tolerate his company.”
- via tariffs on imports (since it was Southerners doing the importing)
- via unequal federal subsidies for companies and infrastructure projects to benefit primarily the North
which was deriving the most economic benefit from slavery. Their comment was "this was slavery the way the North liked it - most of the profits and none of the screams."
Ditto asked me to explain how the North was getting 60% of the profits from slavery. I didn't feel like trying to explain it to him because he can't seem to understand how the South was producing 75% of the tax revenue.
How the North was making so much money off of slavery is probably beyond his ability to grasp.
The distribution system was set up with New York as the central hub. Cargo from Europe might be something needed in Mobile, but not needed in New Orleans. It was illegal for foreign ships to trade in multiple American ports, so if they didn't have products needed in New Orleans, they couldn't off load them.
The packet system took care of the problem of matching cargoes to customers, and so it was just easier for ships to unload at central warehouses in New York, and the packet system, which could unload anything at any port in America, could divide cargos by needs in each port cities.
You are trying to use the complexity of the system to deny the truth of how everything would work *AFTER* secession in the absence of a war.
Once the CSA was it's own separate country, the transport hub for all Southern bound cargo (Which would be 3/4ths of the trade cargo from Europe) would be relocated from New York to some convenient Southern port, perhaps Charleston, or one in Virginia. From there, Southern based packet systems would have carried cargo to all other ports according to their needs.
And initially, all shipping could be foreign owned and crewed, thus creating an immediate savings for everyone paying the exorbitant Northern shipping cotsts.
So tell us how the South paid 75% of Federal taxes.
If you don't understand it by now, I fear you don't have the mental capacity to grasp it. Either that, or the necessary level of honesty to admit it.
If that’s the case, why didn’t those ships go to Southern ports before the war? Do I have to post the 1859 tariff map again?
You are failing to grasp what would have happened in the absence of a war. The South would have continued to gain wealth, and the North would have been suffering a massive economic decline.
LOL. The North was growing fast before the war, and only grew faster after. The South was a backwater because of the slave system and King Cotton. There were a handful of very wealthy and the vast majority of whites lived hand to mouth.
You remind me of an interview I saw years ago with Shelby Foote. He said as a kid growing up in Mississippi, he and his friends would fantasize about what they would have done to make sure the South won the Civil War. You seem to play the same game on revising facts to make the South like like they were not the idiots they were.
LOL. When you can’t answer a question, it because the person asking the question is just stupid. LOL
Tell us how the South paid 75% of the federal taxes. Show us the data.
This is one of the things that clued me into believing something was very wrong with the way we have been taught the history of the Civil War. It's the things that they didn't teach us that first aroused my suspicions.
Decades ago, when I was in Junior High, we were studying this era of history. I asked the teacher what I thought was a relevant question at the time, and I didn't get what I considered a sensible answer.
I said: "Since all the battles were fought on land, and since you have to have soldiers to take and hold land, what was the purpose of the blockade? Why did they think it was so important?"
He said they instituted it to give the Navy something to do. They had ships, and they weren't going to turn sailors into soldiers, so they stationed them off the Southern coasts to disrupt Southern traffic, perhaps to keep them from getting guns from Europe."
I said that "it didn't look like they were successful at keeping guns out of the hands of the Confederates, because they fought plenty of battles with guns."
But it always seemed his answer about "giving the navy something to do" was silly.
Later, when I better understood the economics of the situation, I realized that the blockade was the most important thing they could do during the war.
And then I found out they didn't mention how the war actually started. They left out all the parts about Lincoln sending a fleet of warships to threaten the Confederates.
And then I found out the Northern controlled congress passed a permanent slavery amendment. That was never mentioned in school.
And then I found out "expansion of slavery" was just lie.
The deeper into it I looked, the more coverup I saw. I finally realized we had been sold a narrative that makes the winners look good, but it isn't the truth of what happened.
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