By this definition then, claiming that the southern leadersip was devoted to the principles of the Delalaration of Independence is even more ridiculous.
DiLorenzo hits the nail on the head again
"Above the Constitution, even above the Declaration, as an expression of American principles, is the magnanimous figure of Lincoln," wrote Jaffa’s colleague Charles Kessler in National Review (July 6, 1979)
That's the problem right there. To accept what lincoln did as right in any shape or form is to completely deny the documents upon which this nation was founded and gave him his leadership role. And there are some even today that would apply this to other Presidents. Apparently it doesn't matter if it's Constitutional, it's being done it for the good of the people.
Di Lo's works are pure tripe and hackwork. So the Confederates allegedly believed in "self-determination"? And where was "self-determination for the slave? Where was self-determination for those who opposed secession? The Confederates believed in their conception of majority rule, as did Lincoln. Lincoln's conception had more legitimacy. It coincided with Washington's and Madison's views. Lincoln's view of liberty and majority rule was more in accord with the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
Had the Southern leaders really acted in a pacific, non-belligerent, libertarian or democratic fashion, some of DiLo's criticisms would have merit, but the rebels were determined to realize their desires through force, and I don't fault Lincoln for taking steps to maintain the lawful order.
It's hard to imagine this DiLoenzo bum could make a statement like this with a straight face.
Walt
After Thomas Jefferson was elected president the New England Federalists plotted for over a decade to secede from the Union. Their efforts culminated in the Hartford Secession Convention of 1814, where they decided against secession. The movement was led by George Washington’s Secretary of War and Secretary of State, Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering. All during this time, no one questioned the right of any state to secede because this was the Revolutionary generation, and they revered the Jeffersonian dictum that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
And no one denies a right of secession now either.
What is denied, over and over and over, is that there is a --legal-- right under U.S. law to do so.
And I have asked from time to time for the neo-rebs to quote one of the framers that there was a --legal-- right of secession, and they have yet to quote a single one who said such a thing.
DiLorenzo's statement that I quote, like all his dreck, sounds really, really good to a certain gullible segment, but it does nothing to rehabilitate the secessionist/traitors of 1860-65.
Walt
Lincoln denounced racial equality over and over again throughout his entire adult life. He did not believe that all men are created equal. In his August 21, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas he said "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races" and that "I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary."
"Anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the Negro," he said in the same speech, "is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse."
"Free them and make them politically and socially our equals?" he continued. "My own feelings will not admit of this . . . . We cannot, then make them equals."
Like I said, it's a real hoot for DiLorenzo to suggest that Henry Jaffa or anyone is quoting out of context.
Now Stainlessbanner doubtless winced when he read this excerpt of DiLorenzo's article, because has tried the same tack from time to time, but he doesn't any more. That is because a more complete citation of Lincoln's words won't sustain what DiLorrenzo says. As I suggested earlier, only money or a certain notariety among a segment that hates the United States would drive someone like DiLorenzo to torture the record to come up with an interpretation so poorly supported.
The latest Lincoln statement that DiLorenzo provides is from 1859. That would be great had Lincoln died in 1859.
Whatever ideas Lincoln held in 1859, they changed before his death. And when you consider Lincoln's whole record, it shows DiLorenzo as the charlatan he is:
I just posted this earlier, but I cleverly saved it into a file:
But a decade earlier Lincoln had begun to question just how free those institutions were, so long as slavery existed in this otherwise free country. The "monstrous Injustice of slavery," he said in 1854, "deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites." In the 1850s Lincoln began to insist, contrary to the belief of perhaps two-thirds of white Americans, that the Declaration of Independence was not merely "the white-man's charter of freedom." "The negro is included in the word 'men' used in the Declaration," he maintained. This "is the great fundamental principle upon which our free institutions rest," and "negro slavery is violative of that principle" because the black man is "entitled to . , . the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. i agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects'—here Lincoln stopped short of the abolitionist affirmation of full equality-but, Lincoln continued, "in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."
Lincoln did not consider this a new definition of liberty. He believed that Thomas Jefferson and the other founders had meant to include the Negro in the phrase "all men are created equal," even though many of the founders owned slaves, for they were stating a principle that they hoped would eventually become a reality. Douglas maintained that, on the contrary, Jefferson had not meant "all men" to in- clude blacks-nor for that matter any race except Caucasians.
"This government was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should never be administered by any except white meh," insisted Douglas over and over again. "The signers of the Declaration had no reference to the negro whatever when they declared all men to be created equal. They . . . [meant] white men, men of European birth and European descent and had no reference either to the negro, the savage Indians, the Fejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race." If a national referendum could have been held on these two definitions of liberty—Lincoln's inclusive one and Douglas's definition exclusive of all but white men—Douglas's position would have won.
But Lincoln persisted against the odds, denouncing Douglas's argument as representing a disastrous declension from the faith of the fathers, a declension that if it went much further would extinguish the light of liberty in America. The Know-Nothings, for example, were trying to deny to white immigrants the liberties of free-born Americans. Here was the danger, warned Lincoln in 1855.
Once a nation decided that its constitutional rights applied only to some and not to all men equally, the torch of liberty would go out. "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid," lamented Lincoln with reference to the Know-Nothings. "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal" We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know- Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.'
When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some other country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of'hypocrisy."" To dehumanize the Negro—to insist that he was not a man—would boomerang on all of us, said Lincoln on many occasions in the 1850s. "Our reliance must be in the love of liberty...
. . . the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of al! men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. . . . He who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve It not for themselves. . . . Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises."
The Democratic party of 1859, said Lincoln in that year, had departed so far from the ideas of its founder Thomas Jefferson that it "hold[s] the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man's right of property." The only liberty that many whites seemed to believe in was "the liberty of making slaves of other people."
"That is the real issue," said Lincoln in the peroration of his last debate with Douglas. "That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong . . . from the beginning of time. . . . The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. . . . No matter in what shape it comes, whether from a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an aplogy for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle." To prevent this principle from "eradicating the light of liberty in this American people," Lincoln pleaded, "let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it, . . . If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, for- ever worthy of the saving."
--"Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, pp.50-54 by James McPherson.
Note that Lincoln was taking in the 1850's a position at odds with 2/3 of the voters. That is why he is the greatest American.
Okay, now consider a little more from Father Abraham:
"But to be plain, you are dissatisfied with me about the negro. Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose that you do not. ....peace does not appear as distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to worth the keeping in all future time. It will have then been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And then, there will be some black men, who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet they have helped mankind on to this great consumation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, have strove to hinder it. Still let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober. Let us dilligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result."
8/23/63
"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel...
In telling this tale I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me. Now, at the end of three years struggle the Nation's condition is not what either party, or any man devised, or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North as well as you of the South, shall pay for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God."
4/4/64
"it is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers."
4/11/65
sources: "Abraham Lincoln, Mystic Chords of Memory" published by the Book of the Month Club, 1984 and:
"Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1859-65, Libray of the Americas, Don E. Fehrenbacher, ed. 1989
Now, President Lincoln matched his words to his actions. As I posted earlier, he prodded the War Department to increase the number of black soldiers. He urged the governor of Lousisiana to give the vote at least to black soldiers. He personally came out for black suffrage using his touchy feely technique to see what the people would accept by suggesting it be conferred on the "very intelligent and those who serve our cause as soldiers."
If someone only read traitorous Tommy DiLorenzo, one would have one idea of Lincoln, but if one reads Lincoln, they won't have it long.
It's enough to make you wonder is some of the people who post this anti-Lincoln dreck and those that write it, don't use screen names to cover real names like "Zubaydah", "Khallad", and "al-Sayyid".
They hate America too.
Walt