Lincoln: Tyrant, Hypocrite or Consumate Statesman? (Dinesh defends our 2d Greatest Prez)

thehistorynet. ^ | Feb 12, 05 | D'Souza

[Bigun]

Bravo! Well said!

[basque]

Lincoln provides the key to understanding his presidency. "I had to operate the machine the way I found it."All piecemeal citations of this giant are nothing but renewed assassination attempts by pygmies against the mythic one.

[Bigun]

Slavery was the only significant cultural difference between the North and South in 1860.

That statement is so astoundingly misguided it defies description. There were innumerable cultural differences between the north and south at that time! Literally innumerable!

[Missouri]

That's why the poor whites fought -- to protect that privilege.

I don't believe this is true. Poor whites fought to keep the Yankees out of their hamlets, homes, and states. And as any good soldier, they fought for each other.

[pawdoggie]

Thank you. That was well written.

[squirt-gun]

Re # 35....The South doesn't agree...... That covers every native born southerner?..... I don't think so!!

Many educated southerners who are fair minded and can deal with historical facts (such as those appearing in the current issues of National Geographic or U.S.News and World Report to name a few) would agree with the magnificent contributions Lincoln made to build this nation.

Of course, there are those with hillbilly mentalities ( north and south) who will always act and decide from emotion rather than reason...I guess its more fun that way.

[pawdoggie]

Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant that ended up in exactly the way he should have. Only it was 5 years too late.

I refer you to Mr. D'Souza's comments about the Lilliputian critics of Mr. Lincoln. That, sir, is you. Your remark is despicable, as Robert E. Lee (were he here) would readily agree. You're attitude is a disgrace to the parents who raised you.

[pawdoggie]

This isn't to say Lincoln wasn't a great or even an intellectual president but let's face it, he's got the name recognition because of the situation he found himself in. If Millard Fillmore had been president during the Civil War with it ending as it did we'd always be talking about him and he'd be on the penny. If Millard Fillmore had been President during the Civil War, there's no way the North could have won. Black people would still be held in slavery, and we'd all be speaking with a drawl.

[Reaganwuzthebest]

If Millard Fillmore had been President during the Civil War, there's no way the North could have won.

You may or not be right but the main reason the North won was because they had more in the way of soldiers and resources. Grant especially took advantage of that and in fact Lincoln was not really all that involved in the military planning or decisions per se but preferred instead to leave that up to his incompetent generals.

It's very possible Fillmore would have handled the situation differently causing the North to lose but most likely he or any other president of that era would have played the same attrition game.

[kiriath_jearim]

Here is a copy of the Mississippi Declaration of Secession. Please note the second paragraph in the declaration regarding slavery. Slavery was a very important issue:

http://www.civil-war.net/pages/mississippi_declaration.asp


*****

--A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union--


In the momentous step, which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.

The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.

The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.

The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.

It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.

It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.

It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.

It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact, which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.

It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.

It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.

It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.

It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.

It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.

It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.

It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.

It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.

Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.

Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.

[Colonel Kangaroo]

There were innumerable cultural differences between the north and south at that time! Literally innumerable!

I'll agree that there were differences, but with the exception of slavery, they were mostly superficial. How else can we explain the strong support for Lincoln and the Union in the parts of the South with insignificant slavery? In the 1860s the farmers of the Midwest and South were one people. There were slaveowners of the South and industrial interests of the North that were pitted against one another, but the common people of the whole nation were one. In 1860 as in today, the main fault line should not be North/South, but between the heartland and the mindset of the coastal elites.

In my civic identity, I am a Tennessean and an American who happens to live in the South. I am not a Southerner to the point that it separates me from my fellow Americans throughout the nation. As such I hold Abraham Lincoln in high esteem. He was not perfect in his actions, but it was a blessing to our nation that he was the man of the hour.

[Bigun]

Thank for the explanation. I disagree with you entirely.

Good Day!

[Arkinsaw]

Nobody will ever convince me the poor, young white boys of the South fought, and were willing to die, for the Confederacy to continue slavery.

There was a huge cultural difference between North and South and I think most southerners simply resented Yankees dictating the fate of southerners.

Indeed, there are a vast number of reasons for Southerners to choose to fight. Honor, youthful desire for glory, desire to emulate revolutionary war ancestors, machismo, to remain in good standing with the females, protection of their homes, constitutionalism, or even the simple fact of their duly elected state government conscripting them into service.

You even have to take into account the fact that there were differences in motivation based on background, and rank. The motivations were probably very different between the officer corps and the private soldier. But even there you can't make blanket statements when your reflect on the motivations of people like Patrick Cleburne, Robert E. Lee, or John C. Pemberton.

You also have to take into account the fact that motivations changed over the course of the war. Someone's motivation for fighting in April of 1861 can be far different than their motivation for continuing the struggle in 1864.

Those who spend their life trying to get Confederate monuments taken down, or trying to stamp out any reasonable word said about Civil War era Southerners do not make such distinctions. They refuse to account for such complexity in their formulations and pronouncements.

Truth in this instance is a grey area. Unfortunately a grey truth does not advance their particular modern political agenda as quickly as sound-bites and painting with a single broad swipe of the brush. The intellectually dishonest methods get more traction in the short run.

Sadly, many on the pro-Southern side have taken to fighting this tactic by merely reversing it and flinging it back. I can understand that, because its difficult to fight a two second simplistic and misleading soundbite with a two hour historical lecture.

The NAACP can get on television or in print and throw a two second verbal bomb. The nature of the media is such that it is impossible to take the time to explain the complex nature of why the verbal bomb is misleading. It is far easier to develop your own verbal bomb despite it being less than the full truth of the matter.

There is also the danger of dumbing down your own self, and your own message, when you get into that kind of fight. You can come up with a cute sarcastic turn of the tables to show the futility of judging 1860's people by modern standards but you run the risk of your own supporters adopting that position as the message itself. Your own supporters can even lose sight of the complexity behind your position.

It's my opinion that we have spent the last several years concentrating too much on verbal bombs, and not enough time doing the harder work of educating ourselves, and the public about the complex nature of the event.

The average American understands there are complexities involved only the dumbest are swayed by the simplistic pronouncements we so often see from either side. People pretty much think of the NAACP pronouncements on the subject as nothing more than immature posturing and view pro-Southern soundbites of the same sort as just a little bit loony. Most people recognize demagoguery when they hear it.

Personally, I think we are better off recommending a good book in our two-second soundbite than we are trying to use it to fling a little bomb back at our detractors.

[Arkinsaw]

I'll agree that there were differences, but with the exception of slavery, they were mostly superficial.

Well, I am not one to discount the role of slavery in the conflict as the focal point and prime mover. But I, respectfully, would say that you are giving short-shrift to the effects of the other differences on that friction point.

Despite being secessionists, it was southerners who clung to the traditional concepts of federal republicanism and northerners who appealed to a "higher law". Northerners, for a variety of reasons, many economic, were moving down the road to a more centralized government with broader powers. Their views of the nature of the republic had diverged from the more traditional view held in the south. It is true that protection of slavery also had an impact on southern views, but economic needs in the north (such as in regard to infrastructure) was changing the northern view of what sort of government was needed for their economic well-being.

If the north had still retained its old agrarian nature rather than advancing rapidly toward an industrial model I believe that the frictions in regard to slavery would have been muted because the desire for centralization would have been less. I think this is one reason why the largest pockets of "copperhead" activity were where they were. Those areas, being more agrarian, had less at stake in the move toward centralization and still maintained more traditional views of the nature of the republic.

You can say that it was slavery, but the fact is that northerners had lived in union with slavery for many decades without feeling the overwhelming urge to pick up a gun and go stamp it out for the sake of morality. There was something more going on at this particular time. Slavery was the bomb, but the lighting of the fuse at this particular time has a lot to do with the other differences between the two sections.

I read an editorial out of a New Orleans paper in regard to popular sovereignty. The paper was celebrating the concept. But not because of it being a victory for the expansion of slavery. It was being lauded because the writer believed that the South was being treated as an equal member of the union. The author stated bluntly that everyone knew that the actual expansion of slavery into the territories under popular sovereignty was essentially a pipe dream due to demographic realities but that the concept finally recognized an equality of potential. An even playing field essentially.

Of course, in the north, popular sovereignty was viewed in an entirely different way. It was not seen as an abstract political compromise, but as a potential reality on the ground no matter how unlikely. An abstraction to one, a reality to the other.

The fulcrum here was slavery, but the prime issue for the Southern commentator was the abstract concept of being treated equally within a federal republic and maintaining honor while the prime issue for the northern observer was a concrete threat of having access to the west cut off, having their various interests dominated. Of course for fire-eaters and abolitionists the reasoning was much more purely a direct tie to the slavery issue. Those people, despite how loud they were, were not a majority in either region.

This is only one editorial, but it pretty clearly points out the vast disparity in how the two sides viewed the same simple concept.

Slavery was the fulcrum, but you can't dismiss out of hand the economic interests of the movers in the north and you can't discount the abstractions inherent in the Southern view either.

Cultural differences were rampant. Many of these were caused, over time, by having slavery in the South and not in the North. But not all. Some of the most important differences were caused by industrialization and immigration in the North and the resultant rise in importance of westward expansion to northerners. A strictly internal change in the North influenced very little by Southern views.

[x]

Secession was more about slavery in the deep South states, whereas it was less about slavery as you move geographically farther from the deep South areas.

But, still, the smaller the percentage of slaves and slaveowners, the less likely it was that a state would join the rebellion. That's a pretty good wholesale indicator, though of course, it can't account for everything.

You can not make the statement "The Southern states seceded over slavery" and give a clear picture of the whole.

So far as I can make out, historians tend to avoid blanket statements like that, and look at the actual details of the conflict. Nonetheless, it is quite clear that without slavery and the perceived threat to it, there woud have been no secession and no war.

It's not a black and white answer. Very few things are.

Undoubtedly. In history few things happen because of one and only one reason, but the connection between slavery and secession in starting the Civil War is clearer than the reasons for many other conflicts.

[TexConfederate1861]

I am FAR from "Hillbilly" as you put it. I have a Masters in US and Texas History, and a bachelors in World History, so I am quite educated. The difference is, I look at the historical facts, and can look at the truth, without the "hero" worship in it. Lincoln started this country down the road to big government, and destroyed our republic, in his attempt to "save" it. The only thing good that came from his actions, was that slaves were freed. But the price to our country was NOT worth it.

[TexConfederate1861]

First:

Do not presume that you know my parents mind. They are historians, as am I, and we call it for what we see it.
My ancestor 3 times removed cursed Lincoln to the grave, for the treatment received in a Yankee Prison Camp.

Your Lincoln wasn't fit to lick Robert E. Lee's boots, and
Lee lived to regret his decision to surrender, when he saw his people subjegated to Yankee occupation and cruelty.

I have a feeling you are not at all Southern, (since you don't post your home state flag.) So kindly lecture somone else with your sanctimonious defense of America's greatest Tyrant. I repeat, he deserved what he received, to the sorrow of the South, it didn't happen sooner.

[Arkinsaw]

Nonetheless, it is quite clear that without slavery and the perceived threat to it, there woud have been no secession and no war.

Sure. Don't get me wrong, its my opinion that slavery was the fulcrum, the prime mover.

But I think its fairly meaningless to use the criteria of "the war would not have happened if"....as the determinant of causation. I would posit that if the program of industrialization and resultant immigration in the north had not occurred that northern sentiments would have been damped as they had been for decades before living with slavery as a neighbor. Thus no war and no secession. Just because I believe this is true does not lead me to say "industrialization and immigration is the ultimate cause".

I can say that turning on a faucet is the cause of water running in my sink. It is true in the immediate sense. But I am discounting the fact that there are people at a pumping station somewhere without whom my faucet turning wouldn't matter much.

The only thing I am advocating here is a holistic view. Just because we live in a world where everything has to be explained in a thirty second soundbite on tv does not mean that we must boil the most complex political and social event in our history into a soundbite within our own minds. It leads to stupid "yes it is", "no it isn't" arguments that really have little meaning.

[GOPcapitalist]

Already posted here over a week ago. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1336973/posts

[pawdoggie]

I see you display that great Southron Patriot J.W. Booth's motto, does that make you an assassin?