Lessons from Lincoln

From the Emancipation Proclamation; "Now, therefore I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion,"

Lincoln is at odds with his own Lieber Code, Article 38 stating, "[p]rivate property, unless forfeited by crimes or by offenses of the owner, can be seized only by way of military necessity", and even then, "the commanding officer will cause receipts to be given." Receipts, so that the owner may be indemnified.

I'd also stated that the Supreme Court had ruled before the war that measures such as Lincoln claimed were illegal:

There are, without doubt, occasions in which private property may lawfully be taken possession of or destroyed to prevent it from falling into the hands of the public enemy; and also where a military officer, charged with a particular duty, may impress private property into the public service or take it for public use. Unquestionably, in such cases, the government is bound to make full compensation to the owner.
... Our duty is to determine under what circumstances private property may be taken from the owner by a military officer in a time of war. And the question here is, whether the law permits it to be taken to insure the success of any enterprise against a public enemy which the commanding officer may deem it advisable to undertake. And we think it very clear that the law does not permit it.
Chief Justice Taney, Mitchell v. Harmony, 13 How. 115 , 134, 138 (1852)

A position reiterated by yet another Supreme Court decision:

"We fully agree with the presiding justice of the Circuit Court in the doctrine that the military should always be kept in subjection to the laws of the country to which it belongs, and that he is no friend to the Republic who advocates the contrary. The established principle of every free people is, that the law shall alone govern; and to it the military must always yield. We do not controvert the doctrine of Mitchell v. Harmony, reported in the 13th of Howard; on the contrary, we approve it."
Justice Field, Dow v. Johnson, 100 U.S. 158, 169, (1880)

Heyworth remarked:

-- in the end it pretty much comes down to this: If you want the protections guaranteed in the United States under the Constitution, you probably shouldn't go around renouncing your allegiance to it or making war on it.

But in the end it pretty much comes down to this: If you want to claim that the States had not seceded, and were still citizens of the US, then their Constitutional rights are guaranteed.

Your state government has no power to force an individual to renounce US citizenship.

All persons/civilians in the seceding States remained citizens of the US unless they personally renounced citizenship or aided the rebellion.
By seceding & making war, those in actual rebellion had forfeited their rights to be treated as citizens. As belligerents, their rights to life, liberty or property could be lost.

Your state government has no power to force an individual to renounce US citizenship.

It seems we have a Tory in our midst. At that time a person possessed American citizenship by virtue of state citizenship. If a person chose to remain a citizen of the US, all they had to do was move to a state remaining in the union. No one forced them to stay.

Secession did not mean war - is simply meant that the people of that state chose to exercise their powers as described under the Declaration of Independence, and guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment of the federal Constitution. The seceded states did not send armies to Washington to depose Lincoln and overthrow the federal government. As belligerents, their rights are still God-given:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Lincoln waging war against the seceding states was a war against the Declaration.

Using the term hearsay, which was refuted several posts back, is also a major misappropriation of logic:

Rubbish. You don't know the meaning of "hearsay" or "refute."

Semmes, Bledsoe, Howison, Duyckinck, Avirett, Dabney, and Lossing weren't there. Charles Adams, who's still alive, obviously wasn't there. Therefore, their testimony is second-hand, or in legal terms, hearsay. They aren't giving independent testimony about one incident or about different incidents. Rather, they're repeating one or more stories about which they had no first-hand knowledge.

Some of them retell the Baltimore Sun or Baldwin stories. Others, like Semmes, relate what appears to be the same alleged incident, but put different words in Lincoln's mouth. That's a sign that they aren't working from real sources but from Confederate folk history or mythology of the era. There's nothing that Semmes or Bledsoe or Avirett says that proves anything or provides independent confirmation of any claim.

John Baldwin did meet with Lincoln, but his account -- available at the Library of Congress website -- isn't wholly reliable. See John Minor Botts's The Great Rebellion, also available on line. Botts backs Baldwin on one point, but doesn't express much faith in Baldwin's memory or character in general.

That leaves the Sun story attributed to Fuller. Perhaps the story did come from Fuller, a Baltimore Baptist minister born at Beaufort South Carolina and a defender of slavery as scripturally justified. Perhaps it didn't. Perhaps Lincoln said what the Sun, a paper edited by pro-slavery pro-Confederates, attributes to him. Perhaps he didn't. But it's hardly convincing evidence of any great conspiracy on Lincoln's part.

Revenue is something that any national leader thinks about, and has to think about. It may have been on Lincoln's mind at that moment. But that doesn't mean that revenue was the only or chief consideration on his mind, or that it was "my tariff" that was most important to him, or that the US was going to go to war chiefly or entirely on that ground.

I do have to wonder about the Fuller meeting. Sumter was attacked on April 12-13. Everyone knew that war would be the likely result afterwords. Yet here's this Southern-born minister supposedly telling the President give in on everything, let them have what they want and you'll have peace. Imagine someone telling Roosevelt that after Pearl Harbor or Bush after 9/11. Imagine someone making such a remark at a moment when the country didn't even know if its capital was secure.

If I were President, I'd scarcely know how to respond to such nonsense. I suppose that a clergyman would be justified in making such a request, but there's something a little strange about the whole alleged incident. It's not impossible that Fuller or the Sun writer condensed Lincoln's remarks to put a negative spin on them.

Elsewhere, Lincoln made his prewar rationale clear: the courts, the mails, national defense, and import duties were four ways the federal government expressed its authority. So long as the federal courts were in session, the mails delivered, the forts maintained, and the tariff collected, one could believe that the union was intact. If none of these federal activities was practiced, the union was clearly broken. That's a major reason why the tariff was so much on Lincoln's mind during the Sumter crisis.

But after Sumter war was a fact whatever was done about the tariff. And war was bound to cost more in outlays than it could ever bring in as revenue. I can't answer for what a president might say behind closed doors in a moment of national catastrophe, but there's something questionable about the whole argument that the war was fought for tariff revenues.

Now as for "refute": nothing that you've said "refutes" anything. You simply throw out a little abuse and sarcasm and a mock superior attitude, and assume that you've proved something, when all you've done is cut and paste some text and typed a comment underneath. Whatever name you post under, you're still just a little nit or gnat or fly or flea buzzing around trying to attract attention to yourself.

But in the end it pretty much comes down to this: If you want to claim that the States had not seceded, and were still citizens of the US, then their Constitutional rights are guaranteed.

Your state government has no power to force an individual to renounce US citizenship.

It seems we have a Tory in our midst.

Bizarre use of 'Tory'. -- I support our Constituttion as written, you claim States can ignore it.

At that time a person possessed American citizenship by virtue of state citizenship.

Absolute bull. Quite a few of our US Citizens in those days lived in 'territories', areas that were not yet States. Territories were administered by the federal government and citizens rights under both jurisdictions were equal.

If a person chose to remain a citizen of the US, all they had to do was move to a state remaining in the union. No one forced them to stay.

Are you claiming that a seceding State could ~force~ a citizen to sell out & leave because he refused to actively support the Confederacy?

Secession did not mean war - is simply meant that the people of that state chose to exercise their powers as described under the Declaration of Independence, and guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment of the federal Constitution. The seceded states did not send armies to Washington to depose Lincoln and overthrow the federal government. As belligerents, their rights are still God-given -

All of us hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
-- Yet 'states rightists' want a State to have the power to ignore those rights for some of the men that reside within its borders.. Men that do not agree with the majority politically.

Lincoln waging war against the seceding states was a war against the Declaration.

Whatever. I can't argue against irrational calls to 'save liberty' by ignoring the Constitutional rights of individuals within a State.

I get the impression that you think I am defending slavery!

Not at all, although I've seen a few Lost Causers do so. There was one guy a year or so ago who thought slavery such a fine institution that he said he'd consider becoming a slave himself if it meant he'd be fed and cared for the rest of his life.

My point, though, was that while you claim the EP was pure propaganda, you also state that it had the effect of keeping France and England out of the war for fear of appearing to support slavery. Clearly it could not have had such an effect if slavery wasn't, in fact, seen to be a moral wrong by those European powers. The fact is that, whatever the southern fantasies of having European armies fighting by their side against the United States in order to guarantee the flow of cheap cotton, there was never any serious consideration of it. Slavery WAS a moral albatross around the south's neck, and the southern cause wasn't that popular with the working (and voting) masses from the outset because of it. Hell, the British had essentially invented abolitionism. The EP simply had the effect of silencing the small minority that supported intervention.

So you are saying it wasn’t a propaganda ploy because it was successful propaganda?

Well lots of things can be taken as propaganda ploys. Are presidential inaugural or state of the union addresses propaganda ploys? The EP did function as a legal and military document. While no slaves were "actually freed" in the instant Lincoln lifted his pen from his signature, in a legal sense the Union would no longer recognize slaves as the property of their owners, in the areas under rebellion. As the war went on, and hundreds of thousands of slaves freed themselves by walking off the plantations and heading for Union lines, the EP had very real effect.

But everyone will admit that the EP's greater impact was as a statement of principle in the same way as an inaugural or State of the Union address. And that statement, that when this whole thing was over, slavery would be fatally crippled if not dead, did have a real impact. In America (and read some of the howling southern editorials after the EP for some fun) and in cowing the minorities in England and France who thought cheap cotton somehow trumped basic morality.

As for the Union slave areas, the process of abolition was well underway, with the job finished when the 13th amendment was passed.

Your state government has no power to force an individual to renounce US citizenship.

Why? A state ratifying the Constitution can FORCE federal citizen on parties not desirous of such. Again, citizens derived status by virtue of state/territorial citizenship. It's ludicrous to assert that a person can possess federal citizenship without residing in a state/territory. But yet again, even the Supreme Court acknowledged the fact:

Hence, in organizing this rebellion, they have acted as States claiming to be sovereign over all persons and property within their respective limits, and asserting a right to absolve their citizens from their allegiance to the Federal Government. Several of these States have combined to form a new confederacy, claiming to be acknowledged by the world as a sovereign State. Their right to do so is now being decided by wager of battle.
Justice Grier, The Prize Cases, 2 Black 67 (1863)

Note that it's not illegal, it took force of arms to determine the issue.

Your state government has no power to force an individual to renounce US citizenship.

All persons/civilians in the seceding States remained citizens of the US unless they personally renounced citizenship or aided the rebellion.

Why? A state ratifying the Constitution can FORCE federal citizen on parties not desirous of such.

Force? Daffy idea. -- Anyone can renounce citizenship.

Again, citizens derived status by virtue of state/territorial citizenship. It's ludicrous to assert that a person can possess federal citizenship without residing in a state/territory.

Who asserted that?

But yet again, even the Supreme Court acknowledged the fact:

Hence, in organizing this rebellion, they have acted as States claiming to be sovereign over all persons and property within their respective limits, and asserting a right to absolve their citizens from their allegiance to the Federal Government. Several of these States have combined to form a new confederacy, claiming to be acknowledged by the world as a sovereign State. Their right to do so is now being decided by wager of battle.
Justice Grier, The Prize Cases, 2 Black 67 (1863)

Note that it's not illegal,

Note that ~what~ is not illegal?

it took force of arms to determine the issue.

You obviously think you've made a point, but its not evident. Try again..

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