I have to say that I am a supporter of the Federalist. I have donated money in the past and I enjoy the updates I get via email. So, I must say that it came as a bit of a shock to me when I read your anti-Lincoln screed this week.
Not only was nearly everything you presented about Lincoln skewed badly, but some of it was just plain unfairly attached to the martyred president. Worse yet, you used a quote from Thomas DiLorenzo on whom you laughingly bestowed high credentials of a "Lincoln scholar" to support your positions. DiLorenzo is one of the worst polemicists I think I have ever seen. His MO is one you decry in leftists all the time; arrive at a conclusion, then warp the facts to support it. He is no scholar, and from some of the roundtable discussions I have seen between him and real Lincoln researchers, he ain't much of a gentleman either. You do both yourselves and your readers a disservice to use him as a source.
If you are still bothering to read this, you may want examples of my disagreements with your Lincoln bashing. Well, glad you asked...
Now, I would absolutely agree with you that Lincoln had eliminated the old order of the formation of the country. I agree with you that he instituted a nation of big government. I also lament this to a degree, as well.
However, you act in your piece as if things were going along swimmingly with the Founder's plans until that Lincoln, avaricious of power, came along and destroyed democracy! You are absurd to say so, too. The southern block had quashed democracy in the 1830s with the gag orders on the issue of slavery in Congress long before Lincoln ever decided to run for president. If you want to decry the destruction of the old order, you can thank the slave holding south for starting the ball rolling.
In light of this, I was flabbergasted to see you signing onto the mythical "reunification model" dream that has been touted by people who ignore everything that was happening in this country prior to the war's beginning. Not only that, but to assume that the south would have just meekly returned to the Union after a few decades alone in the wilderness is idiotic to say the least. Nations, once they have successfully assumed that mantle, do not just cast it aside voluntarily and the South would probably have been no different.
Now, I think I can agree that secession was a concept assumed as possible by most politicians of the day and those days previous to the War Between the States. However, I feel that shows a weakness of our system not a strength. And that weakness was exploited dozens of times from before the Constitution was signed to the day the first gun fired at Fort Sumter. Dissolution was a constant threat used by weaker sections to force conciliation. This is a tyranny of the minority and NOT very democratic, I'd say.
The war may have worked for posterity, but I would have stood up at the time in favor of allowing the south to depart in peace, I must admit. So, to this point I'd say Lincoln did overstep his bounds.
But your lauding the ability of the south to separate makes the lie to the very stance you take today on American involvement in the Mideast. Two of the biggest reasons we use to involve ourselves in other countries -- and reasons that are ultimately legitimate in light of American exceptionalism -- are the same ones we have used since the war with Spain; human rights and spreading democracy. If your desires to see the south separate and become a sovereign nation would have come to fruition you would thwart both concepts. The south was neither democratic, nor did it observe the human rights of its chattel slaves. Your inconsistency on this matter is not just incidental, but abhorrent.
Further you assume the consolidation of this southern confederacy was transcendent in the south. But, if you look at the numbers of southern men who fought for the Union from every single southern state, you would see that the Confederacy never had majority support even among its own people. Conversely, few Northern states had anything more than tiny handfuls of men go south to fight for the Confederacy, many states statistically had none. The south forced thousands upon thousands of people in every member state into slavish support of the CSA. So much for your vaunted democratic ideals, eh?
Next you lambasted Lincoln with the results of reconstruction, yet Lincoln was dead during that era and never had the chance to offer his guidance to much of what went on then. And it is widely recognized that radical, "bloody shirt waving" Republicans were the ones that drove reconstruction to the oppressive ends it reached. Lincoln cannot be blamed for reconstruction and you are illegitimate to discuss that era in a Lincoln piece tagging him for its failures and excesses, for sure.
And it is obvious you have read nothing but DiLorenzo's prosaic canard on Lincoln's supposed hypocrisy on the Negro question. Both he and you make it clear that you haven't a clue of the racial attitudes and relationships that most whites had with and for blacks of the time much less any grounding in Lincoln's.
Lincoln mentioned slavery over a thousand times in his personal papers. This idiotic claim that he somehow didn't care about blacks just reveals your lack of knowledge all the way around. Yes he used the emancipation as a war aim. Yes he was cagy at times about slavery and did his best not to be too forthright in his condemnation. But his whole career as a candidate for the presidency from the Cooper Union speech to the day he died was backed by his desire to materially alter and hopefully eliminate slavery in the USA.
The fact that he did not feel blacks were the mental equal to whites is so immaterial to that issue that it isn't even funny. Few whites anywhere in the entire world at that time felt a black could ever be an equal citizen to a white person. Even science at the time had arrived at a consensus that blacks were a lesser human being. And those who did think blacks could be equal thought so on the basis on radical, quasi-religious fervor, not societal or scientific principle. Why would you expect Lincoln to be so much above his society and even the scientists of his day on this issue???
Furthermore your claims that the war was not about slaves at the beginning is a meaningless point. The war, every war, was a political animal as well as a security issue. The war could not have been carried on if it was "all about the Niggers" as many of the day put it (in fact two entire regiments of Illinois troops quit the war when the Emancipation was issued). Like I said, Lincoln was enough of a politician to know that politics is more often about the possible than the principle.
Next you act as if the South would have given slavery up and that it didn't need to take the war to do so. In that contention, history would prove you wrong. As each decade passed after the Constitution was signed slave advocates grew stronger in he south. What on earth would make you imagine that could be reversed?
This feeling against blacks was one that was felt by whites on both sides of the Mason/Dixon line. And that is why Lincoln didn't free any slaves in the North with the Proclamation. Again, we see that politics is about the possible and it was not politically possible to free slaves in the Northern held areas. But, Lincoln was the first president that ever succeeded in making this first step toward eliminating slavery. The issue is far more complicated than your superficial assumption that any US president could just have eliminated slavery with the "stroke of a pen" makes it seem.
(Also, the story of Robert E. Lee being offered command of all Union forces is problematic and not one fully proven.)
As to your discussion of the civil rights abuses that Lincoln engaged in, well that is all quite true. And I also find this a dent in his sterling record. But, then again, every president and administration we have ever had has done similar things to one degree or another in time of war. After all, you have written in favor of the Patriot Act, it MUST be pointed out! (And I support that support, by the way)
We have always limited civil rights in some way when we have been faced with war, and that is as it must be. It is a truism that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. But, every time a war is over, we've gone back to a fuller enjoyment of our common freedoms and that is because our system is designed with the flexibility to respond to times of war.
Also, your harkening back to the abuses of Mad King George is also foolhardy. After all, our president was given powers stronger in many ways than that of the King's by the very men who fought a war to free themselves of that same King. Nearly every president until Lincoln used those powers liberally.
In the end, your reputation has taken a sever blow with me I am quite sad to say. This slanted, often illogical, and badly ahistorical polemic against Lincoln has made you look little better than a hood wearing, cross burning southern apologist from the late 1800s. It has also made you look just like the leftists who warp and bend facts to fit their needs of the day. You needed to bash Lincoln, so you warped things to do so.
I suggest you stay with current affairs. Your history seems a bit tarnished.
This is not my kiss goodbye, I feel it necessary to say. It is my democratic right of disagreement with you. I still support your work and look forward to seeing your next email missive. I just hope that I can trust it as fully as I have in the past.
Thank you
I bailed out from subscribership. What they did was too much. I won't be back.
"Needless to say, when one dares tread upon the record of such an iconic figure as Lincoln, one risks all manner of ridicule from devoted loyalists. That notwithstanding, Patriots should be willing to look at Lincoln's whole record, though it may not please our sentiments or comport with the common folklore of most history books."
Reagan did some things that weren't exactly above board either, but overall the two of them are perhaps our greatest Presidents.
Dixie bump
Lincoln saved the south from the utter stupidity of creating a failed totalitarian thuggocracy.
I don't know if it's God's will or not, but it has been very fortuitous that a unified, Christian land controlled the continent of North America, secure from any European power and able to defeat any empire that sought to control the world.
What perverse imp from hell urged you to start this crap again?
Sic Semper Tyrannis!
No site attacking Lincoln is conservative or worth paying attention to.
No such thing as a Primo confederate apologist.
We ARE Unreconstructed Southernors and will remain so until the end of our days.
Sorry you don't like that but oh well.
Congress arbitrarily capping their number at 435 and the passage of the 17th Amendment had as much if not more to do with the concentration of power in DC than Lincoln did, IMO.
Lincoln did re-image the country from a collection of sovereign states to which the federal government was responsible to a centralized state where the individual states were responsible to the federal government.
Don't know what the article said. I like Lincoln but he was the father of the big federal government IMHO.
I find it highly ironic that any publication or group calling itself "Federalist" would condemn Lincoln in such a fashion. If anything, Lincoln was simply the logical development of Federalist/Whig thought (Hamilton, Washington, Adams, Henry Clay, etc.). Many of our "federalists" today are actually Jeffersonian anti-Federalists. People tend to forget that the original Federalist party (which was the anti-Jacobin and conservative party of its day and the forerunner of the Republican party) was the party of federal supremacy, loose construction, and implied powers. Ironically none other than Pat Buchanan in his The Great Betrayal makes it clear that none other than George Washington was closer to Lincoln than to Jefferson in his ideology of union.
Meanwhile these same "states' rights" palaeos pee in their pants with excitement at the thought of strong centralist rightwing governments in Spain or Portugal or elsewhere in the world.
I guess we are agreed that King George was during the war neither mad nor immoderate in his means. His Government tolerated a very open anti-war movement in Parliament and the country. The newspapers published casualty lists throughtout the war in order to prove to the public that the matter should be given up. The Government quite rightly regarded our efforts as a rebellion, and in the event our goals were achieved by the force of arms. Had he succeeded, we probably would view him as favorably as today we view George Washington.
The South surrendered unconditionally.
..and Billy Yank, Johnny Reb--the war is over...
I'll make sure and read the latest Fed-Pat digest.
The older I get, though, and the more I look into the history of the country, the clearer it is to me that what the rebels did necessarily produced a war. They assumed that they were wholly in command and could lay down an ultimatum to the government which no legitimate government could accept and retain its authority.
Imagine California or Texas, Florida or New England "seceding" today based on spotty or dubious election results, seizing federal property, suppressing loyal citizens, repudiating debts, getting an army together, subverting neighboring state governments, and forming an alliance or new nation against the rest of the country. Can anyone believe that there wouldn't be war?
Where Alexander and others go wrong is in assuming that ordinary political conditions prevailed with secessionists petitioning Congress with their request, rather than seizing the initiative and presenting their demands to the country. They neglect the mania which prevailed in South Carolina and the other rebel areas and the panic that this produced in Northerners.
Unilateral secession wasn't generally accepted as constitutional in 1860, and it's not a very good idea. It encourages people to think that the answer to all their problems is to break away from the larger nation. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. Elections may be disputed, as is the fate of those who want to remain with the rest of the country when their neighbors want to leave. Unilateral secession isn't a workable idea, not that that stops some people who are looking for a cure-all or magic bullet that will resolve all the problems in government.
Maybe the secessionists didn't know what they were doing. We don't have that excuse now. We can see exactly how things developed. And maybe not all of the rebels were primarily concerned with the defense or expansion of slavery. But some were very much preoccupied with that, enough to give their rebellion a bad taste for us now. Whether people want to apply some stigma to the cause as a whole is up to them, and it's not the most useful argument to have. For today's Americans, secession is and was a bad idea.
Good for them!
It's about time somebody told the truth about the biggest tyrant in US History....