Posted on 02/07/2009 7:45:28 AM PST by Loud Mime
Abraham Lincoln's Birthday is this Thursday. I thought it fitting to quote from the first Republican president's debates against Stephen Douglas. Each had an hour to present their case, hardly what the mainstream media would like.
I think, and shall try to show, that it is wrong; wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world where men can be found inclined to take it.
This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty - criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.
Before proceeding, let me say I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses North and South. Doubtless there are individuals on both sides who would not hold slaves under any circumstances; and others who would gladly introduce slavery anew, if it were out of existence. We know that some Southern men do free their slaves, go North, and become tip-top Abolitionists; while some Northern ones go South, and become most cruel slave-masters.
When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia - to their own native land. But a moment's reflection would convince me that whatever of high hope (as I think there is) there may be in this in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days. What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South.
When they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them, not grudgingly, but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the reclaiming of their fugitives, which should not, in its stringency, be more likely to carry a free man into slavery, than our ordinary criminal laws are to hang an innocent one.
But all this, to my judgment, furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go info our own free territory, than it would for reviving the African slave trade by law. The law which forbids the bringing of slaves from Africa, and that which has so long forbidden the taking of them to Nebraska, can hardly be distinguished on any moral principle; and the repeal of the former could find quite as plausible excuses as that of the latter.
>>>Or present in the Constitution? Right?<<<
Huh? That makes no sense.
>>>By design of the separation of powers, the Executive has power, and the duty, to enforce the law.<<<
That is correct. The congress creates law, the executive enforces it.
>>>The fact that the Democrats, in all these years, have NOT filed suit on their hated George Bush concerning this matter seems, to me, to have closed this argument.<<<
Either that, or Bush never suspended Habeas Corpus. I suspect it was the latter.
Sorry, try these links and read up.
http://www.slavenorth.com/profits.htm
http://www.projo.com/extra/2006/slavery/day6/side2.htm
http://www.history.org/Foundation/journa...
http://www.slavenorth.com/index.html
http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/2004_...
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2457...
http://www.boston.com/news/education/hig...
http://www.melfisher.org/lastslaveships/...
LOL. I know of the debate you are referring to. On the same subject, check out Jaffa’s Hitlerian Defense of Lincoln. Professor DiLorenzo shines in that one.
I find it a bit odd that so many of these threads degenerate into 1) Calling Lincoln or Northerners hypocrites and 2) Excessive debate about legalism, enumerated powers, parliamentary procedure, imports and economic motivations and condemnations of “illegal wars” and the like. All in the face of a monstrous and barbarous evil in our land.
Just goes to show you that leftists don’t have the market cornered on that way of debating or rationalizing responses to evil.
“oh it would have gone away on its own.” Just like they argued the Soviet Union would have.
Marxism? LOL
I recall reading a Southern defense of slavery calling it “the highest form of socialism.”
Guys like you are like HOlocaust deniers, in that, you have some emotional or possibly cultural connection and thus you cannot even salvage the noble from the ignoble as other groups try to (including all of Americans) instead of rationalize or defend or try to turn the finger back at the ‘victor’ like a Leftist would do.
I see you and the FR Stars Wars mafia are out in full force today.
Are Saturdays black revisionist at FR day?
and starting up with Southerners equal Nazis tripe...
why do they tolerate yall here?
whatever happened to Jedi?
was he banned
Post 7
Below are two events that always struck me about Douglas, who, with rudimentary help from Sophia and his white playmates learned basic skills that allowed him to begin his quest for learning. We now have people who have resources for learning that Douglas could not have imagined, yet they are ignorant and wear that ignorance as a badge of honor, guess that makes them stupid. We have much to learn from previous generations and would benefit greatly by following their commitment to honor and duty.
“When Douglass was about twelve, Hugh Auld’s wife, Sophia, started teaching him the alphabet, thereby breaking the law against teaching slaves to read. When Sophia’s husband discovered this, he strongly disapproved, saying that if a slave learned to read, he would become dissatisfied with his condition and desire freedom”
“Douglass succeeded in learning to read from white children in the neighborhood and by observing the writings of men with whom he worked.
As he learned and began to read newspapers, political materials, and books of every description, the young Douglass was exposed to a new realm of thought that led him to question and then condemn the institution of slavery”
And who was responsible for overturning the Missouri Compromise? Your boy Stephen Douglas, who needed southern votes to get his chosen route for the transcontinental railroad and opened lands north of the Missouri Compromise line to slavery to get them.
Not to start a tangent but I would like to point out that the Soviet Union ended on a vote, not as a result of a foreign invasion and conquest. If you are trying to maintain that the civil war was necessary to end slavery then the metaphor you've chosen tends to refute your case, not support it.
ouch...that one will leave a mark.
That's an odd statement to make, considering that the Emancipation Proclamation contained a clause saying, "And I further declare and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service." I guess Lincoln just didn't read the proclamation before signing it, huh?
When congress forced it on him he came up with the infamous half pay policy
You make it sound like Lincoln came up with it all on his own. Do you have any qotes from him proposing it or supporting it? And what about the Southern no pay policy of conscripting slaves into service and then paying their owners a salary for their work?
At least you did not call us Nazis, like Jaffa does.
BTW, check out: Jaffa’s Hitlerian Defense of Lincoln to find out who the real Nazi lovers are (or, look in the mirror).
IIRC, they began raising armies immediately, on the supposition that secession would result in an invasion by the North.
So it's not the racist Lincoln you're bitching about, earlier posts notwithstanding, it's the fact that Lincoln successfully put down the Southern rebellion? So why bring up race to begin with?
Self government is the correct answer. We can argue over whether specific things Lincoln or Davis did was right; but the war was about who gets to decide what is right.
Well then let's discuss the reasons why the South felt compelled to pursue 'self government' in the first place? It's not like they weren't well represented in Congress. They had a disproportionately high number of Congressmen. They had control of the Supreme Court. What motivation did they have to rebel, other than defense of slavery?
Section 9 and 10 defines powers and limitiations on powers for the states as well as Congres. And for the executive as well.
It restricts the circumstances under which Congress may suspend it.
It defines the circumstances under which it may be suspended. It is silent on who may do it.
>>>So it’s not the racist Lincoln you’re bitching about, earlier posts notwithstanding, it’s the fact that Lincoln successfully put down the Southern rebellion?<<<
There was no rebellion. The Southern states did not rebel, nor did they attempt to take over the federal government (e.g., there was no “Civil War”). Rather, they attempted to leave the Union peaceably.
LOL!
Despite its provocative insights and obvious rhetorical skill, however, The Real Lincoln is seriously compromised by careless errors of fact, misuse of sources, and faulty documentation. Although individually these flaws may seem trivial and inconsequential, taken together they constitute a near-fatal threat to DiLorenzo's credibility as a historian. A few examples indicate the scope of the problem: DiLorenzo's own article on Lincoln as "The Great Centralizer" appeared in the The Independent Review in 1998, not in 1988 (p. vii); Lincoln advised sending freed slaves to Liberia in a speech in 1854, not "during the war" (pp. 16-17); Lincoln was not a member of the Illinois state legislature in 1857 (p. 18); the commerce clause was not an "amendment," and Thomas Jefferson was not among the framers of the Constitution (pp. 69-70); Thaddeus Stevens was a Pennsylvania representative, not a senator (p. 140); and Fort Sumter was not a customs house (p. 242).Unfortunately, these lapses are more than matched by a clumsy mishandling of sources that violates the presumed trust between author and reader. DiLorenzo claims, for example, that in the four years "between 1860 and 1864, population in the thirteen largest Northern cities rose by 70 percent" (p. 225). On the face of it, this statistic is absurd and defies common sense, and sure enough, the source DiLorenzo cites says that the growth occurred "in fifteen years." Page 11 says that Lincoln's law partner and biographer William Herndon was quoting his own recollections of Lincoln, but he really was quoting another biographer. A few pages later (p. 14), DiLorenzo claims that Lincoln, in his eulogy for Henry Clay, "mustered his best rhetorical talents to praise Clay," but all of the examples that follow come from the "beautiful language" of a newspaper that Lincoln was quoting at length. Moreover, Lincoln's supposed comment about the "deportation" of blacks in his Cooper Union speech was in fact a quotation from Thomas Jefferson, as Lincoln himself says (p. 18). In chapter 3, DiLorenzo claims that in a letter to Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln "admitted that the original [Emancipation] proclamation had no legal justification, except as a war measure" (p. 37). His source, however, is the recollections of a conversation (not a letter) that portrait artist Francis B. Carpenter (not Chase) had with Lincoln, and at no point do these recollections sustain DiLorenzo's summary of them. Moreover, in the reference for this section, DiLorenzo misidentifies the title of his source as Paul Angle's The American Reader, when in fact the jumbled material comes from Angle's The Lincoln Reader. Other errors include misplaced quotation marks, missing ellipses, and quotations with incorrect punctuation, capitalization, and wrong or missing words.
Further examination of the endnotes leads into a labyrinth of errors beyond the ingenuity of Ariadne's thread. On page 281, for instance, note 1 cites page 66 of David Donald's Lincoln, when in fact the quotation comes from page 66 of Donald's Lincoln Reconsidered. On the next page, note 7 cites Lincoln's debate with Stephen Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, on August 21, 1858, but the quotation comes from the debate at Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858. Moreover, hardly a single citation of the Basler edition of Lincoln's Collected Works includes the volume number (see notes 25, 26, and 33), and several of the remaining citations of the Collected Works turn out in fact to be references to Basler's Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings (notes 24, 31, and 44). Note 9 on page 282 again cites Lincoln's 1858 debate with Douglas at Ottawa, but the quotations this time actually come from Lincoln's 1852 eulogy for Henry Clay. Note 14 leads down another blind alley to no trace of the quoted material. On page 287, note 3 cites the wrong page number from Donald's Lincoln, and although note 4 immediately following says "ibid.," it actually refers to Basler's Abraham Lincoln. On page 293, DiLorenzo cites Federalist No. 36 as his source, but the quotation comes from Federalist No. 46. Sad to say, this catalog of errors is only a sampling. Readers looking further into the matter will find incorrect titles and subtitles as well as misspelled publishers' names. Obviously, in view of these problems, the maze of endnotes does not provide the "meticulous documentation" promised by the book's dust jacket.
As it stands, The Real Lincoln is a travesty of historical method and documentation. Exasperating, maddening, and deeply disappointing, The Real Lincoln ought to have been a book to confound Lincoln's apologists and to help rebuild the American historical consciousness. Ironically, it is essentially correct in every charge it makes against Lincoln, making it all the more frustrating to the sympathetic reader. DiLorenzo's love of the chase needs to be tempered by scrupulous attention to detail. Without it, his good work collapses. He is an author of evident courage and ability, but his sloppiness has earned him the abuse and ridicule of his critics. A book such as The Real Lincoln needed to be written, but until it is revised and corrected in a new edition, this is not that book. In the meantime, there is still hope for skeptical cynics.
Fort Sumter involved the use of pre-existing South Carolina militia. The Confederate government didn't begin raising an army until well after Lincoln began to raise troops. The upper South hadn't even seceded yet when Lincoln decided on war.
Why? You quoted her. And it was Tommy DiLorenzo who quoted her in the link you provided. Quoted out of context, actually.
Also note “the trial by jury” was only to ensure free men were not returned as slaves”. It in no way was entended to help fugitive slaves.
It's intention was to do just that. Runaway slaves that wound up in non-slave states were not considered slaves. All those personal liberty laws were meant to protect that status.
There was also no provision for Habeas Corpus.
The provisions for a trial by jury makes statements about habeas corpus redundant. You can't have one without the other.
(Lincoln had no respect for Habeas Corpus, even in this matter).
Nonsense.
Show me where it says he doesn't.
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