Posted on 02/11/2009 6:06:39 PM PST by Kaslin
This is the 200th birthday of the first Republican to win a national election, Abraham Lincoln. It is good for Republicans today to remember Lincoln, not to be antiquarians, but to learn from his principled defense of the Constitution.
By becoming students of Lincoln, Republicans can win elections and would deserve to win by helping America recover its constitutional source of strength and vitality.
The greatest political crisis America faces today is neither the recession nor Islamic terrorism; it's not health care, education, immigration or abortion. It is that the United States Constitution has become largely irrelevant to our politics and policies.
All three branches of government routinely ignore or twist the meaning of the Constitution, while many of our problems today are symptoms of policies that have no constitutional foundation.
If we are to recover the authority of the Constitution and the many ways it restrains and channels government power, someone or some party must offer a principled defense of the cause of constitutional government.
They must understand not only the Constitution, but also the principles that informed its original purposes and aspirations, principles found in the Declaration of Independence among other places.
No one understood that better than Lincoln.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
If 95% of all imports are going to Northern ports then wouldn't that indicate that the overwhelming majority of imports are destined for Northern consumers? It makes no sense otherwise. If they were destined for Southern consumers then they would have gone to the Southern ports. At the same time those goods were flooding into New York, Boston, and Philadelphia over 3.1 million bales of cotton were being exported, and over 2.8 million were leaving from Southern ports. So access to the world's markets wasn't the issue. Demand was.
Or it means that tariffs were effective in shielding northern firms from foreign competition, forcing southerners to buy goods at artificially high prices from northern firms (but still cheaper than foreign goods). The south had the choice of either paying tariffs for imports or paying interests in the north. And since federal spending was northern-weighted (even if only by population), it meant the money went there no matter what.
As for the unconstitutionality of the deportation I fail to see what clause was being violated by Lincoln's act of compassion that spared Vallandigham time in jail.
As chief executive, Lincoln is accountable for the acts of his officers. His officer was subverting the Constitution with General Order 38. It should never have gotten to deportation. The Fifth Amendment provides that No person shall be... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. It's hard to call the tribunal a due process of law, seeing as how it convicted him of violating an unconstitutional decree. You also own your citizenship and Vallandigham was deprived of it.
But slandering Lincoln while ignoring the South is OK, is that it?... And into which you interjected your opinion that Lincoln was also a white supremacist. If you want to judge him by today's standards then shouldn't you also admit that any Southern leader you would care to admit was worse?
It's not slander when it's a fact. And I haven't defended the south, and I never said that what they did was right. You keep forgetting that and are trying to tie me to the Confederacy---to which I don't belong.
You're the one who started down the racist path. Are you back tracking?
No, actually I didn't start that. See iowamark's posts 30 and 76 where he accused me of being racist and a KKK-member. You interjected in that debate (I'll euphemistically call it a debate).
...where was Lincoln so God awful sinister by suggesting that they might do well to carve out their own life free from the bigotry they faced in this country at the time? Can you explain that?
You presuppose that it these refugees would be accepted at their destinations. But no, it wasn't sinister for him to want to help slaves. But it also doesn't change the fact that he was a white supremacist and white separatist.
In the glorious small-government South, Jeff Davis lived up to Confederate ideals of decentralization by allowing local authorities the fun and profit inherent in oppressing the citizenry. My own GGG uncle, an elderly man in Cleveland TN, enjoyed the privilege of paying the local reb thug money to avoid a free trip to the Confederate gulag in Tuscaloosa.
Do you think it was oppression to bully this harmless old man, or is it only bullying when the rich slaveowners get a president they don't like?
“thus the citizens were deprived of the protection of the Constitution.”
It’s a circular argument. Under your way of thinking, the constitution did not protect the states’ rights to secede from the Union, therefore the the states had a right to abandon the constitution. If a state wanted to defy the constitution and restrict freedom of speech the federal government had no power to stop them since ultimately the state could simply leave the union. In effect, under your interpretation the constitution wasn’t worth the paper it was written on since it was completely unenforceable. The Bill of Rights in the constitution specifies what inalienable rights government (State and Federal) can’t infringe upon. It stands to reason that the States which seceded removed that protection from their citizens when they seceded from the Union, therefore violating all the bill of rights.
“If the people of those states chose to leave the union, then they had that right.”
But, you can’t put the rights guaranteed in the constitution up to a vote. That is the most fundamental and important element of the constitution, protecting the minority (even of one) from the majority. Essentially, the states voted to remove the protection of the constitution from their citizens and they didn’t have that right.
And in the plantation-dominated areas with a high slave population, there’s another slavery-related factor encouraging reb army volunteers that was independent of actual slave ownership, that being the widespread fear of a general bloody slave insurrection arising from Union/Republican victory. The plantation owners had a nice system at work where they could enlist the help of the mudsills to control their possibly rebellious two-legged “property”. Who needed Yankee oppression when your own local “betters” down in Dixie oppressed so logically?
After the election of Lincoln, the South's choice was to leave the Union, or stay and let the federal government collapse their agriculturally driven economies.
Some choice.
Oh...My....God.
Well, now we know.
Where is the poster who complained about the the Lincoln posts ending in southerner revisionists being called racist? It is too bad that people who make good faith arguments about the right of sovereign states to secede under the Constitution get lumped in with this kind of stuff.
The Constitution provided for amendments. If slavery was outlawed by amendment, it might have been opposed by the south, but it would have been Consitutional. That was not in the offing in any event, only the prospect that someday in the far off future, with the creation of non-slave states in the west, the South might get outvoted someday. Based on that, they decided they had to leave.
What you call the their "agriculturally driven economies" others call brutal, immoral, debasing, un-Christian slavery. Any thinking human being in 1860 understood that it needed to be phased out, over maybe 30 years. A principled person might say get rid of it right away. A decent person does not suggest that the notion that it might have been eliminated through the political process would have been a bad thing.
I am stunned. Are there more of you here?
Oh. My. God.
Another one.
I was here last night, and thought this thread was dead. I see it came back to life, and I see you have been presenting some of the finest, most logical and well-informed opinions on this subject I have ever read. I consider myself well-read on the history of the period; you sir are an expert. Thanks for spending the time to set out, through debate, the facts of the matter.
The same people who wrote the Constitution seceded their states from England. If they wanted to force the states to a perpetual union, they would have spelled it out as an enumerated power in the Constitution, but they did not. If it is not enumerated in the Constitution it is then left to the individual states and the people. You assume that you know my way of thinking and stated “ the constitution did not protect the states’ rights to secede from the Union, therefore the the states had a right to abandon the constitution”. The word secession is not in the Constitution, how could it protect a right that it does not even address? If it is not enumerated in the Constitution, what do you do? Look to Amendments 9 and 10 for those answers. Freedom of speech is enumerated in the Constitution and is very much enforceable as are any enumerated powers in the Constitution. You think the people of a state are going to ask their representatives to secede from the Union because they no longer want freedom of speech? Hardly, but you should see that they could demand secession if the Federal government attempts to usurp the Constitution and seize powers that are not granted to it by that Constitution. It is that power grab that makes the Constitution unenforceable, not the legal enforcement of the powers granted to the Federal government by the Constitution.
What rights guaranteed do you assume that I believe were put up to a vote? The people of the states voted to leave the Union. There are no rights or powers enumerated in the Constitution that they voted for or against. The people and the states did have the right to govern themselves on any and all issues that were not enumerated in the Constitution.
The constitutional way to suspend the habeas corpus is with congressional consent. Even Jeff Davis knew this; the Confederate congress twice authorized suspension of the h-c.
As did the U.S. Congress. But I will repeat that the Constitution is silent on exactly who may suspend it, and the Supreme Court has never ruled on legality of Lincoln's actions. Justices as recent as Rehnquist and O'Connor have admitted that just who may suspend it has never been definitively identified. So you can't just say that Lincoln was wrong.
And Jeff Davis is about the last person you should be holding up as a defender of a constitution.
I'm not sure that could always be assumed. Recent research in the Georgia vote indicates that secession did not even get a majority much less the strong super majority that would show the necessary popular support to warrant such a momentous regime change. There were also several reports of convention delegates pledged against secession voting for secession once the convention convened. Had Georgia rejected secession, the rebellion wouldn't have been sustainable even in the short term.
Tennessee's secession was just plain illegal, an action of the pro-slavery political class in the legislature against the expressed will of the people.
I only know of these two fraudulent secessions. Then again, these two states are the only cases I've studied.
That's as far as I got as I fail to see how one can defend the Constitution while proceeding to walk all over it!
I don't think either case is acceptable.
Of course you're completely unfamiliar with the old saying 'two wrongs....' and all that.
Interesting defense of Lincoln btw. I always appreciate it when someone says "Well yea, but the other guy was just as bad." Nice technique, Einstein.
L
Heck I'm sure you can find 4 or 5 examples of the word "perpetual" or one of its permutations in the Constitution.
I'll stand by until you get back to me.
Thanks,
L
Are you suggesting that those protected Northern firms sold each and every product they produced to Southerners? Nonsense. Tariffs protected U.S. producers, but Northerners paid the exact same artificially high price as Southerners did. Your suggestion that they paid a disproportionate share is simply incorrect.
The south had the choice of either paying tariffs for imports or paying interests in the north. And since federal spending was northern-weighted (even if only by population), it meant the money went there no matter what.
And let's say for the sake of arguement your claim is true, that federal spending was weighted by population then so what? What are you suggesting? That the South, which paid a disproportionately low percentage of the tariff and therefore provided a disproportionately low share of the federal income, should receive a disproportionately high level of federal spending? You sound like the Southern politicians of today.
As chief executive, Lincoln is accountable for the acts of his officers. His officer was subverting the Constitution with General Order 38.
Subverting it because you say so? The U.S. was in the midst of a rebellion. Martial law had been declared over large sections of the country, an act which the Supreme Court would later strike down. At the time there was nothing illegal or unconstitutional about the actions, according to established precedent at the time. Vallandigham's case is unfortunate and fortunately not likely to be repeated, but it was no different than what happened to many others in both North and South.
The Fifth Amendment provides that No person shall be... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. It's hard to call the tribunal a due process of law, seeing as how it convicted him of violating an unconstitutional decree. You also own your citizenship and Vallandigham was deprived of it.
And Article I, Section 9 gives the circumstances under which those rights can be modified or restricted.
It's not slander when it's a fact.
You offer opinion masquerading as fact.
You presuppose that it these refugees would be accepted at their destinations. But no, it wasn't sinister for him to want to help slaves.
And what kind of warm welcome or acceptance did the first Europeans get when they landed on these shores 400 years ago or more? What kind of acceptance did settlers get when they headed west past the Mississippi and Missouri into wild and unknown territory to carve out a future for themselves? Did they have 7-11s and ATMs waiting for them? No. The hardships that those former slaves who chose emigration would meet was no different than the hardships pioneers have faced throughout our history. But apparently you don't think they would have made it. Obviously you think they were much better in the safety and security of slavery. Cared for by the white man.
And it should be pointed out that the colony in Liberia had been going on for decades prior to the outbreak of the rebellion. It had towns and schools, churches and businesses. Robert Lee paid passages for some of his former slaves to Liberia, and one went to seminary there and became an ordained Presbyterian minister. An opportunity he would never have gotten in Virginia. But Robert Lee is obviously a white supremecist and white separatist for doing that. Using your standards of measurement, of course.
But it also doesn't change the fact that he was a white supremacist and white separatist.
Well you have your racist, bigoted, white supremecist, white separatist heroes and I have mine. But it also doesn't change the fact that he was a white supremacist and white separatist.
Here's to the southern champions of individual liberty!
I haven't been looking because as I pointed out to you earlier, it was Lee who said perpetual union was to be found in the preamble and not me. I don't see the point in wasting time looking for things that aren't there.
No sh** Bunny Rabbit.
Here's to the southern champions of individual liberty!
Ahhh yes, the same trick yet again. No defense of Lincoln and his un-Constitutional acts.
Care to tell us how Lincoln was within his Presidential authority to jail Federal Judges?
How about ordering Federal troops to shut down newspapers? Where EXACTLY is that in the Constitution?
Lincolns Income Tax? Can you point out Article and Section where that was Constitutional?
I breathlessly await your cogent response.
L
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