[Non-Sequitur]

Just what is untruthful there.

Where to begin? There's his judging Lincoln by todays standards of racism. His misquoting Lincoln to make it appear that he used the term 'ni**er' rather than quoting other or attributing the term to them. Lincoln himself never used the term in common conversation or in any of his correspondence. There's his claim that nobody was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. His selective quoting of Frederick Douglass out of context to make it appear that he thought Lincoln was no friend of the black man, the exact opposite is true. There's his claim that many historians agree that the South would have reunited with the North without a war, I don't know of a single historian who says that. His claim that all the founders thought unilateral secession was legal; I'm not aware of a single one who said that and Madison is very dismissive of the idea. Then there's the claim that Robert Lee detested slavery when he in fact believed that was the best condition for blacks to be in. The claim of tens of thousands of polticial prisoners, hundreds of newspapers closed down, and on and on and on. It's nothing more that a list of the top 100 Southron myths.

OK?

[Colonel Kangaroo]

I think the author of the article, Mark Alexander, deserves some credit for rising to a dignity well above the DiLorenzo level. The argument is still misleading, incomplete and just plain wrong, but in not trying to portray Lincoln as a combination of Simon Legree and Pol Pot, he's progressed much farther than the overpriced toilet paper produced by the likes of DiLorenzo.

On the other hand, the relative reasonableness of his prose will likely lessen its appeal with the usual consumers of such work.

[hellbender]

You deny that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and locked up or exiled antiwar Northerners? That's a fact. Lincoln immediately raised a huge army specifically to invade the South, which had declared independence on exactly the same legal basis as that used by the 13 colonies less than a century before. You describe every pro-Confederate argument as a "myth," probably because a bunch of liberal professors filled you with all the gushing Lincoln mythology and Yankee propaganda, just the way they are filling empty heads with worship of 0bama today.

The Civil War was fought almost entirely on Southern soil, and conditions there soon became desperate. Conditions like that motivate extreme measures against people perceived as giving aid and comfort to the invaders, in every war. However, only the North had a specific planned national policy of making war on civilians. When an army invades a rural agricultural society and burns buildings and crops, kills or steals livestock, it is tantamount to killing civilians by starvation and exposure. That's an atrocity unmatched in scale by anything the Confederacy did. In contrast, when Lee invaded PA, his men were commanded to respect civilians, and officers were ordered to pay civilians for supplies they requisitioned. They did not go around burning down PA barns and crops a la Sherman.

I repeat: Lincoln did irreparable damage to the Constitutional, Federal system. Not until FDR was his trashing of States' rights surpassed. If Alexander does exaggerate a little, I don't really care, because we desperately need some antidote to the disgusting sentimental hype about a man who sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths in order to establish by force the outrageous concept that every State and its citizens belongpermanently to some imperialistic "national" govt., instead of being sovereign entities who voluntarily delegated limited powers to a small central govt. Union victory in the war basically trashed every principle on which this country was founded.

If you go on reading slanted liberal academic propaganda about the Civil War and other things, you are well on your way to becoming a fan of FDR ("he had to be fascist to save capitalism") and 0bama.