A Lincoln thread! What could possibly go wrong?
Why wasn't Mr. Davis tried and possibly executed? To put him on trial would be to put secession on trial, a losing proposition for the prosecution.
I find nothing in the Constitution that precludes secession or enumerates a power to the Federal government to preclude it. Indeed, the fact that the Congress accepted Texas' specific reservation of that right in admitting it to the union belies any assertion to the contrary.
That said, that the article does not mention the way the South was paying 70% of the taxes shows that the author had no intention of a reasoned and balanced presentation.
I predict a long and protracted struggle.
State governments are elected governments with sovereign rights.
Gee, he gets it.
....A common blasé position among the Lew Rockwell’s of the world (a man who never felt the lash himself of course) is that slavery would have eventually died out as modernization overtook the antebellum Southern way of life.
Ping for later
Hence, maintaining the Union was his prime motivation...
Hmmm, a direct contradiction, in the first 2 paragraphs, not a good sign.
So was the slavery the casus belli, or was maintaining the Union?
Seems clear that Lincoln's reason for invading the South was to save the Union, NOT to end slavery.
Has the USA been less constitutional, and (much) more centralized on the federal government since? Yes. Absolutely.
ping
Abortion is the slavery of the 21st century and I am an abolitionist.
There was a tyrannical president in office during the Civil War but he was based in Richmond.
Frum-like attempt to drive a wedge between the tea party and republicans....
I bet I could grind the argument to a painful halt by citing the Lincoln-Douglas debates. However, I’m not that sadistic.
So instead, I’ll approach it from an objective point of view, and put the whole blame of the Civil War down to amazingly bad luck.
To start with, after the American Revolution, slavery was dying out, and pretty quickly, and was exclusively an upper class practice. Had things remained this way, slavery probably would have been outlawed around 1833, about the same time as the British outlawed it.
But Eli Whitney, and others, developed the cotton gin around 1800, which meant the previously tedious and expensive processing of cotton could be done by machine, instead of by hand. This made cotton production and wealth explode in the South, with cotton fields springing up all over the place. And it also meant that slavery became within reach of the middle classes.
So an event about 60 years before the Civil War was to a large part responsible. And ironically, 50 years after the Civil War hit, the boll weevil ended cotton production in the South, which would have also removed the reason for the war.
Okay, that was the first thing. Second, though there were some small fanatical groups, like that led by John Brown, who wanted to start a war, after the first real battle of the war, both sides retreated because they knew they needed to ramp up a lot to make a war happen.
This would have been a great time for diplomacy, or at least agreeing to try to hash out differences instead of wholesale bloodletting. But it was a missed opportunity.
And then, when Lincoln sent General McClellan to fight the Confederate forces, McClellan did everything but fight. He wanted to run against Lincoln for president, and conducting a bloody war was not a particularly good stepping stone for the office.
But again, this meant lots of time where there could have been a parlay, but again a missed opportunity.
So, in the final analysis, it takes two to tango, and if either side would have at least offered to settle things down, thing might have been different.
Jefferson Davis was every bit as much a "tyrant" in the South as Lincoln was in the North (by the end of the war, some Confederate states were threatening secession), but he seems to have been forgiven by his "libertarian" fans in the name of sentimentalism. Furthermore, it was the Confederacy, not the Union, that experimented with state socialism towards the war's end.
Let's look at a few more heroes of these champions of liberty who so detest the "tyrant" Abraham Lincoln:
George Papadopoulos
Rafael Trujillo
Francisco Franco
Antonio de Oliveira Salazar
Chiang Kai-shek
Alfredo Stroessner
Augusto Pinochet
Now please do not misunderstand me. I am not in any way saying these men were tyrants on the level of history's Communist dictators (they most assuredly were not) or that their regimes were "just as bad" as the Communists (they were not). What I am saying is that these men ran regimes that were highly centralized and that they curtailed civil liberties in order to fight Communism. Yet libertarians do not hold them to the same standard; to the contrary, they tend to glorify them.
Now if George Papadopoulos or Rafael Trujillo can be excused as acting in extraordinary times then how in the name of all that is reasonable can Abraham Lincoln not be given the same consideration? After all, all Lincoln's "tyrannical" actions occurred after the Confederacy had opened fire on a US military installation. Prior to that time he had done absolutely nothing, nor would he have done anything had the southern states not seceded. He most certainly would never have interfered with slavery in states where it already existed; the Republican party's position was nonextension, not abolition. And the South knew it!!! But based on nothing but this (and possibly an impending high tariff) seven states seceded from the Union before the man had even been inaugurated!
Now, why is it that Rafael Trujillo and George Papadopoulos and Chiang Kai-shek--or for that matter Confederate President Jefferson Davis--are not labeled as "tyrants" by these same "libertarian" hypocrites?
The answer is obvious.
Davis, Trujillo, Papadopoulos, and Stroessner were defending "white western European civilization." Lincoln was (supposedly) fighting for a corrupted and mongrelized Union and for the adulteration of European blood. That's it. Period. And in "palaeo" thought Communism isn't an evil ideology, but rather a defect of non-European blood. Thus the "tyrant" Lincoln was a Communist and the "tyrant" Davis was a shining knight fighting for freedom (even though he had to crush some liberties to do it).
Palaeoconservatives and "palaeolibertarians" do not recognize a single Objective Universal G-d over a unitary human race. They are multiculturalists who advocate a "planet of peoples," in which each of a plethora of unconnected peoples has its own "equally valid" worldview and "gxd." The idea of a single G-d and a single moral standard on the authority of that G-d is "race-mixing" and "one-worldism."
Civilizationism is racialism, and racialism is henotheism!!!
I'm pinging you, wideawake, in case some ignoramus accuses me of equating anti-Communist authoritarians with totalitarian Communist dictators (I explicitly rejected this equivalency but that won't stop them). I didn't even say slavery was wrong! All I am doing is pointing out hypocrisy!
Anyone who cheers Chiang Kai-shek or Francisco Franco for abolishing federalism and instituting highly centralized national governments has no business attacking Abraham Lincoln! (Though I suppose they'll say that centralization is valid for some peoples but not for others.)
I have had mixed thoughts on this point myself but I have to say, when I read that 2nd Inaugural on the wall up there in DC it does bring trears to my eyes...
People attack Lincoln because he makes a nice scapegoat for the real originators of big government, who met in Philly in 1787.
Ironic isn’t it that now the southern states that seceded are the most patriotic while the northern states have the most left wingers
Marx and the commies of '48 supported him.