[You, dissembling] Says Foghorn Leghorn, who always gets lost in his own ranting rhetoric.
I notice that you forgot to deny the charge, that you use "slavery" as a bludgeon just like the Abolitionists did, i.e. dishonestly, and patently so since there is no slavery in the United States, and yet you continually try to attach it to people who disagree with you and object to your sectionalist diatribes.
As for my posts, please show me an example of a "ranting rhetoric" that your fevered imagination tells you I posted.
[Me] You throw the word "slaver" around as if you thought it had a Velcro backing.
[You, dissembling some more] I don't recall every having used the word "slaver." Not my style.
Oh, you don't? "I ..... forgot!!" </Steve Martin>
And yet you continue to use slavery as a moral club, as if simply writing "slavery" transmutes dross into gold, and falsifies everything other people tell you about American history. Used in that way, it becomes an ad hominem argument, and you use it to blackguard people living and dead who never owned a slave.
[You, dissembling some more] I don't recall every having used the word "slaver." Not my style.
Oh, you don't? "I ..... forgot!!"
And yet you continue to use slavery as a moral club, as if simply writing "slavery" transmutes dross into gold, and falsifies everything other people tell you about American history. Used in that way, it becomes an ad hominem argument, and you use it to blackguard people living and dead who never owned a slave.
"Dissembling?" I don't recall ever having used the word "slaver." It's not a significant part of my vocabulary, though apparently it is in yours.
Nor am I aware that I ever said you or your cronies owned slaves. My point was, you can't talk about the events of the 1860s without reference to slavery.
Consider the situation: some lunatic is always going on and on about how once we were free and now we are all slaves of the federal government. Where's the harm in pointing out that we weren't all free in those days and slavery back then was real and horrible?
A system that allowed human beings to hold others in bondage and control their labor and its results had something very wrong with it. It wasn't a utopia by any means. Do you object to that?
Do you really think that's "bludgeoning" more than the usual attacks on Lincoln and the union are? Would you really want to listen to endless defenses of secession and the Confederacy that leave out an important part of our history?
That all said, Guelzo's claims that Lincoln was an antisocialist and that the National Democracy was the forerunner, the spiritual cradle, of today's neo-Stalinists, are novel to say the least.
"Novel"? Back in the 1930s that wouldn't have been so strange. The Democratic Party led the way in creating a new role for government. Southerners who felt left out of the earlier prosperity joined forces with industrial workers, urban political machines, immigrants, and liberal/progressive intellectuals to put Roosevelt in the White House.
Do you really not know your own intellectual ancestors? Charles Beard and the other early 20th century historians who excoriated the Federalist-Whig-Republican tradition and praised Jeferson and Jackson?
Guelzo is returning to an older reading of American politics, not creating a new one. He's giving full credit to the people who actually developed American capitalism, rather than attribute our economic development to agrarians who actually opposed it.
One notices, too, that Guelzo confines his discussion of Lincoln's economic ideas to the sphere of books and public legislation, and does not show how it's of a piece with Lincoln's toleration and even fostering of access-capitalists and war profiteers like Ben Butler who were involved in the clandestine cotton trade through the front lines and the business of buying up confiscated Confederate properties that Lincoln taxed precisely so they could be confiscated -- demanding in his legislation that the taxes be paid in person, even by serving Confederate officers.
Robert E. Lee's family ran into trouble with that law. Just how widespread enforcement was is hard to say. After the war collection of the tax was suspended.
There were court cases and I believe the tax was later repealed. How much money was collected and how many people may have lost property under the act I don't know.
So far as I can ascertain, though, the law didn't actually say the tax had to be paid in person, only that the tax had to be paid "by the owner." The tax collectors' interpretation that Mrs. Lee had to pay the tax in person didn't stand up in court.