Posted on 11/12/2012 9:40:27 AM PST by chessplayer
One was a dictator. The other is a wannabe.
I don’t know where you’re getting your history from. Buchanan was not our most divisive president back when. States may have seceded during his term, but quite obviously it was because of Lincoln’s election, not him.
I agree, but Buchanan's inept handling of the secession caused it to be a much bigger war. His errors turned a fairly severe disagreement into a bloody war.
“Liberals despise Lincoln”
Since when? Along with FDR as long as I can remember he’s been the go-to Big Government guy. Libs absolutely love saying before the civil war it was “the United States are,” and after it was “the United States is.” Gives them the same thrill as we get in saying “molon labe.”
“Dumbass. Lincoln was a Republican.”
Which means almost nothing, unless you want to pretend Democrats are the relative states’ rights party now. The names nay not have changed, but the parties have gone through a few mutations since 1865.
Duh, that’s the point.
I don’t agree Buchanan was inept. Maybe he didn’t do it on purpose, but he had the right idea, and we should’ve let them go peacefully. Some brilliant maneuver may have empowered him to bring the seceders back in peacefully, or somehow made the subsequent war mellower. I don’t know; anything’s possible. It’s just that you can’t call Buchanan the most divisive president of the first 200 years or even a failure just because he wasn’t a Machiavellian genius.
We operate under the delusion that Lincoln stepped in amidst a crisis, that events moved him, and somehow that secession was not only unconstitutional or whatever, but also a threat to the North and moreover that it was the North that was attacked, and Lincoln only kept it together. What a threadbare string of halftruths. Buchanan faced the exact same situation with other federal property as did Lincoln with Sumter, save the fireworks show. Yet somehow his administration avoided all out war. You can argue it only did so by puttees nh off the deciding day, but that’s begging the question. Why did Sumter lead to 600,000 deaths? Why was it there that the decision point lay? Because Lincoln deemed it so, I say, and no other reason.
The South blundered in firing on Sumter started. But what was the blunder? Not the one we read about in history books. It started A war. But that war could’ve started with any seizute of federal property. Washington was within its rights to fight for redress, to get the property back, to be compensated, and to punish tge South. However, Sumter did not suddenly make secession illegal. Nor did it justify the eventual war. No, that war was started by one man and one man alone: the same man who without just provocation blockaded Southern ports and the same man who unconstitutionally called for tens of thousands of troops, thus driving the rest of the to-be confederates out of the union.
This is a delicate point, and bears repeating. The civil war we know from history books was not inevitable given the circumstances facing Buchanan. It was if secession was to be reversed, you may say. But ut was Buchanan’s position that he was legally powerless to do anything about it, and I tend to agree. The only other way we get to a Lincoln war is if the South invades the North, which wasn’t going to happen. (At least not soon. I can’t speak for what a Confederacy might have done in subsequent years or decades.)
How us it, anyway, even accepting the history books’ history, that Buchanan gets all the blame and Lincoln all the credit? Lincoln’s solution to the crisis ended up in 600,000 deaths and untold millions in damage, anyway. I realize historians worship Power, but is action really THAT much preferable to inaction?
The Lincoln fairy tale sells books and movies to this day. It is so much reconstructed BS. Lincoln was a racist to the nth degree and was a war monger. Now we have a Roman Temple with him on the throne. Oh brother what utter BS.
I would argue that Buchanan should have either (1) recognized the South's right to secede, eliminating the cause for war, or (2) immediately mobilized as large an army as necessary and suppressed the secession. His big error was taking a middle position, essentially that the South had no legal right to secede but that he had no legal power to stop them. As he put it, "the power by force of arms to compel a State to remain" was not as he saw it among the "enumerated powers granted to Congress". I consider taking that position for the period December 1860 to March 1861 to be a fatally flawed - fatal for over 600,000 Americans - and thus inept position. Either decisive position, whether in favor of secession or opposed, would have been infinitely better.
Here is a parallel between Lincoln and Obama...secession. States will be leaving the union I predict when Obamacare is being forced down the throats.
re: “Duh, that’s the point.”
No, the so-called “point” was an irrelevancy. The “point” was that half the country didn’t VOTE for Lincoln in his re-election as though, somehow, that made his re-election illegitimate.
The “point” was irrelevant because the states that were in rebellion didn’t vote for or against Lincoln BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T PARTICIPATE in the election.
The equivalent would be like saying that Jefferson Davis didn’t receive any votes from half the country (the North) when he ran for election of the Confederate States of America.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.