Posted on 02/11/2014 2:10:40 PM PST by Kaslin
An Italian exchange student once asked me what he should know in order to understand America. The best I could come up with on the spot was the U.S. Constitution, jazz and baseball.
Later it would come to me that to study each of those only in the abstract, as just a rule book or a series of notes on a page, would be less than useful to someone trying to understand America. The notes would be there, but not the music. The rules of the game would be there, but not the spirit. That spirit cannot be appreciated apart from the history that gave rise to it, and which it shapes in return.
What was the country's spirit like as Abraham Lincoln delivered his second Inaugural Address as president of the United States on Saturday, March 4, 1865? What must it have been like to be there that day? Picture it:
The new vice-president would celebrate his swearing-in by delivering a drunken rant about his modest beginnings and little else. All around the capital lay the evidence of a great civil war that had consumed almost four long years, and left the land covered in blood and ruin, widows and orphans and graves ... and was only then grinding to an uncertain close.
That was the dispiriting scene as the once and future president rose to address those assembled there, and a shattered nation.
Even now, and certainly then, learned scholars would debate the question of what had caused The War. As if standing on the heights of history, Mr. Lincoln would come as close as anyone ever has to answering that question. And his would not be the partisan answer one might have expected from the leader of one side on the cusp of victory in a terrible war:
"Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."
And the war came. Like an awesome act of justice from on high, as if to expiate the terrible sin of centuries of slavery: "These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. ... Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. ... The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes."
The Almighty has His own purposes.
There is something biblical in those words. The victor would assign no blame that all did not share. If he had been unyielding in war, Abraham Lincoln would be more than magnanimous in victory. He would be humble, as his nation, North and South, had been humbled.
The Almighty has His own purposes.
Yet man must do what he can, without thought of vengeance or vainglory. "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in...."
Abraham Lincoln understood that the crisis he faced was too great for smallness on his part, or on his country's. He would look beyond victory and defeat, beyond grief and vengeance, toward understanding, forgiveness, healing, hope. Toward a renewed and ever-new Union.
The continuing and defining American challenge, said Tocqueville in his still unmatched study of "Democracy in America," is to find the right balance between liberty and equality.
In his Second Inaugural, Abraham Lincoln did not choose one or the other, or even portray them as opposing forces. He presented liberty and equality as one, each bracing the other, like the timbers of a great ship, as inseparable as the Union itself. Or in Daniel Webster's words, Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable.
The good ship Union would sail on long after its captain had departed, and it still heads, as always, in the direction of freedom -- and not freedom for just this nation. For such a vessel cannot but help roil the waters all around, sending out ripples who knows how far, lifting the hopes of others just at the sight of its tall masts, its billowing sails, as it proceeds on its own undeterrable course. Despite the debris and wreckage in its wake, despite all the fears and animosities within and without, despite headwinds and gusts that send it off course, mutinies and failures of will, seizures of trepidation and indecision, it sails on, its flag still there. Undeterrable.
I now realize that, when my young Italian friend asked for the key to understanding America, I should have just handed him a copy of Lincoln's Second Inaugural, and said: "Here it is. Now go and study."
Obama's peak spending year was 2011, at 25.3% of US GDP.
Of that, only 20% was for defense, meaning that in 2011 80% of federal spending was for non-defense programs.
US defense spending fell from:
bump
Great post. BTTT
States just don't 'voluntarily' enter the Union. They must be approved for admission by the other states. So then it 'logically follows' that a state wanting to leave the union have the agreement of the other states.
I didn’t know about this letter - Great post.
ping
It wasn't even the Supreme Court... it was Justice Taney alone acting as a circuit court judge in his ruling in ex part Merryman.
The full court never ruled one way or another on the case and even today it is an open question if the exectutive has the power to invoke Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution.
Thank you for correcting my memory on that.
Taney was not the only Supreme Court justice supported the Confederate cause while still in office...
Taney became a very arrogant man who was among the first activist Justices to 'legislate' from the bench'. His Dred Scott decision blatantly ignored both the letter and spirit of the Constitution as well as completely ignoring established precedence to the point of rewriting history to fit his political preference.
I suspect your 1861 expenditure numbers are actually for 1860.
Spending accelerated greatly, as always, once the war started. The 9 months of war during 1861 would have blown that percentage all to pieces.
In raw numbers, it’s always wise to remember the entire federal expenditure in 1860 was $60M. With the most tyrannical intentions in the world, that just won’t buy much of a dictatorship, even with 1860 dollars.
Dred Scott was such an atrocious decision. As you say, it was wrong both historically and on legal precedent.
For one thing, he flat out claimed that Negroes were nowhere in the United States accepted as full citizens and voters at the Founding. This is flatly untrue. At least five states, if memory serves, made no racial distinctions in their voting requirements.
One of them being NC(!), which did not disenfranchise free men of color till it revised its Constitution in 1830s.
Did he support it? In January 1861 Taney wrote a memorandum to be used if the matter came before the court. In it he said, "The South contends that a state has a constitutional right to secede from the Union formed with her sister states. In this, I submit the South errs. No power or right is constitutional but what can be exercised in a form or mode provided in the constitution for its exercise. Secession is therefore not constitutional, but revolutionary; and is only morally competent, like war, upon failure of justice."
Here are some of the raw numbers:
Your comments about the timing of these expenditures may be somewhat correct, since doubtless "fiscal year 1862" began sometime in 1861.
I’m sure you’re right. No way actual spending during the calendar year 1861 went down as a percent of GDP.!
Massive federal spending started to ramp up in May and continued accelerating through the rest of that year. Although much of the initial expense was paid by the states, possibly with later reimbursement by the feds.
I note your numbers show GDP doubling in three years. You will excuse me if I take that with a grain of salt. Especially when a very large part of the 1860 economy was no longer part of the equation.
During the equivalent period of WWII GDP increased only by about 50%.
Righto.
The President takes an oath to " preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Military officers take an oath to defend the Constitution against "enemies foreign and domestic."
The Founders knew well that domestic enemies would likely arise. They provided for temporary suspension of civil rights as necessary to defend the government set up by the Constitution.
To get a good look at what the Founders themselves thought about what was necessary to do to win a civil war, take a look at how they themselves dealt with Tories. Habeas corpus and civil rights did not play a large part in how Tories were handled. Which gives one no reason to assume they would have been appalled by Lincoln's considerably more limited actions against pro-secessionists.
They might very well have thought Lincoln should have allowed the seceding states to leave peacefully, but they would not have been shocked by his methods of making war or dealing with dissenters.
I believe at that time the Federal fiscal year ran from July 1 to June 30.
Hmmmmmm....
I was under the impression that a number of southern justices resigned to join the confederacy, and that while Taney didn't resign he was quite sympathetic.
Now I see that only Alabaman John Campbell actually resigned, and served in the Confederate government.
Others like Georgian James Wayne and Tennessean John Catron remained on the Court.
Wayne's son was a Confederate general.
In the 1863 Prize Cases, Taney and Catron opposed President Lincoln, while Wayne was the deciding vote authorizing Lincoln's blockade of southern ports.
Bottom line: seems to me, while Taney opposed secession in theory, in practice, he did everything he could to block Lincoln from defeating the Confederacy.
Do you agree?
I couldn't tell you how those numbers are determined, but note that US GDP remained in the $8 billion per year range from 1863 through 1873, when it began climbing towards $20 billion in 1900.
Also note that US GDP rose from $38 billion in 1914 to $88 billion in 1920.
GDP also rose from $92 billion in 1939 to $223 billion in 1945.
Clearly there has long been a strong correlation between major wars and US GDP increase.
In part. Let me begin by saying I'm no Civil War expert, and my knowledge of Taney comes from paper I had to do on him years ago in college, dealing with Scott v. Sanford. But I learned a lot more about him in the course of my research.
To answer your question, I don't think Taney supported the Southern acts of secession. Taney first and foremost believed what he said in Dred Scott. He did not believe blacks were citizens or that they ever could be citizens. This was a belief he had been expressing back when he was in Andrew Jackson's cabinet. He believed slavery was legal and the government had no place interfering with it. He also had a narrow view of the Constitution and his opposition to Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was due to that and not due to any sympathy with the Southern cause. He voted in the minority in the Prize Cases because Lincoln had not asked Congress to recognize the existence of the rebellion prior to the establishment of the blockade. It may appear that Taney acted in the manner he did out of loyalty to the South but that would be wrong. He acted as he did out of loyalty to his view of the Constitution. An odd view at times to be sure. But in that he was no different than current justices like Sotomayor or Roberts.
Interesting quote. I’m keeping that one ;’)
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