Posted on 10/12/2018 7:13:42 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
President Trump praised Confederate Geader Robert E. Lee as "a great general" on Friday during a campaign rally in Lebanon, Ohio.
"So Robert E. Lee was a great general. And Abraham Lincoln developed a phobia. He couldn’t beat Robert E. Lee," Trump said before launching into a monologue about Lee, Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant.
"He was going crazy. I don’t know if you know this story. But Robert E. Lee was winning battle after battle after battle. And Abraham Lincoln came home, he said, 'I can’t beat Robert E. Lee,'" Trump said.
"And he had all of his generals, they looked great, they were the top of their class at West Point. They were the greatest people. There’s only one problem — they didn’t know how the hell to win. They didn’t know how to fight. They didn’t know how," he continued.
Trump went on to say, multiple times, that Grant had a drinking problem, saying that the former president "knocked the hell out of everyone" as a Union general.
"Man was he a good general. And he’s finally being recognized as a great general," Trump added.
— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 13, 2018 Trump has drawn criticism for his defense of Confederate statues, including those of Robert E. Lee.
He drew widespread condemnation last year following a deadly rally in Charlottesville, Va., saying that white nationalist protesters were there to oppose the removal of a "very, very important" statue.
"They were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee,” Trump said at the time. “This week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
Trump, speaking at another rally in Ohio last year, said that he can be one of the “most presidential” presidents to hold office. "…With the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office,” he said to a crowd in Youngstown.
Of course it does, in Article 1 section 8, which authorizes Congress to:
Again, if your bizarre legal theories had merit, surely they'd have been tested in courts by now, right?
I can see Lincoln using his "Pen and Telegraph" to enact executive orders that would interfere with it, but I cannot see how the President or the Congress could do anything more than rail about it. No concrete changes could have been enacted.
The Southern reps were not stupid, so I'm finding it hard to grasp how they could have seen an actual threat to their peculiar institution.
I have read others allege and I lean toward's the view that agitation to secede because of slavery was just a means to cover up their real reasons for leaving, which were financial gain.
As the Boston Transcript noted on March 18, 1861:
now the mask has been thrown off and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding states are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centres of traffic can be changed from Northern to Southern ports . . . by a revenue system verging on free trade. . . . The government would be false to its obligations if this state of things were not provided against.
The difference in sentiment between the North and the South about slavery was a convenient wedge issue to achieve the results they sought in obtaining commercial independence. This is not so remarkable when you noticed Thomas Jefferson said something similar years before.
Six years later the territorial legislature of Missouri asked for admission. The House of Representatives in Washington approved, but attached an amendment requiring that Missouri phase out slavery after statehood. The Senate balked at such a stipulation. . . . Jefferson saw Northern sectionalism conspiring to keep additional Southern states out of the Union. The question of slavery carried with it, according to the former president, “just enough semblance of morality to throw dust into the eyes of the people, and to fanaticize them; while with the knowing ones it is simply a question of power.” (Cisco, Taking A Stand, p. 59)
And
The Missouri question is a mere party trick. The leaders of Federalism, defeated in their schemes of obtaining power by rallying partisans to the principle of monarchism . . . have changed their tack and thrown out another barrel to the whale. They are taking advantage of the virtuous feelings of the people to effect a division of parties by a geographical line. They expect that this will ensure them, on local principles, the majority that they could never obtain on principles of Federalism.(Letter from Thomas Jefferson to William Pinckney, September 20, 1820; cf. Robert Catlett Cave, The Men In Gray, Crawfordville, Georgia: Ruffin Flag Company, 1997, reprint of original edition, p. 134)
But not lawfully. The constitution isn't flexible. It's rigid.
So it appears that you share my opinion that the Confederacy did represent a serious existential threat to the United states.
Central_va wishes us to believe the Confederacy was no more a serious threat than, metaphorically, a child losing its baby-teeth.
I'd say it was more equivalent to an adult losing at least a leg and maybe an arm too.
That's what made the Civil War a matter of national life & death.
Two constitutional clauses against your argument.
The Constitution is rigid. The interpretation of what is written in the Constitution is flexible.
Right, and absent Grant, Sherman & Co. 1864 results those Democrats would have won the 1864 election and struck a deal with Confederates.
Stop posting. Take a break. Take a week off an and do some research and stop emoting. Find ONE serious contemporary reference lamenting the threat OR EVEN THE POSSIBILITY of the North being conquered and occupied by the CSA. ONE reference please.
I am not going to repost the documents issued by GA,SC,MS and TX explaining their reasoning for secession. You have read them. They go to great lengths to point out a perceived threat to slavery. Finances are barely mentioned in only two of those documents and not at all in the other two.
You may choose to ignore the written thoughts of the men responsible for secession and prefer the thoughts of men that had nothing to do with secession opining of issues decades before.
The way I read those documents, a strong belief, that in the future, Lincoln and the Republican, would act against slavery was the prime motivations for their actions.
What kind of stupid bs is that? Oh, right. It was the North that opened fire on Ft. Sumter. Yeah. Ok.
To hold Lee responsible for 700,000 deaths is the real stupid BS. Those responsibilities belong to Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.
Read more into Rommel. He wasn’t as great as he was cracked up to be. He certainly was not without skill I’ll grant and although not a Nazi he served an evil regime. I look more at what men do then what they say or is said about them.
I think he’s just slow - hence the large font ;’}
Eventually. Not immediately. Extra capital from cutting out New York and Washington DC from their European trade would have funded industries. They would also have been the middleman for European products distributed throughout the Midwest by the Mississippi, and along the border. This would have further undercut the ability of the Northern manufacturers from making a product.
Yes, they were a quite dangerous threat economically. They were likely not going to be a threat militarily. They would have probably been as benign as Canada.
Territories that became states would have probably aligned themselves with the South over time, and so in this manner they would have also been an eventual threat to Union growth.
Central_va wishes us to believe the Confederacy was no more a serious threat than, metaphorically, a child losing its baby-teeth.
In the short term, he is correct. In the long term, they would have grown at the expense of the existing power structure in New York and Washington DC. I think Lincoln and his Industrialist backers realized this, and that is why they saw it as a necessity to stop the South from leaving.
They were thinking about the consequences years down the road.
Liberal judges have made it flexible, but it really isn't flexible. Consider the 14th amendment for example. Does anyone believe the framers of the 14th in 1868 intended to create a right to abortion? Or Homosexual marriage? Or Anchor babies?
It is this sort of deliberate misinterpretation of the intent of the writers of the constitution and it's amendments that undermine the rule of law.
No corruption of language by me, FRiend.
Thanks to Lincoln's leadership the Union quickly responded, adapted & resisted the Confederates' threat.
But Lincoln's opinion in 1861 was the whole thing came down to one state -- Kentucky.
He thought if we lost Kentucky we'd lose the war and with a successful Confederacy then all the factors which DiogenesLamp keeps pointing to would come into play.
The Union would be further reduced, crippled and effectively extinguished.
DiogenesLamp imagines a Union weak in leadership and lacking in enough basic patriotism to have defended itself from an economically powerful, highly motivated & militarily skilled Confederate assault.
In his mind the Union could not resist the powerful Confederate assault without resorting to such unfair, dishonest, illegal and unconstitutional actions as, for examples, the Anaconda Plan and Emancipation Proclamation.
I think that, as always, DiogenesLamp exaggerates, but at least on this one subject, he's exaggerating in the right direction -- Confederates did in fact represent a major existential threat to the United States, certainly the greatest since Yorktown in 1781.
So the Union's response was totally "proportional" to the threat they perceived and that response represented, after only the Revolution itself, the greatest national effort in our history.
central_va: "The only "existential" threat to the remaining states in the USA have was created in the minds of the 21st century re writers of history. i.e. Dummys like you."
So, do you wish us to believe that, what was it, 700,000 soldiers died for nothing?
The real truth is this: in 1865 there were 35 larger battles, costing the lives of about 15,000 soldiers.
Of those, 25 battles (71%) were fought in Union states & territories and just 10 in Confederate states.
Of Confederate soldiers who died in 1861 battles, nearly 60% died in Union states & territories battles.
So that corruption of language you decry is not coming from me, FRiend, in 1861 the Confederacy was absolutely an existential threat to the United States.
It is immaterial what we think. The decisions of the Courts interpreting the Constitution become the law of the land.
If we don’t like them, live with it, rewrite the law, or amend the Constitution. Those are the three options available. In a few cases, the Courts have decided prior rulings on an issue were wrong. They then have reversed their prior decision on that issue. This is always an option but it is seldom used.
What I am saying is that it was Mr. Lincolns war - a war of choice. A war of choice like WWI, Korea and Vietnam.
The South was either going to gain its independence or parish, reabsorbed back into the US empire. The USA's 18+ remaining states were going to survive as the USA no matter what the outcome below the Potomac. The "preserve the union" meme was cause celeb in 1861. It seems a bit stupid to me but who am I to say. I think the Copperheads had it about right.
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