Posted on 06/12/2003 5:58:28 AM PDT by Aurelius
Over the years I've heard many rail at the South for seceding from the 'glorious Union.' They claim that Jeff Davis and all Southerners were really nothing but traitors - and some of these people were born and raised in the South and should know better, but don't, thanks to their government school 'education.'
Frank Conner, in his excellent book The South Under Siege 1830-2000 deals in some detail with the question of Davis' alleged 'treason.' In referring to the Northern leaders he noted: "They believed the most logical means of justifying the North's war would be to have the federal government convict Davis of treason against the United States. Such a conviction must presuppose that the Confederate States could not have seceded from the Union; so convicting Davis would validate the war and make it morally legitimate."
Although this was the way the federal government planned to proceed, that prolific South-hater, Thaddeus Stevens, couldn't keep his mouth shut and he let the cat out of the bag. Stevens said: "The Southerners should be treated as a conquered alien enemy...This can be done without violence to the established principles only on the theory that the Southern states were severed from the Union and were an independent government de facto and an alien enemy to be dealt with according to the laws of war...No reform can be effected in the Southern States if they have never left the Union..." And, although he did not plainly say it, what Stevens really desired was that the Christian culture of the Old South be 'reformed' into something more compatible with his beliefs. No matter how you look at it, the feds tried to have it both ways - they claimed the South was in rebellion and had never been out of the Union, but then it had to do certain things to 'get back' into the Union it had never been out of. Strange, is it not, that the 'history' books never seem to pick up on this?
At any rate, the Northern government prepared to try President Davis for treason while it had him in prison. Mr. Conner has observed that: "The War Department presented its evidence for a treason trial against Davis to a famed jurist, Francis Lieber, for his analysis. Lieber pronounced 'Davis will not be found guilty and we shall stand there completely beaten'." According to Mr. Conner, U.S. Attorney General James Speed appointed a renowned attorney, John J. Clifford, as his chief prosecutor. Clifford, after studying the government's evidence against Davis, withdrew from the case. He said he had 'grave doubts' about it. Not to be undone, Speed then appointed Richard Henry Dana, a prominent maritime lawyer, to the case. Mr. Dana also withdrew. He said basically, that as long as the North had won a military victory over the South, they should just be satisfied with that. In other words - "you won the war, boys, so don't push your luck beyond that."
Mr. Conner tells us that: "In 1866 President Johnson appointed a new U.S. attorney general, Henry Stanburg. But Stanburg wouldn't touch the case either. Thus had spoken the North's best and brightest jurists re the legitimacy of the War of Northern Aggression - even though the Jefferson Davis case offered blinding fame to the prosecutor who could prove that the South had seceded unconstitutionally." None of these bright lights from the North would touch this case with a ten-foot pole. It's not that they were dumb, in fact the reverse is true. These men knew a dead horse when they saw it and were not about to climb aboard and attempt to ride it across the treacherous stream of illegal secession. They knew better. In fact, a Northerner from New York, Charles O'Connor, became the legal counsel for Jeff Davis - without charge. That, plus the celebrity jurists from the North that refused to touch the case, told the federal government that they really had no case against Davis or secession and that Davis was merely being held as a political prisoner.
Author Richard Street, writing in The Civil War back in the 1950s said exactly the same thing. Referring to Jeff Davis, Street wrote: "He was imprisoned after the war, was never brought to trial. The North didn't dare give him a trial, knowing that a trial would establish that secession was not unconstitutional, that there had been no 'rebellion' and that the South had got a raw deal." At one point the government intimated that it would be willing to offer Davis a pardon, should he ask for one. Davis refused that and he demanded that the government either give him a pardon or give him a trial, or admit that they had dealt unjustly with him. Mr. Street said: "He died 'unpardoned' by a government that was leery of giving him a public hearing." If Davis was as guilty as they claimed, why no trial???
Had the federal government had any possible chance to convict Davis and therefore declare secession unconstitutional they would have done so in a New York minute. The fact that they diddled around and finally released him without benefit of the trial he wanted proves that the North had no real case against secession. Over 600,000 boys, both North and South, were killed or maimed so the North could fight a war of conquest over something that the South did that was neither illegal or wrong. Yet they claim the moral high ground because the 'freed' the slaves, a farce at best.
Remember the Wlat Brigade translation table.
Conservatives are really Socialists.
Conservatives are Classical Liberals.
With that in mind.
Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. ... Unless we fight for proper treatment of history ... no history can be safe from the liberal noise machine. Someday, school children will be taught that all of America cringed with terror at Ken Starr, whose evil designs on the nation were frustrated only through the sacrifice of brave liberals. ... Bill Clinton will be revered in high school history books as the George Washington of his day who, along with patriots Larry Flynt and James Carville, "saved the Constitution."
~ Ann Coulter ~
June 25, 2003
LIBERAL HISTORY
The poetry of this story brought tears to my eyes. I just had to share. It is extraordinarily authoritative and documented. It is by Dr. Farber, Professor of Law at U.C. Berkeley, and is even footnoted.
LINCOLN'S CONSTITUTION
Daniel Farber, 2003, page 8, Chapter 1
The Civil War began in the chilly morning hours of April 12, 1861, when a Confederate battery opened fire on Fort Sumter.
* * *
The early morning shots of April 12 began the bloodiest war in American history. It was four years to the day later when Major Anderson ran the U.S. flag back up at Sumter. In the meantime, the world had forever changed. "By then," in the words of a leading historian, "[s]lavery was dead; secession was dead; and six hundred thousand men were dead." "That," he added, "was the basic balance sheet of the sectional conflict."2
Later that same day, April 12, 1865, yet another price was added to that balance sheet. As the war had begun with the death of a single individual, so it would end. That evening, just about the time Major Anderson toasted the president of the United States, John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at Ford's Theater. By the next morning, Lincoln was dead."3
Footnotes:
1. David Detzer, Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, 2001), Detzer provides a good blow-by-blow acocunt of events in South Carolina, though less information about developments in Washington.
2. David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York, Harber and Row, 1976), 583. Potter's book is indispensable reading on the background of the war.
3. See Detzer, Allegiance, 320
The wallet also contained a pencil, and news clippings of unrest in the Confederate army, emancipation in Missouri, the Union party platform of 1864, and an article on the presidency by John Bright. Those items had more monetary value than the confederate fiver.
If it is disinformation I seek then I need look no further than your latest, interminable post on FreeRepublic. They also serve for comic relief so you should be proud that the stuff you poop out serves a dual purpose.
Sure you don't. I've no doubt that Dr. Bennett would deny being a Lincoln Loather, too. But I think that the body of your work speaks for itself.
The body of your work says nothing at all.
You are the one who called me.
I don't have a problem dealing with it and for the life of me I can't imagine the significance. If you are suggesting that Lincoln was some sort of closet confederate then do you suppose that would account for what you see were his racist beliefs?
Yeah, and I'm sorry I did respond to that particular post. You seemed to be having so much fun playing with yourself that I'm sorry I interrupted. But while I have your attention, was Jefferson Davis a racist? Yes or no?
"It is said anyone who saw Wesley Enloe, son of Abraham Enloe and half-brother of President Lincoln, was struck by the resemblance of one to the other as can be seen in this one-of-a-kind photographic comparison."
LINK
A Challenge to Abraham Lincoln's Ancestry
LINK
The Abraham Lincoln Genesis Coverup by Vincent Enlow (13-page PDF file)
I'll grant that my body of work is nowhere near as...long as yours is. But if your statement is true then I can at least say that I've killed far fewer electrons saying nothing than you have. Saying nothing in 500 lines doesn't automatically grant you credibility except with those without the patience to weed through your slop but merely accept it at face value.
Cold in my professions, warm in my friendships, I wish, my Dear Laurens, it might be in my power, by action rather than words to convince you that I love you. I shall only tell you that 'til you bade us Adieu, I hardly knew the value you had taught my heart to set upon you. Indeed, my friend, it was not well done. You know the opinion I entertain of mankind, and how much it is my desire to preserve myself free from particular attachments, and to keep my happiness independent of the caprice of others. You should not have taken advantage of my sensibility to steal into my affections without my consent. But as you have done it,and as we are generally indulgent to those we love, I shall not scruple to pardon the fraud you have committed, on condition that for my sake, if not for your own, you will always continue to merit the partiality, which you have artfully instilled into me.
~ Alexander Hamilton ~
free dixie,sw
Good God, you are getting more and more pathetic by the moment. I'm surprised you haven't dredged this up before. But let me ask you this, Abe Lincoln had an older sister, Sarah. Was Enloe her father, too?
So was Davis racist or not?
free dixie,sw
Sounds like something Davis would say, doesn't it?
Personally I wouldn't have compared the two. Both were grave injustices in their own ways. But then I don't read Lerone Bennett and I don't use his works to support my position. So that question would be more correctly directed to nolu chan.
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