Posted on 07/27/2003 5:08:19 PM PDT by thatdewd
Edited on 05/07/2004 6:46:56 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
The writer is a circuit judge who lives in Kuttawa, Ky.
KUTTAWA, Ky. - The Courier Journal, at the behest of its columnist John David Dyche, has called for the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue in the rotunda of the Kentucky State Capitol. Such a supposedly politically correct viewpoint reflects a shallow, selective and even hypocritical understanding of history.
(Excerpt) Read more at courier-journal.com ...
As a foremost spokesman for the Northern side, you've often been aggravatingly elusive on certain subjects, but this time you've proved to be a perfect gentleman. Thank you for conceding so graciously, that Jefferson Davis's statue should remain where it is in the Kentucky capitol.
You can't accuse me of cartoonishness. I've told you several times in this thread, that Lincoln was an abolitionist from the git -- or at least, from 1855 when the Whig Party disintegrated and he had to find new bearings if he wanted to continue in public life.
I told you that I thought that Lincoln formed a radical program early on, that he let it hang out only once before the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1856 when he addressed the GOP convention and everyone there present put his pen down -- at Lincoln's request, as I've opined previously. I've told you that I thought that then and there, in 1856, Lincoln propounded his program for destroying the South and ending slavery forever, by any means necessary, appealing to a "higher law" as the Abolitionists had done, to extricate himself from the quandary that what he proposed was in fact a general assault on the Constitution, and on all the slave States -- fully half the States in the Union, at that time. In short, Lincoln proposed a course of violence and ruin, and a program of violent change to the Constitution, in order to end the Hamiltonian-Jeffersonian dialogue in favor of the Federalist/Whig minority and bequeath us, against our ancestors' will, the giant corporatist nation-state that Hamilton and others had looked for, because it would be so good for business.
That's right, Ditto -- blame the guy who walked down a dark alley, and suggest that he provocatively dressed too well, and let $10 bills show out the tops of his pockets.
It would have been a much less violent crime, if only the victim hadn't perversely struggled so. Ah, the folly of pride!
Yeah, right.
Thank you for the honest admission. It sets you apart from the dims.
For all we know Lincoln would have made a humane slave owner. Would that save him from your condemnation?
I don't condemn Davis or Lincoln for their attitudes and perceptions - certainly not from our social mores. What I condemn Lincoln for is his failure to abide by the Constitution.
And the continued push by the Dims that Lincoln waged a war to free the blacks, that Lincoln was the 4th member of the Holy Trinity. In a meeting on 13 Sep 1862:
Mr. Lincoln in his reply to the Chicago Divines, said: "And suppose they (the negroes) could be induced by a proclamation from me, to throw themselves upon us, what should we do with them? Gen. Butler wrote me a few days since that he was issuing more rations to the slaves who had rushed to him than all the white troops under his command! They eat! eat! and that is all!!" [italics in original]
Stephen D. Carpenter, "Mr. Lincoln's Testimony", The Logic of History, Madison, WI: S. D. Carpenter, 1864, p. 20
Would gradual, compensated emancipation with colonization of freed slaves as Lincoln advocated for years have "destroyed" the south, or made it stronger?
I see no evidence that Lincoln in any way wanted to harm the south.
BTW, I didn't accuse you of being cartoonish. That was directed at another poster who is totally Mickey Mouse in his understanding of history. Since you agree that Lincoln did care about slavery and freeing the slaves, I'm sure you agree that his charges are nonsense.
Your facts a straight, it's just that I disagree with you conclusions that seem to go beyond what we can see from the record and go into some sort of ESP into Lincoln's private thinking to divine his motives. I simply don't see any evidence in the record to support your conclusions.
Actually, he was a long-time advocate of colonization, just as he was a long-time opponent of slavery. He spoke very honestly about it in his debates with Douglas, for example.
BTTT. I think nearly all (who post them) would admit that those Lincoln quotes only show up to combat those admirers of his who do not debate with as much honesty as yourself in regards to that topic. The quotes are almost always given only to refute, expose, and I must admit, antagonise the more zealous who would portray his race beliefs to be far different from what they actually were. Those quotes are no more than bullets of truth fired at the revisionist saboteurs of history. It was the 19th century, and it would indeed be unfair to judge ol' Abe by modern standards in regards to his race beliefs. And yes, by those same modern standards Jefferson Davis was most certainly a stone racist too. If more posters could debate with the honesty you have displayed on this particular issue, then it might be possible to finally settle this whole disagreement, and get your side to admit it was Constitutionally wrong about the war... :)
As part of a mandatory process? Then how would the slaveholders' property rights not have been invaded? Then why not take their land, too? The parallel with eminent domain is instructive. Eminent domain probably wouldn't have become the law of the land before the Civil War. Afterward, property rights had been weakened and discredited sufficiently to allow eminent domain to pass, despite the warnings of many defenders of property rights that have since then come largely to pass. Nowadays, in cities as far apart as Houston and Portland, property is routinely condemned and "compensation" awarded the outraged owner at some knockdown price, specifically to convey that same property to wheeler-dealer developers who are politically fixed up with the local politicians. This isn't even corporate welfarism, it's straight robbery by force, using the City as both the strongarm man and the wheelman.
I see no evidence that Lincoln in any way wanted to harm the south.
Do you seriously intend us to believe that he only intended -- oops-a-daisy! -- to singe Atlanta and Charleston a little bit?
In criminal law, intent follows the bullet. Here, I assign intent to follow the bayonet.
No, not really. Fort Sumter came about only upon the confederates learning that Lincoln had dispatched a fleet of warships to fight their way into charleston harbor and reprovision Sumter. Lincoln's expedition was a recognized act of hostility in the southern minds and was warned against as a hostile act even by members of Lincoln's own cabinet.
They stole weapons from federal arsenals.
They seized arsenals within their own borders and did so several months after offering repeatedly, including on the floor of congress, to provide payments for those and other federal properties in the south as a means of securing a peaceful separation. The yankees would have none of it and Lincoln refused to even meet with the confederate representatives who came to negotiate that separation.
They fired on Ft Sumpter.
That they did. And it was a preemptive strike on the fort for the purpose of minimizing casualties and preventing a larger battle when Lincoln's fleet of warships arrived the next day.
They deserved everything that Lincoln could have given them. And more.
That is an illogical non-sequitur. To suggest that the act of firing upon a single fort in a single state without any casualties incurred justifies the unleashing of a full scale military invasion of that said state plus six others that affiliate with it, five others that had not at the time of the attack affiliated with it, and two more that decided against formally affiliating with it is absurd. It is no more reasonable or deserving than the use of a howitzer to quell a barking dog. Yet that is exactly what Lincoln did.
They had signed no oath to break the Union
Yet they signed many oaths to preserve, protect, and defend their states and homes.
wheras Lincoln had sworn to preserve and protect the Contitution.
Evidently that oath was of little value to Lincoln seeing as he violated the constitution and bill of rights regularly in his waging of the war.
Part of that Constitution was the guarantee of republican government to the states.
Indeed it was and Lincoln violated that guarantee in several cases. The most notable was the rightfully elected state government of Missouri. Even though it was not planning on seceding, Lincoln had it chased out of the state capitol by the army and installed them as his own by force.
That guarantee was meaningless if any state could leave, and then set up its own monarchy or tyranny.
No it isn't when those states that leave show all reason to believe that they are continuing a republican form of government and especially when their decision to leave is itself an act carried out by way of that very same republican form of government. To deny a republican government its ability to govern in a republican form is an immeasurably greater violation of that clause than the simple unfounded fear that a seceding state would adopt some other form of government despite no indication ever being given that they would do so.
It should also be noted that the United States was already a perpetual union before the current Constitution. A state leaving the Union was not only in violation of the Constitution, it was in violation of the Articles of Confederation.
The Articles of Confederation were replaced in 1787, thus ending both their system of government and their professed perpetuity.
When Texas joined the Union, its debts were accepted by the US, and that was a liability given to the other states for the sole benefit of Texicans.
And when Texas joined the union, the union also recieved vast territorial tracts to the north and west of the state including sizable portions of what are now New Mexico, Colorado, and Oklahoma. So they both recieved something from the deal. Is this of consequence upon Texas' status as a state and does it make Texas either subordinate to or superior to the other states? Absolutely not, as the Constitution makes zero distinction between the rights of the original 13 and the rights of those after them.
Lincoln was no more responsible for Roosevelt and Johnson than he was for the man in the moon.
Lincoln was responsible for their ability to exercise vast federal power upon his precedent. With that power they enacted massive federal programs. Thus, while Lincoln himself did not act for either Roosevelt or Johnson, his actions did facilitate their later actions that were built upon what Lincoln did. For that Lincoln deserves a degree of blame for the other two, though no less or more than is applicable upon the concept of precedent.
False. The reason that the confederacy did not have a supreme court had absolutely NOTHING to do with giving the executive unchecked power and in fact the exact opposite was true. If you study the confederate constitution's clause on the judiciary, which is virtually the same as the US constitution, you will note that it gives Congress the power to set up the court system and the Senate the power to confirm or reject appointments to the bench.
Jefferson Davis desired for Congress to set up a Supreme Court and allow him to appoint his own judges to the bench. He publicly expressed this desire and even specifically requested it in one of his addresses to a joint session of the confederate congress (the equivalent of a state of the union speech today). But the confederate congress, and spefically the Senate branch of it, was often at odds with Davis over policy. Several senators formed what was known as the "states rights" faction and repeatedly blocked legislation that they believed would be used by Davis to increase executive power. Among that legislation was the bill setting up the Supreme Court and authorizing appointments.
Quite simply the senators feared that Davis would appoint judges to the court who would then overrule their own existing state court systems in favor of Davis every time the two conflicted. That was frequent in the confederacy especially on the issue of using the state militias (Davis often tried to command them as he did regular military troops but several governors and state legislatures were using their militias differently on other military strategies). So long as all the cases were decided in state courts the states had and advantage and a means of checking Davis and LIMITING his power. A Davis-appointed supreme court would have likely overruled those state courts in Davis' favor so the states righters in the Senate exercised their legislative power to slow down and impede the bill creating a Supreme Court.
So he obeyed that one. Then what about all the others he violated, not to mention the parts of the constitution he violated
Lincoln unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus, which, according to the Constitution, only Congress may do.
Lincoln overran the state government of Missouri with the army and installed his own dicatorship thus denying them the constitutional guarantee of a republican government.
Lincoln signed the nation's first income tax, which was unconstitutional before the 16th amendment.
Lincoln used his military to seize printing presses and newspapers, imprison political dissidents, confiscate firearms and property from citizens and noncombatants, and many other similar acts thus violating several amendments in the bill of rights.
Lincoln divided the state of Virginia into two and admitted the divided part into the union as a new state without the consent of the old - something that is banned in the Constitution.
...and those are just a few of his many violations of the highest law in the land.
If you want to get truly technical about it, then no it was not the initiation of hostilities. The first shot was fired across the bow of a southern civilian vessle the night before the bombardment of Fort Sumter by the USS Harriet Lane, one of the ships in the fleet that Lincoln sent to Charleston.
The rebels used cannon stolen from the federal government, and fired from locations fortified by the federal government.
Actually they fired primarily from floating batteries that they had pushed out into the harbor. Other locations included the land based fortifications of Charleston, many of which had been in place since the revolution and had been constructed by the colony and state of South Carolina before the federals occupied them. Fort Sumter itself was similarly placed in federal hands by an act of the South Carolina legislature giving them permission to build on and occupy it.
Southern minds, (at lest the white ones?) are not the measure of virtue or truth, then or now.
And exactly what is that supposed to mean? Truth is existent independent of any mind, southern or northern.
The constitution is not a suicide pact, and after the south made war, to complain that lincoln made war back is pretty petty.
Your logic is fallacious. The so-called act of war at Fort Sumter (which, btw, was preceded by a federal warship firing upon a southern steamer the night before) caused zero casualties and resulted only in the transfer back to South Carolina of a property that it had granted permission to use in the first place. To suggest that that act alone justifies the full scale invasion of 12 confederate states and the military subjugation of 2 additional union states is beyond absurd even if you hold that the south was wrong to fire. For starters it is not a necessary consequence of the initial act as you make it out to be. Nor is it any more a proper justification for Lincoln's war than if you were to burn my house down upon the retaliatory justification that I took my dog to do it's business on your lawn. Then there is the issue of the confederacy itself. At the time of Fort Sumter, the states of Virginia, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina were not in the confederacy. Yet all five were invaded by Lincoln in a manner indistinguishable from the others. It is absurd to suggest that such an invasion was justified by an action that, at the time it was taken, they did not even participate in.
Federal arsenals are and were federal property.
And the easiest way to accomodate that property in peace is to negotiate a price at which it may be transfered. The confederacy attempted repeatedly to do so but Lincoln refused to even meet with them. Thus seizing the property, which in many cases ammounted to nothing more than states reassuming control of what they themselves had unilaterally permitted the feds to occupy, was a last recourse.
It is interesting how, by your lights, the rebels would be allowed to fire on Ft Sumpter as a preemptive strike, while union warships would not be allowed to sail into federally fortified port to bring aid to a federal post under siege by a rebellious mob.
No mob was attacking Fort Sumter and by all reasonable measures and documented accounts it's garrison, though surrender was expected of it, recieved amicable treatment from the confederate authorities both before and after the battle.
The confederates had placed upon the fort a known and announced condition that northern naval ships would not be permitted to provision it. They did so with reason following an earlier attempt by the north to sneak troops into the fort on a ship disguised as a supply vessle and began requiring that all deliveries to the fort be local and go through Charleston. Lincoln knew that the confederates would prevent any warship from entering their harbor yet sent them anyway. Thus his only purpose could have been to provoke a war.
Rebellion is made by rebels.
So what's your point? Sometimes rebellions are legitimate. Were it not for one we would still belong to England.
The southern rebels deserved to be destroyed for their murder of union supporters, if for nothing else.
Please specify the "murders" of union supporters and in doing so answer me this: do you react similarly to the north's murder of confederate supporters?
Once the killing started, (and the killing began before Ft Sumpter) their could be no end to it but by putting down the military power raised by the rebels.
So if one guy gets murdered it means by necessity that a thousand or more must be murdered in returned for sharing a geographical and political affiliation with persons who share affiliations with other persons who share affiliations with the one or two guys who committed the first murder? You are making no logical sense. Even if a state had left the Constitutional Union, (which I dispute) they would have still in the Union created by the Articles of Confederation which was, and is perpetual.
The union predated the Articles of Confederation which, despite its claims of perpetuity, no longer exists as a government of this nation. A law can call itself perpetual to no end, but when that law is replaced so ends its application. A repealed document of constitution that calls itself "perpetual" is no more "perpetual" than the government it created before the new one.
I suggest you look up perpetual in the dictionary.
And I suggest you look up a history of major events that happened in America in 1787-89, cause in those years the "perpetual" Articles of Confederation ceased to be our government.
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