Replies

[sw] arguing with "heyworth the hateful" is pointless.

Oh, heck. To have some fun one just needs to point out the wrongness of material in the propaganda efforts of those of his persuasion.

Take a favorite source, "Back to the Basics for the Republican Party," by Michael Zak.

For example, Mr. Zak writes:

By 1868, congressional Republicans had had quite enough of Andrew Johnson. That year he at last gave our Party a legal pretext for impeachment -- it was not much of a pretext, but it would have to do.
* * *
[T]he Tenure of Office Act was passed so that Johnson could not prevent Secretary of War Stanton from administering the Reconstruction Act which so closely resembled his own plan that he had presented to Abraham Lincoln. When in February 1868 President Johnson went ahead and dismissed Stanton anyway, the House of Representatives immediately impeached him for this and ten other alleged offenses, by a strictly party-line vote of 128 to 47.

How can one praise a group of half-crazed partisans for trying to impeach a president on a legal pretext, which even the author admitted was not much of a pretext? Moreover, how does one do this without noting that the Tenure of Office Act was blatantly unconstitutional?

Moreover, how does one note that the Reconstruction Act resembled the plan Stanton had presented to Lincoln without noting that Lincoln rejected important aspects of said plan?

As Gideon Welles memorialized Lincoln's last cabinet meeting of April 14, 1865,

Mr. Stanton read his project for reorganizing, reestablishing, or reconstructing governments. It was a military or executive order, and by it the War Department was designated to reorganize those States whose individuality it assumed was sacrificed. Divested of its military features, it was in form and outline essentially the same as the plan ultimately adopted. This document proposed establishing a military department to be composed of Virginia and North Carolina, with a military governor. After reading this paper, Mr. Stanton made some addtional remarks in furtherance of the views of the President and the importance of prompt measures.

However, Mr. Lincoln did not accept lumping Virginia and North Carolina together.

The President directed Mr. Stanton to take the documents and have separate plans presented for the two States. They required different treatment. "We must not," said he, "stultify ourselves as regards Virginia, but we must help her." North Carolina was in a different condition. He requested the Secretary of War to have copies of the two plans for the two States made and furnished each member of the Cabinet by the following Tuesday -- the next regular meeting. He impressed upon each and all the importance of deliberating upon and carefully considering the subject before us, remarking that this was the great question pending, and that we must now begin to act in the interest of peace. He again declared his thankfulness that Congress was not in session to embarrass us.
The President was assassinated that evening, and I am not aware that he exchanged a word with any one after the Cabinet meeting of that day on the subject of a resumption of the national authority in the States where it had been suspended, or of reestablishing the Union.

Within hours of overruling Mr. Stanton, President Lincoln was shot.

When President Johnson overruled Mr. Stanton, he was impeached.

For the chutzpah award, there is always the following from Mr. Zak:

To be sure, Union soldiers did wreck whatever war-related facilities they could get their hands on, but there was hardly any looting. The Union army's most destructive campaign, Sherman's march to the sea, it should be noted, was confined to a 60-mile wide stretch of land between Atlanta and Savannah. Confederate apologists would blame northern depredations for a South in ruins, but in truth the rebels had done it themselves.