Posted on 07/20/2018 8:55:10 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
President Trump has once again drawn the sneers and condescension of the Leftist establishment media with his claim that “I am the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party—92 percent. Beating Lincoln. I beat our Honest Abe.” Lincoln, sniffed Newsweek, “died a decade before the telephone, which is used for polling, was even invented, and about 80 years before job approval polls for presidents started.” CNN intoned magisterially, “That’s a hard claim to back up.”
But lost in the media contempt was the salient fact that Lincoln, as revered as he has been since his death, was a wildly unpopular President in his day, even within his own party. As Trump continues to receive relentlessly negative media coverage despite a booming economy and outstanding success against ISIS and with North Korea, this is good to keep in mind.
Just before Lincoln took office, the Salem Advocate from his home state of Illinois editorialized that “he is no more capable of becoming a statesman, nay, even a moderate one, than the braying ass can become a noble lion.” Lincoln’s “weak, wishy-washy, namby-pamby efforts, imbecile in matter, disgusting in manner, have made us the laughing stock of the whole world.” The Salem Advocate argued, just as Trump’s critics do today, that the President embarrassed Americans before the world: “the European powers will despise us because we have no better material out of which to make a President.”
The Salem Advocate wasn’t alone; the most respected pundits in the nation agreed that Lincoln was an embarrassment as President. Edward Everett, a renowned orator, former Senator and Secretary of State, and 1860 Vice Presidential candidate for the Constitutional Union Party, wrote that Lincoln was “evidently a person of very inferior cast of character, wholly unequal to the crisis.” Congressman Charles Francis Adams, the son of one President and grandson of another, sneered that Lincoln’s “speeches have fallen like a wet blanket here. They put to flight all notions of greatness.”
Critics decided what they saw as Lincoln’s despotic tendencies, often denouncing the very things for which Lincoln is revered as great today. When he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the Chicago Times decried it as “a monstrous usurpation, a criminal wrong, and an act of national suicide.” The Crisis of Columbus Ohio sounded the alarm as hysterically as John Brennan crying treason after Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin: “We have no doubt that this Proclamation seals the fate of this Union as it was and the Constitution as it is.…The time is brief when we shall have a DICTATOR PROCLAIMED, for the Proclamation can never be carried out except under the iron rule of the worst kind of despotism.”
On the day the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, January 1, 1863, former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin R. Curtis said that Lincoln was “shattered, dazed and utterly foolish. It would not surprise me if he were to destroy himself.”
The Gettysburg Address didn’t go over any better. Edward Everett spoke for two hours just before Lincoln, and was showered with accolades. One man who was in the crowd, Benjamin French, recounted: “Mr. Everett was listened to with breathless silence by all that immense crowd, and he had his audience in tears many times during his masterly effort.” One of the reporters present, John Russell Young, praised Everett’s “antique courtly ways, fine keen eyes, the voice of singular charm.”
The Harrisburg Patriot & Union, by contrast, in its account of the commemoration at Gettysburg wrote: “We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.”
Everett himself, an experienced speaker who knew good oratory when he heard it, thought otherwise, writing to Lincoln: “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.” In response, Lincoln was grateful but self-deprecating: “I am pleased to know that, in your judgment, the little I did say was not entirely a failure.”
Lincoln did not even command much respect within his own party. The poet and lawyer Richard Henry Dana wrote to Charles Francis Adams in 1863 that “the most striking thing” about “the politics of Washington” was “the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist. He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, none to bet on his head. If a Republican convention were to be held to-morrow, he would not get the vote of a State.”
In 1864, Lincoln was indeed renominated, but in a way that left Attorney General Edward Bates disgusted: “The Baltimore Convention,” he wrote, “has surprised and mortified me greatly. It did indeed nominate Mr. Lincoln, but…as if the object were to defeat their own nomination. They were all (nearly) instructed to vote for Mr. Lincoln, but many of them hated to do it.”
This is not to say that Trump is a new Lincoln, or that he will be as heralded after his administration as a distant memory the way Lincoln has been. But the lesson is clear: contemporary opinion doesn’t always line up with historical assessment. A notably unpopular President in his day, Abraham Lincoln, has become one of the iconic heroes of the Republic. It could happen again, and likewise the reverse could happen: the near-universal accolades and hosannas that today greet Barack Obama may one day, in the harsh light of history, appear to have been naïve, wrongheaded, and foolish in the extreme – at best.
He pulled that number from where he pulls most of his “facts” straight out of his a%^&hole.
You can research this yourselves if you want, but i'm not going to focus on it. When I run across something of relevance to what you ask, i'll let you know. (If I remember.)
Jefferson Davis started the war, his choice, and could have ended it on any day before April 1865 with much better negotiated terms.
But Davis insisted on fighting on & on, to “extirmination” as he said and ultimate unconditional surrender.
Blame Davis.
More interest in that and not the stuff you made up and got called on? Understandable.
You can research this yourselves if you want, but i'm not going to focus on it.
Why spend time researching something that is patently wrong? I might as well research leprechauns and unicorns.
That was a lie the first time you posted it, and gains no veracity by your constant repetition.
Here's the real truth (again):
Yes, and that ardent political enemy of Abe’s soon came around to being one of Abe’s staunchest supporters. I believe he said of Abe, “He is the best among us”.
It saddens me to witness your mental breakdown. You’ve gone over the edge, man. Your “logic” is of the personal kind. Isn’t it. You’ve come to the point of using “geometric logic”. You are the biggest hater of Lincoln on FR. You are blinded by your hate of Lincoln. You are building a sandcastle of mendacity. Go ahead now, break out the graph........
You are just not going to get away with that crap around here, man. There is simply no such actual event in history that fits your description above. It is either, “A collection of British colonies declared independence from a Monarchy” or “A collection of Slave States seceded from a Union”. Make up your mind ......... if it’s not too late. Once and for all get it straight man. One was a revolution, the other was a rebellion. Stop lying.
“A collection of slave owning states declared Independence from a Union and fought to be independent, with their armies being led by a slave owning General from Virginia.”
United Kingdom. George Washington.
Our British cousins mocked the Lincoln government for playing the role of King George, the irony wasn’t lost on them. It’s even better when they bring up Dunmore’s proclamation and the Philipsburg proclamation.
McPherson says, "...about one-third of all Confederate soldiers belonged to slaveholding families..."
Others estimate 1/4, depending on the Confederate Unit's place of origin.
And we can be certain slaveholders held the Confederate leadership positions.
Indeed, Southerners who opposed slavery were more likely to be Unionists.
Of the circa 1,000,000 total Confederate soldiers about 120,000 were drafted and of those large numbers were said to be Unionists:
"A cartoon from the war, showing the Confederates forcibly drafting a Unionist man into the Confederate army.
The Unionist man objects, with the Confederates threatening to lynch him if he does not comply."
Finally, a reminder: Confederates began their war by invading Union states.
In the Civil War's first 12 months, 30 of 52 larger battles were fought in six Union states & territories -- Missouri, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma & New Mexico.
It wasn't until May 8, 1862 that the total number of battles fought in Confederate states first equaled the number fought in the Union.
All told, the Civil War's 384 battles were fought in 18 Union states & territories, and, oh yes, in 11 Confederate states.
DiogenesLamp: "So was the American War of Independence.
We were fighting on the side that said people had a right to be independent.
Not the side that said they must remain in the existing Union against their will."
The first point to remember is: in July 1777 the Brits had already declared & waged war against Americans for over a year.
So when the Declaration of Independence says:
DiogenesLamp: "Once we Won the war of Independence, the paradigm shifted to the position that people everywhere had a right to be independent of a government that no longer served their interests. "
Only in DiogenesLamp's weird fantasies.
The fact is that no Founder ever proposed or supported unilateral unapproved declaration secession at pleasure.
But that's just what Deep South Fire Eaters did, beginning in December 1860.
DiogenesLamp: "Lincoln was willing to let the other states go if Virginia would give him assurances that they would remain in the Union.
If he was willing to let the other states go, then "preserving the union" was not so much of a principle as people later thought it to be. "
Yet more patented snake-oil fantasy from DiogenesLamp.
The offer Lincoln is said to have made was, "a fort for a state" -- meaning Lincoln withdraws from Fort Sumter in exchange for Virginia's promise not to secede.
He certainly was not willing to "let the other states go", and recognize the Confederacy as legitimate.
But Lincoln is said to have been willing to give up Fort Sumter without a fight in exchange for Virginia remaining Union.
Virginians turned Lincoln down.
DiogenesLamp: "If "Preserving the Union" was his unwavering principle, he wouldn't have offered to let the other states leave."
Pure fantasy, Lincoln did no such thing.
Conflating the willful acts of the cornfederates with the necessary actions of the Colonialists is simply retarded. Or dishonest. Take your pick.
And so DiogenesLamp spins out his entire reimagined anti-historical fantasy.
In fact, Republicans as a party were founded in opposition to slavery, a view Lincoln strongly held.
The Republican 1860 platform called for restrictions on slavery and that was the chief, if not only, reason cited by Deep South secessionists in their Reasons for Secession documents.
In fact, neither Lincoln nor any other Republican official cited keeping "the money flowing into New York and Washington DC" as their reason for any action related to Civil War.
DiogenesLamp: "it wasn't until I visited the Lincoln memorial in 2009 that I realized he was willing to keep slavery. I saw it engraved on stone tablets at that memorial, and that woke me up a lot. "
Even in early 1865 Lincoln was willing to strike a deal to prevent further bloodshed, a deal much better than the Unconditional Surrender Jefferson Davis fought on & on & on to achieve:
DiogenesLamp: "If it's negotiable, it wasn't a principle for which men should have died. It was an option.
Fighting an optional war is immoral."
Jefferson Davis' assault on Fort Sumter was totally optional, and he knew it:
Note Davis tells Bragg it's an "advantage" and "overbalanced" by "other considerations", nothing to do with necessity or being "forced by Lincoln", etc.
For Davis starting Civil War was totally optional.
Davis chose unwisely.
You know it's the nature of Free Republic that we can post more-or-less anonymously, nobody sees our faces and so can't know if a lie is bald-faced or not.
Unless someone like DiogenesLamp uses a </sarcasm> tag, we can't see or even necessarily infer smirk on his face.
But what we can do is check out his past posts, and do word searches for names like "Lincoln".
In the past few months DiogenesLamp has used Lincoln's name in posts hundreds of times, many multiples of his number two Democrat, Obama with several dozen mentions.
So clearly, Lincoln-hatred is a big deal to DiogenesLamp.
What about other big-time Democrat progressives, how often does DiogenesLamp mention them?
So, one might suppose that DiogenesLamp would at least know his own mind and his own priority sequence for demonization, but apparently that is not the case.
The fact is, in his mind Lincoln tops the list of political devils by many multiples of all others combined.
DiogenesLamp: "But Lincoln set us on this path of big, unwieldy government concentrating money in Washington to engage in government picking winners and losers among industry, and creating the lucrative influence peddling organizations we see today."
Pure fantasy, Republican government after the Civil War and reconstruction was basically the same as it had been before, with the exception of war debt payments.
For examples, non-debt Federal spending was 2.6% of GDP in, say, 1858, rose to 13% in 1865 then fell back to 2.5% by 1871.
None of these numbers are comparable to the explosion in non-defense Federal spending under Progressive, New Deal & Great Society, transforming the United States to a European style "socialist democracy".
And none of which DiogenesLamp cares even remotely about compared to his devil-of-all-devils: Abraham Lincoln.
I wonder if 150 years from now insane Democrats will still hate Donald Trump the same way they hate Lincoln, you know, for putting America first?
The "emperor's new clothes" are DiogenesLamp's new mythological narratives for the Civil War, abandoning all connections to historical documents & reasons.
By the way, I've correctly accused DiogenesLamp of a Marxist dialectical outlook, but closer inspection reveals that's too broad a brush.
Marxist dialectics in DiogenesLamp's mind only applies to one group of people, Unionists, especially that devil Lincoln.
Confederates by stark contrast in DiogenesLamp's imagination were only driven by the purest & highest of our Founders' enlightened ideals -- freedom, justice, independence, manliness... that sort of thing.
And how does DiogenesLamp respond when confronted with Confederate materialism, for example:
As for alleged "official narrative", we should note there have been about 15,000 books written on Lincoln (about 100 per year on average), more than on any other individual in history except Jesus Christ Himself.
On the whole Civil War, the Library of Congress reports about 75,000 or 500 per year on average.
And how many of those books has DiogenesLamp read?
Not one -- zero, zip, nada books -- and yet he will impose his own fanciful narrative over the works of tens of thousands of authors (some admittedly more serious than others).
Below: The tower of Lincoln's books at Ford's Theater, 8 feet in diameter, 34 feet high, representing about half of the 15,000 total Lincoln books published to date:
All predictions aside, Lincoln and his cabinet knew for certain that Major Anderson must surrender soon if not resupplied, and they were unwilling, just as President Buchanan had been unwilling, to surrender Fort Sumter without a fight.
Buchanan had attempted in January to resupply with an unarmed civilian ship an it failed, so no need for Lincoln to try that again.
Instead he accepted the plan first proposed by army Capt. Doubleday in Fort Sumter, then adopted by Capt. Fox on Lincoln's staff.
The Doubleday-Fox plan was: armed warships sitting off-shore sending in small resupply boats, under cover of darkness & fog.
It was a good plan and would have worked had Maj. Anderson held out a few days longer.
But Jefferson Davis cared nothing about that.
It only mattered to Davis that, when he was ready for a military assault, he ordered it done absent Anderson's surrender.
Lincoln's resupply ships only mattered because they let Davis do sooner what he would have done later anyway, if Anderson didn't surrender.
As for Fort Sumter predictions, here's the one that really mattered:
You have fanaticized those all by your little self, and for what good reason?
Self-amusement is the only thing I can imagine.
DiogenesLamp: "William Seward was set to win the Republican nomination in 1860.
Lincoln bused in (the way liberal democrats bus in people today) thousands of supporters to disrupt the convention, and sow chaos"
More fantasy on which DiogenesLamp has already been corrected, at least once.
It was not Illinoisan Lincoln, it was New Yorker Seward who "bused in" his supporters to the 1860 Chicago Republican convention.
DiogenesLamp: "After throwing the convention into upheaval, Lincoln's agents started bribing the delegates with promises of government jobs, threats, and anything else they could think of. "
The Republican convention was in no sense in "upheaval".
Upheaval is what Deep South Fire Eaters did to their own Democrat convention in Charleston, when they walked out, split their party and refused to support its nominee -- Senator Douglas.
By stark contrast, Republican Chicago was simple politics as usual, then as now.
But Lincoln himself, who was not at the convention, was clear in instructions to his supporters:
Politics, the the art of the deal.
Here's a book by someone who can explain how to do it.
Teddy Roosevelt had stood in for Eleanor's deceased father at her wedding to dashing young Franklin Roosevelt in 1905.
Unlike Teddy's Oyster Bay Roosevelts, Franklin's Hyde Park Roosevelt family were staunch Democrats and in 1912 Franklin became an original Wilson supporter.
That alienated some Roosevelts from each other, but not Bull Moose Teddy, I think because in fact Teddy's & Franklin's actual politics were not very far apart.
Teddy loved that Franklin opposed Democrat Tammany Hall.
The upshot was that young Franklin immediately became Number Two in Wilson's Navy Department, and learned much from Wilson's First World War mistakes.
My guess is that seeing young Franklin in charge of old Teddy's Big Stick navy must have provided him significant satisfaction, more than compensating for Teddy's disappointment at losing in 1912.
By 1860 the US had a long history of state-by-state gradual abolition, and most Republicans like Lincoln expected that to continue into the future.
They were shocked then by the 1857 SCOTUS Dred-Scott decision, in effect nearly abolishing abolition.
As Lincoln said in his 1858 House Divided speech:
More babbling nonsense!
Slavery was the reason Deep South Fire Eaters declared secession, but it was not the reason the Confederate Congress declared war on the United States, May 6, 1861.
The reason for war, as Jefferson Davis clearly expressed was Confederate "integrity" which he considered violated, first at Fort Sumter.
Davis chose to start war at Fort Sumter and could have chosen to end it on any date before April 1865, but insisted to the end that only Unconditional Surrender, or "extermination" would do.
DiogenesLamp: "...and indirectly killed perhaps an additional 2 million."
Pure fantasy, unless you consider babies not conceived while their Dad's were off at war to have been "killed".
In fact there are no records of any numbers remotely approaching "2 million" killed "indirectly".
DiogenesLamp: "There was no attempt by the Congress to abolish slavery.
But you know what congress *did* do?
They attempted to amend the constitution to PROTECT slavery..."
The 1861 Corwin amendment was originally proposed by people like Mississippi Senator Davis in December 1860 as a "compromise" to prevent further secessions.
It failed for the Deep South, but did seem to help keep Border States in the Union.
Corwin was supported and signed by Democrat President Buchanan, then forwarded to the states by incoming President Lincoln.
Kentucky & Maryland ratified Corwin as did Ohio (Corwin's home state) and Rhode Island, though Ohio soon revoked its ratification.
Illinois' ratification is disputed.
DiogenesLamp: "Just stop with your false 'the Union was doing God's work and fighting for freedom!' bullsh*t. "
No, the total BS here is you Lost Causers' claims it's not true.
Of course the Union from Day One fought for freedom, freedom from the rule by slavers over Southern states.
In time the Union (including ex-slaves) also fought for the freedom of slaves from their slaver "masters".
The Big Lies here come from Lost Causers like DiogenesLamp claiming otherwise.
DiogenesLamp: "In light of the facts, I would be embarrassed to keep claiming that the Washington DC power block was fighting to stop slavery.
They were not.
They were fighting to get back that slave produced money stream that was leaving them because of Southern independence."
No embarrassment because the fact is your alleged "DC power block" fought first to stop slavers, then to free their slaves.
As for the money earned by Northeastern merchants on cotton exports, it was never given as a reason for any Union actions.
DiogenesLamp: "Or would you prefer to believe that Washington DC was motivated by morals rather than greed?
Cause if so, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I want to sell you."
Most Americans were motivated by the same principles & morals in the Civil War as in any other major US war -- World Wars One & Two for examples.
Sure, anyone can look for base motives in anything, but for Americans there are always higher goals too, freedom from slavers and freedom for slaves, for examples.
It's a fact that declarations of secession were not treated as "treason" by either Democrat President Buchanan or Republican President Lincoln.
Both though secession unnecessary, unconstitutional and illegal, but not itself treasonous and not by itself reason for war.
And Buchanan did nearly everything possible to prevent some event which could lead to war -- using military force to reinforce Fort Sumter, for example.
But once Confederates openly declared war on the United States then any pro-Confederates in Union states did indeed "give aid and comfort" to our enemies and so met the Constitution's definition of "treason".
As a result, many were arrested & jailed during the war -- as were Southern Unionists by the Confederacy.
As for prosecuting Confederates for treason after the war, neither Presidents Lincoln, Johnson nor Grant wanted it or thought it necessary.
DiogenesLamp: "Independent states had a right to be free.
That was the foundation of our own country, and it should have been recognized back in 1860."
Maybe, under certain conditions, but what they never, ever, ever, ever (get it, never!) have a right to do is provoke, start, declare & wage war against the United States, regardless of how they feeeeeeeeeeel about their "integrity".
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