Posted on 04/02/2002 9:45:23 PM PST by VinnyTex
So it must be God's truth.
How wonderfully lame.
Here's how this works.
I posted:
"Both Jeff Davis and Louis Wigfall, before resigning from the US Senate to go south, threatened the burning of Northern cities and the plunder of their populations as punishment (US Senate, CONGRESSIONAL GLOBE,10 Jan. 1861).
Stonewall Jackson urged the adoption of this policy (Henderson, STONEWALL JACKSON AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, London, 1898), adding that Confederate troops should fight under the "Black Flag" - no quarter, kill all prisoners - and proposing to Virginia Governor Letcher a week after Virginia's secession that he, Jackson, should set the example (Columbia, SC, DAILY SOUTH CAROLINIAN, 6 Feb. 1864).
What YOU have to do, is consult the sources, the Congressional Globe, and this book, STONEWALL JACKSON AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, and the Columbia, SC, DAILY SOUTH CAROLINIAN, 6 Feb. 1864.
Are these sources acurately represented or not?
If you won't consult the sources, then you obviously don't care about the points being made; they are unimportant to you.
You'd rather simply carp than add to the discussion.
Walt
So whaddya say, are we gonna start with 141? You say what the Ape did was OK and that Jackson set the precedent. I say let's look at it from all the angles and perspectives that either camp can muster.
When I have DiLorenzo sign my book tomorrow I will speak with at least one, possibly both, of the men I have contacted in regard to "secesh talk" of the Founders.
Dubble cheers!
Listen, do you have distemper?
You have to show in the record that something SOMEHOW gainsays the Chief Justice on this.
That was a really funny scene in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", and when you just say the same thing over and over with no sources from the historical record -- you've just like Aurelius -- these issues really mean nothing to you, because you are unwilling to do the leg work to prove your points.
You're just like the black knight, not a leg to stand on.
Walt
Where are they available?
Staying in this thread will heap more coals of fire on honorary black knight DiLorenzo.
Walt
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llcg&fileName=051/llcg051.db&recNum=79
Walt
A hard copy, something I can be sure is genuine.
Duh! The didn't secede from Britain! They had a good old fashion revolution. Why on earth cant you guys understand the difference?
James Madison said it best back when this whole secession nonsense got started by the Fire Eaters down in Charleston.
But this dodges the blow by confounding the claim to secede at will, with the right of seceding from intolerable oppression. The former answers itself, being a violation, without cause, of a faith solemnly pledged. The latter is another name only for revolution, about which there is no theoretic controversy.
Robert E. Lee agreed. There is nothing wrong with revolution when faced with intolerable oppression. If you can make the case that the Confederate states were faced with intolerable oppression in 1860, please be my guest. I'll join your side if you can convince me that something the Feds were doing violated the constitution and oppressed the South. But the idea that it was Constitutional for them to withdraw from the Union without agrement from the other states, attack Federal troops, seize Federal property and ignore legetimate Federal authority because they did not like the results of an election is pure BS. No such right ever existed. The Founders did not intend anarchy.
But consider:
Lincoln's extended and moving eulogy to Clay -- in which he is clearly speaking to what he admired most in Clay and what he judges to have been Clay's importance to the Union -- contains no reference to economic doctrine.
But even granting the obvious, which is that apart from slavery, the economic struggles between Whigs and Democrats were a significant share of the political debates in the 1830's and 1840's, all this shows is that Lincoln was on one side of these issues in the 1830's and 1840's. The question is whether he judged economic matters MORE important than the danger posed by the break-out of the slavery issue in the 1850's. He was a loyal Whig as long as the country was chiefly interested in the issued defining the disagreements between Whigs and Democrats. Crucial changes in political priorities occurred in the late 1840's and early 1850's -- resulting in the destruction of one national political party and the division of the other. Simply presuming that Lincoln, so involved in the birth and eventual victory of the Republican Party, was carrying on as a Whig in different clothes requires argument.
I'm sorry to have to repeat this, but there are NO bitter comments on the bank charter veto. I can only presume that you have not read the texts in question, which makes me sorry. They are not even "apparently" bitter comments. Lincoln only mentions the Bank decision and Jackson's veto to convict Douglas of switching from applauding resistance to Supreme Court decisions to condemning resistance to Supreme Court decisions, now that such resistance is inconvenient for Douglas's political strategy.
I would be interested in which features of the Whig economic program Lincoln "immediately acted to implement." Pointing, as DiLorenzo does, to the fact that some things that Southerners had blocked for years were passed by a Congress dominated by Northerners at war with Southerners hardly seems a smoking gun of Lincoln's "real agenda." He made it clear in his presidential stump speeches for Whig candidates in the 1840's that he believed a President's task was not to propose legislation, but to judge what the Congress, heeding the people, passed, and to presume its validity as willed by the people unless he had very strong reasons to oppose it. Under the circumstances of 1861, needing as he did the support of the Congress, it doesn't seem terrible significant that he signed what Congress passed, beginning in the summer of 1861. But I don't know that history --
I do know that DiLorenzo's book is as dishonest here as elsewhere. He gives no evidence that Lincoln was particularly eager while in the White House to advance this agenda (internal improvements, tariff, nationalized finance), and generally treats whatever the Congress did as something Lincoln was maneuvering to accomplish -- with no evidence.
Further, he makes no mention that I can find of the fact that such things as easy credit, internal transportation, and increased federal revenue (tariff increases) ARE ALSO CONSISTENT WITH A DESPARATE ATTEMPT TO WIN A WAR. The intellectual dishonesty is breathtaking.
I am a strong opponent of economic centralization. I am for abolishing the income tax, and elimination of the Fed, and an end to tariff socialism. I think Lincoln was wrong on the tariff, probably naive on the dangers of centralized banking and economic projects. But I also think that it is perfectly clear that he cared about these matters because he cared about the flourishing of this free republic, and when a greater danger arose, he pretty much put all economic concerns aside.
On your next post, it is certainly true that hostility to slavery expansion is consistent with an agenda of flourishing economic liberty. And Northerners did have a pretty clear sense that slavery in a state made economic liberty die in the cradle. But, again, the idea that Lincoln's life-long, and then dramatically intensified, focus on containing slavery was all along driven by economic considerations is just not in the texts. Whenever he gives an argument such as "containing slavery gives white men opportunity" (which is quite rare, by the way) he also invariably makes the point that the most important reason that slavery must be contained because it is WRONG.
DiLorenzo's dishonesty is revealed above all in the fact that he almost never even gestures toward alternative explanations. Jaffa's whole BOOK "Crisis of the House Divided" is divided into "The Case for Douglas" and "The Case for Lincoln." He strives to understand, and then to evaluate, Douglas. And THEN he turns to Lincoln. DiLorenzo only mentions what serves his theory, or manifest caricatures of objections. He NEVER lets those of another view be heard in full sentences, much less extended quotations. His quotations are longest on matters of rape and pillage, where we get about one long paragraph per page of "smoke billowing" and "women screaming." But when he quotes serious scholars on matters of difficult or complex judgment, he either restates their conclusions for them, or cuts what they say into a sentence fragment.
The only long Lincoln quotations in the book -- the only ones I can find that even contain complete sentences from Lincoln, are the quotations in which he appears to doubt the equality of negroes. Everywhere else in the book we get sentences like this:
"Lincoln argued that secession would 'destroy" the government, but such an argument was simply foolish."
Okay, I'll stop.
I believe you've hit on the reason the propaganda that the war was because of slavery was spun so viciously. Somthing, somehow had to be launched to attempt to justify Lincoln's abuses. I see it worked with you. Remember, history is written by the victors, and when it is, it becomes "history".
What would your comments have been if Bubba had done even one thing that Lincoln did?
You ready? Here goes.
You will not find the word secession in the debates or the Federalist Papers either because the Framers did not imagine such nonsense.
Now I'm sure that it is very instructive what the Wisconsin Democrat had to say on the topic in 1861, but they are not the "Federalist Papers. James Madison spoke very clearly on the issue, and said that secession at will was nonsense. Is not Madison's word on the constitution good enough for you?
The University of Virginia has a very large microfilm file of Civil War era newspapers and publications. Click the link to see their catalog.
I just reviewed DiLorenzo's entire book, page by page. He gives Lincoln several long block quotes in the chapters on "Lincoln's Opposition to Racial Equality," and "Why Not Peaceful Emancipation." These chapters prove, of course, that Lincoln cared not a whit about negroes or Emancipation.
In the ENTIRE REST OF THE BOOK, Lincoln gets ONE complete sentence quotation -- if you don't count the tendentious epigrams which occasionally adorn chapter title pages. Meanwhile, historians, critics, and other actors of the day get block quotes and extended exerpts.
Here's the one sentence, from the First Inaugural:
"The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion -- no using force against, or among the people anywhere"(emphasis added).
About which sentence the good doctor comments thus:
To Lincoln, slavery was just another political issue subject to compromies. But protectionist tariffs--the keystone of the Republican Party platform--were nonnegotiable. He promised to wage war on any state that refused to collect enough tariff revenue, a truly bizarre stance. What other American president, in his first address to the American people, would have threatened a bloody war on his own citizens over the issue of tax collection? He was essentially threatening American citizens with death and annihilation unless they continued to pay a tribute (and at a considerably higher rate) to the central government. How else could one interpret his threat of a military invasion? The Real Lincoln, page 237
But at least he let Lincoln speak a whole sentence, that one time.
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