Posted on 04/02/2002 9:45:23 PM PST by VinnyTex
Certain neo-conservatives have responded to the publication of my book, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War , with quite hysterical name calling, personal smears, and slanderous language. The chief practitioners of this vulgar means of public discourse are Alan Keyes and employees of his Washington, D.C. based "Declaration Foundation."
On the Foundation?s Web site on Easter Sunday was a very pleasant, Christian blessing, located right below a reprinting of Paul Craig Roberts?s March 21 Washington Times review of my book (" War on Terrorism a Threat to Liberty? "). In a very un-Christian manner the Declaration Foundation accuses Roberts (and myself, indirectly) of "ignorance and calumny." According to Webster?s College Dictionary "calumny" means making false and malicious statements intended to injure a reputation, slander, and defamation. Let?s see if what Roberts said in his column fits that definition.
"Lincoln used war to destroy the U.S. Constitution in order to establish a powerful central government," says Roberts. This is certainly a strong statement, but in fact Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus; launched a military invasion without consent of Congress; blockaded Southern ports without declaring war; imprisoned without warrant or trial some 13,000 Northern citizens who opposed his policies; arrested dozens of newspaper editors and owners and, in some cases, had federal soldiers destroy their printing presses; censored all telegraph communication; nationalized the railroads; created three new states (Kansas, Nevada, and West Virginia) without the formal consent of the citizens of those states, an act that Lincoln?s own attorney general thought was unconstitutional; ordered Federal troops to interfere with Northern elections; deported a member of Congress from Ohio after he criticized Lincoln?s unconstitutional behavior; confiscated private property; confiscated firearms in violation of the Second Amendment; and eviscerated the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
A New Orleans man was executed for merely taking down a U.S. flag; ministers were imprisoned for failing to say a prayer for Abraham Lincoln, and Fort Lafayette in New York harbor became known as "The American Bastille" since it held so many thousands of Northern political prisoners. All of this was catalogued decades ago in such books as James G. Randall?s Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln and Dean Sprague?s Freedom Under Lincoln.
"This amazing disregard for the Constitution," wrote historian Clinton Rossiter," was "considered by nobody as legal." "One man was the government of the United States," says Rossiter, who nevertheless believed that Lincoln was a "great dictator."
Lincoln used his dictatorial powers, says Roberts, to "suppress all Northern opposition to his illegal and unconstitutional acts." This is not even controversial, and is painstakingly catalogued in the above-mentioned books as well as in The Real Lincoln. Lincoln?s Secretary of State William Seward established a secret police force and boasted to the British Ambassador, Lord Lyons, that he could "ring a bell" and have a man arrested anywhere in the Northern states without a warrant.
When the New York City Journal of Commerce published a list of over 100 Northern newspapers that opposed the Lincoln administration, Lincoln ordered the Postmaster General to deny those papers mail delivery, which is how nearly all newspapers were delivered at the time. A few of the papers resumed publication only after promising not to criticize the Lincoln administration.
Lincoln "ignored rulings hand-delivered to him by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney ordering Lincoln to respect and faithfully execute the laws of the United States" says Roberts. Absolutely true again. Taney ? and virtually all legal scholars at the time ? was of the opinion that only Congress could constitutionally suspend habeas corpus, and had his opinion hand delivered to Lincoln by courier. Lincoln ignored it and never even bothered to challenge it in court.
Roberts also points out in his article that "Lincoln urged his generals to conduct total war against the Southern civilian population." Again, this is not even controversial. As pro-Lincoln historian Steven Oates wrote in the December 1995 issue of Civil War Times, "Lincoln fully endorsed Sheridan?s burning of the Shenandoah Valley, Sherman?s brutal March to the Sea through Georgia, and the . . . destructive raid through Alabama." James McPherson has written of how Lincoln micromanaged the war effort perhaps as much as any American president ever has. It is inconceivable, therefore, that he did not also micromanage the war on civilians that was waged by his generals.
Lincoln?s war strategy was called the "Anaconda Plan" because it sought to strangle the Southern economy by blockading the ports and controlling the inland waterways, such as the Mississippi River. It was, in other words, focused on destroying the civilian economy.
General Sherman declared on January 31, 1864 that "To the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is mercy." In a July 31, 1862 letter to his wife he said his goal was "extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people." And so he burned the towns of Randolph, Tennessee, Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi, and Atlanta to the ground after the Confederate army had left; bombarded cities occupied only by civilians in violation of the Geneva Convention of 1863; and boasted in his memoirs of destroying $100 million in private property and stealing another $20 million worth. All of this destroyed food stuffs and left women, children, and the elderly in the cold of winter without shelter or food.
General Philip Sheridan did much of the same in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, burning hundreds of houses to the ground and killing or stealing all livestock and destroying crops long after the Confederate Army had left the valley, just as winter was approaching.
"A new kind of soldier was needed" for this kind of work, writes Roberts. Here he is referring to my quotation of pro-Sherman biographer Lee Kennett, who in his biography of Sherman wrote that "the New York regiments [in Sherman?s army] were . . . filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World." Lincoln recruited the worst of the worst to serve as pillagers and plunderers in Sherman?s army.
Lincoln used the war to "remove the constraints that Southern senators and congressmen, standing in the Jeffersonian tradition, placed in the way of centralized federal power, high tariffs, and subsidies to Northern industries." Indeed, Lincoln?s 28-year political career prior to becoming president was devoted almost exclusively to this end. Even Lincoln idolater Mark Neely, Jr., in The Fate of Liberty , noted that as early as the 1840s, Lincoln exhibited a "gruff and belittling impatience" with constitutional arguments against his cherished Whig economic agenda of protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for the railroad and road building industries, and a federal government monopolization of the money supply. Once he was in power, Lincoln appointed himself "constitutional dictator" and immediately pushed through this mercantilist economic agenda ? an agenda that had been vetoed by president after president beginning with Jefferson.
Far from "saving the Union," writes Roberts, Lincoln "utterly destroyed the Union achieved by the Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution." The original Union was a voluntary association of states. By holding it together at gunpoint Lincoln may have "saved" the Union in a geographic sense, but he destroyed it in a philosophical sense.
Paul Craig Roberts based his column on well-documented facts as presented in The Real Lincoln. In response to these facts, in a recent WorldNetDaily column the insufferably sanctimonious Alan Keyes described people like myself, Paul Craig Roberts, Walter Williams, Joe Sobran, Charles Adams, Jeffrey Rogers Hummell, Doug Bandow, Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett, Jr., and other Lincoln critics as "pseudo-learned scribblers," with an "incapacity to recognize moral purpose" who display "uncomprehending pettiness," are "dishonest," and, once again, his favorite word for all who disagree with him: "ignorant."
"Ignorant" and "slanderous" is the precise language one should use to describe the hysterical rantings and ravings of Alan Keyes and his minions at the so-called Declaration Foundation.
April 3, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail ] is the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com
Regards,
Richard F.
The legislatures of the Western Virginia counties had every right, and even a duty, to resist that treason and to assure that their constituents retained the representation through a restored legislature. Sorry if that offends your precious southern heritage, but it is a fact and many if not most southerners understood that at the time. A lot of them simply thought they could get away with it. Arbitrary secession was nonsense then and it is even more insane to defend it now.
"Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It was intended for "perpetual union" so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolution, or the consent of all the people in convention assembled. It is idle to talk of secession. Anarchy would have been established, and not a government, by Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, and the other patriots of the Revolution." --- Robert E. Lee, Jan. 23, 1861
******
Alan Keyes: Paid in blood
Monday, April 01, 2002
This Easter season and the truth of the Civil War
WorldNetDaily.com
Holy Week is a season for reflecting on a great price paid, once and for all, and the life that arose in triumph over sin and evil once that price was paid. And what an unfortunate season, indeed, for some to renew their effort to extort "reparations" for slavery from their fellow citizens.
Yet, lawsuits have been filed. Those responsible propose to settle the accounts of slavery leaving the Civil War out of the equation – complete and utter nonsense. The price for the sin of slavery has already been paid, in blood.
To answer the reparations question, we must re-awaken a living understanding of the great moral drama played out in blood, treasure and human spirit on the battlefields of America a century and a half ago. President Lincoln stated in the Second Inaugural that, at the beginning of the war, "slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war."
Somehow.
By this simple adverb, Lincoln captures the great question slavery posed to the soul of the nation. The war began in imperfect understanding, and concluded in clear understanding, that it had been caused by national violation of the laws of nature, and of nature's God. Lincoln spoke this truth for the nation:
If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."
The moral drama of the Civil War was the nation's discernment, in its agony, that slavery was the cause of the war not as an economic interest, not as a political provocation, but as a sin which must be paid for by the blood of North and South.
At the heart of Union sentiment was the sense that a precious common good, to which all had legitimate claim, was being denied by the illegitimate refusal of their fellow citizens in the South to accept the verdict of the 1860 election. In its various ways, the North understood that the Union was the attempt of one people to establish the possibility of self-government upon the basis of the equal dignity of all men. And so the North understood that secession in defense of slavery represented the illegitimate bid by the South to replace self-government by equal free men with its elder adversary – the tyrannical rule of the powerful over their weaker brethren.
In ever increasing numbers and with ever increasing clarity, the soldiers of the North came to understand that the cause of the Union was the cause of liberty for all men. In their letters and diaries, the leavening motive, in the chaos of war, was increasingly the belief that God called them to sacrifice their lives to repair the moral stain of slavery. And over this increasing discernment, President Lincoln exercised wise, and good and patient statesmanship. He saw, and led, a people coming to understand itself and its duty – its vocation unto death and a "new birth of freedom."
This story is so complicated, and deep, that the venal and superficial among us can continue to deny it. Pseudo- learned scribblers who find contradiction in every prudence, and hypocrisy in every generous concession, continue to offer us their "real Lincoln" and to deny that Lincoln, or the North, had any real moral purpose. They demonstrate instead only their own incapacity to recognize moral purpose in the genuine complexity of human affairs. The true Lincoln, and the true moral greatness of the Union cause, will continue to tower above their uncomprehending pettiness.
Our liberty, reborn from the Civil War's labor, remains imperfect – as we must expect of any mortal thing. Pettifogging lawyers and dishonest scholars will always be able to carp selectively and ignorantly about the warts upon our body politic.
But the truth of the Civil War is that the terrible price for American slavery has been paid, once for all, by the American people's deliberate acceptance of their duty to pay it when, in God's providence, Southern intransigence brought it due.
Let us resolve, this Easter season, to remember the price America paid for her sin. Let us remember and venerate the high moral purpose of those, including Lincoln, who died to make men free.
*********
I support every word, every single word, of this column.
Cheers,
Richard F.
“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better to do so than not to be exercised at all.”
-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Abigail Adams, 1787)
“What country can preserve it’s liberties if it’s rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”
-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Wm. S. Smith, 1787)
Regards
J.R.
If you want to worship someone, I suggest you look further than Lincoln. Feet of clay and all that, you understand.
Dilorenzo is nobody, but his lies and slanders corrupt good people and must be countered.
The remark about Pol Pot is the ugliest and most ignorant thing I have seen in print from the right in my 15 year involvement in politics.
It is a sign of cancer of the mind.
It is beyond my power to say what I think of it.
And so I think the fount of this venom, DiLorenzo, and his friends at lewrockwell, must feel the full heat of our righteous indignation.
Liberty, Union and Truth, Now and Forever!
Richard F.
Roberts column is ignorant and contains calumnies. I have said what they are. Respond to that, if you would.
Do you defend the "Pol Pot" remark?
Do you have the gumption to say so in public?
If so, please do it now.
Regrads,
Richard F.
If you don't read the Constitution, you'll never understand what Lincoln did wrong and you'll keep bending over for any tinpot "authority" who tells you to spread'em.
Rather than looking at a map why not look at the tariff statistics? For the period June 1858 through June 1859 the net tariff collected in Philadelphia was $2,262,349.57. The net tariff collected for the 11 busiest southern ports COMBINED was $2,866,496.22. And Philadelphia was the third busiest port. Boston collected $5,133,414.55 and New York collected $35,155,452.75. So of the total tariff collected for the 14 busiest ports in the United States 93.7% were collected in the three northern ports. So how you can say that tariffs raped the southern economy is beyond understanding when almost all of it was paid up north.
It isn't pleasant to finally see the real character of your little social club. At first, I thought you boys were simply eccentric. Now I see that you're intent on pushing an agenda which is antithetical to our constitution. It isn't at all surprising that you're republicans either.
Suits me.
Best wishes to you,
Richard F.
To say that merely because they wanted to split their state up for 80 years and hence they are justified to disregard the Constitution, speaks volumes for exactly what is wrong with the Nation today.
The Democrats justify their slime and filth and leftist leanings and the Republicans are right there doing it for their 'cause'.
I'll tell ya, something, Mr. Ferrier....back in Montana, when our county was crapping on county residents right and left, we were told we didn't count because our tax base was low. We local citizens took our cause to the state legislature and actually got a law enacted whereby we could establish a method to secede from one County and make a new one or go to an existing one.
Our county personnel poo-pooed and fought us with our own tax dollars testifying before our Legislature--but we won......and we did it the right way....and we didn't have to do anything illegal and drape the state flag around it and call it 'legal'.
What in hell has happened with the conservative movement that law and order only applies when the PTB decrees such....are we so under the King's command and control?
Answer me, Dick.....is Dr. Keyes feeling this way, too---the ends justify the means??
That answer will tell me all I need to know about the Declaration Foundation, the Constitution, and Dr. Keyes....
Thanks....I'll patiently await your response...or his, should he care to come on.
I'd be ashamed to be associated with him, myself, even if I were pro-secession.
I'll never get over the Jefferson/Tocqueville friendship.
Or Lincoln's "rape orders."
Scorn is the sovereign remedy for this tripe.
Cheers,
Richard F.
Where in the Constitution did the Founders indicate that pulling out of the Union constituted Treason.....?
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