Posted on 04/29/2002 10:04:22 PM PDT by davidjquackenbush
Don't forget Phat Phil Fulmer. ;-)
Phil is pretty Phat.
Walt
"Quackenbush ... refuses to admit that Lincoln did in fact lament the demise of the Bank of the United Stated during the debates. His earlier claim that there was not a single word said during the Lincoln-Douglas debates about economic policy is simply untrue."
You:
This is one of the few points on which I agree with DiLorenzo. Based on my quick word search of the debates, it appears that Lincoln did very briefly mention his belief that a national bank was Constitutional on several occasions, so McPherson overstated the single-issue nature of the debates somewhat. Of course, Lincoln's comments about the Constitutionality of a national bank severely undercuts DiLorenzo's attempt to paint Lincoln as anti-Constitutional.
I beg to differ. The issue here is whether Lincoln "made it a point" to promote his Clay-derived economic agenda in the debates. Of course Lincoln mentioned the long-standing Democrat opposition to the Bank, but his only point in doing so was to convict Douglas and the Democrats of inconsistency with regard to their support of Taney in Dred Scott.
Lincoln never argued, in the debates with Douglas, that the Bank should be revived, or was a good thing ... in fact, he never advocated, with regard to the Bank, the Homestead Act, the Transcontinental railroad, or the tariff, in the debates, anything like an economic agenda. But DiLorenzo says he did. Therefore, etc., Q.E.D.
What do you say to this?
How so? Why not Washington, or Madison or Millard Filmore? Why do you guys insist on slamming Lincoln for 20th Century socialists, all of whom easily won elections in Dixie.
LBJ, Carter and clinton were your boys, not mine. How about Wilson who hated Lincoln and loved socialists --- as long as they were segregationist socialists.
Certainly. I stated that I could not find that quote in Basler's works anywhere, much less in the volume and pages cited. I'm sure ConfederateMissouri feels as I do, that IF Lincoln had said it - it would fine to attribute it to him. But I refuse to resort to lies to prove my position, and I'm sure he agrees.
LOL - have I fooled you that well? In all seriousness thank you. The feeling is mutual.
The quote is bogus. 'Nuff said.
Best wishes,
Richard F.
That may be the more relevant point, but I was just addressing the narrower issue of whether Lincoln mentioned the Constitutionality of a national bank in any debates. My narrow point was that McPherson was technicallly inaccurate when he stated in Battle Cry (page 182) that "banks ... received not a word in [the Lincoln-Douglas] debates."
Here's what Lincoln stated in the Ottawa debate:
"I have said that I have often heard [Douglas] approve of Jackson's course in disregarding the decision of the Supreme Court pronouncing a National Bank constitutional. He says, I did not hear him say so. He denies the accuracy of my recollection. I say he ought to know better than I, but I will make no question about this thing, though it still seems to me that I heard him say it twenty times. I will tell him though, that he now claims to stand on the Cincinnati platform, which affirms that Congress cannot charter a National Bank, in the teeth of that old standing decision that Congress can charter a bank."
The same argument was made by Lincoln in Galesburg (where I was born 100 years too late to hear it), and Douglas finally responded to that argument thusly:
"He has cited General Jackson in justification of the war he is making on the decision of the court. Mr. Lincoln misunderstands the history of the country, if he believes there is any parallel in the two cases. It is true that the Supreme Court once decided that if a Bank of the United States was a necessary fiscal agent of the Government, it was Constitutional, and if not, that it was unconstitutional, and also, that whether or not it was necessary for that purpose, was a political question for Congress and not a judicial one for the courts to determine. Hence the court would not determine the bank unconstitutional. Jackson respected the decision, obeyed the law, executed it and carried it into effect during its existence; but after the charter of the bank expired and a proposition was made to create a new bank, General Jackson said, "it is unnecessary and improper, and, therefore, I am against it on Constitutional grounds as well as those of expediency." Is Congress bound to pass every act that is Constitutional? Why, there are a thousand things that are Constitutional, but yet are inexpedient and unnecessary, and you surely would not vote for them merely because you had the right to? And because General Jackson would not do a thing which he had a right to do, but did not deem expedient or proper, Mr. Lincoln is going to justify himself in doing that which he has no right to do. I ask him, whether he is not bound to respect and obey the decisions of the Supreme Court as well as me?"
Again, I am not asserting that anything was said by Lincoln or Douglass in their debates regarding banks (or anything else) that was unrelated to their discussion of slavery issues (which so thoroughly dominated their debates that any other subject was merely of footnote status). And certainly DiLorenzo is way out in fantasyland in contending that "protectionist tariffs, tax subsidies to corporations, and centralized banking ... [are] what [Lincoln] and the ... Republicans wanted a centralized government for."
Radical Republicans wanted most of all to abolish slavery as soon as possible, and Lincoln, though a moderate who hoped that abolition could be accomplished gradually by converting Southern political leaders into enlightened Jeffersonians, in the end became a de facto radical due to circumstances beyond his control (i.e. Southern militant bullheadedness).
Of course, responding to Southern militant bullheadedness was an expensive proposition, and tariffs were raised to pay for the war (whereas the Confederates relied on the cruelest tax -- inflation). Nevertheless, tariff revenue during the war never reached the percentage of GNP it had reached during the War of 1812, and it dropped steadily off the table after the Civil War. (Source.) DiLorenzo ignores this important contextual point, and he also ignores the fact that the Morill tariff was passed as a way to deal with the Buchanan/Breckinridge federal deficit.
Perhaps more importantly, DiLorenzo, who is supposedly an economist, curiously ignores the relative economic magnitude of the slavery issue. Since the Confederates in 1860 placed a value of $3 billion on the slaves they held, any claims by DiLorenzo, Lew Rockwell, et al. about tariffs being a major factor in the Civil War are laughable, since even when tariff rates topped out during the height of the Civil War, they only brought in a small fraction of the annual return Southern slaveholders received as a result of their continued use of $3 billion worth of slave labor. So even if you ignore the social value the Confederates placed on perpetuating slavery, the economic threat posed by the abolitionists was enormous.
Lincoln of course realized this, and that is why he tried to come up with some way to soften the blow of abolition to the slaveholders in order to do everything practical to avoid a civil war. Colonialization of liberated refugees may sound like a pretty flaky scheme in the detached comfort of retrospect, but such a scheme was in fact actually implemented in Israel in the aftermath of World War II. Lincoln also proposed paying compensation to slaveholders as part of abolition, but that was rejected even in the border states at a time when any slaveholders in semi-contact with reality should have realized it was the best deal they would ever receive.
It seems that Southern slaveholders were the hopeless addicts of the 19th Century. DiLorenzo and their other heirs apparent appear to be just as hopeless when it comes to a reasonable discussion of the Civil War era.
See my Post #235 above.
Always keeping in mind, of course, that this all started because DiLorenzo said that Lincoln "championed" the "corrupt Whig economic agenda" in "virtually every one of the Lincoln Douglas debates." This, I think we all agree is an entirely different and totally unsupported claim.
You are quite correct.
Why do you frauds have to switch screen names all the time? Is it to try to create the impression that you're more than a few nutcases? All your abandoned nicks are still FR accounts; Llan Deussant, The Cruiser, Who is George Salt, and probably a dozen more that you used before I registered.
Perhaps the "not a word" business has the slightest rhetorical overkill in it. But really, not much. Is it not true that Lincoln utters not a word in the debates whose purpose is to make an economic point for its own sake? Do you think the text you posted is an exception to that statement? The immediate context of the remark you cite makes it clear that Lincoln is only talking about it in order to convict Douglas of inconsistency in his demand that Republicans accept Dred Scott. There is not even the slightest aside about the bank issue in itself, of the sort: "which decision, by the way, I support."
I'm all for being fair, but it seems to me on the question of whether Lincoln discussed economics as a point of debate in the Lincoln Douglas debates, the answer is simply and absolutely, no.
Please don't think me grumpy about your post. I just don't think we need to help DiLorenzo escape from the being convicted as an absolute liar on this point.
"Always keeping in mind, of course, that this all started because DiLorenzo said that Lincoln "championed" the "corrupt Whig economic agenda" in "virtually every one of the Lincoln Douglas debates." This, I think we all agree is an entirely different and totally unsupported claim."
And you replied,
You are quite correct.
Thank you. I think anyone who takes the time to read the debates would agree with you.
May I draw back a bit, and draw attention to the main thesis of the first part of DiLorenzo's book? It is, so far as one can make it out, that Lincoln's political aims were an economic agenda and a politically centralizing agenda, and that he really had little interest in the injustice of slavery, or in the polices that might finally end it. Since the general opinion of citizens and scholars alike is that slavery was paramount in the events bringing Lincoln to the White House, DiLorenzo must debunk that view first.
It was for that reason DiLorenzo brought in the mention of the Bank, characterizing it as he did, and claiming that Lincoln "made it a point" to bring up, not just the word "Bank" but an economic agenda.
Now, in point of fact, the bank issue is subordinated entirely, by both Lincoln and Douglas, to the question of the authority of Supreme Court decisions and precedents, in order to score points on the current Court issue, namely Dred Scott. But that is, materially, a slavery issue.
Thus, DiLorenzo's "evidence," with reference to his thesis, comes to exactly nothing. To borrow from Lincoln, he finds the words, "horse chestnut" and mistakes them to mean a chestnut horse.
Thanks again for you reply,
Richard F
It's funny that we were typing our replies simultaneously.
DiLorenzo's squirming on this reminds me of the old anti-Catholic joke regarding the Jesuit who was on trial for killing three men and a chicken, and in his defense, triumphantly produced the chicken, alive.
Cheers,
Richard F.
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