Posted on 05/08/2002 9:17:51 AM PDT by Korth
I have now interviewed both Dr. Tom DiLorenzo and Dr. Richard Ferrier regarding our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln. I entered the controversy intrigued, but really without a dog in the fight. As I have too often said, "It is not a question of who is right or wrong but what is right or wrong that counts."
I am not a Lincoln hater and I don't idolize the man. Like most of you, I am an interested student.
As usual, both sides have merits and shortfalls. However, in the wake of the two interviews, myriad e-mails and having read, "The Real Lincoln" and the Lincoln-Douglas debates, I have reached personal conclusions.
But, frankly, my conclusions are tainted. I have a few pet peeves. Honesty, to me, is important both in content and in character. I consider "Duty, Honor, Country" as more than a cute phrase, but a credo. Oaths are important, significant, and not to be entered into or broken cavalierly.
When any person swears a sacred oath to "preserve and protect the Constitution," they have made a lifelong commitment. I am routinely annoyed and offended by people who take the oath and subsequently (by thought, deed and action) undermine, abrogate or attempt to alter the very document that they have sworn to "preserve and protect."
I consider those who violate that oath as being guilty of fraud, perjury and treason.
When I interviewed DiLorenzo I told him he had provided me with an epiphany. I have frequently noted that when the framers were forming the republic, Jefferson and Hamilton had a long series of debates. Jefferson was arguing for states' rights, and Hamilton wanted a big federal bureaucracy like we have now. Historically, Jefferson won the debate.
I have been trying to figure out at what point in our history Jefferson lost. I used to think it was inertia building until 1913, and then FDR. But actually, Lincoln should get the credit for defeating Jefferson for Hamilton.
DiLorenzo said, "One of the main themes of my book is that Abraham Lincoln was the political son of Alexander Hamilton Lincoln took up the Hamiltonian mantle of big, centralized government, centralized planning, autocratic leadership. The great debates between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians were ended at gunpoint under the directorship of Abraham Lincoln, in my view. And I think that debate was ended by 1865."
I am more convinced than ever that DiLorenzo is right about that.
Ferrier told me his complaints with DiLorenzo were "falsehood in details, sloppiness of scholarship and a fundamentally wrong-headed view of the role of Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence, and American history and our political philosophy."
I'll get to the "falsehood" charge, but "a fundamentally wrong-headed view of the role of Lincoln" is really a kinda high-handed and pretentious way of saying, "I'm right and he's wrong." Although DiLorenzo didn't say so, I suspect he probably feels the same way about Ferrier and his other critics. By extension and association, Ferrier also must feel Professor Walter Williams has a "fundamentally wrong-headed view of the role of Lincoln."
Ferrier made some good points. However, in my view, in one defense, he further diminishes his idol as disingenuous, calculating and adroit at parsing "weasel words."
In discussing slavery, he confirmed Lincoln said, "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between white and black races, and I have never said anything to the contrary." He corrected the DiLorenzo citation, but said, "Lincoln, who was a lawyer and was careful with his words, did not say 'I do not believe in that equality. I do not think it is a good thing.' He said, 'I have no purpose to introduce it.' Those are the words of a careful lawyerly politician "
In other words Lincoln was using Clintonian verbiage carefully qualifying the definition of what "is" is. So, when Lincoln said, "I have no purpose," Ferrier says he meant, "I don't at the moment intend to bring about such equality." And if he had said anything else in Illinois in the 1850s, he couldn't have been elected to dogcatcher. So Lincoln (according to Dr. Ferrier) was being duplicitous in other words, dishonest.
Both these professors score points in the debate. DiLorenzo apparently misstates citations and uses quotes to support his position and ignores quotes that undercut it. By the way, Ferrier likewise seems comfortable ignoring facts that contradict his preconceived opinion.
DiLorenzo and Ferrier are academics and scholars. I am not. However, a lot of the things Lincoln did were specifically designed to abrogate, eviscerate and destroy the very document to which he swore an oath. For Ferrier and company to say, "Well, gosh, the other guys were doing it too," is not an adequate defense.
Karen DeCoster has been accused of excess in her criticism of Lincoln. However, in my view, she is right when she says he was, "A conniving and manipulative man
he was nowhere near what old guard historians would have us believe."
There is no point in having a written Constitution if it is not going to be obeyed by government officials. If "flesh and blood" politicians take the oath to the Constitution, they are bound to follow the Constitution, whether they like its provisions or not. And if "flesh and blood" politicians find parts of the Constitution objectionable, they can work to amend by the processes provided by the Constitution itself.
Secondly, if the South had been allowed to leave peacefully, the SCOTCS would have been established Constitutionally and Davis probably wouldn't have made half the statements he did. Actions out of necessity which lincoln caused.
The first political prisoner of the Civil War was a newspaper reporter. He printed something that Beauregard didn't like and the general tossed him in the slammer. On a per capita basis more people were jailed without trial and in violation of their civil rights in the confederacy (8000) than in the Union (13,000 to 25,000 depending on the source. No worries about them, billbears?
You forgot to add: "having been deliberatly provoked by Lincoln." Although you very well know that to have been the case.
Walt "
your a sorry piece a plunder..
I guess your bluebelly wonders of the Union 3rd Colorado that kilt ever man woman an child (infants too) of a pieceful village on Nov 30 1864 dont count?
They was flying a white Flag AND a US Flag and the yankees still kilt them all. 150 in all. 100 of those was women and children.
Here's what one a the yankees that went over the place the next day said:
"In going over the battle ground the next day, I did not see a body of a man, woman, or child but was scalped; and in many cases their bodies were mutilated in the most horrible manner. I heard one man say that he had cut a woman's private parts out, and had them for exhibition on a stick; I heard another man say that he had cut off the fingers of an Indian to get the rings off the hand."
-- Lt. James Cannon, affidavit of January 16, 1865
Theres aplenty more where that came from.
Theres somethin sick about you son.. sick. You got a obsession with all this. Theres something you aint tellin us. Ive been round long enough to know.
Sorry, billbears, but that argument is weak, even for you. "Didn't have any time to establish itself," you say? We're not talking about a National Parks Department here; we are talking about one of the three branches of government. They had time to establish a cabinet, something not mandated by the constitution, but they didn't have time to establish a supreme court that was? They had time to pass legislation extending enlistments, establishing tariffs, suspending habeas corpus, nationalizing business, but didn't have time to establish a supreme court to make sure their actions were legal? "If the south had been allowed to leave peacefully...", you claim. Well, the south did leave peacefully, without any action on the part of the North for over a month after Lincoln was inaugurated, and over a month and a half after Davis. And what was the confederate priority? You maintain that they wanted peace, but their first action was to fund a general staff and an army 6 times the size of the United States Army, yet they didn't have time to establish a judiciary to help oversee the freedoms they claimed they needed the army to protect? Face it, bill, the last thing Jefferson wanted was a judiciary that might get in his way. And had the south won the war there is nothing, nothing at all, to show that he might have changed his mind. You say Lincoln broke the law? Lincoln was a rank amateur compared to Red Jeff Davis.
Absolute and total BS. Davis had sent peace commissioners, authorized by th Confederate Congress, to negotiate in Washington for the Confederacy to pay for Federal installations on Southern soil and to compensate the North for the Southern portion of the National debt. Very generous of them considering how the Northern states had bled them dry for years with the tariff. Putting that aside, Davis may or may not have been impetous, I don't think that he was. But he could not have been so impetouous as to have wanted war with the North immediately. And anyone who thinks he could have isn't playing with a full deck.
Well, I'll defer to you as an expert in BS. But as far as Davis is concerned, the evidence doesn't support your claim. The confederate 'peace commissioners', as you call them, were there to negotiate something that they had already appropriated? One would think that the time negotiate a sales price would be before you seize it. The commission was there to negotiate recognition of their act of rebellion, something that Lincoln wasn't inclined to do.
Very generous of them considering how the Northern states had bled them dry for years with the tariff.
Here are the tariff totals for the year prior to the outbreak of the war:
New York - $35,155,452.75
Boston - $5,133,414.55
Philadelphia - $2,262,349.57
New Orleans - $2,120,058.76
Charleston - $299,399.43
Mobile - $118,027.99
Galveston - $92,417.72
Savannah - $89,157.18
Norfolk - $70,897.73
Richmond - $47,763.63
Wilmington, NC - $33,104.67
Pensacola - $3,577.60
You will see that Philadelphia alone collected almost as much in tariff revenue as the nine largest southern ports combined. Tariff revenue from the three largest northern ports accounted for 95% of all revenue collected. So don't try that same old sothron song-and-dance about 'tariff bleeding us dry.' It won't work.
Then you would be in disagreement with Robert Toombs, secretary of state:
"Firing on that fort will inagurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen...At this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend in the North...You will wantonly srike a hornet's nest which extends from mountains to ocean, and legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it put us in the wrong; it is fatal."
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