Posted on 12/11/2002 3:15:37 AM PST by WhiskeyPapa
Now isn't that interesting. It seems our good friend Richard is making his argument against 'the Real Lincoln' by attacking DiLorenzo's personal scholarly credentials. This claim is very peculiar as it reveal as much about its author as it does about the person he's attacking. Let's compare these two individual's scholarly credentials:
Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo -
Professor of Economics, Loyola College (Maryland)
Amazon.com identifies him as the author of at least 11 published books.
An academic journal database search has multiple hits for DiLorenzo as a published author.
Dr. Richard Ferrier -
Tutor, Thomas Aquinas College (California)
Amazon.com identifies him as the author of ZERO published books. His college's website identifies him as the co-author of a forthcoming "e-textbook" that is available for download off the internet.
An academic journal database search identifies Ferrier as the author of ZERO published journal articles out of several hundred listings searched.
And in the unlikely event that rdf is still out there watching...sorry Dick, but you'd be advised to look in the mirror first the next time you wish to call somebody else a "minor scholar." Other than that, have a nice day!
The ACS was part of that early anti-slavery sentiment in Virginia, Maryland and Kentucky, as well as in Northern states, that we've been told died after a more militant abolitionism took root in the North. Seen from the perspective of its day it was one of the few channels for promoting emancipation and manumission voluntarily by slaveholders themselves. The refusal of the states to treat free blacks as equals, and the opposition of many people to emancipation if freed Blacks remained in the country led many humanitarian minds to support the ACS. Opposition to the ACS, at least in its early days, was more likely to come from staunch supporters of slavery than from abolitionists.
So in saying that Lincoln supported the Illinois Colonization Society, you're saying that he was of one mind with more enlightened political luminaries of the day. In retrospect the idea of removing freed slaves from the country their labor had helped to build up looks monstrous. Was it worse than slavery itself? Was largely voluntary resettlement worse than the slave trade or the crimes involved in the maintenance of slavery? Was it worse to resettle slaves in a free country or to separate them from their families and sell them down the river? Was resettlement of freed slaves worse than the dispossession and removal of Indian tribes going on at the same time? Was it much worse than the forcible resettlement of English convicts and paupers in Australia?
We rightly reject such ideas of "resettlement" or "population exchange" today. There is much cruelty and injustice hidden behind such euphemisms. In retrospect, it's clear that colonization or resettlement was an alternative to integration, but we shouldn't single out the ACS as a particularly evil organization in the context of its day, when integration and racial equality were not considered options.
Your politically correct attacks on Lincoln are of a piece with attacks on Washington and Jefferson for having been slaveholders. Dismantling the "Lincoln myth" won't be any prelude to a glorification of secessionist or Confederate leaders. It's just another step in the trashing of the American past.
Ahh, but they haven't been held up as the end all be all to the holy cause of the union and its no quarter war against the South just to end said practice are they? So it was common to be a member of the ACS. What of it? Face it, your hero could have cared less about the slaves and the falsehoods presented in the above article to paint him as some type of saint are getting tiresome. He was a big government thug and could care less about the Constitution. The exact thing that conservatives today are supposed to rally against. Except with abe we have to make an exception. We have to forget everything that is historically correct about the man, everything that would disgust a conservative if it were anyone else, and just remember his worthless political speeches
On the contrary, you may not agree with his ideas on colonization but Lincoln was against the institution of slavery, unlike your southron heroes, and said so on many occasions. The same cannot be said of the holy Davis and the sainted Lee. I've pointed this out before but considering the treatment shown towards free blacks down south prior to the war, and given that their welcome up North wasn't very warm either, and in light of what the south tried to pull off after the war with their Black Codes, was Lincoln doing them any harm suggesting that they might be better of carving a new life for themselves overseas? Someplace where they could run their own lives and their own societies free in a way that southern whites would never voluntarily allow? In retrospect we are a better country for having an integrated society, but I would not have wanted to go through what blacks went through in the 100 years following the war.
Oh, I guess you mean their ability to own land, property, and even rent property as historical fact shows in Charleston. Or do you mean such as further South where blacks owned land, plantations, and slaves to work for them? Or perhaps you're talking about the freedmen skilled workers in VA?
and given that their welcome up North wasn't very warm either
Well I'll give you that!!
On that I can fully agree with you. But the problems they faced were not centered, nor completely the fault, of the Southern policies in the decades following the war. Unless you're suggesting there were no race riots, protests, or problems with integration outside of the South
Oregon had this provision in it's Constitution:
"No free Negro, or mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of adoption of this constitution, shall ever come, reside, or be within this state, or hold any real estate, or make any contract, or maintain any suit therein; and the legislative assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such free negroes who shall bring them into the state, or employ or harbor them therein.In 1814 the Illinois legislature authorized the use of slaves in the salt mine. Free blacks migrating to Illinois after 1829 had to post a $1000 bond to prevent their being a "charge to the county", and Illinois in 1848 changed it's Constitution to prohibit the entrance of blacks. The "Black Law" of 1853 provided for the arrest of blacks staying more than 10 days in the state, along with a $50 fine, and their sale into indentured service (slavery) if they did not pay the fine. The law also prohibited the intermarriage of whites and blacks. Illinois has a database of slave records at "Illinois State Archives: Servitude and Emancipation Records"
The 1862 Revised Code of Indiana outlawed immigration of negroes and mulattos into the state, prevented blacks from entering contractual obligations, fined anyone employing a black $500, forbade interracial marriage, and prevented blacks from testifying in court against whites.
It wasn't just a southern thing.
ROTF - please don't confuse anyone with facts!
Well, I guess out of fairness we gotta give Richard credit for his "e-textbook" on the Declaration foundation site. For only $15 you can download your own copy today, or, even better, for twice that ammount they'll run a copy off the printer, drive down to the copy shop, and spiral bind it for you! Evidently self publishing Lincoln-worship rants on the Declaration site for free wasn't bringing in any income.
But not to worry, they've got something to compete with DiLorenzo's book now, courtesy of the Hewlitt-Packard printing press and the Kinkos Bindary.
Silly Bear. Robert E. Lee has been presented as the "end all be all to the holy cause" of the South. Take Lee as some kind of spotless hero, and you can't attack Lincoln for having agreed with him at some point about colonization.
And this "Lincoln: Saint or Demon" thinking is shallow and stale. Lincoln clearly did care about slavery -- in large part because he cared about freedom, but also because he wasn't deaf to the injustice done to the slaves. He wasn't a 21st century egalitarian or welfare state coddler, but he was fully aware of the evil of slavery.
Nor is it the case that Lincoln was a "big government thug." He supported protective tariffs, federal currency, and public support for railroad construction. So did many Americans of his generation and the next. That's hardly a recipe for tyranny or leviathan. If you look at things honestly, you are probably in favor of more big government, whether at the state or federal level than Lincoln was. Most Americans today certainly are. When it came down to it, the Confederate government was as well.
Nor is conservative respect for Lincoln some "exception." We also respect Washington, though he advocated the replacement of the loose Articles of Confederation with the Constitution, which increased the powers of the federal government. Joe Sobran and others have expressed a preference for the Articles of Confederation over the Constitution, but it's not clear that retaining the Articles would really have made us freer, happier or more secure. Indeed, it's also doubtful that the success of the Confederacy would have left most of us freer than we are now, though mythology makes many think so.
I would have to disagree. Ideas have consequences that are often unseen or transparent in their simplest of forms. As a perfect example, one need only look at the horrific conclusions of David Hume to see the problems of his seemingly benign predecessor John Locke, who is often very appealing to conservatives on first glimpse.
Years after the fact, that which is built upon earlier precedents can emerge as a beast of untold size and horror. In those respects, Lincoln's actions were a recipe for what we have today.
If we can design taxes for the purpose of giving unfair advantages to a certain few at the expense of the rest, what is to stop us from simply allocating policy to advantage acertain few? If we can appropriate interventionary funding to the advantage of a certain economic entity over its competitors, what is to stop wider scale economic management and intervention by the government later? It may sound like a slippery slope because it is, but more so the policies such as those favored by The Lincoln allowed a foot in the door, which was incrementally pried open over the century that followed.
Your assessment is absolutely correct. It is no longer about Abe Lincoln the man and what he did or did not do. It is about The Lincoln, a diefied concept of political idolatry for those who flock around him.
Some defenders of The Lincoln deny this situation's existence, and individually that is entirely possible. But evidence exists that it is there, the strongest piece being the radical inability of certain idolaters to concede any form of human or political flaw whatsoever in their item of worship, The Lincoln.
Some who practice this idolatry adamantly deny it in words, but not in their actions. Take Walt for example. Just look at the extreme efforts he exerts to deny or excuse even the simplest of flaws on the part of The Lincoln, some of them so extreme that even his associates back away. He simply cannot concede the constitutional error of suspending habeas corpus, or that of ignoring a federal court decision denying him the suspension privilege he exerted. Nor can he concede that any wrong of any fashion was committed against innocent southerners by yankee armies. Instead he denies the rapes and murders ever happened by pushing a history that leaves them out, and when presented with indisputable evidence to the contrary, he ignores it or belittles and downplays it because he cannot fathom the alternative - having to admit that The Lincoln and his general Sherman were thoroughly flawed and sinful human beings capable of perpetrating a wrong.
Walt is the extreme case, but this passage from the kinkos pamphlet by Ferrier shows the same tendencies. The human person of Abraham Lincoln indisputably subscribed to and publicly espoused racist beliefs. Any individual who recognizes that Abe Lincoln was a flawed and worldly human being has no problem recognizing this, accepting it as so, and moving on. The Lincoln's idolaters cannot do that though as, again, it would require they concede a flaw which they simply cannot do, be it large or ever so slight. Instead they perpetrate the fraud of arguing at length that when The Lincoln made racist statements, he was really not making racist statements or at least not believing them. In doing so they rely upon lines of rationalization so extreme and so intense that they preserve The Lincoln's infallability in their own minds. The rest of us see it for what it is - that linguistic process that Lincoln himself once described as reaching a horse chestnut out of a chestnut horse.
Call it claremonster worship under the Abratollah Jaffa, the cult of Harry, whatever it may be - the idolatrous worship of a false diety known as The Lincoln exists among certain members of conservative circles and, in its presence, detracts from the greater good to be gained out of conservatism by attempting to reorient us around what is at its core a falsehood, an idolatrous lie.
Never said it was. But it was more common in the south. Every southern state had laws against blacks emigrating into the state. Not a single southern state allowed blacks to vote. Almost every southern state prevented blacks from practicing some trade or another. Almost every southern state had clauses in their constitution that prevented laws that would free slaves. As hard as it was up North, it was as hard or harder down south.
What is slavery, but a way of "giving unfair advantages to a certain few at the expense of" others -- and a way a good deal more savage than any protective tariff could be. That "foot" was already in the "door," and Lincoln's generation did much to get it out. To extract the profits of uncompensated labor and to use the resources of others to protect that compelled labor source dwarfs anything the Republican party ever did.
Every system of law, government, ownership, reward, or taxation will benefit some groups more than others. We are all on a "slippery slope" to unfair favor or tyranny or chaos and always have been. It was certainly true that the suppressed classes of the Old Republic saw unfair favor and tyranny exercised over their own lives. And it has been true since. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. But tariffs and trade duties are a question for political debate and discussion. When all those concerned are given a say in determining tariff levels and they exercise their voice effectively, tariffs are not in themselves acts of tyranny, and it's foolish to think them such.
On balance, though, Lincoln's influence brought greater liberty. Whether Lincoln's tariff policies were for the best is open to debate, but if you ignore or discount the connection felt at the time -- using tariffs to promote a free labor, industrial economy rather than an agrarian, slave, neo-colonial economy -- you don't do justice to Lincoln's generation and the alternatives they faced. Lincoln's policies may not have been the best choice, but Calhoun's marriage of free trade, slavery, and minority rule certainly deserved -- and deserves -- repudiation and condemnation.
And today, those who have expressed concern about globalization and the developing "New World Order" would perhaps agree that free trade does not necessarily bring freedom, nor protectionism inevitably result in tyranny.
You tell me if that is your interest. But my question to you was not about slavery but the implications of the government action practiced by The Lincoln that you listed. Therefore as far as I am concerned, your attempt to throw the slavery red herring into the particulars of this discussion, not to mention your tu quoque equivocation by way of this issue, is little more than a diversionary tactic to assist you in avoiding the response I made to your earlier comment.
Now, returning to the discussion, you made the statement that certain aspects of The Lincoln's politics were not a recipe for big government tyranny. I challenged that assertion of yours and provided my reasons, which you then avoided. Do you care to address them now, and if so, please state your response.
Is that why he invaded the South?
Please. Do the defenders of the South constantly have to be referred to--even indirectly--as terrorists?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
