Posted on 04/16/2003 5:44:44 AM PDT by Lady Eileen
Washington, DC-area Freepers interested in Lincoln and/or the War Between the States should take note of a seminar held later today on the Fairfax campus of George Mason University:
The conventional wisdom in America is that Abraham Lincoln was a great emancipator who preserved American liberties. In recent years, new research has portrayed a less-flattering Lincoln that often behaved as a self-seeking politician who catered to special interest groups. So which is the real Lincoln?
On Wednesday, April 16, Thomas DiLorenzo, a former George Mason University professor of Economics, will host a seminar on that very topic. It will highlight his controversial but influential new book, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. In the Real Lincoln, DiLorenzo exposes the conventional wisdom of Lincoln as based on fallacies and myths propagated by our political leaders and public education system.
The seminar, which will be held in Rooms 3&4 of the GMU Student Union II, will start at 5:00 PM. Copies of the book will be available for sale during a brief autograph session after the seminar.
Sorry!
I was in the midst of posting a thread today and almost missed your reply.
As evidenced on this thread, Wlat and his minions seem to be still tinkering with their super-secret "Cut and Paste" machine! :)
I will take the History Channel over Wlat & his ilk any day.
FRegards-
CD
You must have been taught that in the first grade, last year.
And under British law, the colonies as separate and sovereign states did have a right to exist?!? What history book have you been reading from? If they had a legal right to exist, perhaps you could inform us all as to what that 6+ year battle was all about? The Southern states did the exact same thing that all of the states did a scant 80 years earlier. Secede from a union that they no longer wished to be a part of. The reason does not matter. For you to state that the South had no right to secede, denies the very right of the colonies to secede from the British Empire
Not really. The calls for "reparations" for descendants of slaves is a modern political cause. By contrast, "revelations" about Lincoln's poor character and political abuses have been written of and documented since the war ended. Check out Lysander Spooner's book "No Treason" from 1870. Spooner, one of foremost abolitionists in the country prior to the war, denounced the war itself and those who waged it as tyrants for their destruction of self-government.
but what was the most prominent end result of the US civil war? The end of Slavery - right?
No. That was the most immediately visible political change from the war, but the most prominent result, which still effects us to this day, was the war's implications for the federal relationship and construct of government in the United States. The war altered the concept of federalism, and with it our entire government's evolution.
To claim that such an event has occurred is a gross distortion of the facts in itself. The complaints you mention have been alleged almost entirely from persons that are closely affiliated with a single source, the Claremont Institute. After having read through each of their attacks on this book, I may only conclude that they are all heavy on rhetoric but short on substance. The most damning complaint they offer, if you can even call it that, refers to a single mistaken quote which has since been corrected. Beyond that, they have obsessed over and over and over again on a total of about 2 typos and a disputed interpretation of another historian's words. The sum of it all ammounts to about 5 complaints, some of them moot and others very shaky at best, from the same source of complainers. The truly amusing thing is that they've devoted literally dozens of "articles" reiterating these same 5 complaints and patting each other on the back as if they have somehow discredited a 200 page book when in fact they have yet to even address any of its main arguments.
That is a gross oversimplification of the issue with ahistorical conclusions. In fact, there were plans made at various times throughout the war to appoint such a judiciary, including some supported by the administration. The states rights faction in the CSA Senate blocked it though, not to give Davis unchecked power but rather because they feared that a judiciary appointed by him would be used to infringe upon the authority of the states themselves. In short, they feared judicial activism that would transfer power from the states to Richmond, so the move was actually to RESTRAIN the power of the national government!
Alexander Hamilton said "to coerce the states is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised."
Your last nine words are superfluous.
I'm not so convinced that it was illegal, although I am surely not enough of a constitutional scholar to insist that I am right.
IMO, the War Between the States changed the entire complexion of the U.S.A., sending us on the road to a system of much greater federal authority. Ironically, this is what the South was trying to escape; it could be that if the Southern States hadn't seceded, that the State power they cherished would be relatively greater today, as it was earlier.
However, I am unconditionally glad that the Union and our great country were preserved. And I am also proud to be from the great state of Virginia.
No it didn't. In fact, the properly elected and seated members of that government were prosecuted and penalized repeatedly and their authority overrun by military coercion with the sanction of Lincoln. Lincoln unilaterally and unconstitutionally suspended habeas corpus almost immediately after the war broke out and used it to silence both his critics and those who acted to impede his waging of war. Properly elected members of the Maryland legislature were imprisoned and others were sent fleeing from Annapolis under threat of having the same done to them.
One of the worst cases happened in Missouri, which, at the opening of the war, had decided to remain in the union and declared its neutrality in the conflict like Kentucky. The Missouri government called out its state militia at the beginning of the war and stationed them in St. Louis with the task of keeping the arsenals from being taken for use in warfare on their soil. Lincoln's army crossed into the state, violated its neutrality, captured the militia, and marched them through St. Louis as prisoners. When civilians came out to the streets in protest, the army opened fire on them killing several. This incited the Missouri legislature, which had previously voted NOT to secede, to organize troops in opposition to Lincoln's violation of their neutrality. The feds responded by marching the U.S. army on the state capital to oust the governor and state legislature!!! As the state militia organized to hold off the army, the legislature and governor fled the capital toward Arkansas. The state government convened in October in the town of Neosho, where the previously neutral legislature that had decided earlier not to secede drafted an emergency resolution and voted to join the confederacy. The secession ordinance explicitly stated their purpose of doing so - their lawfully elected government and lawfully convened state militia was literally being attacked and overrun by the federal army!
Similar abuses by Lincoln reached into the highest levels of the government. On the outset of the war, he had a U.S. Congressman from Maryland arrested and imprisoned. A few years later federal troops arrested and deported the leader of Lincoln's critics in Congress, former Rep. Clement Vallandigham of Ohio. In May of 1861 Lincoln even ignored a Federal Court ruling by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney overturning his order to suspend habeas corpus. In any other time, this would have been an impeachable offense. And that goes without mentioning that some evidence exists that Lincoln or others in his administration were even considering, at one time, arresting Taney himself over the ruling.
Now, if none of that is a disruption of the way our Government operates and operated, I do not know what is!
Also, no contingency of war prevented Jefferson Davis from appointing federal judges, etc.
Actually, one did indeed exist. It was called the Confederate Senate and it actively sought to halt judicial appointments out of fear that they would be used to assert national control over the state militias, which many governors wanted to control themselves.
Really? Cause this is what Jefferson said about the union:
"The future inhabitants of the Atlantic & Missipi States will be our sons. We leave them in distinct but bordering establishments. We think we see their happiness in their union, & we wish it. Events may prove it otherwise; and if they see their interest in separation, why should we take side with our Atlantic rather than our Missipi descendants? It is the elder and the younger son differing. God bless them both, & keep them in union, if it be for their good, but separate them, if it be better." - Thomas Jefferson, to John C. Breckinridge, August 12, 1803
That seems to be a bit wishful as a theological argument, don't you think? I do however think that there is, at minimum, great irony though that Lincoln died on the day that, more than any other, now symbolizes the belief that he adhered to with greater consistency than any other in his entire political career. That belief was in higher taxes.
Why should someone who dissaproves of Lincoln belong at DU? Marxists have always adored Lincoln and sung praises of Abe Lincoln. And that includes the one named Karl.
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