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.
Read it and weep.
"Sir: We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery. From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class." - Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln, January 28, 1865 (Collected Works of Karl Marx, Vol 20)
" It is not our part to call words of sorrow and horror, while the heart of two worlds heaves with emotion. Even the sycophants who, year after year, and day by day, stick to their Sisyphus work of morally assassinating Abraham Lincoln, and the great Republic he headed, stand now aghast at this universal outburst of popular feeling, and rival with each other to strew rhetorical flowers on his open grave. They have now at last found out that he was a man, neither to be browbeaten by adversity, nor intoxicated by success, inflexibly pressing on to his great goal, never compromising it by blind haste, slowly maturing his steps, never retracing them, carried away by no surge of popular favour, disheartened by no slackening of the popular pulse, tempering stern acts by the gleams of a kind heart, illuminating scenes dark with passion by the smile of humour, doing his titanic work as humbly and homely as Heaven-born rulers do little things with the grandiloquence of pomp and state; in one word, one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great, without ceasing to be good. Such, indeed, was the modesty of this great and good man, that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr." - Karl Marx to Andrew Johnson, May 13, 1865 (Collected Works of Karl Marx, Vol 20)
"The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world." - Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln, January 25, 1865 (Collected Works of Karl Marx, Vol 20)
That quote is a matter of hearsay with no corroboration that it ever occurred. It was reported to have been said after the fact by another who claimed to have been in Hitler's presence, quoting him.
Here is one thing that Hitler is indeed known to have said:
"[In America] it is impossible to speak of original sovereignty in regard to the majority of the states. Many of them were not included in the federal complex until long after it had been established. The states that make up the American Union are mostly in the nature of territories, more or less, formed for technical administrative purposes, their boundaries having in many cases been fixed in the mapping office. Originally these states did not and could not possess sovereign rights of their own. Because it was the Union that created most of the so-called states." - Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf volume II, 1926
Seems that Hitler's view of the union corresponds nicely with Lincoln's. Wonder why that is?
No, but to block judicial appointments from occurring was. Or do you not remember the events of only a few months ago when the Dems were in control of the current senate? Judicial benches all over the country sat vacant for over a year, and many are still vacant, because the senate blocked any effort to fill them. Now it was wrong of them to do so, and we were right to complain, but it cannot be denied that the act of doing so is a right of theirs under the Constitution.
Give me a break. People in the south have no monopoly on love for this country.
That may be so, but it is also true that the regions to the northeast and to the left of the south have disproportionately large numbers of America-haters when compared to the normal regions of the country.
So honor in the South means that a young man can sneak up behind an old man and beat him nearly to death with a cain?
Up here, young men don't beat up old men, and men fight face to face.
The quote you probably heard is the following, which is from one of his debates with Stephen Douglas:
"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." - Abraham Lincoln, 8/17/1858
According to historical codes of honor, honor with peers was sought in the situation that means of recourse was a duel. To drunkards, dolts, and other low lifes of society, means of recourse was a beating with a cane.
Senator Sumner = a low life of society, therefore the means of seeking recourse for honor with him was by beating him with a cane.
I don't think Tim Robbins wants to bomb New York or Susan Sarandon wants to make Islam our official religion, but people have charged that they give support and comfort to our enemies and make common cause with them. You yourself have made extensive use of "guilt by association" tactics in your posts, so you understand the idea. I don't argue that Spooner is "guilty by association," though, just that associations between Spooner and neo-confederatism do exist and shouldn't be ignored. Spooner should not be represented as a typical or important abolitionist without serious consideration of the anarchist views that differentiated him from other, and more important abolitionists.
Spooner defended the "right to secession" and attacked unionist doctrines and efforts to fight back. He may not have agreed with everything the Confederates wanted to do, and may not have been willing to defend them from rebels in their own camp, but he certainly did write an apologia for secession, and hence, to all practical purposes, for the Confederacy. To be sure, he was anti-slavery, but the neo-confederate argument is that the war was not about slavery and that one could be pro-Confederate and anti-slavery, so this hardly counts as an objection.
The publication of Spooner's writings in De Bow's was an early milestone in the development of neo-confederate ideology and argument, and the move away from slavery to other justifications for the rebellion. There certainly are real contradictions between Spooner's anarchist denial of state sovereignty and the secessionists advocacy of that doctrine, but neo-confederate theory is rife with such contradictions. Intellectual ammunition is valued more than consistent thought, and Spooner provided Confederate apologists with such ammunition, if they chose to use it.
Spooner had no problem sending his writing to a pro-secession journal and giving them permission to publish "No Treason" and they had no problem publishing what he sent in and asking him for permission to reprint the pamphlet (see the headnote to Part One. The reference to the court in Boston in the footnote to Part Two may be some sort of copyright notice. Someone sent the pamphlet to De Bow's and that someone may have been Spooner himself. De Bow's didn't dig it out of court documents).
Spooner and De Bow's may not have agreed with each other on all particulars but neither had any trouble about using the other. That an abolitionist was willing to send an article to what had been the most prominent pro-slavery journal and was still unrepentant about secession and White supremacy suggests that he was not a typical abolitionist. Hair splitting and invective may obscure this, but those who may be interested or concerned may judge for themselves.
Spooner's article is far more -- or less -- than a scholarly study of the meaning of treason. Unbiased observers may see that by reading the attack on "the North" at the beginning of the excerpt in De Bow's. Spooner's support for the "right to secession" was precisely what unregenerate Confederates wanted, as is the reference to United States citizenship as "political slavery" and the United States government as a "tyranny." The anarchist sentiments and doctrines that Spooner passionately expresses in "No Treason" differentiate it from a sober, scholarly study of what treason is. Heavy on rhetoric and abstract theory, "No Treason #1" is light on serious constitutional analysis. I also doubt legal scholars are usually so free with exclamation points. "No Treason #2" makes more mention of the Constitution, but it too is heavy on anarchist theories and light on documentation.
Spooner's ideas were present at the creation of the neo-Confederate apologia. As a precursor and foundation of the Rockwellite argument, Spooner can't be taken as an unbiased outside arbiter of the controversy.
What you think is clear, and I hope that's also true of what I think. It's up to those who are interested in this question to make up their own minds. Links to the relevant articles are here. It's important, though, to read other articles from DeBow's to get a clear view of just who and what Spooner was flirting with.
If you had read my post carefully, you would see that I readily admitted that Jaffa was a distinguished Lincoln scholar, but other historians who aren't closely identified with ideological camps haven't yet weighed in on Di Lorenzo's book. When they do it will be the end of DiLorenzo's book among thinking people, but because a craving to believe is at the root of his appeal, it probably won't affect his sales.
You left out the old men!
So you're telling me that Johnston and Hood only had women, children and slaves under their command? That Sherman sure did kick the crap out of them.
In other words, Butler didn't have enough balls to challenge the old man? He had to sneak up behind him and brain him with a cane.
Show me some stats on that. How different is Atlanta from San Francisco? How is Miami different than New York? How is some rural county in Alabama different in terms of duty, honor and love of country than a rural county in Pennsylvania or Ohio?
Don't go patting yourself on the back too damn much. If you hung out where I do every day and claimed being southern made you a better American, you would likely find yourself lying flat on your back. Matter of fact, stop by my Legion post and tell the guys there how much more patriotic the south is.
Even if in doing so they were ignoring a constitutional requirement for an entire branch of government? Like I said, it's a neat trick you accept. They trampled on the constitution by refusing to accept their constitutional requirement to staff a supreme court. All aided and abetted by Davis himself. After all, he was within his constitutional power to use a recess appointment. But why appoint something that you have no respect for and might just get in your way? Ya gotta love it.
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