Lincoln and Secession

Xenophobe3691 · Post by **Xenophobe3691** » 2004-01-13 01:39pm

Iceberg wrote:The South seceded because they had backed themselves rhetorically into a corner where to not do so would have unmanned them politically in all future conflicts with the North. They threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected - blackmailing a presidential election so they could get a pro-slavery Democrat - and to not do so would have badly wounded them politically.

Do not ascribe honorable motives to the Confederate secession; it had none.

There's also the horrible tariffs on imported industrial goods that hurt the South economically. One of the Republicans' first moves was to be another tariff, one that would hurt the South even more. South Carolina had already threatened secession before, they just succeeded this time...

Nathan F · Post by **Nathan F** » 2004-01-13 01:48pm

Iceberg wrote:The South seceded because they had backed themselves rhetorically into a corner where to not do so would have unmanned them politically in all future conflicts with the North. They threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected - blackmailing a presidential election so they could get a pro-slavery Democrat - and to not do so would have badly wounded them politically.

Do not ascribe honorable motives to the Confederate secession; it had none.

As Xenophobe said, secession was discussed before slavery became the topic it was. And if you'll remember correctly, the North was just as guilty of propogating slavery as the south, seeing as how they used as much if not more slave-produced goods than the south did.

The north has no place for a holier-than-thou position in the civil war.

Rogue 9 · Post by **Rogue 9** » 2004-01-13 02:30pm

The Dictator Lincoln invaded the South without the consent of Congress, as called for in the Constitution; declared martial law; blockaded Southern ports without a declaration of war, as required by the Constitution; illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus

Lincoln did not recognize the South as an independent nation. Declaring war would require recognizing them as such, and would give legitimacy to the Confederacy. The President has authority to put down rebellions; its not a war against a foreign power and so requires no declaration. Also, the writ of habeus corpus may be suspended in times of rebellion, which the Civil War most certainly was.

I do not claim that Lincoln was a saint. He got to the ends, but his means were sometimes wrong. However:

all of these dictatorial acts were bad enough, but their real, long-term effect was to "lay the groundwork" for such unprecedented acts of coercion as military conscription and income taxation.

Ooooo, income tax! We're in trouble now! You prefer flat taxes? You can name a single, fixed sum that would not crush lower-income families and at the same time both make the government's operation possible and matter one whit to, say, Bill Gates? But that's a separate topic. Back to Lincoln.

He was certainly not a saint, but he did what he had to do. The reason the Emancipation Proclamation exempted areas under federal control was the positions of Kentucky and Maryland, both slave states that did not secede. If their slaves had all been yanked out from under them, they likely would have seceded right there in the middle of the war. This would be especially bad in the case of Maryland, because that would leave Washington sitting right smack in the middle of Confederate territory. See why now?

Iceberg · Post by **Iceberg** » 2004-01-13 03:23pm

jegs2 wrote:
Iceberg wrote:If you can't "waste your time" to back up your arguments, your arguments are worthless. Thank you, please pull ahead.
Since you seem to be thoroghly indoctrinated to envision Lincoln as a holy saint,

Since you seem to be thoroughly indoctrinated to be a babbling fool, you ascribe false motivations to me. As usual. Lincoln need not be a saint (and many of the Saints had flawed character anyway, need I remind you of the three denials of St. Peter?); he need only be better than the alternative. And the alternative to Lincoln was a weak figurehead to Southern interests who would have hurt the modern industrial and agricultural economy of the North.

I'll humor you once, though you will doubtless reject anything I would post that would challenge your views of Lincoln's ability to walk on water (thus my assertion that it be a waste of my time):

Can you sound like any more of a sectional partisan idiot? If you try really, REALLY hard, maybe? Maybe start calling me a carpet-bagging Yankee?

From this article:

Right. Like an anarcho-libertarian website - run by a guy from Alabama at that - is going to be objective OR fair about a president who crushed a rebellion. Typically sites run under these premises like to fantasize about a la-la neverland where a disappearance of government regulations will bring about utopia (coincidentally, guess what immediately precedes the communist utopia in Karl Marx's drug-dreams).

I'll deal with the rest later.

jegs2 · Post by **jegs2** » 2004-01-13 04:17pm

Iceberg wrote:Since you seem to be thoroughly indoctrinated to be a babbling fool...

Can you sound like any more of a sectional partisan idiot?

Thank you for the Ad hominem attack. You have lost all credibility with me, until you reply with an apology. I'll not trade childish name-calling with you or anyone else, so you are dismissed.

Iceberg · Post by **Iceberg** » 2004-01-13 04:25pm

A little late to take the high-and-mighty, Jay.

[quote=jegs2]Since you seem to be thoroghly indoctrinated to envision Lincoln as a holy saint, I'll humor you once,[/quote]
Hmm, hypocrisy much, anybody? I'd say you owe the first apology.

Nathan F · Post by **Nathan F** » 2004-01-13 04:25pm

Iceberg wrote:
From this article:
Right. Like an anarcho-libertarian website - run by a guy from Alabama at that - is going to be objective OR fair about a president who crushed a rebellion. Typically sites run under these premises like to fantasize about a la-la neverland where a disappearance of government regulations will bring about utopia (coincidentally, guess what immediately precedes the communist utopia in Karl Marx's drug-dreams).

I'll deal with the rest later.

[/quote]

Show that what was said was actually wrong, then get back to us, instead of tossing ad hominems like they're going out of style.

Guardsman Bass · Post by **Guardsman Bass** » 2004-01-13 04:30pm

You have lost all credibility with me, until you reply with an apology. I'll not trade childish name-calling with you or anyone else, so you are dismissed.

Man, I'm sure Iceberg is really scared now.

it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. The Confederates went into the battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision of the rest of the country."

What bullshit; they went into battle to protect their right to govern others(aka the black slaves) for their own economic reasons(aka that of the planter class).

Lincoln put an end to that idea by having his armies slaughter 300,000 of them, including one out of every four white males between 20 and 40

Look how this nicely excludes the fact that more than half of the 600000+ people killed in the Civil War were Northern troops, instead choosing to portray it as if Lincoln sent the troops and killed the poor,defenseless southernors(who were anything but that- the reason the south managed to survive so long in spite of a weak confederate currency and central govt. was the wealth they had accumulated from 20 years of mega-economic success from cotton sales).

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2004-01-13 04:30pm

In any case, if not for Lincoln the South may very well have become an stomping ground for imperial Europe. I could very well be singing Le Marseilles if not for him... *shivers*

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2004-01-13 04:33pm

Lincoln put an end to that idea by having his armies slaughter 300,000 of them, including one out of every four white males between 20 and 40

Except, of course, for the 100,000 white Southerners who were disgusted with the course of action their leaders had taken and served in the Union Army.

jegs2 · Post by **jegs2** » 2004-01-13 04:39pm

Joe wrote:In any case, if not for Lincoln the South may very well have become an stomping ground for imperial Europe. I could very well be singing Le Marseilles if not for him... *shivers*

Read what Stravo wrote. It is not the outcome of the war that is the issue. It was the conduct of Lincoln during that timeframe in regards to the US Constitution and laws that were in place at that time, the whole premise of the debate being that he was some sort of human rights "hero".

Andrew J. · Post by **Andrew J.** » 2004-01-13 05:33pm

Lincoln did a lot for human rights, and he hurt the civil rights of the North for a time to do so, but it did no permanent damage, and he did it to preserve his country and defeat the South, which had illegally seceded and seeked to preserve a horrible system of human rights abuses.

And let's see about that article:

More than 130 years of government propaganda has hidden this fact from the American people by creating a Mythical Lincoln that never existed. Take, for instance, the fact that everyone supposedly knows – that Lincoln was an abolitionist. This would be a surprise to the preeminent Lincoln scholar, Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer David Donald, who in his 1961 book, Lincoln Reconsidered, wrote that "Lincoln was not an abolitionist." And he wasn’t. He was glad to accept on behalf of the Republican Party any votes from abolitionists, but real abolitionists despised him. William Lloyd Garrison, the most prominent of all abolitionists, concluded that Lincoln "had not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins."

Lincoln did not believe that the Constitution gave the federal government to abolish slavery in any state, although in private he complained about how hyprocritical the nation was for beiing founded on "the self-evident truth-all men are created equal" and then turning around and calling that self-evident truth a lie. He didn't support federal abolition because he was in favor of states' rights! I wonder how many anti-Lincolnists realize this.

As H.L. Mencken said of the Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln absurdly claimed that Northern soldiers were fighting for the cause of self determination ("that government of the people . . . should not perish . . .": "It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. The Confederates went into the battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision of the rest of the country."

States do not have the right to secede from the United States of America. That has been established by the Supremem Court. The Southern governments and armies consisted of rebels and traitors. And speaking of self-determination, did the black people of the South have any voice in how they were governed? Didn't think so.
The Dictator Lincoln invaded the South without the consent of Congress, as called for in the Constitution; declared martial law; blockaded Southern ports without a declaration of war, as required by the Constitution; illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus; imprisoned without trial thousands of Northern anti-war protesters, including hundreds of newspaper editors and owners; censored all newspaper and telegraph communication; nationalized the railroads; created three new states without the consent of the citizens of those states in order to artificially inflate the Republican Party’s electoral vote; ordered Federal troops to interfere with Northern elections to assure Republican Party victories; deported Ohio Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham for opposing his domestic policies (especially protectionist tariffs and income taxation) on the floor of the House of Representatives; confiscated private property, including firearms, in violation of the Second Amendment; and effectively gutted the Tenth and Ninth Amendments as well.

Legally speaking, it was a revolt, not a war, since the USA did not recognize the CSA as a nation, and the president could authorize the military to do what he wanted under his title of Commander-in-Chief. Censoring and nationalizing are things governments do in times of crisis. I haven't heard anything about deporting Congressemen or fixing elections, so I'll need more sources for those, and under what circumstances was this property confiscated? Were they criminals, anarchists, rioters, or Southern fith-columnists?

As Dean Sprague correctly pointed out in Freedom Under Lincoln, all of these dictatorial acts were bad enough, but their real, long-term effect was to "lay the groundwork" for such unprecedented acts of coercion as military conscription and income taxation.

The fuck? First of all, conscription is hardly "unprecedented." Plenty of other countries did it then, before then, and still do it now. Perfectly civilized ones, like Sweden. And income tax? You've gotta be kidding me. jegs, why are you using this whacko libertarian' s writing? There's a lot to criticize Lincoln about, but using the ramblings of this idiot has hurt your credibility in my eyes.

Iceberg · Post by **Iceberg** » 2004-01-13 05:39pm

The problem with that article is that its writer acts like a prosecuting attorney, showering the reader with reams and reams of information and quotes and hoping that the reader takes his word for it so he'll just STFU. A good chunk of his claims are rendered invalid because the United States of America never recognized the Confederate States of America, but a Southern rebellion instead (the Confederacy was also never formally recognized by any foreign state). The nonrecognition of the Confederacy meant that the US government had wide latitude in suppressing the rebellion.

Bob McDob · Post by **Bob McDob** » 2004-01-13 08:33pm

Rogue 9 wrote:
The Dictator Lincoln invaded the South without the consent of Congress, as called for in the Constitution; declared martial law; blockaded Southern ports without a declaration of war, as required by the Constitution; illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus
Lincoln did not recognize the South as an independent nation. Declaring war would require recognizing them as such, and would give legitimacy to the Confederacy. The President has authority to put down rebellions; its not a war against a foreign power and so requires no declaration. Also, the writ of habeus corpus may be suspended in times of rebellion, which the Civil War most certainly was.

Be that as it may, the US did ascribe limited belligerent status to the Confederates, in the sense that it took prisoners of war (instead of simply trying them for treason, as some Northerners argued) and, IIRC, performed POW exchanges, and blockaded Southern ports (generally an act of war against another country) instead of simply declaring them closed.

That last part sounds laughable, but Lincoln did free the southern slaves without any way to enforce that until the war ended, so he could conceivebly have "forcibly closed" ports instead of using the language of international warfare.

jegs2 · Post by **jegs2** » 2004-01-13 11:37pm

Andrew J. wrote:First of all, conscription is hardly "unprecedented." Plenty of other countries did it then, before then, and still do it now. Perfectly civilized ones, like Sweden. And income tax? You've gotta be kidding me. jegs, why are you using this whacko libertarian' s writing? There's a lot to criticize Lincoln about, but using the ramblings of this idiot has hurt your credibility in my eyes.

The last paragraph is a stretch, but then not all of those points are valid. We're looking more at those laws in place at the time that Lincoln violated. Hindsight is 20/20, and Lincoln's gambles and violations of the law led to the greater good of abolishing slavery and reclaiming the South through violence. It can be easily argued that the only reason he is regarded as a hero is that he won. Had he somehow lost or was beaten in a follow-on election (during the States War), then he very well may have been impeached. His assassination only served to increase that "hero aura" as assassinations to to most US presidents...

Illuminatus Primus · Post by **Illuminatus Primus** » 2004-01-13 11:52pm

jegs2 wrote:
Joe wrote:In any case, if not for Lincoln the South may very well have become an stomping ground for imperial Europe. I could very well be singing Le Marseilles if not for him... *shivers*
Read what Stravo wrote. It is not the outcome of the war that is the issue. It was the conduct of Lincoln during that timeframe in regards to the US Constitution and laws that were in place at that time, the whole premise of the debate being that he was some sort of human rights "hero".

Human rights are not civil rights, Jegs.

Iceberg · Post by **Iceberg** » 2004-01-14 12:08am

jegs2 wrote:His assassination only served to increase that "hero aura" as assassinations to to most US presidents...

Four U.S. Presidents have been assassinated: Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy. Of the four, only the first, Lincoln, and the last, Kennedy, are seen as heroes.

Bob McDob · Post by **Bob McDob** » 2004-01-14 12:30am

It's worth noting that Garfield's popularity shot up dramatically after he was shot, though.

Andrew J. · Post by **Andrew J.** » 2004-01-14 04:08pm

jegs2 wrote:
Andrew J. wrote:First of all, conscription is hardly "unprecedented." Plenty of other countries did it then, before then, and still do it now. Perfectly civilized ones, like Sweden. And income tax? You've gotta be kidding me. jegs, why are you using this whacko libertarian' s writing? There's a lot to criticize Lincoln about, but using the ramblings of this idiot has hurt your credibility in my eyes.
The last paragraph is a stretch, but then not all of those points are valid. We're looking more at those laws in place at the time that Lincoln violated. Hindsight is 20/20, and Lincoln's gambles and violations of the law led to the greater good of abolishing slavery and reclaiming the South through violence. It can be easily argued that the only reason he is regarded as a hero is that he won.

Look at it another way: Lincoln's bold actions and willingness to bend the law a little in order to accomplish what he thought was a just goal are what make him a hero and what helped win the Civil War.

Nathan F · Post by **Nathan F** » 2004-01-14 04:30pm

Andrew J. wrote:
jegs2 wrote:
Andrew J. wrote:First of all, conscription is hardly "unprecedented." Plenty of other countries did it then, before then, and still do it now. Perfectly civilized ones, like Sweden. And income tax? You've gotta be kidding me. jegs, why are you using this whacko libertarian' s writing? There's a lot to criticize Lincoln about, but using the ramblings of this idiot has hurt your credibility in my eyes.
The last paragraph is a stretch, but then not all of those points are valid. We're looking more at those laws in place at the time that Lincoln violated. Hindsight is 20/20, and Lincoln's gambles and violations of the law led to the greater good of abolishing slavery and reclaiming the South through violence. It can be easily argued that the only reason he is regarded as a hero is that he won.
Look at it another way: Lincoln's bold actions and willingness to bend the law a little in order to accomplish what he thought was a just goal are what make him a hero and what helped win the Civil War.

Removing Habeus Corpus is 'bending the law a little'?

Another thing we must think of in this debate is the intent of the framers of the Constitution. Would they hae wanted individual states to be bound to a tyrranical central government, or would they want them to be able to break away if they saw it fit? I do think that considering that they had just broken away from their central government, they would want the states to be able to break away. Now, I'm not saying that they would have been better off breaking away, or staying broken away, or if the central government was tyrannical, but were the states within their rights to break away if they saw it fit? I say yes, they were.

HemlockGrey · Post by **HemlockGrey** » 2004-01-14 04:45pm

Did Lincoln only suspend habeus corpus in the rebelling territories?

Nathan F · Post by **Nathan F** » 2004-01-14 04:48pm

HemlockGrey wrote:Did Lincoln only suspend habeus corpus in the rebelling territories?

How could he suspend the rights in another country? It would have been about as effective as him telling Canada the same thing.

Iceberg · Post by **Iceberg** » 2004-01-14 04:59pm

The US government never recognized the Confederacy. The "independence" of the Confederacy was wholly dependent on its ability to defend that independence with force of arms and it failed to do so.

EmperorSolo51 · Post by **EmperorSolo51** » 2004-01-14 05:49pm

HemlockGrey wrote:Did Lincoln only suspend habeus corpus in the rebelling territories?

No. He also suspended it in the US. He had anti-war newspaper editors, reporters, and columnists thrown in jail without being notified that they were charged for a crime.

Illuminatus Primus · Post by **Illuminatus Primus** » 2004-01-14 06:43pm

Nathan F wrote:Removing Habeus Corpus is 'bending the law a little'?

The Confederacy was a clear and present danger to the preservation of the Union.

Nathan F wrote:Another thing we must think of in this debate is the intent of the framers of the Constitution. Would they hae wanted individual states to be bound to a tyrranical central government, or would they want them to be able to break away if they saw it fit? I do think that considering that they had just broken away from their central government, they would want the states to be able to break away.

Absurd; the Framers' intent was to counteract the absurd power and unanimious requirements under the Articles. The Constitution and the Federal Government were to be free of any naked coercement and control by any particular state or sect of states.

All of this is irrelevent. The seceding States did not have the legal right to do so, and your opinion doesn't change that.

Nathan F wrote:Now, I'm not saying that they would have been better off breaking away, or staying broken away, or if the central government was tyrannical, but were the states within their rights to break away if they saw it fit? I say yes, they were.

Tell that to experts on Constitutional law and to SCOTUS.