Constitution of the Confederate States; March 11, 1861

[heavenlyboy34]

Ya, he was a regular Mahatma Gandhi.

+rep

 

[Tudo]

Equal rights for all, special rights for none.

And now the South is even more statist in foreign policy then the north.

 

[jay_dub]

This is the ignorance from the liberty movement that has to stop eventually. It was not Lincoln's war. Lincoln grew up in anarchy and he rejected it as a man. He was not a killer or tyrant. He was a man. He was basically drafted as president when slave masters wanted to expand slavery and abolitionists wanted to kill slave owners. It was not Lincoln's war.

Lincoln basically drafted???

Republican Convention of 1860

Confident that Seward would not have enough votes to lock up the nomination on the first ballot, Lincoln intended to get the second highest vote count on the first ballot and line up additional votes for the second ballot in order to show increasing strength. He hoped that this strategy--combined with the presence of an enthusiastic band of followers on the floor--would be sufficient to win the nomination on the third or subsequent ballot.

Lincoln’s men left no detail unattended in their pursuit of this strategy. They made certain that Seward’s New Yorkers were seated far from other critical delegations with whom they might collaborate. They printed hundreds of counterfeit tickets and distributed them to Lincoln supporters with instructions to show up early--in order to displace Seward’s supporters.

They also assigned two men with noted stentorian voices to lead the cheering. One of these men reportedly had a larynx powerful enough to allow his shout to be heard across Lake Michigan.

Finally, the third day arrived. One thousand Seward men marched behind a smartly uniformed brass band. They wound their way noisily through Chicago’s streets, playing the song “Oh, Isn’t He a Darling?” and finally arrived triumphantly in front of the Wigwam. To their horror, they found that they could not get in: the Lincoln men, admitted with their counterfeit tickets, had taken their seats.

http://www.greatamericanhistory.net/nomination.htm

 

[itshappening]

He was a boy who grew to be a man. Lincoln was a principled, honest, hard working man who freed the negro slaves in America. He never killed anyone his entire life. He was a man of circumstance.

Lincoln wanted to deport the slaves to Africa. He was writing to leaders around the world days before his death begging them to support this plan... and that's his own writings that scholars have discovered. Look it up.

He aint the saint you think he is.

 

[jay_dub]

He was a boy who grew to be a man. Lincoln was a principled, honest, hard working man who freed the negro slaves in America. He never killed anyone his entire life. He was a man of circumstance.

He may not have directly killed anyone, but the blood of a nation is on his hands. He manufactured the incident at Fort Sumter as he had no legal basis to prevent the South's secession. Here's a glimpse of how his actions were viewed by Northern newspapers.

"The affair at Fort Sumter, it seems to us, has been planned as a means by which the war feeling at the North should be intensified, and the administration thus receive popular support for its policy.... If the armament which lay outside the harbor, while the fort was being battered to pieces [the US ship The Harriet Lane, and seven other reinforcement ships], had been designed for the relief of Major Anderson, it certainly would have made a show of fulfilling its mission. But it seems plain to us that no such design was had. The administration, virtually, to use a homely illustration, stood at Sumter like a boy with a chip on his shoulder, daring his antagonist to knock it off. The Carolinians have knocked off the chip. War is inaugurated, and the design of the administration accomplished." ~ The Buffalo Daily Courier, April 16, 1861.

"We have no doubt, and all the circumstances prove, that it was a cunningly devised scheme, contrived with all due attention to scenic display and intended to arouse, and, if possible, exasperate the northern people against the South.... We venture to say a more gigantic conspiracy against the principles of human liberty and freedom has never been concocted. Who but a fiend could have thought of sacrificing the gallant Major Anderson and his little band in order to carry out a political game? Yet there he was compelled to stand for thirty-six hours amid a torrent of fire and shell, while the fleet sent to assist him, coolly looked at his flag of distress and moved not to his assistance! Why did they not? Perhaps the archives in Washington will yet tell the tale of this strange proceeding.... Pause then, and consider before you endorse these mad men who are now, under pretense of preserving the Union, doing the very thing that must forever divide it." ~ The New York Evening Day-Book, April 17, 1861.

"Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor." ~ Providence Daily Post, April 13 1861

"We are to have civil war, if at all, because Abraham Lincoln loves a [the Republican] party better than he loves his country.... [He] clings to his party creed, and allows the nation to drift into the whirlpool of destruction." ~ The Providence Daily Post, April 13 1861

"If this result follows – and follow civil war it must – the memory of ABRAHAM LINCOLN and his infatuated advisors will only be preserved with that of other destroyers to the scorned and execrated.... And if the historian who preserves the record of his fatal administration needs any motto descriptive of the president who destroyed the institutions which he swore to protect, it will probably be some such as this: Here is the record of one who feared more to have it said that he deserted his party than that he ruined the country, who had a greater solicitude for his consistency as a partisan than for his wisdom as a Statesman or his courage and virtue as a patriot, and who destroyed by his weakness the fairest experiment of man in self-government that the world ever witnessed." ~ The American Standard, New Jersey, April 12, 1861, the very day the South moved to reclaim Fort Sumter.

The grandson of Francis Scott Key, Francis Key Howard, the editor of the Baltimore Exchange, was arrested as well as others who wrote against Lincoln. While he was imprisoned at Fort McHenry, he wrote the following words. The date was September 13, 1861...... 47 years to the day!

"When I looked out in the morning, I could not help being struck by an odd and not pleasant coincidence. On that day, forty-seven years before, my grandfather, Mr. F. S. Key, the prisoner on a British ship, had witnessed the bombardment of Ft. McHenry. When on the following morning the hospital fleet drew off, defeated, he wrote the song so long popular throughout the country, the Star Spangled Banner. As I stood upon the very scene of that conflict, I could not but contrast my position with his, forty-seven years before. The flag which he had then so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place over the victims of as vulgar and brutal a despotism as modern times have witnessed."

When he was finally released on November 27, 1862 he wrote:

"We came out of prison just as we had gone in, holding the same just scorn and detestation [for] the despotism under which the country was prostrate, and with a stronger resolution that ever to oppose it by every means to which, as American freemen, we had the right to resort."

From......"Fourteen Months In the American Bastiles" by Francis Key Howard

Think it wasn't deliberate on Lincoln's part?

"You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumter, even if it should fail ; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result. "~Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to Gustavus Fox, May 1, 1861

Lincoln was intimately involved in not only the pretext for, but the prosecution of, a war that utilized the concept of total war, including on a civilian population. He had no objections to the abuses and war crimes of some of his officers.

Here's one notable instance.

In April, 1862 Union General John Basil Turchin unleashed his troops on Athens, Alabama. Turchin told his troops, "I shut mine eyes for two hours. I see nothing". What followed was a spree of looting, raping and pillaging. When news of this brutality reached General Don Carlos Buell in June, he launched an investigation and had Turchin relieved of his command on July 2. Charges stemmed from not only the brutal behavior but also from Turchin's having his wife accompany him in the field. Turchin was court-marshaled, found guilty and sentenced to dismissal from the Army in August, 1862.

President Lincoln set the order aside and promoted Turchin to Brigadier General, retroactive to July 17.

From ...Encyclopedia of the American Civil War P. 1984

 

[itshappening]

You know, I've heard this argument before. Nobody has ever responded to the question "Why would they have had to change their constitution and end slavery when slavery still exists"? Seriously? And nobody ever looks at the unique dynamic of regional slavery in the U.S. In other nations where slavery ended naturally, there was no concept of "slave state" and "free state".

Because attitudes in the South would have changed and slavery abolished over time. Maybe in 1900, maybe in 1920, I don't know, who knows but it would have happened. It happened everywhere else. Are you seriously telling me the CSA would have kept slavery going well into the 50's, the 60's, and possibly now? Maybe they would have transitioned to an apartheid system and even South Africa could only keep that going until the 1990's when it eventually collapsed after international boycotts and pressure to reform. Zimbabwe/Rhodesia kept white minority rule until the 1980's but was cut off from the UK and Mugabe took over.

The reality is slavery would have ended peacefully and without war natually. A war that had, lets not forget, terrible consequences, 500,000 dead and many more disabled. Nearly every American family was touched by the civil war (population was a lot lower then!) and in many cases devastated. A whole generation lost.

 

[Travlyr]

Lincoln wanted to deport the slaves to Africa. He was writing to leaders around the world days before his death begging them to support this plan... and that's his own writings that scholars have discovered. Look it up.

A lot of people supported colonization for African slaves. Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, Harriet Beecher Stowe, even William Lloyd Garrison did for a while. Several states funded the practice. "In 1850, Virginia set aside $30,000 annually for five years to aid and support emigration. In its Thirty-Fourth Annual Report, the society acclaimed the news as "a great Moral demonstration of the propriety and necessity of state action!" During the 1850s, the society also received several thousand dollars from the New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Maryland legislatures."

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Just as an aside (not to derail the thread), a bit about what RP said on this subject:

 

[Travlyr]

He may not have directly killed anyone, but the blood of a nation is on his hands. He manufactured the incident at Fort Sumter as he had no legal basis to prevent the South's secession.

The blood of the nation is not on Lincoln's hands. He did not want war and he made that very clear in all of his speeches prior to the Southern forces firing on Fort Sumter. Even the Confederate Secretary of War admitted to starting the war.

The Siege of Washington: The Untold Story of the Twelve Days That Shook the Union by John Lockwood & Charles Lockwood

"On April 12, 1861 only hours after Confederate guns opened fire on Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor, Confederate Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker appeared before a jubilant crowd in Montgomery, Alabama. "No man can tell when the war this day commenced will end," Walker thundered from the balcony of the Exchange Hotel, at the heart of the Confederate capital, "but I will prophesy that the flag which now floats the breeze here will float over the dome of the old capital at Washington before the first of May."

When Fort Sumter was captured, Varina Davis, the wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis sent invitations to her friends to attend a May 1 tea after Jefferson Davis had licked the North and was the new occupant of the White House.

 

[Travlyr]

He aint the saint you think he is.

Nobody is calling him a saint. He was a man who got some things right and some things wrong just like Jefferson, Washington, you and me.

 

[Travlyr]

Just as an aside (not to derail the thread), a bit about what RP said on this subject:

Unfortunately, Thomas J. DiLorenzo does not have any credibility regarding Abraham Lincoln. He outright lied in "The Real Lincoln." He starts out by claiming Lincoln had a 28 year political career when in fact, by checking the official records, Lincoln served five terms in the Illinois legislature and one term as U.S. Congressman for a total of 12 year political career before becoming president. Then DiLorenzo goes on and on and lies about a bunch of other stuff. He claims that Lincoln blocked the Democrats attempt at auditing the State Bank of Illinois, yet Lincoln is on record in 1835 as writing an amendment to audit the bank.

It is public record. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln1/1:67?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

 

[jmdrake]

Because attitudes in the South would have changed and slavery abolished over time. Maybe in 1900, maybe in 1920, I don't know, who knows but it would have happened. It happened everywhere else. Are you seriously telling me the CSA would have kept slavery going well into the 50's, the 60's, and possibly now?

Are you seriously telling me that someone who could do this to a boy in 1955 because he whistled at a white woman and the all white jury that let those monsters free would have any qualms about keeping someone as a slave?

Are you seriously telling me that the people who still illegally keep chattel slavery even in the 21st century wouldn't lobby to keep slavery legal in the CSA?

Maybe they would have transitioned to an apartheid system and even South Africa could only keep that going until the 1990's when it eventually collapsed after international boycotts and pressure to reform. Zimbabwe/Rhodesia kept white minority rule until the 1980's but was cut off from the UK and Mugabe took over.

Or maybe they would have kept slavery. They transitioned to an apartheid system when slavery was abolished through force. And international boycotts are just another form of pressure. Who knows, if the CSA had survived and somehow flourished (doubtful considering how behind the South was in industry before the civil war...which is largely why they lost the civil war) they might have become strong enough so that they could have supported South Africa through trade. Who knows?

The reality is slavery would have ended peacefully and without war natually.

That's not "reality". That's your fantasy and conjecture. I laid out a plan how slavery could have ended peacefully and without war. But it wouldn't have ended naturally. Even your "international boycott/pressure" idea isn't slavery ending "naturally".

 

[jmdrake]

Lincoln wanted to deport the slaves to Africa. He was writing to leaders around the world days before his death begging them to support this plan... and that's his own writings that scholars have discovered. Look it up.

Another convenient lie. Lincoln did want to provide the opportunity for slaves to leave that wanted to leave. But he never took any steps to deport freed slaves. And yes, I've done the research. The compensated emancipation plan that was enacted in Washington D.C. provided funds for those who wanted to emigrate to Africa, but it forced no one to leave.

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/dc_emancipation_act/

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The District of Columbia Emancipation Act

F. Dielman's sketch of Celebration of D.C. Abolition of Slavery. 1866On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia. Passage of this law came 8 1/2 months before President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. The act brought to a conclusion decades of agitation aimed at ending what antislavery advocates called "the national shame" of slavery in the nation's capital. It provided for immediate emancipation, compensation to former owners who were loyal to the Union of up to $300 for each freed slave, voluntary colonization of former slaves to locations outside the United States, and payments of up to $100 for each person choosing emigration. Over the next 9 months, the Board of Commissioners appointed to administer the act approved 930 petitions, completely or in part, from former owners for the freedom of 2,989 former slaves.

Although its combination of emancipation, compensation to owners, and colonization did not serve as a model for the future, the District of Columbia Emancipation Act was an early signal of slavery's death. In the District itself, African Americans greeted emancipation with great jubilation. For many years afterward, they celebrated Emancipation Day on April 16 with parades and festivals.

He aint the saint you think he is.

He wasn't the monster you pretend him to be either.

 

[itshappening]

it's a pretty safe bet slavery would have ended at _some point_. It did not need a war of conquest by Lincoln and his Union forces. They could have had a diplomatic solution and left the South to its own devices but the conquest was driven by spite and plunder, certainly not about freeing the oppressed slaves that he supported being oppressed and 'not touching' .

 

[itshappening]

Another convenient lie. Lincoln did want to provide the opportunity for slaves to leave that wanted to leave. But he never took any steps to deport freed slaves. And yes, I've done the research. The compensated emancipation plan that was enacted in Washington D.C. provided funds for those who wanted to emigrate to Africa, but it forced no one to leave.

There were letters from him days before his assassination to other leaders I believe asking them to support his idea of deporting them to an unknown state in Africa, maybe a new state. I think he was asking the British for help with that.

 

[jmdrake]

There were letters from him days before his assassination to other leaders I believe asking them to support his idea of deporting them to an unknown state in Africa, maybe a new state. I think he was asking the British for help with that.

The undisputed fact is that when Lincoln actually implemented compensated emancipation he did so with a voluntary immigration plan. I posted the evidence. You have not posted any evidence. You can either accept the facts as presented or continue to live in denial. I care not which option you choose. I also see that you have yet to comment on the actual plan I laid out how slavery could have ended without war. I find that odd. Maybe it disturbs your fantasy that slavery would have ended "naturally".

 

[jmdrake]

it's a pretty safe bet slavery would have ended at _some point_. It did not need a war of conquest by Lincoln and his Union forces. They could have had a diplomatic solution and left the South to its own devices but the conquest was driven by spite and plunder, certainly not about freeing the oppressed slaves that he supported being oppressed and 'not touching' .

It's 2012. It's almost 2013. Slavery still exists in the world. It's not a safe bet that slavery would have ended through "wishful thinking". Even Ron Paul tacitly admits this when he talks about "compensated emancipation". I have simply gone a step further than Dr. Paul and pointed out that Lincoln tried compensated emancipation and explained how compensated emancipation actually could have worked in the large if Lincoln had tried the approach of tying it to tariffs.

 

[Travlyr]

Lincoln basically drafted???

Republican Convention of 1860

Confident that Seward would not have enough votes to lock up the nomination on the first ballot, Lincoln intended to get the second highest vote count on the first ballot and line up additional votes for the second ballot in order to show increasing strength. He hoped that this strategy--combined with the presence of an enthusiastic band of followers on the floor--would be sufficient to win the nomination on the third or subsequent ballot.

Lincoln’s men left no detail unattended in their pursuit of this strategy. They made certain that Seward’s New Yorkers were seated far from other critical delegations with whom they might collaborate. They printed hundreds of counterfeit tickets and distributed them to Lincoln supporters with instructions to show up early--in order to displace Seward’s supporters.

They also assigned two men with noted stentorian voices to lead the cheering. One of these men reportedly had a larynx powerful enough to allow his shout to be heard across Lake Michigan.

Finally, the third day arrived. One thousand Seward men marched behind a smartly uniformed brass band. They wound their way noisily through Chicago’s streets, playing the song “Oh, Isn’t He a Darling?” and finally arrived triumphantly in front of the Wigwam. To their horror, they found that they could not get in: the Lincoln men, admitted with their counterfeit tickets, had taken their seats.

http://www.greatamericanhistory.net/nomination.htm

Lincoln wasn't even there. He was in Springfield during the Chicago 1860 nominating convention.

http://www.chicagohs.org/history/politics/1860.html

Lincoln supporters then traveled to Springfield, where the candidate had waited throughout the convention, to formally notify him of his nomination.

 

[itshappening]

It's 2012. It's almost 2013. Slavery still exists in the world. It's not a safe bet that slavery would have ended through "wishful thinking". Even Ron Paul tacitly admits this when he talks about "compensated emancipation". I have simply gone a step further than Dr. Paul and pointed out that Lincoln tried compensated emancipation and explained how compensated emancipation actually could have worked in the large if Lincoln had tried the approach of tying it to tariffs.

So why didn't he do it then? Could he not talk to Davis? No, the war was about conquest and plunder. It was about money as Dickens said, not slavery. He wanted to conquer the South and force them into his Union for economic reasons.

 

[TheTexan]

If you want to free the slaves, forcing 9 million people to join your Union so they can be your tax-slaves is the wrong way to do it.