Dishonest Abe Lincoln

[Fisherking]

Who still believes what you were taught in school about this man?

He was a corrupt politician, a racist, and his treason brought about a war that killed or maimed 1.5 million people and destroyed half the wealth of the country. But his political party was the dominant one in American politics for more than 40 years.

He was one of Hitler’s heroes and he used examples form America’s handling of the Indians in dealing with the Jewish Problem…

[Fisherking]

I sure hope not.

You want to hit on TR or WW?

[Fisherking]

LOL, typical reaction. It must be a southern plot to trash the memory of Father Abraham, Saint of Democracy.

Lincoln was much hated in his lifetime and that was in the north. He funded crony capitalists during the war. When he selected the eastern terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad it just happened to be in a town where he had extensive real-estate holdings. He bankrupt the state of Illinois with his internal improvements legislation, what today we would call corporate welfare.

His law career was as a railroad lobbyist. His intended version of the 13th amendment was to make slavery ever protected from the Federal Government. Only circumstances and political opportunism changed that. http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2013/02/...richard-albert


GH, you in particular would favor little of what the man stood for. Most of what you hear of him is pure propaganda. Why would you think the first Republican President would be any different from the rest?

[The Lurker Below]

Who still believes what you were taught in school about this man?

He was a corrupt politician, a racist, and his treason brought about a war that killed or maimed 1.5 million people and destroyed half the wealth of the country. But his political party was the dominant one in American politics for more than 40 years.

He was one of Hitler’s heroes and he used examples form America’s handling of the Indians in dealing with the Jewish Problem…

Lincoln the man prior to presidency would have been a hero to today's Republican Party. Born in a log cabin, mostly self taught, and a millionaire by age 40 via a successful corporate law practice.

Hmm. During the Minnesota uprising Lincoln pardoned nearly 60 of the 100 that were scheduled to hang. Was that the styling Hitler copied?

Don't forget the Catholics. They wanted him dead too.

[Fisherking]

He pardoned the Indians in the interest of international politics. He thought such a mass hanging would inflame the British and the French.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I have had mixed feelings about him for some time.

I do not think him any more of a racist than were many (most?) in his time. I do believe he came to view slavery as an evil that had to be ended -- and that this change of heart was not solely due to the abolitionists being a big bloc within the nascent Republican Party. It is a certainty that -- prior to the secession -- he favored slavery withering on the vine or being reduced by "buying them out." Liberia and other efforts suggest that while opposing slavery, he was not necessarily of a mind to create a truly blended society.

He was a very practical politician, on many levels, and he did indeed have an eye towards "P.R." that any modern pol would understand...and probably emulate. Did this mean he was a political whore with no convictions whatsoever? I do not think so. But he could be, and was, a very hard nosed political leader who used a soft style to make it more palatable. He certainly cut deals with the political machines, turned a blind eye to the first real military industrial complex, sanctioned the brutal suppression of the New York draft riots, and any number of other political moves....all in the name of accomplishing his paramount goal of preserving the union. To achieve this 'end,' he justified a number of less than palatable 'means.'


It is hard to say what Lincoln would have done without the secession. With secession a fact, he was cold-blooded enough to recognize that civil war must follow and that he could put some of the onus on the Confederacy by re-supplying Sumpter. Had their been no secession, but instead an effort for some new Great Compromise, we may have seen a very different leader emerge. Once committed to ending the secession and restoring the USA to the status of a single political entity, which Lincoln took as an absolute goal, most of the rest of his decisions all flowed from this single centerpoint.

My grief with him mostly centers on his trampling of the Constitution in the process of saving the Union. His actions regarding individual rights etc. make the Patriot Act look a bit tame. Moreover, by denying any mechanism whereby one of the constituent states could withdraw from the Union -- which is by the way never addressed in the Constitution as either permissible or forbidden, in is simply un-discussed -- Lincoln established the framework for federal ascendency over the constituent states without which the great federal government expansions under Roosevelt, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Johnson could never have occurred. In many ways, he ended the United States of America and replaced it with a singular.

[Fisherking]

My main objection is that we have deified the man as a martyr and he didn’t save the Union but fundamentally changed it.

His views on slavery are hard to pin down because they changed depending on who and where he was speaking. He wrote the Corwin Amendment and had Seward and Corwin introduce it in Congress, I understand. Later, he refused to play a part in the passage of the other 13th amendment even when urged to do so.

He was first and foremost a freesoiler. He never opposed the exclusionary laws of Illinois which required blacks to post a $1000 bond before being allowed into the state and strict laws regarding their assembly and activities. He also always favored colonization of blacks out of the country.

I am lead to understand that he was a very astute PR man who even Bill Clinton could have learned form. During his term in Congress he gave one address that certainly sounded as though he supported secession.
In a speech in 1848 on the Mexican War, Abraham Lincoln said, "...Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.“
Secession and nullification were remedies for the states published in constitutional law texts at the time. It was a view seldom questions except by large business interests who might have to pay duties if states left the union. Remember that Lincoln was a strong protectionist favoring high tariffs, one of the few views he never altered.
The war its self was completely avoidable. Secession was a right of the states. It is important to remember that the exact duties of the federal government are laid out in the constitution. It imposed limits. The 10th amendment makes clear that the states retain all other rights.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Lincoln‘s misreading was deliberate. The use of We the people was another falsehood. It was a shorthand and was originally a list of all the states.

The greatest lie however, is not Lincoln‘s. It is that of historians. In the 1960 revisionists decided to make the war about slavery from its outset. It was deliberate and political.
Slavery was much more secure within the union than out of it. Without the fugitive slave laws, slaves would be free just crossing to the north, not all the way to Canada. This is why most abolitionists favored it and a number of planters, especially in the upper south, opposed it. In his inaugural address he assured slave states that slavery was secure and he supported the amendment to make it so forever. The threat of troops was over the Moral Tariff, should they nullify or remain outside the union.

[Montmorency]

Regardless of what one thinks of Lincoln the man, he was indisputably one of the greatest statesmen of all time.

As for the whole "war not over slavery" canard, I suggest one read this.

[Fisherking]

Saint of democracy? That's not really accurate. He's seen as the destroyer of slavery, and that is true. An implementer of the just and necessary war. Nobody is surprised or upset about the darker sides of how it was conducted, and its not much of an argument against his legacy.

I fear you are thinking with your emotions rather than with you head.

He wanted an amendment that made slavery untouchable and no state could refuse to return slaves.

This fit his political agenda which stopped slavery form expanding because he didn’t want blacks free to mix with whites.

When he made the Emancipation Proclamation it was a military tactic and a PR move but it freed not one slave.

When the now 13th Amendment was offered he refused to offer his support and would have preferred to leave it in the hands of the states.

He wanted black people deported.

He did as little to affect the institution of slavery as he could and did not end it.

It is the same as if Hitler, who started a war had ended Communism by conquering Russia.

The war was not necessary. It was to accomplish a political goal. Not freeing the slaves but forming a federal government that was the arbiter of its own powers.




“People are easy to fool, just almost impossible to convince that they have been fooled.” don’t know who said it but it is true.

[Fisherking]

You say a lot of "because" or "he wanted" and "it was a conspiracy to empower the federal government" (okay I paraphrased that one) in there, confusing your opinion with historical fact or political decision-making processes. Everybody knows there was a lot of shady conduct around the civil war. Hell, Sherman's March was calculated brutality approved of by Lincoln. Half the generals in charge of the union Army were fired, demoted, or ridiculed by Lincoln for their lack of bloodlust and initiative. I don't know what school system you went to, or even when you went to school, but these things aren't glossed over. Everybody with an education knows it wasn't roses and peaches. The South had to be destroyed, and its a good thing Lincoln was around to make sure it was done right.

The fact that you think a little black spot here, or a little "gotcha!" fact there is enough to de-justify the entire war speaks more to your biases than anything else.

Lincoln’s administration was now more of a conspiracy than many other administrations. He was a political party boss and knew how to get his way. We are not taught about that or that he was a lobbyist and corporate lawyer. He lived a life of privilege and traveled about the country (as corporate lawyer and Illinois Legislator) in a private rail car with an entourage of railroad executives.

The death figures for the war have recently been revised upward. I have not looked into them but accepted estimates are in the range of 800,000 killed and around 1.5 million total casualties from a total population of about 35 million. It also destroyed nearly half of the nations wealth, and that is not by freeing the slaves.

Every other country managed to end slavery without a war. It is not a badge of honor that we didn’t.
Some have argued that the way our slaves were freed, more than anything else, has lead to the long racial divide in the US. Certainly the UK and Brazil don’t have the problem to this extent.

There are a great many problems with the view that the ends justified the means.

Because of the war the fundamental limits of the federal government was altered. It was changed from the limited government the founders gave us into an all powerful central government with only the limits it set its self. And that continues to be the case.

Lincoln and the government suppressed all basic freedom, violated all of the bill of rights, slaughtered civilians, robbed, pillaged, and raped, conducted war against the civilian population, tortured its own citizens, established concentration camps, used forced deportation, and started the systematic genocide of Native Americans.

Here you tell me that those are a little black spot here and there! What constitutes a major one?

Given 19th century recourses I wonder if Hitler or Stalin could have done better. They had the benefit of Lincoln’s blueprint in their own work. Hitler even wrote of Lincoln in Mein Kaumpf, and Sherman’s words are replayed in “The Final Solution”.

Obviously you seem to believe that southerners were some subhuman abomination deserving of total eradication, and that the ends are justified.

Perhaps you should share why they were all so evil as to deserve death?

[Seamus Fermanagh]

He ended up living a life of privilege. His early career is more prosaic -- though admittedly the "Honest Abe the Rail Splitter" has a lot of political image making in it. Maybe not quite as fabricated as Washington's cherry tree, but towards that end of the scale.

It is saddening that we went to war to end slavery when so many other nations managed to avoid that.

I concur with you on the limitations of the federal government.

I believe that Lincoln may have handled emancipation following the war better -- whatever his personal thoughts on race relations -- than did Johnson and Grant. Booth ended that option. Lincoln seemed to be seeking some way of avoiding an apartheid South, and may have had the clout to put some better answer in place before granting amnesty to all the Southerner. Grant just let amnesty and apartheid happen without even a murmur.

And Hitler wrote specifically of Lincoln in order to tap into his "secular saint" image -- the image you have already decried above. He really only used it as an example that federal sovereignty superseded any provincial sovereignty -- and Lincoln wasn't the first to voice that line of argument in the USA or anywhere else.

I think the Southerners were continuing, by-and-large, an institution which, in their heart of hearts they knew to be wrong. The fear of Nat Turner and the Slave Revolt in Haiti was a constant backdrop to Southern thinking -- but it is not paralleled in the North by deep-seated fears that the workers were going to revolt and kill all the factory owners (not that there were not excesses in industry -- there were; and companies opposed unionism, sometimes violently). Such fears existed in the South because slavery runs counter to basic human desire. I also think that they were idiotic to allow themselves to be goaded into seceding when they did and to firing the first shot of the war in addition. They somehow thought that England and/or France would side with a slave-holding nation and provide the outside help needed to repeat the American Revolution. England wouldn't have minded a weakened USA, but any support for a slaving state was anathema. France was interested in Mexico and wasn't willing to really push hard for that, much less support the South. And without outside intervention, they had to win every battle every time with dwindling resources -- and such things only happen in alternate history novels.

[Fisherking]

I think that the reconstruction proposed by Lincoln for the Southern States was the best course. Whether he would have done that is only speculation, as he was often compassionate in words but not in deeds.

Johnson’s program was much the same, but you can see what the Radical Republican Clique thought of that.

As to the Jim Crow laws that dominated the south for nearly a century, I doubt that Lincoln would have made any difference unless he had deported all or most of the blacks to other locations. Laws as repressive or more so were already on the books in the north even before the war.

The civil rights of blacks was quickly forgotten after the war by all but a very few.

Those who did work for equal right are mostly forgotten or had their reputations ruined. In some cases it was coved up. J.O. Shelby and Forrest come to mind. Confederate Generals who stood up for black right after the war and are looked upon with distaste and loathing today because they served the south and therefore the side of slavery.

[Pannonian]

I think that the reconstruction proposed by Lincoln for the Southern States was the best course. Whether he would have done that is only speculation, as he was often compassionate in words but not in deeds.

You expect compassion during war? The US is a nation that prides itself on being founded on ideals that it's fought and won a war for. Along those lines, it has always fought for freedom against tyranny, on the side of good against the side of evil. The American nature of war is that it is on the side of righteousness, and the other side is wrong and must be subdued. You don't show compassion against evil. You fight until you prevail. The point about your Civil War is that both sides thought they were on the side of good, with the other side being evil. This isn't such a problem for countries that accept compromise as part of being, but in the US, where lack of compromise is seen as a virtue, this isn't possible. See your posts about how Lincoln's study of rhetoric means he is tainted for an example of this. You show compassion after you've won, when you're showing it as a mark of your superior moral virtue and the reason why you won.