One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago On This Day

[icenine]

Originally Posted by donquixote99

Oh, I agree he's not a diety. But he's got quite a temple on the mall anyway.

He went to war because he was told it would be quickly won, while ducking it would have been difficult and probably politically ruinous. A 'police action' was what was expected; the army would march south and restore order. He had no experience to tell him how bad it could be, and the experienced guys were very confident.

The Habaes Corpus suspension was completely justified and proper under the circumstances, except the Constitution gives Congress the power to do it, not the President. But Congress ducked making it legal, preferring to leave Lincoln stuck with the onus.

Now I'm OK with criticism of Lincoln in principle, if well-founded. But most of it is trite and tainted with Southern Revisionism.

He went to war because after he was elected the South seceded because they were upset that a President opposed to the EXTENSION of slavery to the new states was in office. When the Federal government tried to resupply the base on Ft Sumter they were attacked by the South.

You sort of make it sound like Lincoln made the decision on his own. His adminstration called it The War Of The Rebellion.

I do agree with you however in your main points. All the revisionist arguments are bullshit.
Pretty soon the "slavery did not cause the war" bullshit will rear its neanderthal head.

[donquixote99]

Originally Posted by icenine

He went to war because after he was elected the South seceded because they were upset that a President opposed to the EXTENSION of slavery to the new states was in office. When the Federal government tried to resupply the base on Ft Sumter they were attacked by the South.

You sort of make it sound like Lincoln made the decision on his own. His adminstration called it The War Of The Rebellion.

I do agree with you however in your main points. All the revisionist arguments are bullshit.
Pretty soon the "slavery did not cause the war" bullshit will rear its neanderthal head.

Lincoln made the decision to resupply Sumter, rather than surrender it, knowing and expecting that the southerners would open fire if resupply was attempted. He saw war as necessary and practically unavoidable, and he wanted the South to fire the first shot.

Pete is correct, above: it was war or accept disunion. Lincoln, for both principled and practical reasons, could not accept disunion.

[icenine]

Originally Posted by donquixote99

Lincoln made the decision to resupply Sumter, rather than surrender it, knowing and expecting that the southerners would open fire if resupply was attempted. He saw war as necessary and practically unavoidable, and he wanted the South to fire the first shot.

Pete is correct, above: it was war or accept disunion. Lincoln, for both principled and practical reasons, could not accept disunion.

As Commander in Chief you do not have a choice in re-supply matters.

[Zeke]

Originally Posted by icenine

As Commander in Chief you do not have a choice in re-supply matters.

Which goes to my original point: any competent Executive would have taken the same actions that Lincoln did.

Presuming a desire to retain the Union at all costs, the only play is "all in."

[Charles]

H.L. Mencken on Abraham Lincoln

From "Five Men at Random," Prejudices: Third Series, 1922, pp. 171-76.
First printed, in part, in the Smart Set, May, 1920, p. 141

"Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States—first, murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln. But despite all the vast mass of Lincolniana and the constant discussion of old Abe in other ways, even so elemental a problem as that of his religious ideas—surely an important matter in any competent biography—is yet but half solved. Was he a Christian? Did he believe in the Divinity of Jesus? I am left in doubt. He was very polite about it, and very cautious, as befitted a politician in need of Christian votes, but how much genuine conviction was in that politeness? And if his occasional references to Jesus were thus open to question, what of his rather vague avowals of belief in a personal God and in the immortality of the soul? Herndon and some of his other early friends always maintained that he was an atheist, but the Rev. Willian E. Barton, one of the best of later Lincolnologists, argues that this atheism was simply disbelief in the idiotic Methodist and Baptist dogmas of his time—that nine Christian churches out of ten, if he were live today, would admit him to their high privileges and prerogatives without anything worse than a few warning coughs. As for me, I still wonder.

Lincoln becomes the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality. Washington, of late years, has been perceptible humanized; every schoolboy now knows that he used to swear a good deal, and was a sharp trader, and had a quick eye for a pretty ankle. But meanwhile the varnishers and veneerers have been busily converting Abe into a plaster saint, thus marking hum fit for adoration in the Y.M.C.A.’s. All the popular pictures of him show him in his robes of state, and wearing an expression fit for a man about to be hanged. There is, so far as I know, not a single portrait of him showing him smiling—and yet he must have cackled a good deal, first and last: who ever heard of a storyteller who didn’t? Worse, there is an obvious effort to pump all his human weaknesses out of him, an obvious effort to pump all his human weaknesses out of him, and so leave him a mere moral apparition, a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost. What could be more absurd? Lincoln, in point of fact, was a practical politician of long experience and high talents, and by no means cursed with idealistic superstitions. Until he emerged from Illinois they always put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of unescapable record that his career in the State Legislature was indistinguishable from that of a Tammany Nietzsche. Even his handling of the slavery question was that of a politician, not that of a messiah. Nothing alarmed him more than the suspicion that he was an Abolitionist, and Barton tells of an occasion when he actually fled town to avoid meeting the issue squarely. An Abolitionist would have published the Emancipation Proclamation the day after the first battle of Bull Run. But Lincoln waited until the time was more favorable—until Lee had been hurled out of Pennsylvania, and more important still, until the political currents were safely funning his way. Even so, he freed the slaves in only a part of the country: all the rest continued to clank their chains until he himself was an angel in Heaven.

Like William Jennings Bryan, he was a dark horse made suddenly formidable by fortunate rhetoric. The Douglas debate launched hum, and the Cooper Union Speech got him the Presidency. His talent for emotional utterance was an accomplishment of late growth. His early speeches were mere empty fire-works—the hollow rodomontades of the era. But in the middle life he purged his style of ornament and it became almost badly simple—and it is for that simplicity that he is remembered today. The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost gem-like perfection—the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.

But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—"that government of the people, by the people, for the people," should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary."

Any thoughts,

Chas

[icenine]

Originally Posted by Zeke

Which goes to my original point: any competent Executive would have taken the same actions that Lincoln did.

Presuming a desire to retain the Union at all costs, the only play is "all in."

Yeah what kind of President would let his troops go without food, etc?
Gotta take care of the troops....

[piece-itpete]

I'll agree that the Civil War guaranteed Federal superiority, and that Lincoln was NO saint. He was a master politician for sure. Agreed too about his beliefs. He sure knew his Bible though.

He also dances awkwardly for furniture commercials every Presidents day. I think it's very unsuitable for a man in his position.

Pete

[icenine]

Chas..who gives a phuck what Mencken thought about Lincoln. Mencken was just the early 20th century version of Howard Stern who actually acheived immortality by poking fun at the hypocracies of "Progressive" 20th century America that felt it necessary to ban alcohol.

And Lincoln did not smile in the pictures for the same reason no one else did at that time....the exposures were too long in the early days of photography you could not smile or the picture would have motion in it. DUH.

Sure Lincoln was a normal politician like everyone else back then. The outcome matters Chas not the motivation. When he saw the cost of lives in the middle of the conflict he realized that slavery had to end. Whether he came to that realization on his own with diffidence or the lastest body count from Antietam shocked him into action does not really matter. Who cares.

[piece-itpete]

The timing was political cunning.

Pete

[BlueStreak]

I've already had this argument.

Dave