You are pathetic Sir.

I understand that people here want to honor Republicans, but IMO they didn’t get really good until Harding. I know I wouldn’t support a high tariff, inflationary Greenback-supporting (if we were still on the Gold Standard now) president who trampled over the idea of state sovereignty.

Sure he helped free the slaves, but he said himself he wouldn’t care if they stayed slaves as long as the union was preserved. It was just a means to an end for him.. You can look back at the Lincoln Douglas debate to see his views on race.

If there ever were someone who should be classified as three-fifths of an person, it’s this guy.

Lincoln and his presidency are the cause of many of the ills we have with the federal government today. Not slavery issues mind you, but the power and rights of the federal government versus the powers and rights of the states.

Please explain your credentials.

I would.

Well said! I do wonder why Republicans celebrate with Lincoln Day dinners. I understand it celebrates the birth of the party on the birthday of a former President many admire, but why we would want to emphasize, say, suspension of habeas corpus and its effect on free speech, press, and assembly over, for example, limited government eludes me. If things go badly for our country in the future, we or our philosophical heirs could be subject to a Lincoln-like President, which isn’t a pretty thought.

Fla Mom

Lincoln was a great leader.

Lincoln saved the union and the country.

Lincoln could not have foreseen what the future would bring.

But, because the results of his efforts were unpleasant for us, we shouldn’t celebrate him a a great leader who saved the union.

Sorry, I must have missed something….???

Well said erinmist.

Its often quite easy to tell where someone is from based on their view of Lincoln- the north and west revere him, much of the south still considers his name a dirty word. Though he is often rated with Washington by northeastern historians, most down here in SC (I’m in Wilson’s 2nd) do not agree with this assessment. A few in the south do, but these are mostly people who do not have actual roots down here.

No doubt some rude, juvenile, insulting Yankee will come along shortly and spout off as happens all to frequently here and which has shown itself on this thread (see Marcus Traianus above). Some of you gentlemen have no idea what a turn off some of you are to people in the South which is a shame becasue it seriously detracts from the readership and influence of this site. In the north its natural to pop off at the mouth without consequence, down here you will still get a broken nose for that. The amusing part is that its not our states falling under the leftist thumb, its the states of the frothing northeners and left coasters. It is very irritating to see the regular commentary here berating the southerners while your own states are coming apart at the seams- the true power center of American conservatism is in our states, not yours. You are moving to our states in droves- we are not coming to yours and dont even visit them if we can help it. It doesn’t help you much to be so condescending when you are not capable of maintaining your own homes in a fashion remotely approximating the model set forth in the Constitution, but then again I suppose to mythologize Lincoln so wholeheartedly such issues can only be so dear to your innermost hearts no matter how loudly you proclaim them.

Reading some of the posts from Marcus and his sort, alot of Southerners think- “Why on Earth do we need these people again?”

Personally I am glad and proud that my ancestors fought against him, and I am far from alone amongst southern conservatives in that regard.

After all, THEIR actions led to the current federal government as well.

We could not have the Federal Government of the United States of America if we didn’t have the United States of America, now could we.

Why didn’t we just stay under the Articles of Confederation, where we were a loose confederation of sovereign states? The founding fathers, just like Lincoln, were well aware that as a loose confederation of states we were vulnerable to invasion and conquer. That is why we must remain united, as one nation, under a unified government of, for and by the people.

I am tired of you folks who want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Blaming Lincoln because liberals have used the strength of the Federal Government to impose their will on the rest of us is like blaming a rape victim for being attractive to her rapist.

Read carefully the word of the Gettysburg Address. Remember, he didn’t have a team of speech writers, pollsters, focus groups and teleprompter operators. He wrote that speech himself and carried it around in his coat pocket until time to give it. Read and understand the words. You can’t fake that. Words like that come from a heart moved by God.

Please note that you were not given the option wrt RS.

Civil War era Atlanta was not the place of tree lined, sidewalked streets and white columned mansions in GWTW. It had a population of 4000 or so in the ’60 Census and existed only because it was a railroad junction called Terminus, then Marthasville, and finally Atlanta. Because it was an important railroad junction, it became a center of military manufacturing, warehousing, and troop transfers.

By the time Sherman was before it in the summer of ’64, it had become essentially a fort surrounded by earthworks and had lost much of its strategic importance as a railroad junction because the rail lines north of the city were in Yankee hands. There was some civilian loss to artillery fire during the siege but it was certainly no worse than that endured by Charlestown and Petersburg, and far less severe than that to which Vicksburg was subjected.

When Sherman broke Hood’s lines, Hood evacuated the works and the city and destroyed all the military supplies and equipment that he couldn’t take with him. The spectacular fire portrayed in GWTW with the exploding box cars and such were the result of Hood’s firing the military supplies, warehouses, and other structures with military use, not of Sherman burning Atlanta. Ultimately, Sherman did order the few remaining civilians out of the city and destroyed anything remaining that was of military value to the CSA and some civilian homes were burned in that exercise, but the dramatic “Burning of Atlanta” of Southern mythology and GWTW fame was done by CS Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood, not US Mj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.

1913. She’s gone now but the Fourth is still as much Grandma’s Birthday as it is Independence Day!

along with goodly chunks of Longfellow’s O Ship of State and Whitman’s “O Captain My Captain.” That was in a Jim Crow school in rural Georgian in the early ’60s. ‘Course that was back in the days when they thought you gained self-esteem by geing good at something and before they discovered the Drill Kills.

Prior to the war we said “The United States are.” After the war we said “The United States is”.

The war made us an is.

Personally, I prefer the latter.

Slavery certainly was an albatross to the South, but it was an economic albatross, not a moral one. Only in the aftermath of the Civil War did it become the raison d’etre for Northern action, and in thus couching the “win” made it morally reprehensible everywhere.

And if you think about it, the Civil War could not logically be about slavery. Indeed, it was money and taxes — pretty much the same as every war.

Robert E. Lee specifically wrote to the Confederate government that he would not raise so much as a finger to save that dying institution, and certainly would not have raised an army to defend it. Lee didn’t think it was about slavery.

300,000 dead men on the Confederate side didn’t think it was about slavery, as none of the poor farmers and tradesmen who owned no slaves and had no hope or desire to own a slave would have marched to their deaths over such a silly notion.

And with racism every bit as prevalent in the North, another 300,000 men would hardly have marched to THEIR deaths to free a race of people they virtually considered sub-human.

When Jefferson Davis, in 1863, fully two years before the war’s end, offered to free the slaves in exchange for Lincoln’s and the USA’s recognition of the CSA, a request which Lincoln denied, the moral banner the North wrapped itself in was seen for what it was – a fig leaf. Davis offered to free slaves under which he held legal authority. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed no slaves over which he had authority.

Most border states had banned the import of new slaves, and economically, only in the Deep South was slavery still viable. By 1870, slavery would have been gone as it became ever more economically unsustainable. Industrialization was certain to make that happen.

Fighting a war over slavery would be akin to fighting a war over buggies as the dawn of the automobile was beginning. It makes no sense.

Winner write histories, of course. So slavery became the reason brother started killing brother. The reality, of course was much more complicated. And war only became a necessity when the confluence of trade policy, tariffs, Northern banking interests, and Southern secessionism all ran headlong into an abyss.

without the Mississippi River, there would have been no war. Neither Lincoln’s nor any other contemporary Northern/Republican administration would have dared try to get The North to go to war to free the slaves; you think socialized medicine is unpopular? On the other hand, a free trade South aligned with Great Britain and in control of the Y traffic of the Ohio and Missouri into the Mississippi to Nawlins would have destroyed most Northern industry and the ports of Boston, New Yawk, and Philadelphia – who needs ‘em, they don’t make anything the World wants. Read Greeley in the first months of secession fever and see how he changes his mind about “let our wayward sisters go” as the mercantile comminity of New Yawk contemplates a free trade South.

So I’d be happy to agree that the way things came together, it was the primary catalyst for differing views over the role of government. But in the absence of slavery, however, is there really any doubt that by the end of the 19th century there still would have been a split?

In an era were the use of the force of arms was more common and more accepted, the highly disparate view points, which you rightfully point out dated back to the founding of the Republic, and which were detailed in many of Patrick Henry’s writings urging that the states NOT ratify the U.S. Constitution, and spelled out in some detail in “The Anti-Federalist Papers”, North and South were all but destined to have some sort of run-in.

Whether such an inevitable parting, far more thinkable when the country was still young, could have been done peacefully, and would have avoided war, secession, and the CSA is speculating, much as I could speculate that Lincoln would have been no less a leader, no less a statesman, and certainly less controversial had he merely accepted the secessions as legal (which they most emphatically were — the Constitution is not a suicide pact in perpetuity) and allowed countrymen who wanted something different from their government to go their own way.

Please don’t construe this exercise as one of wishful thinking or as a nostalgic longing for a mythical era that has been romanticized to a fare-thee-well. The strong Federal government that came out of the Civil War led to a superpower which has done more to help the world and liberate people across the globe than any force in human history. We truly became the benevolent hegemon, even though we never wanted that status. So it’s not all bad.

My point to all this was that it is important to know how we got to where we are. My theories (worth every bit of what you paid for them) go something like this. Assuming either a peaceful separation, or a Confederate victory, by 1880, the two sides would have found more in common, and ultimately reunited. And by then, slavery would likely to have been abolished regardless, given its economic inviability. We forget that it was an incredibly inefficient means of labor, so much so that 90% of all slave holders only owned ONE slave. Less than 1% owned more than 20. We imagine plantation fields filled with these poor souls, but that was simply not the case. It was going to collapse no matter what.

What wasn’t going to change, though, was how each side viewed government. Today, I read the Constitution of the Confederate States, and I can’t help but wonder where we would be: 95% verbatim of the U.S. Constitution, but with term limits, line-item veto, no “general welfare” clause subject to the current abuse we see, fiscal restraints that would make it unconstitutional for the government to pay a contractor a single penny more than what was budgeted. And references everywhere to “Year of our Lord” where the US version simple says “Year” and is utterly silent on a deity to whom we owed our blessings and existence. Sadly, the included two clauses enshrining slavery make it a desperately imperfect document, but no more so than our own which originally counted the black race as only 3/5ths human.

Slavery was a reprehensible evil, and if Lincoln were truly interested in ending its practice in this country, perhaps there would be less controversy. But given his writings, his speeches, and his own prejudices, we know that’s not the case. So if Lincoln wasn’t fighting to “free the slaves”, what the heck was he fighting for? And what was the war about?

Ultimately, it boiled down to what role the Federal government will have in a federalist context — the same thing liberals and conservatives fight about to this very day.

Long way of saying I agree with you, but the point is moot. It was going to be about something. It happened to be about slavery. It could have been about something else. But in the larger context, it was about federal control. And as Obamacare so loudly demonstrates, THAT battle didn’t end in a courthouse in Appomattox.

Words like that can only be divinely inspired.

Seriously, if you can read those words and not get chills, you must not have a pulse.

Most speeches in those days lasted hours. And no one remembers any of them (except a few scholars). Lincoln himself was capable of speaking at great length.

This short speech said so much in so few words. This speech has lasted for a century and a half and still has the power to move people. When put into context it’s even more powerful. Imagine, standing in the middle of a soldier’s cemetery with a war tearing apart the nation and hearing those words…..

Be careful lest one of the self appointed arbiters of historical truth descend upon you.
Hate to break it to them, but just because they say it was this or that doesn’t mean jack to me. Perhaps they could cite some references to support their comments. A few folks have, and it is appreciated.

So far as the moderators, they mostly insist on respectful discourse, instead of particular viewpoint. (Usually.)

The mythologically proportioned Lincoln is taught right here in our own schoolbooks, by myself occasionally. I do strive to mention to the kids that there was more than just one issue. I include the personal opinion that eliminating slavery was certainly worth fighting a war over, but there were also other factors contributing to the pot boiling over.

The aftermath of the Civil war was the end of states rights, a trend that continues today. Had Lincoln survived to oversee reconstruction, I really don’t know if states rights would have been better off or not.It would only be guess.

Regards

Even before his election*, they were making noises about tearing apart the Union if Lincoln was elected.

Lincoln was an abolitionist. The leaders of the Demcorat party knew it and the newspaper rhetoric at the time claimed that Lincoln would abolish slavery by executive order upon taking office.

Above ALL, Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union. He was willing to leave slavery to die a slow natural death (which he believed it would if it were kept contained in the existing slave states). That speech was an attempt to keep the Union whole. It didn’t work. Almost immediately several southern states seceded. Others were making noises of doing the same. War was inevitable just because Lincoln was elected.

* By the way, Lincoln only got elected because the Democrats split their vote. Some people like to point to Lincoln as an example of how a 3rd party can become successful, but in reality Lincoln was elected because of the split in the Democrats rather than the success of the Republicans. He only got 39.9% of the vote.