Another great post from Thunderbolt and – surprise – no serious rebuttals.
“Did Lincoln ever buy real estate in Council Bluffs, Iowa, for when the transcontinental train went through?”
No idea, but his widow was destitute not longer after he died so he either didn’t have too much dough or she was even more of a legendary spendthrift than reported.
"What Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, and others were taught about secession at West Point was that to deny a state the right of secession “would be inconsistent with the principle on which all our political systems are founded, which is, that the people have in all cases, a right to determine how they will be governed.”
Initially Robert E. Lee considered secession a betrayal of the Founders. George Washington would have agreed with him.
"At the outbreak of the War for Southern Independence in 1861 the vast majority of Northern opinion leaders still believed that a right of secession was fundamental, and that the South should be allowed to go in peace. The abolitionist Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Daily Tribune and the preeminent journalist of his day, wrote on December 17, 1860 that “if tyranny and despotism justified the American Revolution of 1776, then we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861” (Howard Perkins, Northern Editorials on Secession). “Nine out of ten people of the North,” Greeley wrote on February 5, 1861, “were opposed to forcing South Carolina to remain in the Union,” for “the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration . . . is that governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed.” Therefore, if the southern states wanted to secede, “they have a clear right to do so.”
Vast majority of Northern opinion leaders? Wait. Let me guess – Lew Rockwell went to the library, searched through all of newspapers of the era and tallied up the results. A rumor got out into the papers that Lincoln was abandoning Sumter and the papers (and population) went ballistic. Even Alexander Stephens, future vp of the Confederacy, agreed that if the South seceded before any aggressive action was taken by President Lincoln they would be in the wrong. He was right. (Of course, they changed their tune after the war.)
Horace Greeley was a flip-flopper. Even before Lincoln’s inauguration, Greeley and other ‘go in peace’ Republicans were referring to secessionists as ‘traitors’ and after Ft Sumter was attacked, he was ready to waddle down and bayonet some Rebels himself. Who gives a rats ass about him anyway?
"States that considered secession, or seceded:
New England, in 1803 over the Louisiana Purchase, in 1808 over the embargo of British trade, in 1814 over war with Britain, in 1843 over the annexation of Texas, and in 1847 over the Mexican War.
South Carolina, due to the “Tariffs of Abomination” which threatened both South Carolina’s economy and the Union"
So why didn’t they? Maybe they were afraid of getting hung from the nearest tree, hmm? Timothy Pickering got absolutely no one to go along with him in 1804. Scratch that one. Madison’s secretary of state sent troops up to keep the Hartford Convention from starting any mischief, despite the fact that it was another toothless effort. Andrew Jackson threatened to invade South Carolina and hang the traitors from the nearest tree and good old Zachary Taylor threatened to hang his own ex-son-in-law, Jefferson Davis. Well, I’ll be. Nobody was going to roll out the red carpet. Sorry about that.
"Similar statements were made by newspapers all throughout the North on the eve of the war, and are perhaps best represented by an editorial in the Kenosha, Wisconsin Democrat, which on January 11, 1861, wrote that secession is “the very germ of liberty” and declared that “the right of secession inheres to the people of every sovereign state.”
What some editor at the Bumblefuck, Indiana Daily Bugle thinks doesn’t matter to me. We can quote Northern newspapers all day.
“South Carolina…cannot get out of this Union until she conquers this government. At the close of that war we can tell with certainty whether she is in or out of the Union. While this government endures there can be no disunion…If the overt act on the part of South Carolina takes place on or after the 4th of March, 1861, then the duty of executing the laws will devolve upon Mr. Lincoln. The laws of the United States must be executed-- the President has no discretionary power on the subject – his duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution. Mr. Lincoln will perform that duty. Disunion by armed force is treason, and treason must and will be put down at all hazards. The Union is not, and cannot be dissolved until this government is overthrown by the traitors who have raised the disunion flag. Can they overthrow it? We think not.”
Illinois State Journal, November 14, 1860
See? So what?
"In his 1801 First Inaugural Address one of the first things Thomas Jefferson did was to support the right of secession. “If there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form,” the author of the Declaration of Independence said, “let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
" Jefferson and James Madison were the authors of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 which held that “where powers were assumed by the national government which had not been granted by the states, nullification is the rightful remedy,” and that every state has a right to “nullify of its own authority all assumptions of power by others. . .” Nullification of unconstitutional federal actions was a means of effectively seceding."
James Madison spent the last six years of his life disgusted with the fact that a new breed of politicians were perverting the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions into a pretext for disunion, and died a very pissed off and bitter individual. Stop making him roll over in his grave. Thanks in advance.
"Lincoln said, “Any people whatsoever have the right to abolish the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right.” Lincoln biographers never seem to get around to quoting this particular speech. "
More bullshit taken out of context. Lincoln had always carefully qualified his support of the right of revolution by insisting that it was a moral, rather than legal, right that must be exercised for a morally justifiable cause. Without such a cause (for instance, the Confederacy), revolution is no right but simply a wicked exercise in power.
