I am mystified by all the whooping on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Most of the commentators seem to believe that Lincoln was an honest man touting the highest ideals.
\nThe fact that warmongers like George W. Bush and Obama purport to idolize Lincoln should be a warning sign to attentive folks.<\/p>\n
Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner offered the most concise refutation to President Lincoln\u2019s claim that the Civil War was fought to preserve a \u201cgovernment by consent.\u201d Spooner observed, \u201cThe only idea . . . ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this\u2014that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.\u201d<\/p>\n
The main lesson from the Gettysburg address is – the more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans\u2019 rights. Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth century presidents\u2014and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Lincoln swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom or self-rule. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly shut down hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed \u201cthat this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lincoln’s rhetoric cannot be judged apart from the actions he authorized to enforce his “ideals”:<\/p>\n
In a September 17, 1863, letter to the War Department, Gen. William Sherman wrote: \u201cThe United States has the right, and \u2026 the \u2026 power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle \u2014 if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.\u201d President Lincoln liked Sherman\u2019s letter so much that he declared that it should be published.<\/p>\n
On June 21, 1864, before his bloody March to the Sea, Sherman wrote to the secretary of war: \u201cThere is a class of people [in the South] \u2014 men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.\u201d<\/p>\n
On October 9, 1864, Sherman wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant: \u201cUntil we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.\u201d Sherman lived up to his boast \u2014 and left a swath of devastation and misery that helped plunge the South into decades of poverty.<\/p>\n
General Grant used similar tactics in Virginia, ordering his troops \u201cmake all the valleys south of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad a desert as high up as possible.\u201d The Scorched Earth tactics the North used made life far more difficult for both white and black survivors of the Civil War.<\/p>\n
Lincoln was blinded by his belief in the righteousness of federal supremacy. His abuses set legions of precedents that subverted the vision of government the Founding Fathers bequeathed to America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am mystified by all the whooping on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Most of the commentators seem to believe that Lincoln was an honest man touting the highest ideals. The fact that warmongers like George W. Bush and Obama purport to idolize Lincoln should be a warning sign to attentive folks. Massachusetts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-22395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22395"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22402,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22395\/revisions\/22402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22395"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=22395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}