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"Lincoln’s devotion to the constitutional union took precedence over the abolition of slavery, but in a way that set the nation back on course to ridding itself of slavery." This quote comes from further down the page.  As I am relived to see that Lincoln really supported the Constitution I am saddened to face some Facts such as, that Americans are now Slaves to the Federal Government and that the Constitution is now really a Dead Letter.

 

 

The following selection was found in a book titled "Our Country a Household History" by Benson J. Lossing, LL.D. This book was published  in 1879, long before political correctness came the norm. We came across this book browsing the old history books at John Kings Rare and Used Books in downtown Detroit. It is really cool because you never know what awaits in the old books. This photo of a rock engraved in Lincoln's  image was taken by yours truly. 

President Lincoln, standing at the east front of the Capitol, like Saul among the prophets, head and shoulders above other men, read his inaugural address in a clear, loud voice, in the ears of a vast multitude of people, who heard him distinctly, and who greeted its sentences with cheer after cheer. It had been waited for by the loyal people of the land with the greatest anxiety, for it was expected to foreshadow the policy of the new administration. And so it did. It gave no uncertain sound. To the people of the slave-labor States he first addressed a few assuring words, in which he said; “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exist. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He read a resolution of the Republican Convention that nominated him, which declared that the rights of the States, in order that they might control their own institutions, should be maintained inviolate, and denouncing as a high crime the invasion by an armed force of any State or Territory,” no matter under what pretext.” He reiterated these sentiments as his own; assured the people that “the prosperity, peace, and security of no section” were to be “in any wise endangered by the new incoming Administration.” And that every section of the Union should have equal protection.

 Mr. Lincoln then discussed the political structure and character of the Republic, showing that the Union is older than the Constitution; that it is necessarily perpetual; that that there is no inherent power in the whole or in part to terminate it, and that the secession of a State was impossible. Assuming that the Republic was unbroken, he declared that, to the extent of his ability, he should take care, as the Constitution required him to do, that the laws should be executed in all the States, performing that duty as for as practicable, unless his “rightful masters, the American people.” Should withhold the requisite means, or, in some authoritative manner, direct the contrary. “ I trust this will not be regarded as a menace,” he continued, “ But only as the declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend and maintain itself. In doing this,” he added, “there need be no blood shed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the National authority.” He declared that the power confided to him should be used “ to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government, and to collect the duties and imposts.”

So, in a frank, generous, kindly manner, did Mr. Lincoln avow his determination to perform the duties of the Chief Executive of the nation, according to his convictions and his ability. He had said in a speech at Trenton, on his way from New York to Philadelphia: “I shall do all that may be in my power to promote a peaceful settlement of all our difficulties. The man does not live who is more devoted to peace than I am—no one who would do more to preserve it; but it may be necessary to put the foot down firmly.” The Springfield Journal, published at the home of Mr. Lincoln, and his accredited “organ,” had said weeks before: “If South Carolina violates the saw [ by obstructing the collection of the revenue], then comes the tug of war. The President of the United States, in such an emergency, has a plain duty to perform. Mr. Buchanan may shirk it, or the emergency may not exist during his administration. If not, then the Union will last through his term of office. 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.” So felt all the loyal people of the land; and they were strengthened by hope, given in the promise of his inaugural address that he should faithfully do his duty.

In that address, the President also declared that he should” endeavor, by justice, to reconcile all discontents;” and he asked the enemies of the Government to point to a single instance where “any right, plainly written in the Constitution,” had ever been denied. He then showed the danger of the precedent established by secession, for it might lead to infinite subdivisions by discontented minorities. “Plainly,” he said, “ the central idea of secession is anarchy.” He referred to the impossibility of a dissolution of the Union, physically speaking; and contemplating a state of political separation of the sections, he asked, significantly, “Can treaties be more faithfully enforced among aliens than laws can among friends?”  He reminded them that their respective territories must remain “face to face;” that they could not “fight always,” and that the causes of feuds would continue to exist. He begged his countrymen to take time for serious deliberation.

“Such of you,” he said “as are now dissatisfied, still have the old Constitution unimpaired, and, on the sensitive point, the laws of your own framing under it; while the new Administration will have no immediate power, if it would to change either.  .  .  .

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of Civil War. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the Government; whilst I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and  defend it.

 

 

Sobrans -- The Real News of the Month

 


August 3, 2000

Most Americans are under the impression that Abraham Lincoln personally abolished slavery. It seems almost self-evident that “Lincoln freed the slaves.” For generations, many blacks voted Republican out of gratitude to Lincoln.

But the statement that “Lincoln freed the slaves” is a gross oversimplification. Its widespread acceptance shows not only ignorance of history, but a deep incomprehension of the U.S. Constitution.

No president, as Lincoln well knew, could simply pick up a pen and do away with slavery. To think that he could is remarkably naive — yet that is what most people do think.

Legally, slaves were the property of other men; that is what slavery means. And under the Constitution, nobody could be deprived of his property without “due process of law” — that is, a court proceeding had to prove to a jury that a slaveowner had somehow forfeited his property.

“Due process of law” didn’t mean a legislative act. Congress had no power to pass a law outlawing slavery. Lincoln acknowledged this in his first inaugural address and even said he could support an amendment to the Constitution protecting slavery where it already existed.

[Breaker quote: The real 
legacy of the Great Emancipator] If the Constitution meant what today’s liberals say it means, Congress could have simply passed a law banning slavery by invoking its “Power ... to regulate Commerce ... among the several States.” But in the 1860s, nobody thought that this power was so broad as to nullify property rights. They understood that the Constitution would have to be amended to give Congress authority over slavery, which at the time seemed less likely than an amendment for the opposite purpose.

Lincoln knew that emancipation would be a risky business. Convinced that whites and blacks could never live together as equals, he contemplated resettling freed blacks in Africa and Latin America.

During the Civil War, Lincoln decided, after much agonizing, to declare that slaves in the seceding states were free. The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to slaves in the states that remained within the Union. So it didn’t really “free the slaves.” It had little immediate effect on slaves in the Confederacy, of course, since they were beyond Lincoln’s reach. Wags quipped that Lincoln had freed the slaves he couldn’t help, while doing nothing for the slaves he could have helped.

The question everyone asked was by what authority Lincoln could help any slave. Lincoln admitted that Congress had no constitutional power to touch slavery by legislation; but he argued that he, in his capacity as commander in chief of the armed forces putting down what he defined as an insurrection, could punish “rebels” by stripping them of their property, even if that property happened to be slaves. In a civil war, he contended, this could be done without the peacetime niceties of “due process of law.”

So the Emancipation Proclamation was a limited, complex, and constitutionally dubious measure. Still, it was a brilliant propaganda coup that won foreign sympathy for the Union cause. It redefined the Civil War as a contest over slavery rather than secession, distracting attention from the basic question of whether a state could declare its independence of the Union.

That question was brutally answered anyway by the outcome of the war. Since 1865 it has been assumed that no state may secede for any reason, no matter how tyrannical the federal government may become, no matter how wildly it exceeds its constitutional powers. People still illogically associate secession with slavery; and even if the federal government is wrong in its claim of absolute sovereignty, the states and the people are helpless against it. The federal government can now change the meaning of the Constitution that is supposed to restrain it, and there is no practical remedy for its abuses.

Lincoln was in some ways a short-sighted man, who neither foresaw nor intended the ultimate results of the Civil War. But “preserving the Union” turned out to mean inverting its federal structure and creating a central government so strong that no countervailing forces can stop it from monopolizing power. The worst of it is that most people in the United States of Amnesia can’t even see this as a problem.

Joseph Sobran

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Forced Into Glory: Lincoln Revisionism

By Lucas E. Morel

Lerone Bennett, Jr. Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2000); $35.00; 652 pp.

Lerone Bennett, Jr. published an article in the February 1968 issue of Ebony magazine that asked, “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” He answered in the affirmative. Thirty-two years later, Ebony’s executive editor has expanded his six-page critique into a book more than 600-pages in length. As the new title suggests, Bennett argues that Lincoln was “forced into glory” against his personal and political wishes by “the real emancipators,” black and white abolitionists (among others), to whom Bennett dedicates his book. At the heart of his revisionist appraisal of Lincoln’s legacy is the claim that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave, nor was it Lincoln's intention to do so. If the “great emancipator” had his way, Bennett adds, he would have instigated “the racial cleansing of the United States of America.”

Where to begin? Never has so much been so wrong about so important a subject. The only way to misrepresent Lincoln more would be to misspell his name. Add to this Bennett’s denigration of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Booker T. Washington, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and conservatism generally, along with frequent references to Lincoln’s endorsement of “ethnic cleansing” and a “final solution” to the race problem, and his diatribe becomes almost impossible to take seriously. The wonder of it all is that Bennett consulted not only Lincoln’s own speeches and writings, but also a host of primary and secondary sources that should have cleared up much of his confusion about Lincoln’s approach to slavery under the Constitution. Here, more was not better. Bennett allows Lincoln’s rivals to second-guess Lincoln’s own explanations for what he was attempting to do as president of a republic during a rebellion. Bennett’s attempt to understand Lincoln’s principles and policies regarding American slavery falters on so many fronts that we will focus on the greatest misunderstandings, especially as they pertain to the American form and practice of self-government.

Although Frederick Douglass heads the list of “real emancipators” on his dedication page, Bennett quotes selectively from his “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln” (1876). To portray Douglass as a tepid supporter of Lincoln, Bennett violates his own admonition against “the fallacy of the isolated quote” by highlighting only criticisms of Lincoln by the famous abolitionist speaker. Douglass does say that Lincoln “was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” But Bennett omits several passages that show Douglass’s more sober and deliberate assessment of Lincoln. Speaking as an escaped slave, Douglass remarks that under Lincoln’s “wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood.” Unlike Bennett, Douglass praises the Emancipation Proclamation as “the immortal paper, which, though, special in its language, was general in its principles and effect, making slavery forever impossible in the United States.”

Douglass goes on to conclude that if Lincoln “put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible.” Viewed from the abolitionist ranks, “Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

It’s as if Douglass grows in his understanding of Lincoln’s statesmanship as the speech progresses. But Bennett sours from the very beginning, unable to appreciate with Douglass the great difficulty of Lincoln’s task and the nobility of what he ultimately accomplished.

Bennett also dedicates his book to a couple of “radical humanitarians,” John Brown and Wendell Phillips. (Bennett crosses abolitionist extraordinaire William Lloyd Garrison off his list because he became a Lincoln supporter during the 1864 election.) These so-called freedom-lovers sought to free Americans by preaching against the limitations of constitutional self-government and free elections. Bennett admits these and other abolitionists “inflame” public opinion and “create contempt” for the Constitution, but he applauds them for it because of the purity of their motives.

Upon finding several of Lincoln’s contemporaries complaining of his contempt for abolitionists, Bennett concludes that Lincoln did not, in today’s parlance, “feel the slaves’ pain.” A better indication of Lincoln’s personal feelings regarding the plight of American slaves, however, can be found in an 1855 letter he wrote to his best friend, Joshua F. Speed: “I confess I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, and unrewarded toils; but I bite my lip and keep quiet.” Lincoln also reminded Speed, a Kentucky slaveholder who professed “the abstract wrong” of slavery, of the shackled slaves they saw onboard a steamboat they rode in 1841: “That sight was a continual torment to me.” Lincoln then explained that he and most Northerners “do crucify their feelings, in order to maintain their loyalty to the constitution and the Union.” Lincoln’s refusal to join the abolitionist cause, therefore, derived not from callous indifference toward the slave but from principled devotion to the American regime -- a form of government that would extend its protection of freedom as far as the governed would allow. As he put it to his long-time friend, “I also acknowledge your rights and my obligations, under the constitution, in regard to your slaves.” Lincoln, in short, distinguished his personal sentiments from his political responsibility regarding a subject that had “the power of making me miserable.”

Simply put, Lincoln’s hesitation to emancipate slaves during the Civil War derived from his recognition that the American experiment in self-government was in danger. “We already have an important principle to rally and unite the people in the fact that constitutional government is at stake,” he wrote. “This is a fundamental idea, going down about as deep as any thing.” Lincoln was at pains to figure out how to preserve a constitutional regime from the physical force of rebellious southerners as well as the rhetorical force of rebellious abolitionist: the former were unwilling to obey a duly elected Republican administration, while the latter were unwilling to support a constitutional union of freemen and slaveholders. To act simply according to an abstract truth about the natural equality of human beings -- by proclaiming the natural injustice of slavery -- without acting as well in accordance with the coeval truth that government can act legitimately only by the consent of the governed would be to subvert the very form of government and law-abiding habits that make for a free society.

The Constitution vests limited powers in the three branches of the national government. This was always Lincoln's understanding, and one he reiterated at the outset of his First Inaugural Address as it pertained to slavery in the South. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” he said. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so.” The Constitution restricted what Lincoln as president could do about “the peculiar institution,” and as the most deliberate and settled will of the American people, the Constitution stood as the political lodestar for Lincoln.

Upon what authority, then, did he proclaim freedom to slaves in the South almost two years later? As the final Emancipation Proclamation states it: “by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief, of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion.” The nation had moved from peace to war since his inauguration, which legitimated his war-making authority; in addition, Lincoln judged that the uneven progress of the war now called for eliminating the support that slavery gave to the southern war effort.

In his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln emphasized that his war aim had not changed: “hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the states, and the people thereof, in which states that relation is, or may be, suspended, or disturbed.” Thus, he wanted the nation to understand his war-time emancipation proclamation not as a mere exercise of will or force on behalf of a moral objective but as a military measure in accord with his constitutional oath to uphold the laws in all the states.

Lincoln gave the clearest statement of his intention as president and commander-in-chief regarding slavery and the war effort in response to a public letter by New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln wrote. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” Of course, he led the nation through all three scenarios by the time of his second inauguration, at which point the 13th Amendment had been approved by Congress and was on the way to state ratification by year’s end.

Lincoln’s devotion to the constitutional union took precedence over the abolition of slavery, but in a way that set the nation back on course to ridding itself of slavery. Miss this, as Bennett does from cover to cover, and you misunderstand the Emancipation Proclamation and its connection to the Union war effort.

This priority reflected Lincoln’s concern for finding legitimate ways to put down the rebellion without losing the allegiance of unionist southerners, some of whom included slave-owners who had a constitutional right to own slaves that Lincoln as president was sworn to uphold. As William C. Harris shows in With Charity for All: Lincoln and the Restoration of the Union (1997), “war-time reconstruction was designed to initiate the restoration of civil self-government in the South.” Harris reminds us that Lincoln’s expressed war aim was to quash he rebellion without “depriving Unionists of their constitutional rights” or “making it more difficult for them to cooperate in the restoration of loyal governments in the South.” Lincoln’s apparent hesitation to free slaves simply cannot be understood without a clear understanding of his constitutional obligations, which Bennett summarily overlooks.

Bennett also claims that Lincoln deliberately undermined the Emancipation Proclamation by its selective application: “What Lincoln did — and it was so clever that we ought to stop calling him honest Abe — was to ‘free’ slaves in Confederate-held territory where he couldn’t free them and to leave them in slavery in Union-held territory where he could have freed them.” This argument implies that what Lincoln should have done regarding slavery concerned only military might, and not constitutional right. But Lincoln omitted the so-called “border slave states” of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware from the Emancipation Proclamation because they were not in rebellion against the federal government and therefore its citizens deserved the full protection of their constitutional rights.

The explicit exceptions Lincoln made of southern, slave-holding areas under Union-army control prior to January 1, 1863 (i.e., the counties constituting West Virginia and portions of Virginia and Louisiana) also fall under this category. When Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase argued for applying the Emancipation Proclamation to the exempted areas of Virginia and Louisiana, Lincoln replied he could only do so “without the argument of military necessity, and so, without any argument, except the one that I think the measure politically expedient, and morally right.” He added, “Would I not give up all footing upon the constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism?”

Lincoln shows that a president, even acting as commander-in-chief, must exercise authority not as a dictator — benevolent or otherwise — but within the limits set forth by the Constitution. Lincoln wanted to rid the nation of slavery, but not at the price of free government.

As for the claim that the Emancipation Proclamation was a dead letter to slaves behind Confederate lines, Lincoln committed “the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof,” to “recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.” Slaves escaping from their rebellious masters would no longer be viewed as fugitives from justice but receive legal protection of their freedom by the national government. For Bennett, this amounts to an empty promise because the slaves were free only on paper and not in practice. But what alternative was there for slaves behind enemy lines?

As Lincoln himself admitted only nine days before his preliminary proclamation: “Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states?” He therefore waited for a Union victory as a sign that as commander-in-chief he could back ink on paper with swords on the battlefield. (For the definitive exposition of the Emancipation Proclamation, see George Anastaplo's chapter on it in Abraham Lincoln: A Constitutional Biography [1999].)

Bennett chides Lincoln for promoting gradual, compensated emancipation and the colonization of freedmen as the means of achieving his dream of a “lily-white America.” In this context, the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, announced 100 days before its implementation on January 1, 1863, was merely a ruse, Bennett asserts, to delay emancipation until Lincoln could persuade Congress to “deport” all blacks from the United States. To be sure, Lincoln favored gradual emancipation as well as colonization of blacks, but not because he was a white supremacist. Although he recognized the manifest injustice of slavery, he also believed that emancipation was always at best only half the battle. As Anastaplo observes, one then had to devise a way for former masters and former slaves to live with each other as free men.

On this question, Lincoln was neither sanguine nor alone in the recognition that slavery’s demise “was piled high with difficulty.” That most famous foreign observer of the American republic, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in Democracy in America (1835) that “it is impossible to foresee a time when blacks and whites will come to mingle and derive the same benefits from society.” Moreover, American slavery had so poisoned each race’s view of the other that if blacks continued to concentrate in the South, “sooner or later in the southern states white and blacks must come to blows.” This conclusion of a disinterested commentator on the American regime makes Lincoln’s support of colonization less a reflection of racism than a sober consideration of the social and political reality of his day.

Tocqueville noted, “In antiquity the most difficult thing was to change the law; in the modern world the hard thing is to alter mores, and our difficulty begins where theirs ended.” If American mores were such that American democracy could not avoid this coming clash of erstwhile enemies, former white masters versus former black slaves, then Lincoln along with Henry Clay and other colonizationists may not have been the most optimistic republicans. But they could hardly be faulted for attempting to prevent a regional race war that might tear the entire nation and its experiment in self-government into pieces. Bennett makes no allowance for sensible and learned men like Lincoln to believe that American blacks and whites en masse simply would not live peaceably with each other at the close of an oppressive history. The racial divide still present in America today confirms the difficulty Lincoln, Tocqueville, and others anticipated when former slave owners and former slaves, and their descendants, continued to reside in the same territory.

Bennett’s exercise in exasperation over Lincoln as the Great Emancipator displays his woeful ignorance about the principles and practices of American self- government. Lacking even a rudimentary grasp of how the ideas of human equality and the consent of the governed inform the constitutional operation of the American government, it’s no wonder Bennett is unable to grasp Lincoln’s political prudence. Bennett concludes, “There is thus nothing we can learn from Abraham Lincoln about race relations, except what not to say or do.” By reading Forced Into Glory, one learns nothing from Lerone Bennett about the requirements of statesmanship within a constitutional democracy. With Lincoln as his tutor instead of his target, you would think he might have learned something.

Adjunct Fellow Lucas E. Morel is Assistant Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University and author of Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion's Role in American Self-Government (Lexington Books, 2000).

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Lincoln's Economic Legacy

 

Mark