Happy President's Day!

Mine is Abraham Lincoln followed by Teddy Roosevelt, Barack Obama, and Jimmy Carter. We think we have it bad now, politically speaking, on how divisive and nasty each side treats each other but it's nothing compared to the time leading up to, and during, our Civil War. It took a truly great leader to get us through those dark times, one who was steadfast in his convictions, deeply knowledgeable, thoughtful, intelligent, philosophical, and generous-hearted. An incredible orator, his speeches brought people together and motivated them to act. I mourn what might have been a better reconciliation period after the war ended had he not been assassinated, for Andrew Johnson was horrific and set the stage for much of the civil rights abuse following.

In honor of President's Day, the family and I visited the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum this past weekend. Unfortunately, the library is closed on weekends, but it was worth the visit. We didn't have time to make it to his home or other historical sites, so we'll have to go back.

This was an interesting tidbit I hadn't known, can you imagine this happening in this day and age? It's like an arranged marriage!

I loved that there were women involved in marches!

The results of the first election. Did you know when he first entered politics, he was a Whig?

There were several walls of sample cartoons, I could've posted so much worse. Methinks a certain someones in the WH today who think they are so persecuted should open a history book...


Roosevelt I admire for his environmental conservation and brutally honest candor.

Obama not so much for any particular accomplishment (and he was definitely too soft on Russia's attacks against us, and on the environment), but because our first black president had to be of impeccable character and moral integrity, and he was that and more.

Carter because of all his community service since his presidency. He is kind, generous, and caring and we need more of that.

After that, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington for all they did to lead our country into existence, and their wisdom guiding her in our early days.

Second Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln

SATURDAY, MARCH 4, 1865
Fellow-Countrymen:

At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp

towermonkey wrote: Before the Civil War, we were the United States - states actually governing themselves but united as a bloc much like the EU. After Lincoln's trouncing of the Constitution and suspension of habeas corpus, we became a large country where state's rights meant almost nothing. When judges ruled against him, he had them tossed in prison. You want to leave the union? We will kill you and all of your family. Lincoln ranks right up there with ISIS in my history book.

That's an interesting take there TM. I'm surprised you didn't call it the War of Northern Aggression rather than the Civil War. Do you think the Founding Fathers would've looked favorably upon the dissolution of the Union in favor of "states rights"? Should Lincoln have just let them go? They sure weren't going to come back just because someone asked the nicely in order to avoid bloodshed, and the emancipation of slaves had been growing as an issue for years beforehand, that evil practice wasn't going to be allowed to continue.

Lincoln responded to the southern states who renounced, and trounced, the Constitution first by seceding from the United States of America - many before he was even sworn in as President - and in order to protect the most heinous of institutions: slavery. The south made the first shot and after that it was war. The crappy thing about war is that human rights always get abused (which is one reason why us bleeding heart liberals hate war so much), and most of those arrested were justified (unlike FDR rounding up Japanese-Americans during WWII), if you take some time to read through this analysis.
The Lincoln Administration and Arbitrary Arrests: A Reconsideration
Mark E. Neely, Jr.
Volume 5, Issue 1, 1983, pp. 6-24
Permalink: hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.2629860.0005.103

To answer these questions which lie to some degree outside the usual question of the legality or constitutional validity of the arrests, I have begun compiling a list of all the civilian arrests in the North during the Civil War. From the State Department's record of "Suspicious and Disloyal Persons," from dozens of lists of inmates in federal prisons (the notorious "Bastilles of the North"), from William H. Seward's unpublished correspondence, and from the narratives of political prisoners published in book form, I have compiled a list of 866 "prisoners of state" or "political prisoners" (as they were very frankly termed by the Lincoln administration) arrested while Seward was in charge of the program. A close look at them suggests some rather surprising answers to the questions.
<snip>
Thus slave states accounted for 73 percent or nearly three-fourths, of the arbitrary arrests in the first year of the war.

It should be remembered too that many of the arrests involved allegations, not of victimless crimes like holding the wrong political ideas, but of serious ones like murdering pickets, bushwhacking, burning bridges, and raising money and men for the Confederate Army.

Thus the primitive state apparatus of Lincoln's day turned in a fabulously successful and efficient internal security system. Even the 2.9 percent success record beats that of the twentieth-century security apparatus of Woodrow Wilson's progressive state. Despite arrests during World War I of 6,300 enemy aliens (2,300 interned), 2,168 trials under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, and 40,000 men detained by the American Protective League's notorious "slacker raids," not one bona fide spy or saboteur was convicted by the Wilson administration. Franklin D. Roosevelt removed 120,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast in World War II, but there was not one single act of espionage, sabotage, or fifth-column activity by any Japanese-American on the West Coast in World War II.

Because the southern states were traitors to the United States of America and became so in order to protect and defend evil human rights abuses for the sake of greed, sloth, and avarice.