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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.
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towermonkey wrote: Exactly what in my post had ANYTHING to do with race?
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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.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.
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from dozens of lists of inmates in federal prisons (the notorious "Bastilles of the North"), from William H. Seward's unpublished correspondence, and from the narratives of political prisoners published in book form, I have compiled a list of 866 "prisoners of state" or "political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.
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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.
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