Comments on: Lincoln: A brief introduction

by: Darrell Wallace

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:46:48 +0000

Having read it in it’s entirity, the 2 volumes of “America’s Caesar” by Greg Lorne Durand helps one to realize what one was not taught in the public school system.
Mr. Durand, in my estimation, is brilliant in his expose’ of what the UnCivil war was all about.
It was about the beginning of a call for unity even if it meant at Gunpoint which I can no where find in the Constitution a legal leg to stand on.
It was all about the power of government to orveride the Constitution and promote it’s own agenda and to favor one section of the country’s economics over the other. The Morill Tariff Act favored the North economics and devasted the South’s.
The textbooks failed to reveal the secret plans of Lincoln and General Winfield Scott to disguise supply ships to Fort Sumter and send troops and amunitions to reinforce Major Anderson and subdue South Carolina because she had sedeeded from the Union.
Lincoln’s lust for union hinged on the fact that a free trading South would produce no income for the bankrupt North and the then coffers of the Government.
May I suggest that you purchase Mr. Durand’s work. All his work is documented and accurate.

by: TJH

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 03:47:12 +0000

Kay — I haven’t played Scrabble in 22 years, and I don’t think I was very good even then, so I’m guessing you found the wrong Tim Harris. Rats.

Don’t know the book. Why don’t you get your friend to post a brief statement of the two or three best arguments of the book. We’d certainly be interested.

by: Kay

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 01:33:52 +0000

Tim,
I just found your blog through a series of events. We have mutual friends and I hear you are wicked at Scrabble. Anyway, I have had 2 friends over the last couple of years tell me they changed from a pro-southern view to a more popular view after reading the following book:
Arguing About Slavery by William Lee Miller.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679768440/ref=ord_cart_shr?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

Any thoughts on this? Are you familiar with this book?

by: TJH

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 03:38:17 +0000

Jonathan B (#9) — someone pointed out that I never responded to your claim.

I am relieved that you don’t endorse the common opinion that “slavery was an ultimate evil and that the civil war was justified in fighting over it.”

My remarks (#7) stand contra the common view; don’t read them as personally directed to you. That your view does not exemplify that premise, I freely grant based on your testimony to the contrary.

by: Tim H

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 12:40:43 +0000

Ron S: Your view of history is a very good illustration of the pagan view, which I am opposing with the Augustinian or Christian view. The former appeals to randomness or the “end justifes the means” as it suits the immediate purpose. The latter sees both continuity and development (thus: not a simple straight-line extrapolation), where both are manifestations of covenant (keeping or breaking), as exercised by people that are all without exception either citizens of the City of God or Man.

Re your own incorporation, distinguish. If this is a providential means by which you, as an honest man, can protect yourself from unscrupulous customers, then by all means avail yourself of it. But as ethicists, we must also observe that the same contrivance can be used by unscrupulous businesses to shield themselves from honest customers.

In our age, whenever one applies normative analysis to social affairs, one will be accused by superficial men of “axe grinding” — try it, and see. In reality, I’m not so much grinding an axe as collecting the axes of the court magicians for a big bonfire on the town square.

by: Ron S

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 03:34:20 +0000

You make it sound like anything about today is the end of some linear continuum. Reality is any moment in time is more like the piece of a puzzle. If you add any second piece and find the third, then d draw a line through them, you may just be heading in an almost random direction. Today’s forces directing history are a combination of history and randomness. Events are more like genetics, generating amazing variability from the same source, along with mutations heading in infinitely random directions, still within the boundaries of the puzzle. “You are where you were when”, not where and when your grandparents were. This applies to individuals, organizations, and applications of “constitutionality”.
The best place to study the Constitution is the Constitution itself and the documents and Founders arguments leading up to it. To say that anything about today, especially the fabric of today’s Republican party is a continuum from Lincoln’s times or that he destroyed it and it has remained so without change is myopic and an over simplification.
The 14th Amendment did not cause what you say. It was the moment in time application of real need, well founded legal arguments, and the temporal vision of the courts and persons involved that applied it to the definition of Corporations. As a very small (incorporated) business owner, I am damn glad I have some protections from an irrational customer taking every nickel I own, forcing my family into the streets. Anything you don’t like about the larger corporations’ behavior has more to do with human organizational behavior and normal human power rather than the 14th amendment.
I have a greater sense in your writing that you have an axe to grind. It’s affecting your historical vision.

by: TurretinFan

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 18:48:00 +0000

Please pardon my overly hasty leap to an incorrect conclusion as to your intended linkage. I eagerly await the tie-in.
-Turretinfan

by: Tim H

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 20:01:03 +0000

Fellow TurretinFan– I haven’t yet made a connection between Lincoln and the Republican party of today, other than perhaps the link I gave “on the relation between current leaders and Lincoln”– which however would apply to many Democratic leaders as well–, and the mention in “Election 2006: Summary”– but that was only a hint.

You are ahead of me, however: I do plan to propose a linkage. But that discussion will be fruitless unless enough people have first come to understand the real, as opposed to the civic-myth Lincoln.

by: TurretinFan

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:27:53 +0000

It hardly seems fair for the heavily southern Republican party of today to be burdened with the crimes of Lincoln and the heavily northern party with which he was connected.

by: Tim H

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 01:04:22 +0000

On books:

The book by Durand (comment #2) is a treasure trove of quotations.

A 2002 book by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, is briefer than Masters’, and with a touch of libertarian emphasis. The preface by Walter Williams concludes, “The Real Lincoln contains irrefutable evidence that a more appropriate title for Abraham Lincoln is not the Great Emancipator, but the Great Centralizer.”

I own, but have not yet read, a recent book on the Republican destruction of the printing press in (for me) nearby West Chester, Penna, Lincoln’s Wrath. Will review when I have a chance to study.

It is hard to imagine that any work could exceed the passion of Masters’ (but see my warning in the post). As a minor aspect, yet significant in its own way, he alone deals with Lincoln’s way of relating to women.