>Wonderful.
>
>What did you mean about Lincoln? I thought he was a good president?
>
>Karl Pearson
>Senior Systems Analyst
>Senior Database Analyst
>mailto:karlp@Colubs.com
>http://www.ColumbiaUltimate.com
Good? He was a GREAT president ... in the eyes of anyone who wants a vastly stronger central government, untrammeled by all those pesky individual rights to life, liberty, etc.
Lincoln was a tyrant who imposed the first income tax (later ruled unconstitutional) and further used conscription (a form of slavery, except that farmhand slaves were statistically omewhat less likely to die soon and hideously) to raise a vast army to burn American cities, kill thousands of civilians, and conquer by military force hundreds of thousands of freedom-loving Americans who longer wanted to be part of his union.
He sent his generals to jail northern newspaper editors (far from the war zone) who dared criticize his policies in print, and he never even freed any of the slaves who were being used by union troops to harvest the cotton crops (vital to Yankee foreign exchange) in captured portions of Arkansas and Texas -- the so-called "Emancipation Proclamation" actually "freed" only those slaves under CONFEDERATE jurisdiction ... the very ones over which he had no effective authority. (You can go look it up.)
Why would it say that? Why wouldn't it say all former slaves are now free, NO MATTER WHERE THEY ARE?
Lincoln even admitted, repeatedly and publicly, that he'd gladly let the Southerners keep their slaves if they'd stay in his precious union. What kind of "emancipator" is that ... or should we just assume your "great president" was lying?
Lincoln was a railroad lawyer, nominated and elected in what amounted to an absentee campaign in which he was falsely portrayed as a simple log-splitting bumpkin. OK, Harrison's "war hero " status from Tippicanoe may have been pretty far-fetched. Still, Lincoln's probably qualifies as the first successful "advertising and show biz" presidential campaign.
The South was the breadbasket and source of agricultural cmmodities for his Northern corporate masters. What the war was really about was the tariff -- the Yankees didn't want to allow Southern planters to trade their produce with the British in a FREE MARKET for farm equipment and other stuff they needed. Instead, they wanted the southerners to be forced (by the prohibitive tariff on goods shipped to and received from overseas) to serve as a CAPTIVE MARKET for Yankee industrialists ... precisely what they were able to bring about in 1866 after Lincoln conquered their subservient agricultural slave state for them, entering "carpetbagger" into our lexicon as a synonym for the greasy outsider with a bag full of cash.
Been reading some government-school textbooks, have you? I highly recommend Jeff Hummel's "Emancipating Slaves; Enslaving Free Men," available from Laissez Faire Books in San Francisco.
Or, ask L. Neil Smith.
Best Wishes,
-- V.S.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principle are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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