The Never-Ending War on American Freedom
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

From the beginning of the American Republic there has been a group of influential people who have devoted their lives and careers to putting more Power In Government (PIGs). As soon as the American Revolution ended Alexander Hamilton schemed to overthrow the first Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, and replace it with a document that would legitimize a permanent president who would appoint all the governors and have veto power over all state legislation. He wanted a king, in other words, who could force British-style mercantilism and an imperialistic foreign policy on America without any significant resistance by the citizens of the states. He failed during his lifetime, but that is essentially the system Americans live under today. We now live in "Hamilton’s republic," as his idolaters gleefully remind us.

As soon as Hamilton’s party, the Federalists, gained power, one of the first things they did was to rescind the First Amendment to the new Constitution with the Sedition Act during the presidency of John Adams. Hamilton authored several long-winded reports as Treasury Secretary in which he invented the insidious notions of "implied" powers in the Constitution along with such an expansive interpretation of the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses that the Constitution would become useless as a restraint on governmental tyranny.

Hamilton’s political compatriot, Chief Justice John Marshall, turned Hamilton’s legalistic mysticism into legal precedent during his long tenure on the Court, with many other PIG lawyers following suit over the succeeding generations. And of course Abraham Lincoln established a French Revolutionary/Stalinist-style regime that imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political dissenters, employed an army of spies and informers (on Northern citizens), shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers, illegally suspended habeas corpus, deported an outspoken member of the opposition party, confiscated firearms, illegally created the state of West Virginia, censored all telegraph communication, and myriad other assaults on the Constitution, including waging war on his own country after promising to defend the lives and liberties of the very people he was waging war on.

The brilliant John C. Calhoun explained the inevitability of all of this – and more – in his Disquisition on Government, written in the late 1840s and published shortly after his death in 1850. Calhoun wrote that it is an error to think that "a written constitution, containing suitable restrictions on the powers of government, is sufficient, of itself, without the aid of any organism . . . to counteract the tendency of the numerical majority to oppression and the abuse of power."

All democracies are broken down into two basic groups – net taxpayers and net tax consumers, said Calhoun. And the latter group (PIGs) will inevitably prevail, as history teaches us. The party in favor of constitutional restrictions on governmental power at first "might command some respect" but "would be overpowered." It is mere folly, he argued, to suppose that "the party in possession of the ballot box and the physical force of the country [i.e., the military], could be successfully resisted by an appeal to reason, truth, justice, or the obligations imposed by the constitution." Moreover, "the end of the contest [between net taxpayers and tax consumers] would be the subversion of the constitution" whereby "the restrictions [on state power] would ultimately be annulled, and the government be converted into one of unlimited powers."

This is why Calhoun embraced the Jeffersonian idea of nullification during the sectional dispute over the 1828 "Tariff of Abominations." As explained by Ross Lence in the Foreword to Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, the former vice president was "seeking a means by which [disunion] could be avoided," and so he "turned to the doctrine of interposition, which defended the right of a state to interpose its authority to overrule federal legislation. The seeds of this doctrine were introduced by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and 1799." Of course, such ideas as nullification, interposition, secession, and federalism were snuffed out by the Lincoln administration as a result of the War to Prevent Southern Independence.

Calhoun’s prediction of a government of unlimited powers eventually came true. The Jeffersonian strict constructionists did more or less prevail for a while, but were nearly wiped out by 1865, and were nowhere to be found by the turn of the twentieth century. At that point numerous notorious PIGs gleefully thumbed their noses at the Constitution and the freedoms it was supposed to protect. This story is told in great detail in the new book by Tom Woods and Kevin Gutzman entitled Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush.

Woodrow Wilson resumed the totalitarian attacks on free speech that Adams and Lincoln had pioneered with the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. These laws literally criminalized opposition to going to war in Europe, as Woods and Gutzman explain. In addition, the creepy-sounding "Committee on Public Information" portrayed Germans "as subhuman savages"; and sauerkraut even became known as "liberty cabbage," an early precedent for the moronic "freedom fries" language adopted by the Bush administration after its invasion of Iraq in 2003 when the French government refused to participate.

During the Lincoln administration roving gangs of Republican Party thugs destroyed printing presses, intimidated Democratic voters in the Northern states, and generally behaved like twentieth-century brownshirts. Woods and Gutzman write of how the exact same thuggish behavior was an integral part of the Wilson administration. A Christian minister was sentenced to 15 years for distributing a pamphlet to five people explaining that Jesus Christ was a pacifist (reminiscent of how Congressman Ron Paul was loudly booed by an audience of "evangelicals" when he reminded them in 2008 that Jesus was known as The Prince of Peace). Men were tarred and feathered for not spending enough of their income on "Liberty bonds" that helped fund the war; German language Bibles were burned; and the producers of a movie about the American Revolution that portrayed America’s "ally" Great Britain in an unflattering light were sentenced to ten years in prison.
By the 1950s American presidents clearly thought of themselves as dictators who were not constrained one iota by the Constitution. Consequently, Harry Truman felt justified in having the government seize and operate the steel mills so that he could better prosecute the undeclared war in Korea. Truman insisted that he had absolute, dictatorial power to "do whatever is for the best of the country." Constitution schmonstitution. The Supreme Court eventually ruled against this particular act of theft, but it had little effect in deterring future dictatorial behavior. Today, American presidents think of themselves not just as unrestrained dictators but as emperors of the world.

Woods and Gutzman provide a scholarly analysis of why Brown vs. Board of Education was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court "set itself above the Constitution" for what the majority believed was a good cause. Constitution schmonstitution.

There is no constitutional authority for the myriad pork-barrel spending projects that Congress funds year in and year out with tax dollars, but so what? Woods and Gutzman describe the evolution of this particular power grab, from the time when the "father of the Constitution," James Madison, vetoed an "internal improvements" bill as unconstitutional to today’s anything-goes mentality in Washington, D.C.
Then there is the theft of privately-held gold by FDR. The Supreme Court never even bothered to comment on this grossly unconstitutional act of thievery. Nor is there any constitutional basis for the government’s ban on prayer in public schools or military conscription. Not to mention the dictatorial implications of presidential "executive orders." Teddy Roosevelt receives special mention with regard to this latter authoritarian tool. He issued 1,006 executive orders compared to 51 and 71 for his two predecessors, write Woods and Gutzman. The "Bush Revolution," discussed in chapter 12, proves that modern American presidents and their advisors have nothing but absolute contempt for the Constitution.

Upon reading Who Killed the Constitution? the Jeffersonian wing of the founding fathers, were they alive today, would be reaching for their swords, preparing for another revolution. The Hamiltonians, on the other hand, would be popping champagne corks, high five-ing each other, and smiling very broadly. Calhoun would be deeply saddened that his dire predictions about the fate of an American democracy that is stripped of its Jeffersonian, states’ rights moorings have all come true in spades.
August 30, 2008

How Lincoln’s Army 'Liberated' the Indians

In a recent issue of The American Enterprise magazine devoted to the War between the States (see my LRC article, "AEI is Still Fighting the Civil War") Victor Hanson, a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, defends and makes excuses for Lincoln’s intentional waging of war on Southern civilians. This included the bombing, pillaging and plundering of their cities and towns, the burning of their homes, total destruction of farms and livestock, gang rape, and the killing of thousands, including women and children of all races. (See Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War by John Bennett Walters or The Hard Hand of War by Mark Grimsley).

It was all justified, says Hanson, because General Sherman and his men were supposedly motivated by the belief that it was necessary "to guarantee the American proposition that each man is as good as another." Sherman’s "bummers," as they were called, were "political avenging angels" who were offended by racial inequalities in the South. They were driven by "an ideological furor, to destroy the nature of Southern aristocracy." The "tyrannical Southern ruling class" needed to be taught a lesson. (Besides, he writes, "rapes during [Sherman’s] march were almost unknown)."

In reality, neither Sherman nor his soldiers believed any of these things. (And rapes were not as "unknown" to the Southern people as they are to Hanson). In the Northern states at the time, myriad Black Codes existed that prohibited blacks from migrating into most Northern states and kept them from entering into contracts, voting, marrying whites, testifying in court against whites (which invited criminal abuse), or sending their children to public schools. They were excluded altogether from all forms of transportation or required to sit in special "Jim Crow sections." They were prohibited from entering hotels, restaurants or resorts except as servants, and were segregated in churches, prisons, and even cemeteries. Free blacks in the North in the 1860s were cruelly discriminated against in every aspect of their existence, and were denied the most fundamental of citizenship rights

Sherman himself certainly did not believe that "each man is as good as another." For example, in 1862 Sherman was bothered that "the country" was "swarming with dishonest Jews" (see Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman, p. 153). He got his close friend, General Grant, to expel all Jews from his army. As Fellman writes, "On December 17, 1862, Grant . . . , like a medieval monarch . . . expelled ‘The Jews, as a class,’ from his department." Sherman biographer Fellman further writes that to Sherman, the Jews were "like niggers" and "like greasers (Mexicans) or Indians" in that they were "classes or races permanently inferior to his own."

The notion that Sherman’s army was motivated by a belief that all men are created equal is belied by the further fact that just three months after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox the very same army commenced a campaign of ethnic genocide against the Plains Indians. In July of 1865 Sherman was put in charge of the Military District of the Missouri (all land west of the Mississippi) and given the assignment to eradicate the Plains Indians in order to make way for the federally subsidized transcontinental railroad. Like Lincoln, Sherman was a friend of Grenville Dodge, the chief engineer of the project. He was also a railroad investor and he lobbied his brother, Senator John Sherman, to allocate federal funds for the transcontinental railroad. "We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians stop and check the progress of the railroad," he wrote to General Grant in 1867 (Fellman, p. 264). As Fellman writes:

[T]he great triumvirate of the Union Civil War effort [Grant, Sherman and Sheridan] formulated and enacted military Indian policy until reaching, by The 1880s, what Sherman sometimes referred to as "the final solution of the Indian problem," which he defined as killing hostile Indians and segregating their pauperized survivors in remote places . . . . These men applied their shared ruthlessness, born of their Civil War experiences, against a people all three despised, in the name of Civilization and Progress (emphasis added).

Another Sherman biographer, John F. Marszalek, points out in Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order, that "Sherman viewed Indians as he viewed recalcitrant Southerners during the war and newly freed people after the war: resisters to the legitimate forces of an orderly society," by which he meant the central government. Moreover, writes Marszalek, Sherman’s philosophy was that "since the inferior Indians refused to step aside so superior American culture could create success and progress, they had to be driven out of the way as the Confederates had been driven back into the Union."

"Most of the other generals who took a direct role in the Indian wars, writes Marszalek, "were, like Sherman, [Union] Civil War luminaries." This included "John Pope, O.O. Howard, Nelson A. Miles, Alfred H. Terry, E.O.C. Ord, C.C. Augeur, and R.S. Canby. General Winfield Scott Hancock should be added to this list of "luminaries." Among the colonels, "George Armstrong Custer and Benjamin Grierson were the most famous."

Sherman and General Phillip Sheridan were associated with the statement that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." The problem with the Indians, Sherman said, was that "they did not make allowance for the rapid growth of the white race" (Marszalek, p. 390). And, "both races cannot use this country in common" (Fellman, p. 263).

Sherman’s theory of white racial superiority is what led him to the policy of waging war against the Indians "till the Indians are all killed or taken to a country where they can be watched." As Fellman (p. 264) writes:

Sherman planted a racist tautology: Some Indians are thieving, killing rascals fit for death; all Indians look alike; therefore, to get some we must eliminate all . . . deduced from this racist tautology . . . the less destructive policy would be racial cleansing of the land . . .

Accordingly, Sherman wrote to Grant: "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children." Writing two days later to his brother John, General Sherman said: "I suppose the Sioux must be exterminated . . ." (Fellman, p. 264).

This was Sherman’s attitude toward Southerners during the War for Southern Independence as well. In a July 31, 1862 letter to his wife (from his Collected Works) he wrote that his purpose in the war was: "Extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the [Southern] people." His charming and nurturing wife Ellen wrote back that her fondest wish was for a war "of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like the Swine into the sea."

With this attitude, Sherman issued the following order to his troops at the beginning of the Indian Wars: "During an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age. As long as resistance is made, death must be meted out . . ." (Marszalek, p. 379).

Most of the raids on Indian camps were conducted in the winter, when families would be together and could therefore all be killed at once. Sherman gave Sheridan "authorization to slaughter as many women and children as well as men Sheridan or his subordinates felt was necessary when they attacked Indian villages" (Fellman, p. 271). All livestock was also killed so that any survivors would be more likely to starve to death.

Sherman was once brought before a congressional committee after federal Indian agents, who were supposed to be supervising the Indians who were on reservations, witnessed "the horror of women and children under military attack." Nothing came of the hearings, however. Sherman ordered his subordinates to kill the Indians without restraint to achieve what he called "the final solution of the Indian problem," and promised that if the newspapers found out about it he would "run interference against any complaints about atrocities back East" (Fellman, p. 271).

Eight years into his war of "extermination" Sherman was bursting with pride over his accomplishments. "I am charmed at the handsome conduct of our troops in the field," he wrote Sheridan in 1874. "They go in with the relish that used to make our hearts glad in 1864-5" (Fellman, p. 272).

Another part of Sherman’s "final solution" strategy against this "inferior race" was the massive slaughter of buffalo, a primary source of food for the Indians. If there were no longer any buffalo near where the railroad traveled, he reasoned, then the Indians would not go there either. By 1882 the American buffalo was essentially extinct.

Ironically, some ex-slaves took part in the Indian wars. Known as the "Buffalo Soldiers," they assisted in the federal army’s campaign of extermination against another colored race.

By 1890 Sherman’s "final solution" had been achieved: The Plains Indians were all either killed or placed on reservations "where they can be watched." In a December 18, 1890 letter to the New York Times Sherman expressed his deep disappointment over the fact that, were it not for "civilian interference," his army would have "gotten rid of them all" and killed every last Indian in the U.S. (Marszalek, p. 400).

To Victor Hanson and the American Enterprise Institute this is the kind of man who "deserves a place on the roll call of great liberators in human history." Native Americans would undoubtedly disagree.

February 12, 2003

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House, 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.

(CNS) The popular notions of the 16^th President of the United States were often crafted to glorify the man and his office, rather than explain the reality of Abe Lincoln. He is either painted in the tones of a semi-mythical demigod or the political pragmatist, but not the historical figure, of which there are tremendous amounts of information available that contradicts the popular notions. In David Donald's biography called "Lincoln," the man who emerges is an indecisive leader with few firm convictions, not the great leader riding events, but thrown about by them, so that he was constantly in a reactionary mode. But the image that comes out of the most recent research on Abe Lincoln, contained in the book "Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream," by author Lerone Bennett, Jr., is a full-scale assault on the two-dimensional image of the painted saint.

Bennett is a long-time employee at Ebony magazine, a magazine whose target audience is the African American community, which immediately became a sticking point to critics like Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University. Foner admits that Bennett contributed important works of African American history in the 1960s, such as "Before the Mayflower," which surveyed the black experience in America, and "Black Power USA," which challenged prevailing interpretations of Reconstruction by stressing how blacks achieved significant political power after the Civil War, as well as "Pioneers in Protest," which offered portraits of key leaders in black history; but Foner's first criticism of the book "Forced Into Glory," is that Bennett is not an academic historian, a minor if not a petty point.

The seed for the book "Forced Into Glory" was an article by Bennett that appeared in Ebony magazine in 1968, entitled, "Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?" That article put Bennett on the radar screen of academic history. Seeking to dismantle the myth of the larger-than-life Supreme Leader of the Republic during the War Between The States, since inflated to include the title of the Great Emancipator (even though England emancipated her slaves as early as 1772), Bennett argued that Lincoln shared the racial prejudices of most (but, of course, not all) of his white contemporaries.

The one thing that kept the poor from combining and joining forces was the classic institution of racism, which was introduced throughout colonial lands during the first settlements, so that irregardless of how poor a white European was, he could still think of himself as "better" than natives, or African persons brought in from outside and enslaved, which began after 1619 in north America when absentee plantation owners found that they could not successfully enslave the native American population. Due to the fact that the Europeans went to so much trouble capturing people and transporting them in chains from Africa, and because they shared a basic familiarity with one another, the "white community" came to accept its own existence, even though "whites" could be from any northern European country; and the "colored community" began to realize it had to deal with this solidarity on the part of the "whites," who were perpetually terrified of slave revolts, or attacks by unpacified native Americans. Racism also appeared to justify the savagery that was necessary to perpetuate slavery as an institution, because so long as the supporters of racism believed that the members of the non-white races were not quite human, they did not feel obliged to treat them as human beings (the same thing took place in Nazi-era Germany, with the Nuremberg laws that stripped Jews of German citizenship).

The "black community" formed in direct response to the forces causing the solidarity of the "white community," which ever afterward would be a polarizing force between the two camps. The two camps, however, do not really exist. They are neither nations nor ethnicities, the whites can derive from Russia, Poland, Denmark, Britain, Spain, Italy, Greece, Hungary, and any other ethnic group with fairly pale skin; while the blacks can derive from any of thousands of distinct tribes that exist all throughout Africa, so that their ancestors, if put in one room, would have been unable to communicate by the same language (which would apply equally to the ancestors of the whites, if they came from Russia, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Greece or Britain, etc.)

Racism is not natural, but it is a byproduct of a natural primitive fear of the members of an unknown foreign tribe. Ancient people were marked by two forms of habit, first, instinctual fear, the fight or flight instinct, and hospitality. Modern historians often paint a picture of antiquity as though everyone alive in the past was more unfortunate than the people alive during the present, which is really an article of faith in modernity, the belief in progress as a product of technology. The truth is that life is not about convenience or technology, it is about being and experiencing one's own time, because no matter what time period anyone may live in, it is a good thing to be alive. To back up excessive boasting by pharmaceutical companies about their "contributions" to modern life, they always point to statistical data that the average lifespan has increased, and that ancient man only lived to about 20 years. The truth is that as long ago as ancient Egypt there were individuals who lived into their seventies. This is not to infer that life has not changed for the better, but only to suggest that historians should be more objective in portraying the past, and they should leave out how allegedly "nasty, brutish and short" they believe life was, in favor of the facts, just the facts.

Americans often regard racism in 18^th century America as a given, but the truth is that there have always been people in America who were not racist. Abraham Lincoln, however, was not one of them. And neither was Mary Todd Lincoln, whose Southern family had owned slaves. As an Illinois legislator, and later as a congressman and political leader, Lincoln opposed the abolitionists, rigorously supported enforcement of the brutal and mean-spirited Fugitive Slave Law, and was in favor of forcefully removing all African American people from the United States. Furthermore, Lincoln explicitly endorsed the State of Illinois' laws barring African Americans from voting, serving on juries, holding office, or intermarrying with "white" Americans. According to his confidants he regularly used the word "nigger" in private conversation and sometimes in speeches (this author apologizes for using the offensive "N" word here, but it is the author's intent not to cloak the reader from the intense reality underlying the truth that Abe Lincoln was a bone-deep racist).

In 1858 Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in Chicago affirming the equality of man, and then gave another address the same year in southern Illinois in which he stated that he opposed "bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races." As President of the United States Lincoln initially allowed the four slave states that remained in the Union during the Civil War - Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri - to dictate his policy on slavery. Bennett argues in his book "Forced Into Glory" that Lincoln refused to free and arm the slaves because of his ingrained racism; but one could easily add that the arming of the black community, which had suffered such indignities at the hands of the white community, was the very nightmare that haunted many of the white people in north America since the days of Thomas Jefferson. It's one thing to free them, in theory, but it is entirely another thing to put weapons in their hands, especially when you are deeply aware of the way they have been treated for so long. The deepest fear among white people in north America at the time of the Civil War was of a secret desire among the African American community to seek revenge, because the white people had no real idea as to whether or not the black people around them harbored such thoughts, since the whites did not want to hear the black people's real emotions, and the blacks had learned long before never to honestly express their feelings, for fear of reprisals. That is the very essence of a slave state: fear of revenge and fear of reprisals.

Bennett attributes the abolitionist policies that came out of the Civil War not to Lincoln, who had to be dragged into it, but to abolitionists like Wendell Phillips, Thaddeus Stevens, Frederick Douglass, and the Radical Republicans in Congress, who in 1862 pushed through the Second Confiscation Act, freeing slaves of owners who supported the Confederacy. The Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln, Bennett wisely observes, did not free a single slave because it applied only to areas outside of the Union's, and therefore Lincoln's, control. In fact, the Proclamation, with its tricky legalese wording, was designed to save as much of slavery as it could, and to the end of his life, Lincoln was a devoted, unrepentant proponent of white supremacy. (If anyone doubts this they should not read about the Proclamation, but carefully read the document itself. It should take all of 30 seconds to recognize that it is written in pure legal mumbo jumbo, meant to obfuscate, and it was, at the time of its issuance, completely unenforceable).

"Forced Into Glory" does a marvelous job of describing the age in which the abolition of slavery took place, offering a valuable discussion on the vicious Black Laws of pre-Civil War Illinois, which not only denied African Americans of basic civil and political human rights, but also required any African American entering the state to post a bond of $1,000. Bennett highlights little known acts of Congress that paved the way for the emancipation of the slaves of the United States. For example, the Confiscation Act of 1862, and also an even earlier revision of the military code that forbade Union soldiers from returning fugitive slaves to bondage. Even more significantly, Bennett covers a measure passed by Congress that freed the families of African American men who enlisted in the Union Army, sidestepping the Emancipation Proclamation by destroying slavery in those loyal border states where the Proclamation never took effect, proving that all white Americans did NOT share Lincoln's racist opinions. Most importantly, Bennett presents compelling evidence that historians have routinely sidestepped Lincoln's true racial views. Previous scholars downplayed or outright ignored Lincoln's commitment to colonizing African Americans outside the country, which he advocated widely throughout his entire political career, a position he shared with his political hero, Henry Clay. This was no fleeting notion. Lincoln's commitment to the idea of deporting black Americans is mentioned in numerous prewar speeches, two State of the Union addresses, several Cabinet meetings, and in a notorious meeting with African American leaders at the White House, at which he urged them to encourage their followers to leave the country.

Lincoln was hardly alone in his idea that America was a white republic. Virtually every major political leader of the early republic held this view, including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, John Marshall, and even George Washington himself. Historians have simply decided to excise this indecent aspect of Lincoln, so that they can force his image into the mold of the sainted president, which was invented as a device to manipulate public opinion in favor of any policy of the sitting leadership. Historians all quote Lincoln's allusion to the "monstrous injustice" of slavery in his Peoria speech of 1854, but not the passage in the SAME speech asserting that he would send the liberated slaves "to Liberia - to their own native land." A phrase Lincoln used even though some African Americans' ancestors had been in north America longer than Lincoln's!

Historians are so selective about history that they virtually re-write it. They cite Lincoln's message to Congress in December 1862, with its eloquent passage about the "fiery trial" through which the nation was passing due to his leadership, but they never note that, in the SAME speech, Lincoln not only affirmed his strong support for colonization of black Americans in Africa, but for the first time used the ominous word, "deportation." Lincoln's racism was not just a lightly held notion, but was the center and circumference of his being, as one of his most deeply held beliefs. He resisted the abolitionists in the Republican Party from the very start, and had no intention of implementing their agenda. He was in fact a major supporter of slavery in the United States, and in and of himself was an oppressor. That is why he was so able to send the country into a Civil War, and then suspend the constitutional right to Habeas Corpus, and throw his political opponents in jail without warrants; the fact that the opponents he threw in jail were not African Americans illustrates the fact that he was equally at ease penalizing members of the white community as well as any other ethnic group, because Lincoln was above all the leader of a police state, which, as a corporate attorney, he was intensely aware of.

In the end Lincoln was a political opportunist. One contemporary remarked that he was a "first rate second-rate man." Before his career as a politician he had served as a corporate attorney for some of the biggest interests in Illinois, including railroad corporations. He was also responsible for authoring important legal papers which defined the powers of corporations, and which became precedents in the progress of corporations to becoming recognized as the equivalents of natural persons, as "legal persons." As president Lincoln was very good to the railroads, signing legislation that virtually gave away miles of public land to the railroads, for free. What is also often overlooked by historians busy painting a rosy hue over the presidency and its multitude of presidential families, was the fact that Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln, went on to a successful career as the president of the Pullman Car Company, which became famous for the public disorders that took place in its company town of the same name.

Lincoln did not decide to make the emancipation of slaves a central issue in the Civil War until the North was nearly defeated. What is generally neglected in the average person's understanding of the causes of the Civil War is the exceedingly legalistic conflict that erupted over the legal doctrine called "nullification." It is far easier to get people excited over the War by telling them that it was fought to free slaves, than by telling them the truth that it was started because the states' politicians thought that they could nullify federal legislation within their states' borders, and the Federal Government claimed that they could not. Like the idea that the Revolution was fought to save Americans from "taxation without representation," the conflict over nullification reads like an attorney's manual. Due to Lincoln's assassination by a racist Confederate supporter, he gains the upper hand when it comes to public sympathy, because no matter how foul anyone might be, the decent majority are offended by the murder of a human life. This is why later attempts by so-called "anarchists," (members of a 19^th century extremist ideology that was born out of middle-class reaction to the totalitarian practices of states), to topple oppressive regimes by assassinating their leaders, all failed. Because by murdering people, all they generated was sympathy for the targets.

The fact that Lincoln did not want to free slaves does not mean that the liberation of people is not a significant issue; but if America were truly founded for the purpose of liberating human beings, the slaves would have been emancipated in 1776. In fact, the English did liberate their slaves in 1772, and slaves from all over the colonies deserted their masters for port cities, because if they could make landfall in England they would be emancipated by the Royal Government. Rather than increase the desire among white Americans to liberate their slaves, this had the ugly side-effect of causing resentment against the British for causing American slaves to desert their American masters. Abraham Lincoln is the favorite President of the United States for many people, but only because what they know of him is false. It is a disservice to America for her people not to know the truth, because without truth, there can be no justice.

http://www.worldfreeinternet.net/news/nws198.htm

Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization

MICHAEL VORENBERG

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Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts [End Page 22]   The last day of 1862 was a busy one for Abraham Lincoln. Aside from his daily trudge to the War Office, which in the wake of recent Union army defeats in the East at Fredericksburg and in the West at Vicksburg (the first assault) had become even ghastlier in its dependable gloom, the commander-in-chief also had to make final preparations for his boldest measure so far, the Final Emancipation Proclamation, which he was to sign the next day. Early in the day he presided over the final discussion of the proclamation with his cabinet. That afternoon, with painstaking care, he began to write out the final document. Late into the night and into the dawn, Lincoln finished the document, although perhaps still not to his satisfaction. He knew, as he told Senator Charles Sumner, "that the name connected with this document will never be forgotten." 1	1
On that same day, December 31, 1862, Lincoln connected his name to a document that many of his adherents and later apologists would gladly forget: a contract with Bernard Kock, an ambitious and unscrupulous venturer, to use federal funds to remove some five thousand black men, women, and children from the United States to a small island off the coast of Haiti. It was Lincoln's last effort at colonizing blacks outside the United States, executed only one day before he was to sign a proclamation putting into effect his first official effort at permanently freeing slaves in the country.2	2
The juxtaposition of these two efforts — colonization, a remnant of a former generation's conservative approach to slaves and free blacks, and outright emancipation, a more progressive program with no provisions for sending freed slaves abroad or compensating their [End Page 23] former owners — has long perplexed and frustrated historians, just as it did Lincoln's contemporaries. Although most historians have conceded that Lincoln was motivated by politics as well as principle in his approach to emancipation and equal rights for blacks, there has been unending debate on his commitment to racial equality.3 On the specific issue of colonization, scholars have focused far less on Lincoln's political calculations and far more on possible racial motivations.4 Those who tend to see Lincoln as a racist usually assume that he never gave up the idea of deporting all free blacks, while those who believe in Lincoln as a racial egalitarian typically assert that his racial views matured as he realized that colonization could not work and that he came to believe that blacks had a legitimate claim to remaining in the United States.	3
An examination of Lincoln's efforts, and not just his rhetoric, in favor of colonizing blacks outside the United States suggests that Lincoln was as much motivated by political concerns as by his personal views toward blacks. His strategy was to propose colonization to sweeten the pill of emancipation for conservatives from the North and the border states, the slave states that did not secede during the Civil War; at the same time, he used political manipulation to prevent radicals from thwarting the colonization program and [End Page 24] thus jeopardizing his ultimate goal of making emancipation an acceptable war aim to the Union cause. Lincoln, always a careful politician, admitted nothing of political motives behind his advocacy of colonization, so we are left only with his actions and the opinions of his contemporaries to lend insight into his true intentions. Yet even with such limited evidence, a clear picture emerges of Lincoln using the prospect of black colonization to make emancipation more acceptable to conservatives and then abandoning all efforts at colonization once he made the determined step toward emancipation in the Final Emancipation Proclamation.	4
I
As a young politician in Illinois before the Civil War, Lincoln often voiced his belief that blacks and whites would live best if they lived separately. It was a belief he shared with the two American statesmen he revered most: Thomas Jefferson, an early advocate of gradual, voluntary emigration of blacks; and Henry Clay, a leader of the Whig party during the 1830s and 1840s and a founder of the American Colonization Society. The society, founded in 1816, sought to remove black Americans voluntarily to Africa. In 1821 the society purchased land in northwest Africa and set up the colony of Liberia, which remained a U.S. colony until it gained independence in 1846. The colonization movement foundered in the late 1840s but was resuscitated in the early 1850s as the American Colonization Society intensified its recruitment of black emigrants.5	5
Lincoln first proclaimed an interest in colonization during his eulogy for Henry Clay in 1852, when he admitted his allegiance to the esteemed Kentuckian's dual creed of gradual emancipation coupled with colonization. If slavery could be eliminated and the slaves returned to "their long-lost fatherland," claimed Lincoln, "it will indeed be a glorious consummation." Impressed by Lincoln's commitment to colonization, the members of the Illinois Colonization Society repeatedly asked him to speak at their meetings, and he obliged them in 1853 and again in 1855. Although by no means a leader of the colonization movement in Illinois, Lincoln still could use the issue to attach himself to the political tradition of Clay and, [End Page 25] as inheritor of Clay's stately mantle, to become a leading politician of the West.6	6
Henry Clay, Lincoln's beau ideal of a statesman
Lincoln's belief in colonization also worked to his advantage in many debates with Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas. In 1854, while Douglas campaigned for reelection and Lincoln campaigned [End Page 26] for the anti-Douglas coalition, the two met in a series of debates on the issue of the Kansas-Nebraska bill and its doctrine of popular sovereignty, which Douglas had helped formulate. Under Douglas's proposal, the people of any territory seeking admission to the Union would determine whether slavery could exist in the territory. Lincoln stood firmly against popular sovereignty and the extension of slavery that it would allow, but his stance left him politically vulnerable to Douglas's charge that he favored racial equality. Racism was prevalent in the Midwest in the 1850s. When Douglas tried to portray Lincoln as the friend of the blacks, Lincoln countered, as he did in a speech at Peoria, Illinois, by denying that he saw blacks as equals and by advocating the colonization of freed slaves in Liberia. Lincoln was aware, however, of the practical difficulties of such a program: "If they were all landed there [Liberia] in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days," he stated.7	7
Three years later in Springfield, Lincoln again debated Douglas. Now the issue was the Dred Scott case, and Douglas, the dominant force behind the Democratic party in Illinois and throughout the nation, accused not only Lincoln but also the entire newly formed Republican party of favoring black equality. Lincoln sidestepped Douglas's charge by discussing colonization instead: "I can say a very large proportion of its members are for it." Lincoln wanted the audience to believe that his advocacy of colonization was more than just a whimsical hope, that it was in fact a genuine party policy, albeit an unstated one. During the Senate race in 1858, Lincoln again invoked colonization, as well as an occasional statement of white superiority, to counter Douglas's charges that he favored racial equality. All through the debates Lincoln walked a narrow political path by refuting Douglas's support of slavery without claiming equal rights for blacks. Colonization, like no other issue, helped him stay the course.8	8
But Lincoln did not invoke colonization only when it was politically expedient to do so. In his first few months as president, at a time when there was no particular demand for a plan of colonization, [End Page 27] Lincoln took important steps toward such a plan. In October 1861, he asked Caleb B. Smith, secretary of the interior, to look into a proposal for colonizing blacks on the isthmus of Chiriqui, a small area in the northwest of present-day Panama.9	9
In his annual message to Congress in December of that year, Lincoln made his first public statement as president in support of colonization. Former slaves seeking refuge across Union lines, who were regarded as contraband, had aroused the racist fears of northern whites and threatened to become an economic burden. To alleviate the problem, Lincoln suggested that Congress appropriate funds for colonizing the slaves. He also advocated an additional step. "It might be well to consider," he submitted, "whether the free colored people already in the United States could not, so far as individuals may desire, be included in such colonization."10 Thus he called for not just a relief plan for the freedmen, but for a full program of racial separation.	10
II
Congress answered Lincoln's call in the next few months. Although few legislators considered full separation of the races either desirable or practical, many of the Republicans, who held a majority in Congress, were willing to vote for small-scale colonization projects. During March and April 1862, as Congress debated whether to emancipate slaves in Washington, D.C., Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin argued for appropriations for the voluntary emigration of the freed slaves from the District. His arguments incurred angry rebuttal from Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky and many other border state Unionists who favored forced deportation of the former slaves. If the freedmen were not forced to leave, Davis said, "The negroes that are now liberated, and that remain in this city, will become a sore and a burden and a charge upon the white population." Doolittle refuted such statements with impassioned pleas for the humanity of voluntary colonization. In addition, he argued against restrictions on how the president should use the $100,000 proposed for colonization. It was only after Doolittle received opposition on [End Page 28] this point from a fellow northern Republican, John Hale of New Hampshire, that he suggested a generous maximum of $100 be spent on each emigrant.11	11
Meanwhile, Francis P. Blair, Jr., of Missouri, a longtime advocate of colonization, defended Lincoln's policy in the House of Representatives. On April 12, 1862, the day after slavery was abolished in Washington, D.C., Blair admitted that Liberia had "failed to attract the freed negro population in any considerable numbers," but proclaimed his optimism about the possibility of Negro colonization in Central America. "There is a vast difference," he said, "between the idea of being colonized on our own continent, under our own flag, and being buried in Africa." Blair not only believed in colonization as a remedy to present and future racial hostilities, but also well understood how the promise of colonization could help undercut the political power of slaveholders in the Confederacy: "We can make emancipation acceptable to the whole mass of non-slave-holders at the South by coupling it with the policy of colonization. The very prejudice of race which now makes the non-slaveholders give their aid to hold the slave in bondage will induce them to unite in a policy which will rid them of the presence of negroes."12 The arguments of Blair in the House and Doolittle in the Senate helped lead to a congressional appropriation of $100,000 to be used by the president for colonizing the freedmen of the District.	12
Three months later, on July 16, 1862, Congress appropriated $500,000 more for the colonization of any other freedmen under the Second Confiscation Act, which allowed military commanders to free slaves held by southern rebels. Thus, only six months after suggesting a colonization policy, Lincoln had received $600,000 in congressional appropriations.	13
Historians who have analyzed the colonization issue assert that Lincoln called for colonization and Congress answered. Thus, in the words of Benjamin Quarles, "Lincoln's support of colonization succeeded in breathing a little life into the long-ailing movement." Implicit in the scenario is an assumption about the relationship between Lincoln and the Congress that has received criticism from such scholars as Harold Hyman, who disputes the notion that Lincoln [End Page 29] was the main force behind the government during the Civil War and calls for a more detailed analysis of the role of Congress in forming Lincoln's Civil War policy.13	14
Perhaps such an approach could allow more insight into the colonization issue. Rather than assuming that Congress was solely responding to Lincoln's agendas, historians might ask how congressmen with their own agenda influenced Lincoln's decisions. Even before Lincoln took office, Blair and Doolittle had argued for colonization, and Senator Benjamin F. Wade had supported a specific plan of colonization in Central America. This prior congressional action may have reinforced Lincoln's own inclination toward setting in motion a colonization plan. He could only be pleased that Congress, in its act to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, joined emancipation to his own "two principles of compensation, and colonization ... and practically applied [them] in the act."14	15
Furthermore, before Lincoln delivered his annual message of 1861, he had received key support for a plan of colonization in Chiriqui from Francis P. Blair, Sr., the eternal sage of Silver Spring, Maryland, who had once served in President Andrew Jackson's "Kitchen Cabinet" and now occasionally advised Lincoln. Knowing that Blair's sentiments were shared by his sons, Francis P. Blair, Jr., in the House, and Postmaster-General Montgomery Blair in his cabinet, Lincoln could be confident of further support as he moved ahead in his plans for colonization.15	16
III
It is difficult to account for the lapse of time between the congres- [End Page 30] sional appropriations for colonizing blacks in April 1862, and Lincoln's initiation of an actual plan of colonization four months later. By mid-July, Lincoln had more than just congressional endorsement of colonization; he had an actual appropriation. Yet he waited until much later that year before taking any measures toward such a plan.	17
Lincoln certainly had many options from which to choose. Caleb Smith, his secretary of the interior, had informed him on May 9 of private investors who owned available lands in Honduras, Costa Rica, and Chiriqui. Any of these plans of colonization might be suitable, Smith said, as long as the United States did not violate the terms of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty between the United States and Britain, which prohibited either country from exercising sovereignty over lands in Central America. Moreover, Smith wrote a week later, "Prompt action on the part of the Executive is required to meet the wishes of Congress and the growing sentiment of the country in favor of the experiment of colonization authorized by the law of April 16."16	18
Although Lincoln hesitated in approving any of Smith's plans, he was more than willing to use the prospect of colonization for political purposes. In an appeal to representatives from the border states on July 12, he reiterated his desire for gradual emancipation. He assured the delegation that "Room in South America for colonization can be obtained cheaply, and in abundance."17 His reference to South America instead of Central America, the area most likely to be colonized, suggests that he cared less about the actual details of colonization than about offering it as a way of gaining border state acceptance of emancipation.	19
Perhaps Lincoln held all plans of colonization in abeyance at this time because he was more concerned about how to move on the larger issue of emancipation. During the ten days following his meeting with the border state representatives, he took definite steps toward freeing the slaves. On July 13, he told Secretary of State William H. Seward and Secretary of Navy Gideon Welles that he was considering emancipation, and on July 21, he proposed to his cabinet a military order to enlist blacks as troops, to employ them as laborers, and to colonize them in the tropics. This was the first time Lincoln introduced the colonization issue to the cabinet. Ac- [End Page 31]   Secretary of State William Henry Seward [End Page 32]   cording to Secretary of Treasury Salmon P. Chase, colonization was hardly discussed, and at the cabinet meeting the next day, it was dropped entirely, while the other two measures were accepted. 18 Because Lincoln had just signed an act approving $500,000 for colonization, he probably felt obliged to bring up the issue with his cabinet. Yet he was not so dedicated to it that he would force the issue at the expense of generating ill sentiment among cabinet members that might jeopardize the two remaining orders or the Emancipation Proclamation, the first draft of which Lincoln read to his cabinet at the July 22 meeting.	20
Lincoln was still committed, however, to the idea that emancipation had to be linked to colonization. From August to December 1862, as he came closer to a final Emancipation Proclamation, he simultaneously tried to effect a successful plan of colonization. First, he sought to colonize Chiriqui. Lincoln set the Chiriqui project in motion by appointing James Mitchell as commissioner of emigration on August 4, 1862. Mitchell's first assignment was to assemble a delegation of five black leaders to meet with the president at the White House on August 14.19	21
At that meeting, the first and only time he would ever take the proposal of colonization directly to blacks, Lincoln assumed the unfortunate tone of a condescending father scolding ignorant children. "But for your race among us there could not be war," he observed, and he went on to prescribe their removal as the remedy. He had given up Liberia as an option for colonization because transportation there was too expensive and blacks preferred to remain on the American continent. Instead, he touted Central America, although not mentioning Chiriqui by name, as an area rich in coal where even a small band of colonists might succeed. When the prominent black abolitionist Frederick Douglass read about the meeting, he reacted with fury. "It expresses merely the desire to get rid of them," Douglass said of Lincoln's proposal for freed blacks, "and reminds one of the politeness with which a man might try to bow out of his house some troublesome creditor or the witness of some old guilt." Other blacks angry with Lincoln's words still supported his proposal. Henry Highland Garnet, a long-time advocate of vol- [End Page 33] untary emigration, praised the Chiriqui plan as "the most humane, and merciful movement which this or any other administration has proposed for the benefit of the enslaved."20	22
With seemingly no regard for black reaction to his plan, Lincoln pressed on. He was not even dissuaded upon receiving word on September 5 from the renowned scientist Joseph Henry that the coal deposits in Chiriqui were of the lowest grade. Lincoln went ahead and signed a contract with Ambrose Thompson, the land developer who owned the site, and he appointed Senator Samuel C. Pomeroy of Kansas as his agent of colonization. Pomeroy immediately began recruiting blacks for the new colony, now dubbed "Linconia" by the press.21	23
For a man who had decided to "advance slowly" on the issue of blacks, Lincoln seemed to be making some hasty and short-sighted decisions. Although he had told the black delegation to "Take [their] full time" in making a decision about the Chiriqui venture, he himself forged ahead with the project before learning whether enough colonists would volunteer. He touted the rich coal deposits in Chiriqui, but then chose to ignore Henry's dismal report. He signed a contract with Thompson despite the warnings of his secretary of the navy, who considered Thompson a scoundrel.	24
Perhaps Lincoln's most puzzling move was the appointment of Pomeroy as colonization agent. As a leading member of the New England Emigrant Aid Company in the 1850s, Pomeroy had experience in promoting an emigration program, and he had curried favor with Lincoln by supporting his candidacy at the 1860 Chicago convention. But the president certainly had heard the rumors that Pomeroy was a shady character, a man whom Welles suspected of having "a personal interest in the matter." No matter how sincere Pomeroy appeared in his desire to help execute the Chiriqui scheme, Lincoln should have been suspicious of a man who had opposed appropriations for colonization in April of that year and who in June [End Page 34] had mocked the idea of colonization by proposing in its place a measure to colonize freed slaves together with their former masters.22	25
IV
Northern newspaper editors refused to be taken in by colonization schemers, and they ridiculed the proposals of the president. The Democratic press voiced nothing but scorn. The New York Evening Express, run by the ever-intemperate Congressman James Brooks, complained that the cost of such a program would "entail upon the White Labor of the North, the doom and debt of the tax-groaning serfs and labor-slaves of Europe."23 The Republican press was equally critical. Henry Raymond's New York Times plainly gave its verdict: "No, Mr. Pomeroy. No, Mr. President. The enfranchised blacks must find homes, without circumnavigating the seas at the National expense." Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune agreed: "The blacks can neither be colonized across the Gulf, or sent through our lines to the North. Their numbers utterly forbid and render futile these measures save on the most limited scale." Lincoln would have to look elsewhere for support of the Chiriqui project.24	26
Even members of the American Colonization Society expressed dismay over the Chiriqui venture, suggesting that it had been effected for the sake of expediency. "Are the leading minds of our time incapable of perceiving the necessary temporary character of all such expedients?" one member asked. William McLain, financial agent for the society, felt especially snubbed by Lincoln's proposal. On August 14, 1862, Lincoln had met with McLain and Joseph J. Roberts, president of Liberia, and told them that he thought Liberia a fine place where free blacks could flourish. Less than an hour later, he proposed the Chiriqui plan to the black delegation. Furious at Lincoln's apparent deceit in praising the Liberia effort, McLain ridiculed [End Page 35] Mitchell, Pomeroy, and the entire Chiriqui plan: "Out upon all such men and such schemes!"25	27
Lincoln's decision to go forward with the Chiriqui plan in the face of such opposition may have been based on a purely political calculation. It was September of 1862, and Union armies were still faring poorly. Lincoln was ready to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as soon as there was a Union victory, but he knew how serious the effects of such a proclamation could be on the November elections.26 Emancipation without colonization may have seemed to Lincoln so radical a policy that it could result only in the demise of the Republican party in Congress and in the northern state legislatures.	28
Soon after Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, he had to suspend the Chiriqui plan because ministers from Central American countries objected to any such scheme without a treaty. Yet the project had served its purpose by allowing Lincoln to claim publicly that he had done something for the colonization movement. "[T]he effort to colonize persons of African descent," he wrote in the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, "with their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the Governments existing there, will be continued [author's emphasis]." In private, however, the president was not nearly so optimistic. He told Thompson that he was discouraged by rumors he had heard of the Chiriqui proprietor and some of his business associates using funds allocated to colonization to pay private debts. Finally, on October 7, 1862, Lincoln formally suspended the Chiriqui plan despite protest from Senator Pomeroy that 13,700 blacks had already applied for emigration.27 [End Page 36]	29
V
Two days after promising in his preliminary proclamation not to proceed with colonization without first entering into treaties with the Central American states, Lincoln assembled his cabinet to suggest that the United States make treaties with foreign governments in order to establish colonies. Welles remained against such treaties; Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was absent; and Seward, according to Welles's account, expressed some reservations. All others approved the proposal.28	30
That Lincoln waited so long to bring the Chiriqui plan to the attention of his full cabinet suggests another political dimension to colonization. He had dropped the colonization issue from cabinet discussions after July 22, 1862, when the issue threatened to distance his secretaries from him and from each other on the larger topic of emancipation; and, until the meeting of September 24, he had acted on his own initiative in the Chiriqui venture. By late September, after he had written colonization into his preliminary proclamation and after the Chiriqui scheme had threatened to embroil the United States in a diplomatic conflict, Lincoln had to bring the issue to the cabinet. A cabinet that had rejected an order for colonization in July now lent its support to the idea.	31
The cabinet's reversal might be explained simply as a reaction to the steps Congress and Lincoln had taken toward colonization. With $600,000 in appropriations available to the president, and various proposals for him to choose from, it was now clear to all that colonization was more than mere rhetoric. Another possible explanation might lie in Lincoln's skill at political management. Blair, Smith, and Attorney General Edward Bates had supported colonization, while Welles and Stanton had opposed it. Seward and Chase held the balance. Lincoln met Seward's concerns by agreeing to seek treaties for colonization.29 [End Page 37]	32
He approached Chase more indirectly. In July 1862, the secretary had opposed colonization. But over the next two months, he came to support "simple arrangements, under the legislation of Congress, by which any persons who might choose to emigrate would be secured in such advantages as might be offered them by other States or Governments." The intervening impetus behind Chase's new opinion may have been the appointment of his ally, Senator Pomeroy. Possibly Chase was swayed by Pomeroy's conversion from staunch opponent of colonization to leading agent of the movement and further impressed by Lincoln's decision to employ Pomeroy in one of his schemes.30	33
The colonization issue may again have played a part in cabinet dynamics when Lincoln promoted John P. Usher to succeed Caleb Smith as secretary of the interior in December 1862. Smith had been a loyal supporter of colonization, and Usher, as assistant secretary of interior, had personally extolled its benefits to Lincoln: "It will, if adopted, relieve the free states of the apprehension now prevailing, and fostered by the disloyal, that they are to be overrun by negroes made free by the war, [and] it will alarm those in rebellion, for they will see that their cherished property is departing from them forever and incline them to peace." In Usher, Lincoln found yet another ally in the cause of colonization.31	34
VI
Supported by his cabinet in his commitment to find diplomatically feasible ways of colonizing the freedmen, Lincoln decided to initiate a colonization scheme at Vache Island, a small island off the coast of Haiti owned by land developer Bernard Kock. Kock claimed to [End Page 38] have a diplomatic arrangement with Haiti that would permit the United States to colonize his island, although no one bothered to check the validity of his claim. Like Ambrose Thompson before him, Kock was a suspicious character. Even Bates, a consistent supporter of colonization, called Kock "an errant humbug." Despite these potential problems, Lincoln directed Usher to set up a contract with Kock; and on December 31, one day before signing the Final Emancipation Proclamation, he approved a contract for the transportation of five thousand blacks to Vache Island.32	35
Salmon Portland Chase [End Page 39]
Once more Lincoln had entered into a bargain with a questionable man to colonize blacks in a questionable place. As to why Lincoln pursued the plan, the answer again seems to lie in the timing of the scheme Posted at 02:03 pm by Psychomike Make a comment   Permalink Aug 9, 2008 Lincoln And Bush, Lincoln Quotes President Katrina by Joe Sobran [Breaker: George Bush as Liberal Icon?] George Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln. The choice of outfit and the ship were deliberate. During the fuss about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps, liberal critics were on the verge of making a few good points. But they missed the biggest point of all: George W. Bush is the fruit of their own liberalism. David Ignatius of The Washington Post quite properly noted that Bush and Dick Cheney make the dubious claim that the president's constitutional wartime authority “trumps everything,” even acts of Congress specifically forbidding, say, warrantless wiretaps. Sound familiar? Where have we heard this before? Yes, of course! Abraham Lincoln felt entitled to claim any powers he deemed necessary to perform his transcendent duty to “save the Union.” True, the Constitution didn't spell these out, but as Harry V. Jaffa has written, Lincoln “discovered” a whole “reservoir” of wartime powers implicit in Article II. Why shouldn't Bush imitate the great example of Lincoln, one of liberalism's gods? After all, liberalism adores “great” presidents, those who, like Lincoln and the Roosevelts, take a “creative” and “expansive” view of executive power, not necessarily going by the book. This approach dovetails nicely with the liberal view of the Constitution as a “living document” whose meanings evolve over time, adapting to new circumstances. President George W. Bush speaks at the dedication of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., Tuesday, April 19, 2005. "When his life was taken, Abraham Lincoln assumed a greater role in the story of America than man or President," said President Bush. "Every generation has looked up to him as the Great Emancipator, the hero of unity, and the martyr of freedom." White House photo by Eric Draper This is a game any number can play. Today liberals are understandably upset with what Bush is doing, and I'm not happy about it myself. But Bush and his men are merely doing what liberals have always done, finding new implications — penumbras and emanations and so forth — in the Living Document. And they have so many precedents on their side. This is just the Republican version of what the Democrats have been doing since Woodrow Wilson. (And Republicans had been doing it long before that.) I can't get hysterical about the remote possibility that my own phone may be wiretapped. The real danger is more general than that; and even to call it a “danger” is wrong, because it's a certainty, and it's already happening. All limits on federal power are going the way of the New Orleans levees. I must admit that the colossal and explosive growth of the federal government under Bush has surprised me. But I can't deny its logic, given the legacy of liberalism. What surprises me more painfully is that Bush has done all of this with so little protest or resistance from conservatives who should know better. However it happened, it has happened. The federal budget first reached a trillion dollars under Ronald Reagan; Bush has now proposed one of $2.77 trillion. And it's safe to assume even this figure understates the amount that will actually be spent. “The era of big government is over,” Bill Clinton assured us, lying as usual. What we didn't suspect was that Clinton was just the calm before the real storm, to wit, the political Hurricane Katrina that is the Bush administration. Who ever dreamed that a president calling himself a conservative would end any illusion that government could be limited? http://www.sobran.com/columns/     Abraham Lincoln, as cited in "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln," Roy Basler, ed. 1953 New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press: "I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races -- that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." An address by Abraham Lincoln at Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857 [Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol II, pp 408-9, Basler, ed.]: "A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as immediate separation is impossible the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. Such separation, if ever affected at all, must be effected by colonization The enterprise is a difficult one, but 'where there is a will there is a way:' and what colonization needs now is a hearty will. Will springs from the two elements of moral and self-interest. Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and at the same time, favorable to, or at least not against our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be." "The Great Proclamation" (1960), Commager, Henry Steele; "Mr. Lincoln's Proclamation" (1964), Donovan, Frank; "The Emancipation Proclamation" (1964), Franklin, John Hope, ed. THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION: Whereas on the 22nd day of September, A.D. 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit: "That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free... Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Palquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebone, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Northhampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued." NOTE - Slavery was NOT abolished in one Confederate (Tennessee) and four Union states (Maryland, Delaware. Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri). Abraham Lincoln 1859 [Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol III, pp 399, Basler, ed.] "Negro equality, Fudge!! How long in the Government of a God great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue to be knaves to vend and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagoguism as this?" -- "Constitutional Problems under Lincoln," James G. Randall, 1951, Urbana: University of Illinois Press: "Among the unconstitutional and dictatorial acts performed by Lincoln were initiating and conducting a war by decree for months without the consent or advice of Congress; declaring martial law; confiscating private property; suspending habeas corpus; conscripting the railroads and censoring telegraph lines; imprisoning as many as 30,000 Northern citizens without trial; deporting a member of Congress, Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, after Vallandigham - a fierce opponent of the Morrill tariff -- protested imposition of an income tax at a Democratic Party meeting in Ohio; and shutting down hundreds of Northern newspapers." The Glittering Illusion: English Sympathy for the Southern Confederacy, Sheldon Vanauken, 1989, Washington, DC: Regnery/Gateway. "...So Englishmen saw it. Lincoln's insincerity was regarded as proven by two things: his earlier denial of any lawful right or wish to free the slaves; and, especially, his not freeing the slaves in 'loyal' Kentucky and other United States areas or even in Confederate areas occupied by United States troops, such as New Orleans." The Confederate War, Gary Gallagher, 1998, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press: "The Emancipation Proclamation caused a desertion crisis in the United States Army. At least 200,000 Northern soldiers deserted; another 120,000 evaded conscription; and another 90,000 Northern men fled to Canada to evade the draft, while thousands more hid in the mountains of central Pennsylvania 'where they lay beyond the easy reach of enrolling officers.'" Abraham Lincoln, as cited in "The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln," Roy Basler, ed. 1953 New Brunswick, N.J.,: Rutgers University Press: "Send them to Liberia, to their own native land. But free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit this." Abraham Lincoln, as cited in "Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings," Roy Basler, ed. 1946, New York: Da Capo: "Some ten years later, in his December 1, 1862, message to Congress, Lincoln reiterated that 'I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization." "A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States," Alexander Stephens , 1870, Philadelphia: National Publishing Co.: "When asked by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stepehens at the 1865 Hampton Roads 'peace' conference what would become of the freedmen without property or education, Lincoln sarcastically recited the words to a popular minstrel song, 'root, hog or die.'" "Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation," Ira Berlin, 1987, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: "In an April 16, 1863, letter to the War Department regarding the fate of ex-slaves should emancipation become a reality, Lincoln wrote, ''They had better be set to digging their sustinence out of the ground.'" History of the administration of President Lincoln: including his speeches, letters, addresses, proclamations, and messages. With a preliminary sketch of his life; Raymond, Henry J.; 1864, New York, J. C. Derby & N. C. Miller, pp. 213 Pres. Lincoln's response of September 13, 1862, to a call for a General Emancipation: "Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel States? And what reason is there to think it would have any greater effect upon the slaves than the late law of Congress, which I approved, and which offers protection and freedom to the slaves of rebel masters who come within our lines? Yet I cannot learn that the law has caused a single slave to come over to us." Overland Monthly and Out West magazine/Volume 9, Issue 52, San Francisco, 1887, pp. 540, 541 - "An Episode of the Civil War," John T. Doyle "At another time, Mr. Lincoln publicly recommended Central America to a delegation of blacks who waited on him, as suited by climate and so forth to colonization by their people. In the fall of 1862 there appeared in New York a certain Mr. Koch, with a queer story and a queer project...he had conceived the project of taking to Santo Domingo a colony of blacks from the United States, procuring a grant of land, and settling them on it, to raise cotton. Mr. Lincoln was entirely captivated by it; ...The President made a contract with him (Koch) for the transportation of the first colony of blacks, four hundred in number, to his (Koch's) island of La Veche, at the price, I think, of $100 per head; to be paid, one half when the colonists had embarked, and the other half when they were safely landed on the island. Before many months were over, the President was constrained as a matter of mere humanity to send a vessel of war after the poor fellows, and the remainder of them was brought back and landed in Boston. The last thing I heard of them was a public meeting under violent anti-slavery auspices to denounce the brutal and inhuman conduct of President Lincoln, in sending these poor men into exile; and one or two of the negroes themselves appeared at the meeting in support of the resolutions! John T. Doyle" "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men," Jeffrey Rogers Hummel; Laissez Faire Books "The Lincoln Administration imprisoned at least 14,000 (Northern) civilians throughout the course of the war. ... The federal government simultaneously monitored and censored both the mails and telegraphs. ... It also suppressed newspapers. Over three hundred, including the Chicago Times, the New York World, and the Philadelphia Evening Journal, had to cease publication for varying periods." "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men," Jeffrey Rogers Hummel; Laissez Faire Books Former Democratic Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, running for governor, "delivered a speech in May 1863 that accused the President of unnecessarily prolonging the conflict. The Union commander in Ohio" -- never a war zone -- "rousted Vallandigham from his home at night and jailed him. A military court handed down a sentence of confinement for the war's duration, but public indignation forced Lincoln to commute the sentence to exile behind Confederate lines." Posted at 09:57 pm by Psychomike Make a comment   Permalink Aug 8, 2008 Jefferson Davis and Slavery WHAT WERE JEFFERSON DAVIS' VIEWS ON SLAVERY? There is no one more erased from history than the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis. Add up all the mentions of Lincoln in Ken Burns CIVIL WAR series, then try to find info about Davis. After all, if you were watching a series on the European theater of war in World War 2, and there were no mentions of Hitler while entire episodes were on FDR, wouldn't it strike you as odd? Most of Jefferson Davis' public references to slavery were associated with the rights of the states and people under the 10th Amendment. He seldom addressed slavery in and of itself except as a constitutional issue. He held private beliefs that slavery would end in a reasonable time, as it was ending in most parts of the world. One of his big concerns was the "property" aspect and just compensation to the owners for those emancipated. He had further concerns with the release of millions into a society with little or no means to provide their own shelter, food, clothing, medical and elder care. For the reasons above, and more, he advocated and supported Manumission, a process whereby a current slave could be awarded a share project from which he could earn money. This money would be held in escrow until an agreed amount could be paid for Free Man status. While history has not greatly extolled the results of Manumission or gradual emancipation, it was quite widely adopted, and the numbers of Free Men were growing as a result. In fact, there were more black Free Men in the South than the North at the outbreak of hositilities (due largely to northern state black codes and their tendency to "sell them South"). In European nations and colonies, slavery was abolished with gradual emancipation without any war whatsoever, allowing for owner compensation and the education of the people to become freemen. The other side of the question is the private side. This is the least known and publicized. In order to paint President Davis as some sort of barbarian, great distorions have been published. Worse, the real Davis has been carefully ignored. Those interested in a little research are invited to study the Brierfield Plantation in Mississippi, owned and operated by Jefferson Davis. Beyond what Davis wrote or said on the issue, it's revealing to see what Davis actually did regarding slavery. Some of the highlights you will find: The Brierfield overseer was a black man, James Pemberton. The slaves themselves maintained their social order at Brierfield. A judicial system was developed whereby any slave brought up on criminal charges would be tried by a panel of other slaves. Mr. Davis could not intervene other than to reduce a sentence. All slave families at Brierfield were kept together. A nursery and early grade school was developed for slaves (contrary to existing law). Slave families were assigned land to farm on their own time to accrue their own money. Provision were made for religious education. Mr. Davis arranged a special section of his own church for the slaves, who attended regularly. It was not uncommon that he sat with them during services. The Davis family took great interest in the well being of all of the slaves on the plantation. It is said that President Davis knew everyone by name, including the children. Little known and conspiculously missing from most published work on the subject is the fact that Mr. Davis paid for higher education for some of the slave children at Brierfield. He arranged for James Pemberton's son to attend an Ivy League University. Then, there is the story of Jim Limber. This particular story has been more widely told, particularly in the South. Few Northerners know the story. It began in Richmond, where he was President of the Confederacy. One day, while riding in their carriage from a function, Mr. and Mrs. Davis came upon a group of black boys beating another younger one. They broke up the melee and sent the marauders packing. They placed the beat up boy, Jim Limber, in the carriage and took him to the Confederate White House. There, he was cleaned up and attended to. He was given his own room. Over several days he became friends with the Davis children, and began taking meals with the family. As time went on, Jim Limber became very close with the children and Mr. and Mrs. Davis. Since he was a free orphan, they executed a legal custody arrangement. Jim Limber did everything the family did. He was with the family at the capture of President Davis at Irwinville, Georgia. He was separated from the family by their federal captors amid great anquish by the Davis children. Jim Limber was never heard from again. While in prison at Fortress Monroe, President Davis wrote the commander of the U. S. Army in the area inquiring of Jim Limber. It should be further noted he offered to pay for his keep and schooling. There was never a reply, official or otherwise. The Kennedy brothers, in their book WAS JEFFERSON DAVIS RIGHT?, tell the Jim Limber story and provide a photograph of him. http://georgiaheritagecouncil.org/site2/commentary/davis_davis_slavery.phtml Posted at 07:11 am by Psychomike Make a comment   Permalink Jul 29, 2008 Lies, and Presidential Lies Apotheosis of the Lie by Joe Sobran [Breaker: When Truth Is Relative, So Is Virtue] “I cannot tell a lie,” the mythical little George Washington told his father. Parson Weems seems to have invented this edifying tale, and it summed up the old American assumption that republican rulers should be virtuous men, with honesty chief among their virtues. The apotheosis of Abraham Lincoln included the popular myth of “Honest Abe.” These myths made a deep impression on generations of Americans. I know, because they made a deep impression on me. I still vividly remember reading children’s biographies of Washington and Lincoln in the second grade in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in a small classroom where the Ten Commandments were posted on the bulletin board. After reading that Lincoln had walked miles to pay a few pennies to a customer he had inadvertently shortchanged, I made a point of admitting my own faults whenever possible. It always made me feel good. It was a chief tenet of our patriotism that American presidents should be virtuous — or, as we were more likely to say, “godly.” That attitude persisted through the Vietnam War, when one of the chief charges of the war’s critics was that Presidents Johnson and Nixon were “lying to the American people.” It seemed a serious charge at the time, so serious that I could hardly believe it even of Johnson, much as I disliked him. Could a liar even get into the White House? Surely our system was designed to weed out ungodly men before they achieved power! For the same reason I was reluctant to believe the charges brought against Nixon during the Watergate scandal. The idea of a mendacious president was simply unbearable to me. And not only to me: in 1959 the American public was deeply shocked to learn that Dwight Eisenhower had lied when he denied that a U-2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union had been on an espionage mission. Well, as Sam Goldwyn once observed, “We have all passed a lot of water since then.” I was very naive well into my adult years, but my trust was in keeping with the decorum of the time, including its reticence about sex. Even the sophisticated pundit Walter Lippmann, when he accused Johnson of lying about Vietnam, used the ironic euphemism “credibility gap.” We’ve heard all too much about the “lessons” of Vietnam and Watergate, but those two debacles did destroy the old decorum. They both proved that presidents could not only lie, but lie with disastrous results. We should have known this all along. Some of us did, but many of us (including me) really didn’t. Even when, throwing off my family’s loyalty to the Democratic Party in my early twenties, I came to despise Franklin Roosevelt, I was made uneasy by conservatives who insisted that he’d lied to get us into World War II. I still preferred to think of liberalism in general as an honest mistake. That gets harder and harder with the years. After a while, even honest mistakes lose their innocence and have to be sustained by ignoring, and eventually falsifying, the facts. Today I find many of the same people who roasted Johnson and Nixon for lying defending the lies and perjuries of Bill Clinton. Worse yet, liberals — and their neoconservative cousins — have developed a new tradition of actually praising certain presidential lies. It has become a dogma of the progressive elements among us that Franklin Roosevelt, faced with the threat of Hitler, had no choice but to lie to the public, which was in an “isolationist” mood. So it was actually virtuous of FDR to deceive, mislead, and withhold vital information from the American people when they went to the polls. Roosevelt didn’t just lie on one crucial occasion. He was a totally devious man, as close students of his life have always known. His defenders admit that he “misjudged” Stalin, but insist that he was forced to make a wartime alliance with him. Actually, Roosevelt’s beneficence to Uncle Joe began in 1933, when he extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union despite the well-publicized Soviet “agricultural policy” of starving millions of Ukrainian peasants for resisting forced collectivization. Roosevelt knew a fellow collectivist when he saw one, and he recognized a natural ally in the Soviet dictator. He even defended the Soviet constitution, assuring Americans that it, like our own Constitution, guaranteed religious freedom. He praised his own ambassador Joseph Davies’ absurd book, Mission to Moscow, which justified even the Moscow show trials, and urged Warner Brothers to make a major motion picture of it. In fact, Roosevelt trusted Stalin more than he trusted Winston Churchill (not that Churchill warranted anyone’s trust, either). Official wartime propaganda portrayed the cunning monster as “Uncle Joe,” our democratic ally against the Axis dictators. Yet a recent article in The New Republic distinguished between Roosevelt’s “noble” lie that drew America into World War II and Lyndon Johnson’s wicked lies that drew America into Vietnam. Such defenses of FDR have become standard. They show that sophisticated liberals now have no objection to lying in anything they regard as a good cause. We’ve come a long way from Honest Abe. As a matter of fact, Honest Abe himself has undergone revisionism. His myth has been undermined not by Confederate sympathizers, but by one of his chief contemporary worshippers: Garry Wills. In his 1992 book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, Wills argues that Lincoln’s sternest critics had a point. One contemporary newspaper accused Lincoln of “misstat[ing] the cause for which [the Union soldiers] died,” namely, “to uphold [the] Constitution,” not to free slaves. Wills doesn’t disagree. The Gettysburg Address did indeed mislead Americans about the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; Wills argues that this “giant (if benign) swindle” was all to the good. At Gettysburg, Lincoln subtly “corrected” the Constitution. He “performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting.” Wills agrees with conservatives like M.E. Bradford and Willmoore Kendall, who regard the Gettysburg speech as (in his words) a “clever assault upon the constitutional past,” a “stunning verbal coup,” even “a new founding of the nation.” Indeed, he gloats that Lincoln got away with this “swindle,” which has made possible the centralization of power the Framers of the Constitution had tried to prevent. Wills acknowledges that Lincoln was “subverting the Constitution,” but he thinks it deserved to be subverted. It’s a curious transformation — not only of Honest Abe, but also of Garry Wills, who, 30 years ago, was writing acidly about Richard Nixon’s lies. But his praise of Lincoln’s “swindle” has been warmly received by liberal opinion; it actually won a Pulitzer Prize for history! Something has changed in the American ethos, and we shouldn’t marvel that the elites are so forgiving of more recent presidential swindles. http://www.sobran.com/columns/ Posted at 12:04 am by Psychomike Make a comment   Permalink Jul 25, 2008 The Trial Of Jefferson Davis The Case Against Jefferson Davis What, exactly, happened in the case of The United States v. Jefferson Davis? Enough intrigues, maneuvers, plot twists, and changes of the political wind exist to fill a book (and it would make a good one). It is quite a complex matter, but the bottom line is that the case never went to trial and the indictments were dismissed. The proceedings dragged on into 1869, but Davis himself was only in the courtroom on two separate days. Davis was captured by troops and held at a military base (Fort Monroe) in a state (Virginia) under martial law. Had he been linked to the Lincoln assassination, his trial would have taken place before a military tribunal, but the fabricated case connecting him to the assassination (the primary informant was convicted of perjury) fell apart before Davis was charged. The government soon decided that any trial for treason would have to be in a civil court, and in Virginia, the base of Davis' alleged treasonable activities, directing armed rebellion against the United States. Neither John C. Underwood, circuit court judge for the District of Virginia, nor Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, who presided over the circuit including the Virginia district, felt he had any authority as long as Davis was held by the military. Chase in particular wanted to avoid such dangerous legal waters, and he continued to find excuses to avoid hearing the case. Underwood's competence was questionable, and he was known to be overly zealous (he had bragged to a congressional committee in 1866 that he could pack a jury to insure a conviction), so Chase's presence was essential for a respectable verdict. Because of the issues of military control of Davis' imprisonment, Chase refused to issue a writ of habeas corpus in June 1866, but almost a year later, in conjuction with an order to the military authorities from the president, a writ of habeas corpus brought Davis to Richmond to be transferred to the authority of the federal courts. He appeared before Underwood on May 13, 1867, bail was set at $100,000, and the bond was immediately posted. "Deafening applause" broke out in the courtroom when Davis was freed. Horace Greeley, one of a growing number of northerners who wanted the case settled so the country could get on with the healing process, had secured backing for the bond and personally guaranteed a quarter of it. He was in the courtroom that day and met Davis after his release. After half a year with his family in Canada, Davis returned to Richmond in November 1867 for what was supposed to be the beginning of the trial. Court convened on the 26th, but Chase was not present, and the government asked for a postponement. Davis was released on his own recognizance, and the defense asked that some sort of consideration be given him so he would not be "subjected to a renewal of the inconvenience" of making the trip to Richmond if a trial was not going to be held. As it turned out, Davis would not have to appear in court again during any of the subsequent proceedings. As time passed, many elements changed, and so did the players. U.S. attorneys general came and went (three different men were involved in the Davis case). Andrew Johnson was impeached and nearly convicted. And the 14th Amendment was passed and ratified. Johnson began to fear that if Davis were tried and acquitted--a very real possibility with a Virginia jury--he (Johnson) would be impeached again and removed from office. For a variety of reasons, no significant action was taken until after the 1868 election. In an unusual twist, Chase made known to Davis' attorneys, a distinguished group of northern and southern litigators, his opinion that the third section of the 14th Amendment nullified the indictment against Davis. His contention was that by stripping the right to vote from high Confederate officials, a punishment for treasonable activities had been legislated, so Davis could not be punished again for the same crime. Davis' friends reminded his lawyers that Davis (who was in Europe and out of telegraphic range) wanted a trial because he saw it as an opportunity to vindicate both himself and the actions of the Confederacy, i.e. the constitutional right to secede. Davis' lawyers, however, pointed out that Davis' life was at stake, and there was a general agreement that they could not pass up the opportunity to arrange what they believed to be an honorable settlement. One of the attorneys later wrote Davis that the defense team also felt that if they could establish a precedent based on the 14th Amendment, it would lift the threat of prosecution for other Confederate leaders as well. On November 30, 1868, Davis' lawyers filed a motion requiring that the government attorneys show cause why the indictment (the latest of at least four indictments which had been handed down with the same charge--another long story) should not be quashed. A hearing on the motion was held before Chase and Underwood on December 3-4, and on the 5th they announced their finding. The vote was split--Chase favoring laying aside the indictment, and Underwood, who had overseen the grand juries responsible for the indictment, wanting the case to be tried. Chase's anger with Underwood was obvious, and he stated for the record why he believed the 14th Amendment exempted Davis from further prosecution. The certificate of division between Chase and Underwood was forwarded to the Supreme Court, and the indictment technically remained pending, but there would be no more action taken. It was clear that Chase would favor overturning a guilty verdict, making the government hesitant to proceed. The Davis case remained on the circuit court docket for February 15, 1869, but the government indicated at that time that it would not prosecute (nolle prosequi). The indictment was, therefore, dismissed, as were indictments against thirty-seven other ex-Confederates, including Robert E. Lee. Davis' lawyers contacted the Justice Department to make sure that other indictments against him in Washington and Tennessee were not going to be prosecuted. The full story of the case remains to be told, but there are a couple of articles which provide good background information. Eberhard P. Deutsch, "United States v. Jefferson Davis: Constitutional Issues in the Trial for Treason," American Bar Association Journal, 52 (Feb. and March 1966): 139-45, 263-68, deals with the legal matters of the case. Roy F. Nichols, "United States vs. Jefferson Davis, 1865-1869," American Historical Review, 31(Jan. 1926): 266-84, covers many of the political issues involved. Bradley T. Johnson's detailed court record is reprinted in Davis, Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist, edited by Dunbar Rowland (10 vols., 1923), 7:138-227. No work has been done on public perception of the case in North and South. The involvement of influential northerners, with Horace Greeley at the center of activity, was a major factor in what transpired. There is also much left to be written about the maneuvering of Chase, Johnson, and the Justice Department. http://jeffersondavis.rice.edu/faqs.cfm Posted at 10:05 pm by Psychomike Make a comment   Permalink Next Page