Those were some rough 30 days. 
That guy accomplished nothing…
Then I argue you are ignorant of American history. Have you actually read the words Lincoln spoke? It wasn’t just preserving the Union for the sake of the Union, but for the principles for which the government and our constitution stood.
The Federal government did not have a position to end slavery, Lincoln never campaigned on doing a single thing to prohibit slavery where it already existed. So I’m not sure what negotiating stance the Federal government should have taken. That they would overrule the laws of all non-slave states and make the whole country slave states? That they would enshrine the right to own slaves into the U.S. constitution so that it would be permanently protected? The South didn’t secede because the Federal government decided to end slavery, they seceded because for 80 years they had been able to bully the rest of the country into doing exactly what they wanted and in the election of 1860 they were unable to bully the country into electing a Democrat, so they took their ball and went home. The South did not want equality, they wanted to run the entire United States. In 1789 states like Virginia were the most populous, but by 1860 the South was only 1/3rd of the U.S. population yet its increased radicalism meant that for some generations Northern politicians had frankly been afraid of the South and would not vote to put men in office who would antagonize the South. That is why in a country in which Southerners were a minority you had a string of very pro-Southern Presidents before Lincoln (Buchanan, Pierce, Tyler.)
The South was very pro-slavery yet slavery and the agrarian-focused plantation system was economically injurious to virtually all whites aside from owners of more than 2-3 slaves (there’s some evidence that even small time slave owners would have been better off economically in a non-slave economy that was developing a manufacturing base–primarily because the slave economy essentially made entrenched, inherited property ownership the only way to advance whereas more fluid economic systems can lead to greater social and economic mobility.)
This situation was not accidental. Early in the country’s history there were significant abolition movements in the South. Eventually as the South radicalized the Southern gentry using their wealth and power silenced abolitionism by more or less intimidation and violence, and through their control of State legislatures were able to essentially destroy the abolitionist movement in the South.
Southern legislatures actually prohibited under penalty of law the possession of abolitionist literature. A writer in the 1850s, Hinton Helper, was a Southerner and published an anti-slavery tract that was very little about morality and almost entirely about the negative economic impact of slavery on most of the white South aside from large plantation owners. Helper’s work was banned and he was burned in effigy throughout the South.
These are just some of the blatant violations of already extant civil liberties by the governments of the Southern states. While the Bill of Rights did not apply to State law prior to the 14th Amendment, virtually every Southern state had a free speech provision in their constitutions that was routinely ignored or outright rejected by the gentry when it came to abolitionist literature or activity.
Basically, it is no accident that most of the South fought against the North to preserve a system that was to their detriment. It was because of a powerful oligarchy that used force, intimidation, and their disproportionate representation in the legislatures to legally prohibit any sort of speech that would undermine their position of power.
Perhaps I am somewhat ignorant of it, I’ve certainly learned things from this thread. I suspect I’m not the only person who is though, there’s a mythology that’s grown up around Lincoln that’s somewhat at odds with his words and actions.
You mention reading the words Lincoln spoke. Here are some from his Inaugural Address, concerning the proposed Corwin Amendment:
[QUOTE=Abraham Lincoln]
I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution—which amendment, however, I have not seen—has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service…[H]olding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Abraham Lincoln]
[I have] no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
[/QUOTE]
These do not seem to imply that he considered ending slavery to be his concern as President, nor his concern as the head of the US armed forces. I’m aware that he opposed slavery before he became President, here’s one quote I found -
[QUOTE=Abraham Lincoln]
I cannot but hate it. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world.
[/QUOTE]
So, either he wasn’t being truthful when he claimed that the war wasn’t about slavery, or he cared more about the survival of the political entity than the people. The Corwin Amendment would have enshrined slavery in the Constitution, and Lincoln was willing to accept that if the southern states rejoined the Union voluntarily. I suspect that, had they accepted and the amendment occurred, Lincoln would not be on many people’s favourite President list.
In the rest of your post, and in your reply to Freddy the Pig, you list many good reasons why change needed to come to the south, and come with some urgency. What I don’t see is any evidence that these are the actual reasons the north went to war.
Lincoln’s main goal was preserving the United States intact. He didn’t like slavery but it was not a goal of his or the Republican Party’s to try to eliminate slavery in the United States.
The Republican platform was that the states could decide their own policy on slavery and that the federal government could set slavery policy in the territories (platforms which the southern states opposed incidentally, which says all that needs be said about later claims the south was advocating states rights). As Lincoln observed, the Corwin Amendment would have just made this policy explicit in the Constitution.
This is entirely non-responsive to what Martin Hyde wrote. He did not claim that Lincoln started the war to end slavery, nor has anyone else in this thread made that claim.
Sorry, Steophan, but I’ve seen your arguments before (I grew up in Georgia, after all) and they fall apart for the obvious reasons:
- At Fort Sumter, the Confederates fired first. Period.
- Slavery was an evil worth going to war to rid the nation of, even if that wasn’t the original intent (akin to Holocaust and WW2). All the twisting arguments that tries to ignore the fact that slavery was the basis of the dispute in favor of states rights are twisted precisely because it is impossible to claim that “state’s rights” are a greater right than that of personal freedom. If Montana secedes tomorrow morning and institutes slavery of all females, can one seriously argue that they have the moral right to do so because the US once broke away from England and that’s more important than the fact that 400,000 people are now enslaved?
- In light of future world history, the US and the Confederacy were far better served being together than apart. Assuming Europe’s development mirrored our world, can you imagine the tragedy that would have occurred had the US and the Confederate states taken opposite sides in WW1 and WW2? Was the right to hold slaves (or even the “right” to break away from the Republic) worth the possibility of trenches around Washington DC?
To me, the consequences of a Confederate victory are too horrendous for me even to contemplate the “rightness” of their position, a position that, regardless of how they twisted it, came down to whether men had the right to own men. It wasn’t as if they broke off because of a goddamned trade dispute… they broke off because they wanted to bring their slave culture to the expanding West and the rest of the country was moral enough to say “Fuck that.”
Curtis is only young, and is smart enough to know he must re-evaluate his opinions, even if after study he retains his older views. AFAIK, he did read the Wiki summary of the book.
You, on the other hand, obviously didn’t even read the Wiki summary, yet still deign to intervene. :smack: 
The book is O’Neill’s personal impressions of Bush’s decision making. Given this, your “if the book is accurate, the actual facts will be presented somewhere else” is such a non sequitur, it makes me doubt that you knew even that much about the book.
And I don’t need to hear about “well-educated people who disagree with” O’Neill and myself, from someone so pretentious as to post about a book without even glancing at its linked-to Wiki summary.
My standard responses to this kind of question are “Madison and Buchanan”
Madison was the only US president to let the Capital get sacked by an invading army.
Buchanan was the only US president to have a civil war break out on his watch (Lincoln didn’t enter the picture until after the Secession and the attack on Fort Sumter).
Compared to either of these, anything else seems like small change to me. 
They have these things called libraries now. It’s really cool – you can borrow books, and they’re like, FREE. Amazing.
Also, your white knight schtick got old long before you joined this board. If Qin is going to participate in a debate, then he needs to address the points given to him, rather than wave them away. No matter HOW old he is. If you think we’re too hard on him because he’s “just a kid”, then maybe you feel he’s too young for this place?
:rolleyes:
I would like to point out to the other Hoover voters, that he had been in office only 8 months when the stock market crashed. Prior to that market crash, I am not aware of any drastic economic change that could have precipitated it. It is the economic policies of Calvin Coolidge and continued through early Herbert Hoover that caused the Great Depression.
The worst President was George W. Bush. After him, the worst President was Lyndon B. Johnson.
My point is that since other Presidents did equally bad things with no accomplishments they should be ranked below Nixon.
James Buchanan for obvious reasons.
Not to mention New England might have seceded over the War of 1812. We were incredibly lucky that the War of 1812 was a draw.
The slavocracy also imposed direct violations of the Federal constitution, such as the “gag rule” dismissing abolitionist petitions to Congress out of hand (an blatant asswipe of the petition clause of the First Amendment). John Quincy Adams’ repeated attacks on the rule via constant attempts to end-run around it were one of the ways he showed himself to be one of the best ex-Presidents.
Any updates?
(I’m sorry, just could not resist.)
Wow. We were so young, so innocent. We had no idea.
Trump and it’s not even a close call, IMHO.
For sure. He got us going down the road to destroying democracy and possible civil war.
All because of an out of control ego.
Trump. He knocked George Bush Jr. out of the number one spot. Of course the bar was set high, it took treasonous behavior to overcome such a high level of incompetence.