Reflections on Being Called a Swine

Towards the end of the comment section of Tuesday's edition of A Red Mind In A Blue State , I am called a swine, and told to look at a book designed to de-swine me Benjamin Morris, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States.

I don't feel it appropriate to write a 500-word response in a comments section, so I only wrote a little there. My full comments are:

On The Religious Leanings of the Founding Fathers

Nice of you to direct me to a book written during the Civil War, because it allows me to share with you my basic bedtime story --

The single fact of American history is that the Union won the Civil War in 1865 -- slavery was abolished (13th Amendment) -- equal protection (14th Amendment) and voting rights (15th Amendment) were added to our Constitution.

And those people who lost the war, and who were forced to eat non-sweetened Jim Crow, forced to come back into the Union with the new amendments, they have been trying to reverse that result ever since.

They try to minimize the effect of those amendments. They try to say that the Amendments did not mean freedom, did not mean equality (and diminish States Rights), and did not give anyone the full right to vote.

(And nowadays, for sure, things are looking up for people who think like that. That voting rights decision from Indiana, just this week -- Good job)

So on one level, it has been an outrageous rewrite of American History, for the whole time from 1861 onwards, to even care too much about what the Founding Fathers wanted.

Because everything they wanted was mixed in with the compromises that they had to make on slavery.

Because everything they wanted was washed away, as Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural, in the 250 years of blood from the lash, and the 250 years worth of blood drawn from the sword.

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And out of all that blood, came the only good news out of the whole 4 year ordeal

Lincoln's New Birth of Freedom.

Which meant that the old constitution was void. It still had some purpose - but mostly as background for the new Constitution, the one with the new amendments attached to the end.

And then non-believers killed Lincoln on Good Friday.

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When people say that the country has been in decline since the 60s, and everything that happened since then is a mistake, or that such and such a thing proves that the 60s spirit is still alive, or that such and such a thing proves that the 60s are over, and good riddance, I always have to ask

Which 60s are you talking about?


At What Point Did America Go To Hell In A Handbasket?

Slavery was abolished in the 60s, and the 14th Amendment gave all citizens equal rights. Among other things, a labor movement, a woman’s suffrage movement, and a civil rights movement, and an attempt to inch the concept of equal rights closer to reality.

At which of those points can the country be said to go downhill?

Was it when slavery was abolished?

When we decided we had killed enough Indians?

When we released the Japanese from the concentration camps?

When we decided that maybe 15-year old girls were too young to be mothers? That maybe they ought to have a few years to get an education and figure out one or two ways to make their own money?

When the lynchings went underground, and the wife and kiddies were no longer invited to spend Sunday afternoons cheering along?

Some people say it was the invention of ragtime.

Others say it was the invention of jazz.

And all of these low points that caused -- as you put it --the country's long decline towards equality -- where the riffraff think they're good as you and me -- all these things occurred before the invention of television.

Abe Lincoln In Illinois -- 1856

The Case of Abraham Lincoln by Julie Fenster (2007 Palgrave MacMillan)(228 pages plus notes and index)

"Looking over the Know-Nothing platform (the Democrats) did not notice any animosity towards old bachelors, only towards foreigners, and especially Catholics. With that the country was drenched with the news that John Fremont was a Catholic -- a lie they managed to back up with facts. For instance, although Fremont was a practicing Episcopalian, his father had indeed been a Catholic. And Fremont had been married by a Catholic priest, due to his Protestant clergyman being indisposed at the last minute. In the campaign of 1856, that was more than enough to sustain a scandal that followed the Republican campaign all year .. To them (being married by a priest) amounted to a kind of treason, and the Anti-Nebraskans undoubtedly lost votes because of it."

The book covers the murder of a blacksmith in Springfield Illinois in 1856. The blacksmith's wife and his nephew, who was boarding with them at the time, are the prime suspects. Wife and nephew/ boarder may have had something going on. The case pulls in all of the leading Springfield attorneys at the time. Some of these names -- William Herndon and John Stuart, along with the Judge, David Davis -- are familiar to Lincoln buffs.

While all this was happening, Lincoln was hardly in town. He was busy helping to form the new "Anti-Nebraska" Party in Illinois, making speeches for the Presidential candidate, John Fremont, practicing law on the Illinois circuit, which seems a lot like a travelling circus (in the best sense of the word), and leaving his wife to supervise the renovation of their home.

The book paints an interesting picture of Lincoln on the cusp of fame, and what mid-century small-city life was like for the rising man. It also paints a pretty nice picture of the "hurry-up-and-wait" nature of the legal practice, and the theatrics of the political rallies and stump speeches. One interesting vignette shows how Lincoln, due to a scheduling conflict, had to move a speech up a few hours. So he was speaking at one corner of the square (probably more like an undeveloped field), and other speakers were competing for attention at other parts of the square.

The book, in part due to its short length, has problems of focus -- it spends too much time on this, and not enough time on that.

In particular, the book makes too little of the fact that Lincoln, without really being too famous, and without being there, or having any of his major supporters there, was the runner-up for the Republican Party Vice Presidential nomination in 1856. The book does not even mention John Brown at all, or Dred Scott at all.

On the other hand, the book has the fullest development of the so-called "Lost Speech" (the first speech that Lincoln made as a Republican)that I have seen. The tag line to a South threatening secession --

"We WILL not go out; and you SHALL not go out."

Abraham Lincoln in New York City -- February 27, 1860

I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To do so, would be to discard all the lights of current experience - to reject all progress - all improvement. What I do say is, that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot stand; and most surely not in a case whereof we ourselves declare they understood the question better than we. …

But he has no right to mislead others, who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live" were of the same opinion - thus substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair argument. If any man at this day sincerely believes "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live," used and applied principles, in other cases, which ought to have led them to understand that a proper division of local from federal authority or some part of the Constitution, forbids the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories, he is right to say so. But he should, at the same time, brave the responsibility of declaring that, in his opinion, he understands their principles better than they did themselves; and especially should he not shirk that responsibility by asserting that they "understood the question just as well, and even better, than we do now." …

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"…

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas' new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us. …

*****

Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this? ...


If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively.

Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored - contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man - such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care - such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance - such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

I wrote about this speech the night Barack Obama addressed the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

The entire Cooper Union speech is here .

Happy Birthday Abe!

"What they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by war"

From Abraham Lincoln’s Message to Congress, July 4, 1861 talking about Fort Sumter and its aftermath. (I believe that the reference to “Washington” is to George Washington and neither to the city nor to the government that lives there.)

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It forces us to ask: "Is there, in all republics, this inherent and fatal weakness?" "Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?"

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This is essentially a people's contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men -- to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life. … (T)his is the leading object of the Government for whose existence we contend.

I am most happy to believe that the plain people understand and appreciate this.

It is worthy of note that while in this, the Government's hour of trial, large numbers of those in the Army and Navy who have been favored with the offices have resigned and proved false to the hand which had pampered them, not one common soldier or common sailor deserted his flag, .. To the last man, so far as known, they have successfully resisted the traitorous efforts of those whose commands but an hour before they obeyed as absolute law. This is the patriotic instinct of plain people. They understand, without an argument, that the destroying the Government which was made by Washington means no good to them.

Our popular Government has often been called an experiment.

Two points in it our people have already settled -- the successful establishing and the successful administering of it.

One still remains -- its successful maintenance against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it. It is now for them to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion; that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets; and that when ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided there can be no successful appeal back to bullets; that there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves, at succeeding elections. Such will be a great lesson of peace; teaching men that what they cannot take by an election, neither can they take it by war; teaching all the folly of being the beginners of a war.