If our title runs counter to your understanding of the place in history of The Great Emancipator, you should read Mr. Alexander's piece.
Lincoln was responsible for distorting the Constitution, initiating an unnecessary war, unnecessarily prolonging that war, brutalizing civilians, and suppressing dissent. He left us the disastrous legacy of an all powerful central government.
"The Lincoln Legacy Revisited ." By Mark M. Alexander, 2/17/06.
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2 comments:
Licoln did do all the things Mark Alexander said he did. It is all absolute truth. Nonetheless President Lincoln is still one of the preimminent leaders the federal Union of the United States of America has ever had.
If Lincoln had not done what he did America would have become a fragmented nation open to the continueing designs of Britain, France and emerging Germany.
Licoln served the greater good to preserve this nation which now is the most powerful nation in the world.
Lincoln may have accomplished the good that you describe. However, the more I read about the manner in which he suppressed dissent the more I am disquieted by Lincoln.
His determination to prevent secession of the South was also plainly contrary to the clear understanding of the States that ratified the Constitution and Lincoln did grave damage to it by denying the right of secession.
It is hard to justify the final result when one considers the terrible carnage of the war. All that for Lincoln's interpretation of the Constitution?
My father's father took a ball in the shoulder at Perryville and survived. His father suffered a debilitating hernia during the siege of Atlanta. Both men suffered from the effects of these injuries long after the war. Whatever result there might have been, I suspect they would have gone back to the same Illinois that they left and lived the same lives they lived that they would have had there never been a war.
So what was the point?
I am not well read in the history of the time, I confess, but I think Mr. Alexander's idea is reasonable, namely, that the South would have rejoined the Union anyway.
Even if the country split permanently, I am not convinced that the two parts would have been unsuccessful and weak.
Given how the U.S. government has come to dominate the states, I think it would not have been a bad thing that such a powerful government, whose authority today is founded in intellectually dishonest Supreme Court decisions, ended up controlling a smaller territory.
That is all quite academic now as the U.S. is what it is and we have all benefited from what it became.
My assessment of those benefits is colored by my belief that it would have been a different and, I think, better country if we had adhered to the Constitution as it was ratified. We would have a far more vibrant and diverse culture if the Commerce Clause, the 14th Amendment, and the Bill of Rights had not been contorted by the Supreme Court as they have.
It's a great country, but one in which its citizens are without a clear understanding of what their rights and the rights of the states are in the Constitutional scheme.
The de facto disposition of power is founded on the dreams of socialists and statists. Maybe the elites' long, long love affair with statism will give way to an interpretation of the Constitution that means less government and more liberty.
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