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Originally Posted by daswig
(pulling out my big honkin book of Lincoln quotes)
Here's one for you, Mephisto...
What's more interesting is that he actually carried through on it, having an Ohio Congressman named Vallandigham arrested, tried by a military tribunal, stripped of his citizenship, and deported.
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Not doubting your veracity here, but can you point us to a source for this?
Well sure he sounds like a white supremacist now, but he was saying these things 145 years ago. You have to understand that these postions were considered radically progressive at the time. Sending the slaves back to Africa was a common abolitionist plan. In fact it is the final didactic message of
Uncle Tom's Cabin, heard of it? Liberia was founded as an American colony of ex-slaves so it was infinitely preferrable for slaves to the South's plan of perpetual work without pay for them, their children, their children's children etc.
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The Emancipation Proclaimation was a tool to use against the South during the war. You'll remember that NORTHERN slaves had to wait for the ratification of the 13th Amendment to be freed...which happened well AFTER Lincoln's death.
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Well on paper, sure, the reality at the time was a different story. Lincoln knew what he was doing when he wrote the Emancipation Proclaimation. You have to remember that freeing all the slaves would have have been highly unpopular even in the North.
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Or how about Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeus corpus in 1861, and his imprisonment of a decent chunk of Maryland's legislature in Fort McHenry? Let me ask you this...what would you think if Bush had filled Gitmo with Congresscritters who opposed the war? Because that's pretty much what Lincoln did. The Supreme Court said basically "You can't do that, that's unconstitutional!" in U.S. v. Merryman, issuing a writ ordering the release of the imprisoned lawmakers. Lincoln's response? He ignored it and left them in jail. Eventually Congress passed a law giving him that power....but only AFTER he'd already purged everybody that disagreed with him (like Vallandigham).
So, I guess Lincoln has some problems as far as considering him the greatest American...unless, of course, Julius Caesar was the greatest "president" of the Roman Empire...
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Not sure I understand your Julius Caesar-Abe Lincoln analogy. Are you saying that had he lived Lincoln would have declared himself emperor for life? I don't really see that in his personality. It's funny that you feel the need to assassinate our first Republican's character. You're not one of those "the South really won" people are you? Because the South got their asses collectively kicked in the civil war, even with the greatest American general, Robert E. Lee, commanding their army.