150 years ago today - Lincoln shot

crimsonaudio

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I kind of expected this would drift into one of these discussions, and I'm glad it has. Lots of stuff being posted here I had either forgotten or simply didn't know.

Thanks, Tidewater.
 

Tidewater

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I agree. I just think the dynamics of what was going on, especially considering Missouri and Kansan, most probably would have started the fighting anyway and others would have joined those from each side. There is obviously no way of knowing.
Ask a Kansas (at least one that is historically aware) and he'll tell you the war started out there in the mid-1850s.
Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee had big enough Unionists minorities that infighting would have been a distinct possibility if peaceful secession of the Deep South was allowed to stand.

True. I think most people misunderstand this when discussing the dynamics of what happened. The whole United States is/are change is indicative. BTW:

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wordroutes/the-united-states-is-or-are/
Basil Gildersleeve, Confederate cavalryman, and world renowned scholar of Latin and Greek, said it was a war about grammar ("The United States are ..." vs. "the United States is...")

Thanks. That is one of the reasons I rummaged. I think there is ample evidence that there were plenty of people itching for a fight on both sides.
Yes, there was plenty of that going on. Just like at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War and of World War I.
 

Tidewater

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There is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance when some read of Abraham LIncoln in some other light than the cartoon character Saint Abraham view of the man.

General Don Piatt, an officer in the Union Army, a man of some culture and literary attainment, who knew Mr. Lincoln personally. On the subject of the "real Lincoln," Piatt wrote:

Don Piatt said:
With us when a leader dies, all good men (meaning stanch Republicans) go to lying about him. From the monument that covers his remains to the last echo of the rural press, in speeches, in sermons, eulogies, reminiscences, we hear nothing but pious lies. ... Abraham Lincoln has almost disappeared from human knowledge. I hear of him, I read of him in eulogies and biographies, but I fail to recognize the man I knew in life.
The man was complicated not the caricature presented in most histories. Piatt, who knew the man personally, did not recognize the caricature of him he read.

That said, I am truly sorry he was murdered. He was just at the dawn of the time when perhaps he could have done real service to the south, to make up in some small way, the damage he had done before that date. Booth was among the worst of the many bad men of that era.
 

seebell

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Interesting info in these posts. Thanks fellas. I think Lincoln was willing to go to war to preserve the Union. All other considerations aside, I am glad the Union was preserved.
 

Tidewater

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Interesting info in these posts. Thanks fellas. I think Lincoln was willing to go to war to preserve the Union. All other considerations aside, I am glad the Union was preserved.
Here, here.
That said, John Randolph of Roanoke, I believe, expressed the relationship between the Union and its purposes.
John Randolph of Roanoke said:
For, with every other man of common sense, I have always regarded union as the means of liberty and safety; in other words, of happiness, and not as an end, to which these are to be sacrificed.
The Union of the States is the means, preserving liberty and safety, the ends for which it was constituted. Millions of southerners decided, for reasons they found sufficient, that the Union was no longer meeting these ends, so they opted to leave and seek their own liberty and safety.
And since every time the topic is brought up amongst northerners and their sympathizers, slavery is always and everywhere brought up, as if this was the sole reason, and the ending of which justifies everything that was done and how it was done.
I believe that we should bear in mind the cost, both in terms of dead and wounded men, destroyed property, political damage and perversion of the purposes for which the Union was formed in the first place.
 

Tidewater

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Found this recently and thought it might be of interest.
In the late summer and fall of 1860, William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama undertook a speaking tour of the norther. The gist of his speeches was to try and convince northerners to vote for the Republicans. The northern states made a lot of money off of having the southern states in the Union, and the radicals in the Republican party were, in effect, strangling the goose laying the golden eggs.
Here is an excerpt of Yancey's speech in Washington DC in September 1860:

"If the South ever undertakes to make other marts than New York, and if the North does not uphold this Union, but permits it to be destroyed, the South intends to make her Baltimore, her Norfolk, her Charleston, her Savannah, her Pensacola, her Mobile, and her New Orleans, her marts. Rivals, not rivals merely, but substitutes for New York, will rise up all along the southern border. Three hundred and sixteen millions of exports in the last year were all given to New York and New England commerce, the coasting and shipping and foreign trade of the North, and interchanges usually make that right. $250,000,000 of this amount were the sole results of southern industry. This $250,000,000 a year can make commerce at other ports than New York. Let New York see to it my countrymen. If she loves her commerce and loves her palatial houses and princely merchants, let them see to it that the South, driven to the wall, does not make New Yorks of her Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, and grass grow in the streets of New York. We can do without her commercial facilities, but she cannot do without our agricultural labor. We can bring the shipping of the world to our ports, and make our own shipping to carry away 250 millions of the 316 millions. She cannot supply the 250 millions of our Southern labor, if ever she does permit that division to take place. I say therefore, to New York, in no spirit of arrogance and pride, that her commerce, while in some respects it may be the handmaiden, is the creature of Southern industry and Southern wealth, and unless she chooses to take in hand this question, she, Boston, and Philadelphia, and settle it so as to preserve the benefits of this Union, and the Constitution that secures it to her, we will show to the North that we can do without New York, Boston and Philadelphia, and then make other marts for our industry, while shipping and wharves and her warehouses will rot for the want of that industry and support. The Union is everything to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The Union is much to the South; we prefer to have it as it is and we will deprecate disunion. But if it is dissolved, it shall not be the South who do it. It shall be dissolved by those who are warring on the South and seeking to destroy the Constitution and destroy the Union that is made by the Constitution. Let Northern men see to it that they preserve that union, if they want to preserve their commerce, if they wish to preserve their manufacturers or power, and if they wish to preserve the South as the best market for the sale of their products, the fruits of their industry and their commerce. If we of the South were driven to support ourselves, we are independent of the world; we have a great peacemaker, King Cotton, within our midst. [Vociferous applause]"
Richmond Enquirer, September 25th, 1860, pg. 2, col. 4-6.
 

mittman

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Found this recently and thought it might be of interest.
In the late summer and fall of 1860, William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama undertook a speaking tour of the norther. The gist of his speeches was to try and convince northerners to vote for the Republicans. The northern states made a lot of money off of having the southern states in the Union, and the radicals in the Republican party were, in effect, strangling the goose laying the golden eggs.
Here is an excerpt of Yancey's speech in Washington DC in September 1860:

"If the South ever undertakes to make other marts than New York, and if the North does not uphold this Union, but permits it to be destroyed, the South intends to make her Baltimore, her Norfolk, her Charleston, her Savannah, her Pensacola, her Mobile, and her New Orleans, her marts. Rivals, not rivals merely, but substitutes for New York, will rise up all along the southern border. Three hundred and sixteen millions of exports in the last year were all given to New York and New England commerce, the coasting and shipping and foreign trade of the North, and interchanges usually make that right. $250,000,000 of this amount were the sole results of southern industry. This $250,000,000 a year can make commerce at other ports than New York. Let New York see to it my countrymen. If she loves her commerce and loves her palatial houses and princely merchants, let them see to it that the South, driven to the wall, does not make New Yorks of her Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, and grass grow in the streets of New York. We can do without her commercial facilities, but she cannot do without our agricultural labor. We can bring the shipping of the world to our ports, and make our own shipping to carry away 250 millions of the 316 millions. She cannot supply the 250 millions of our Southern labor, if ever she does permit that division to take place. I say therefore, to New York, in no spirit of arrogance and pride, that her commerce, while in some respects it may be the handmaiden, is the creature of Southern industry and Southern wealth, and unless she chooses to take in hand this question, she, Boston, and Philadelphia, and settle it so as to preserve the benefits of this Union, and the Constitution that secures it to her, we will show to the North that we can do without New York, Boston and Philadelphia, and then make other marts for our industry, while shipping and wharves and her warehouses will rot for the want of that industry and support. The Union is everything to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. The Union is much to the South; we prefer to have it as it is and we will deprecate disunion. But if it is dissolved, it shall not be the South who do it. It shall be dissolved by those who are warring on the South and seeking to destroy the Constitution and destroy the Union that is made by the Constitution. Let Northern men see to it that they preserve that union, if they want to preserve their commerce, if they wish to preserve their manufacturers or power, and if they wish to preserve the South as the best market for the sale of their products, the fruits of their industry and their commerce. If we of the South were driven to support ourselves, we are independent of the world; we have a great peacemaker, King Cotton, within our midst. [Vociferous applause]"
Richmond Enquirer, September 25th, 1860, pg. 2, col. 4-6.
I never have understood (or really looked into it that much) why the south became dependent at all on northern ports of entry in the first place. One would think that any with a coast would stipulate the right to develop and use their own ports as a deal breaker when initially joining the union, and then make every effort to create their own New York.

This is another one of those quotes that is indicative of how dependent everyone was on slave labor at the time whether they liked it or not.
 

Tidewater

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I never have understood (or really looked into it that much) why the south became dependent at all on northern ports of entry in the first place. One would think that any with a coast would stipulate the right to develop and use their own ports as a deal breaker when initially joining the union, and then make every effort to create their own New York.
It has to do with four things.
1. The Warehousing Act of 1846 (modeled on the British act of the same name) stipulated that an importer could deposit his merchandise in a bonded warehouse for up to a year without paying the import duty. So the importer needed a port of entry that had ample bonded warehousing facilities.
2. Once the importer had found a buyer in the US, and gotten a down payment check from the buyer, he could pay the import duty to the US Customs Officer, get his merchandise out of the bonded warehouse, and ship the merchandise to the buyer. This made proximity to a trustworthy banking system a must.
3. Trans-shipping merchandise (by rail or coastwise shipping), meant the buyer needed access to excellent rail and coasting trade facilities.
4. Which American ports were closest to northern Europe (Britain being the greatest American trading partner? New York, Boston and Phillie).

Which location had bonded warehouses, robust banking system, access to transhipment facilities and proximity to northern Europe? New York (followed distantly by Boston and Phillie).
Guess which were the three largest ports of entry into the US (regardless of where the merchandise was eventually going? New York, Boston and Phillie. In Fiscal Year ending 30 Jun 1860, 77.4% of US customs receipts were received in New York. 11.3% in Boston and 4.9% in Phillie. 93.6% for the three. If the south secedes peacefully, most of that trade would go away, and much of it would enter through New Orleans, Mobile, Charleston.
This is another one of those quotes that is indicative of how dependent everyone was on slave labor at the time whether they liked it or not.
The estimated that between $2 and $4 billion worth of slave property was in the slave states.
Split the difference and call it $3 billion. We are to believe that protecting this property was the sole motivation for the southern states, whether the southerner opting to leave the Union owned a single slave or not, they all wanted solely to protect slave property.
The northern states, by a couple of estimates (by Yancey and T. P. Kettel, a northern man) was that the United States gained $250 million in income per year from having the southern states in the Union, but northerners were unconcerned about something as tawdry as money. They only wanted to free the slaves. (Of course, nobody in the north wanted to spend their own money to buy the freedom of the slaves. They wanted someone else to bear the cost of freeing the slaves. And nobody in the north wanted the freedmen to move to their states. No, no, those freed slaves had to stay where they were. We don't want them here in the north. And while somebody should provide the freedmen some land to farm and some implements to farm with, nobody in the north wanted to spend their money to achieve these indispensable ends.)
Anyway, in 12 years, if peaceful secession had been allowed, what was left of the United States would have lost an equivalent amount of money in income ($3 billion) as the southern states would have lost in the event of immediate uncompensated emancipation. Yet, somehow, southerners were motivated only by money, and northerners were above all of that. I guess they were just "better people."
 
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CullmanTide

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I think Lincoln was one of the worst "leaders" this nation has ever had. Instead of pulling the country together and settling differences he was divisive. Instead of building bridges, he tore them down. In the end he got exactly what he deserved.
 

Bamaro

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I think Lincoln was one of the worst "leaders" this nation has ever had. Instead of pulling the country together and settling differences he was divisive. Instead of building bridges, he tore them down. In the end he got exactly what he deserved.
He never had a chance considering S C, Miss, Fla, Ala, Ga, La & Tx seceded even before he was even inaugurated.:eek:
 

Tidewater

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He never had a chance considering S C, Miss, Fla, Ala, Ga, La & Tx seceded even before he was even inaugurated.:eek:
Well, he could have sat down with the Confederate Commissioners who were sent to Washington specifically to discuss matters with him. He could have tried to avoid a shooting war. He could have withdrawn Federal army garrisons from Forts Sumter and Pickens, to avoid a shooting war, while discussions were going on. He could have tried to win the seceded states back by their own volition, by reassuring citizens of the southern states. That would have been leadership.
Instead, he said, "I have an army. I will crush you." He deserves to be remembered for that failure.
 

Tidewater

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I think Lincoln was one of the worst "leaders" this nation has ever had. Instead of pulling the country together and settling differences he was divisive. Instead of building bridges, he tore them down. In the end he got exactly what he deserved.
Lincoln had difficulty in leading his own cabinet. While his Secretary of State was privately assuring th Confederate Commissioners in Washington that Sumter was to be evacuated soon, Lincoln was ordering a military relief expedition.

His difficulty lay in his refusal to bow to the will of his sovereigns, the peoples of the states and accept that the people of seven of those states no longer wished to be members of the Union. Not only did he refuse to recognize their sovereignty, he undertook to kill them for not bowing to his will. He was, in a sense, a regicide. And in the end, he was laid low by a regicide.
 

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