Congressman Ron Paul (R. Pluto) is running for President again, and I assume his views on the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln haven’t altered since this interview which took place in 2007. I will leave to other venues debates as to Ron Paul and his stance on current issues. I would merely note that in regard to the Civil War he appears to be singularly ill-informed. According to Mr. Paul the entire Civil War could have been avoided with a plan for compensated emancipation. Now if only Abraham Lincoln had thought of that! Wait, he did!
Abraham Lincoln was in favor of compensated emancipaction from the 1840s, a stance that he held to through the Civil War, a fact which appears to elude Mr. Paul. Here is an excellent article on Mr. Lincoln and compensated emancipation. Lincoln offered compensated emancipation time and time again, the last time being at the Hampton Roads Peace Conference on February 3, 1865, when the Confederacy was clearly almost defeated. His proposal was rejected by the Confederates. The simple fact is that neither slave holders in the Confederacy nor in the border states had any interest in compensated emancipation. I hope if this subject comes up again during this campaign that someone will take the opportunity to correct Mr. Paul’s vast ignorance in this area.
Don, perhaps you would be interested in what H.L. Mencken wrote about Lincoln in May 1920, a lot closer to the Civil War than now:
“Lincoln becomes the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality. Washington, of late yeas, has been perceptibility humanized; every schoolboy now knows that he used to swear a good deal, and was a sharp trader, and had a quick eye for a pretty ankle. But meanwhile the varnishers and veneerers have been busily converting Abe into a plaster saint, thus making him fit for adoration in the YMCA’s. All the popular pictures of him show him in the robes of state, and wearing an expression fit for a man about to be hanged. There is, as far as I know, not a single portrait of him smiling—and yet he must have cackled a good deal, first and last: who ever heard of a storyteller who didn’t?
“Worse, there is an obvious effort to pump all his human weaknesses out of him, and so leave him a mere moral apparition, a sort of amalgam of John Wesley and the Holy Ghost. What could be more absurd? Lincoln, in point of fact, was a practical politician of long experienced and high talents, and by no means cursed with idealistic superstitions.
“… Even his handling of the slavery question was that of a politician, not that of a messiah. Nothing alarmed him more than the suspicion that he was an abolitionist, and Barton tells us of an occasion when he actually fled town to avoid meeting the issue squarely. An Abolitionist would have published the Emancipation Proclamation the day after the first battle of Bull Run. But Lincoln waited until the time was more favorable—until Lee had been hurled out of Pennsylvania, and more important still, until the political currents were more safely running his way. Even so, he freed the slaves in only a part of the country; all the rest continued to clank their chains until he himself was an angel in Heaven.”
Mencken goes out to praise the Gettysburg speech as “most eloquent,” but then said it boiled down to this: “The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—that ‘the government of the people, by the people, for the people’ should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country – and for nearly 20 years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary.”
You may consider the source unreliable, Don, given Mencken’s agnosticism, but as lifelong newspaper reporter with an eye for astute and objective observation he was without peer. He goes on to express doubts that Lincoln was a Christian, noting: “Herndon and some of his other early friends always maintained that he was an atheist, but the Rev. William E. Barton, one of the best of the later Lincolnoligists argues that this atheism was simply disbelief in the idiotic Methodist and Baptist dogmas of his time—that nine Christian churches out of ten, if he were alive today, would admit him to their high privileges and prerogatives without anything worse than a few warning coughs. As for me, I still wonder.”
I treasure Mencken’s The American Language Joe, and I have read with pleasure many of his bitter and acerbic columns. However as a historian he is the same league as Ron Paul.
We see that in full display in his essay The Calamity of Appomattox:
http://brionmcclanahan.com/?p=184
Among other historical howlers he makes this gem:
“No doubt the Confederates, victorious, would have abolished slavery by the middle of the 80s. They were headed that way before the war, and the more sagacious of them were all in favor of it.”
Now that statement is completely at variance with reality. In the states that made up the Confederacy the bonds of slavery were being tightened in the decades prior to the War. Very few future Confederate leaders made any anti-slavery statements in the 20 years leading up to the war, Robert E. Lee was a notable exception, and those who did made them in passing in private correspondence. The Confederacy was set up to protect slavery. The depth of Confederate committment to slavery was indicated in that a proposal to enlist black troops in the Confederate Army, in spite of a critical manpower shortage for the Confederacy throughout the War, was not enacted into law until 1865 when the Confedracy was on its deathbed. Black troops fighting for the Union and their white officers were subject to the death penalty under Confederate law. Many blacks and their white officers were executed after capture with spared black troops not treated as POWs, but rather enslaved.
HL Mencken: good writer, poor historian, rotten human being.
Don, disagree, having read much Mencken. In context, although he was irascible and not in a league as a thinker as his two idols–G.B. Shaw and Nietzsche–he was vastly underrated as humorist and often wrote tongue firmly in cheek.
He was more a critic of ideas than of men; ribald, fresh and original. His “Treatise on the Gods,” while flawed in many respects, is truly devoid of malice. He loved to raise hackles, which he did better than anyone else during his prime.
As for his being a “rotten human being,” you ought to cut him some slack. Because, as he neared death, he wrote: ‘If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.’
He was the self-described ‘amiable skeptic,’ who never denied the existence of God, but never fully embraced it; he thought too much and left too little room for the spiritual. As an agnostic, I can relate. I would have loved to had a beer or two with him.
Don, you might enjoy this, only known recording of HLM:
http://youtu.be/S4bYv3uwDqc
He was a pro-abort and a snob Joe, as well as being a full time jerk. The only amiable feature I can think of him is his care for his wife when she was dying, which is to his credit. However, I think that is probably enough in regard to Menken as I do not want this thread to devolve into a debate over the Sage of Baltimore.
Hmmm, ad hominems do not address the accuracy of his observations, Don, I’m surprised that you would try the old tactic of the trial lawyer, “if you have the law, pound the law, if you have the facts, pound the facts, if you have neither, pound the table.”
If Menken is right he’s right, regardless of his character, if he’s wrong, he’s wrong, regardless of his character. Either way, whether he was an SOB is irrelevant.
He’s really correct about Lincoln, of course: he couldn’t have cared less about waging an armed crusade to destroy slavery (of course, Ron Paul makes the incorrect assumption that Lincoln was motivated by slavery). Slavery was a cynical ploy to boost flagging support for the war and keep England from joining the war on the side of the South.
Paul’s fundamental claim is accurate: Lincoln by his precipitate resort to armed invasion of the South fundamentally altered the nature of our Federal republic from one of limited and tightly controlled central government, to a virtually unlimited central government. After all, when you can militarily invade and occupy 11 states, it’s hard to imagine what power can NOT be assumed by the federal government.
Wrong Tom, and actually I did point out instances where both Mencken and Paul are wrong on history. It is icing on the cake that Mencken was a SOB and Paul is a headcase.
Don, I believe you can argue better than to merely cast aspersions. You are persuasive and at your best when you avoid ad hominems, as we all are. Factual history is often illusory from the distance of more than a century. Contemporary accounts are perhaps the most accurate. Is it so important that each of us has to be 100 percent “right” about every issue? Can we not stipulate that there are so many variables and points of view that allow for fair and honest disagreement without resorting to name-calling, the least convincing of all forms of argument?
Well Joe you cited Mencken as an authority. I pointed out that he was a good writer, a poor historian and a rotten human being. In regard to Mencken none of those statements are ad hominem but merely descriptive. I rather think that Mencken, cross-grained as he was, might well have agreed with all three. I would note that I have previously indicated that I did not wish this thread to devolve into a debate over Mencken, and I will begin to prune comments if necessary to avoid this becoming a thread about the most famous American devotee of Nietzsche.
Who am I to argue with the man who controls the switch?
Alright Tom, your turn to man up. Instead of just asserting something to be true: “he couldn’t have cared less about waging an armed crusade to destroy slavery (of course, Ron Paul makes the incorrect assumption that Lincoln was motivated by slavery). Slavery was a cynical ploy to boost flagging support for the war and keep England from joining the war on the side of the South.”
Prove it.
Vocational iconoclasts can get tiresome very quickly (and Mencken does), but isn’t it rather de trop to refer to him as a ‘rotten human being’? His life was truncated, not scandalous.
No more on Mencken. Last warning to all. This thread is not about him and I am not going to allow this thread to proceed down that path. I have been very lax as of late about my threads staying on topic, and not going down various divergent by-ways, but Mencken is simply too far removed from the subject of the post. I will do any pruning of comments that I need to to enforce this blog ukase after I get out of court this afternoon. 🙂
This war hungry mentality of conservatives is really weirding me out. Why must war be a logical answer to the frustrations of a people?
When is it incoherent to suggest 600,000 lives should not have been lost.
Why don’t we go to war over abortion? That is a more serious offense than slavery. Now, that is a war I’d be happy to fight in.
So Ron Paul and Lincoln actually agree – compensated emancipation was a good idea! 😀
(Too bad the South and the Border States didn’t agree. 😛 )
I think Ron’s animus against the Union as per the (not so) Recent Unpleasantness stems from a tendency of libertarians to see the Confederates, in their emphasis on secession and the rights of the states, as fellow allies in the Great Struggle Against Centralization And/Or Government Intervention. With that mindset, it seems, the fact that the Confederates main reason for secession was the preservation of the right to enslave one’s feloow man is a mere inconvenience, and Lincoln the true villain of the story.
That said, does this mean we can say “Ron Paul is a neo-Con!”? 😉
Would I be out of bounds to note that it sure looked like there was a civil war brewing over Mencken?
It’s not incoherent to suggest that there might have been alternatives to the bloodiest war in our history. The problem is, Paul is, as is too often the case, talking out of his hat. With the honorable exception of abortion, he seems to think that problems can be contracted away–the free flow of commerce is a balm for all ills.
Don correctly notes that the slave codes of the southern states were being tightened in the decades before the War, and the restrictions on the small numbers of free blacks in slave states were also increased. Lincoln had a hell of a time trying to persuade the Union slave-holding states to abandon the institution, which is why we ended up with the 13th Amendment instead. Moreover, slaves were being used in southern factories, which meant that modern harvesting methods wouldn’t have made the institution obsolete by any means.
Frankly, I don’t see how the War could have been avoided. The best result was that it could have ended in a much earlier Union victory (but still post-Emancipation), without the bitter desolation of the South. But that’s the province of alternate history, alas.
Speaking of which, a fine example of an alternate War is Newt Gingrich (!) and William Forstchen’s trilogy that starts with “Gettysburg.” Without spoiling it too much, after a pair of crushing defeats, Lincoln calls Grant and his army from the west, including a significant number of black troops, to take on Lee in a fight to the finish.
Peter Tsouras’ “Gettysburg” is an alternate history of the battle which puts Winfield Scott Hancock in charge of the Army of the Potomac on the third day, facing a much larger version of Pickett’s Charge, now fully supported by Longstreet. Needs more maps, but it’s very clever and well-thought out.
God, I hate these War Between the States threads. Spare us another 3-and-a-half years of this.
😉
C’mon, it’s elementary school knowledge by now that lincoln famously stated, in 1862, well after the start of war, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
He only later issued the so-called Emancipation Proclamation, a deeply cynical document that freed exactly zero slaves, and was aimed at weakening the Confederacy; Lincoln wrote to a supporter, “I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union.” (emphasis added).
Whatever his personal views,it is clear as can be that Lincoln had no desire to enforce as a war aim the abolition of slavery, until 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, and even then, as the passage above makes clear, the Proclamation was intended as an aid in restoring the union, not as a war-aim in itself.
Lincoln honestly (and correctly) understood that he had no constitutional right to abolish slavery. Even after military conquest, it took passage of a constitutional amendment to effectuate that aim.
C’mon, it’s elementary school knowledge by now that lincoln famously stated, in 1862, well after the start of war,
Yeah, but it’s also elementary knowledge that:
1) When Lincoln wrote that he had already written the text of the Emancipation Proclamation, he just hadn’t issued it yet.
2) However much people may want to insist that Lincoln wasn’t all that abolitionist and slavery wasn’t really the main issue — one group that clearly thought that Lincoln was abolitionist enough to force major action was the Confederate states, who seceded back in 1861 because they considered Lincoln unacceptably anti-slavery. To quote James McPherson’s This Mighty Scourge:
Lincoln hated slavery, and rightly so. He would have tried to limit it as much as possible within his powers, but not to the point of jeopardizing the nation. His priority certainly was to preserve the union, but that by no means meant he was indifferent to slavery. The idea that Lincoln really didn’t care about slavery is unsupportable. He just didn’t care enough about it to risk the union, and without question Lincoln’s motivation for fighting the war was to preserve the union, not eliminate slavery. Fortunately, both happened.
And Don is correct. The theory is the South was already well on the way of eliminating slavery is nonsense put out by neo-confederates who cannot face the fact that the South sought to excercise its perceived right to secede because if felt slavery as an institution was endangered.
Who cares what Paul or Menken say about the CW.
What does Obama say?
“The theory is the South was already well on the way of eliminating slavery is nonsense put out by neo-confederates . . . ”
TRUTH. The southern economy was 90% dependent on cotton which was utterly dependent on slave labor.
Same same northern abolitionists/indutrialistic plutocrats were competely depended on wage slaves and child labor.
This thread just goes to prove that Americans never get tired of fighting the same old battles.
“This thread just goes to prove that Americans never get tired of fighting the same old battles.”
Joe, you haven’t lived until you’ve watched a three day running internet battle between Catholics and Protestants over sola scriptura. You feel like you’ve time travelled back to the 16th Century.
I’m convinced that quarrelsomeness is both a feature and a bug of human interaction.
Dale, I’ve been through several of those, along with the arguments over creation vs. evolution, the death penalty, the chicken vs. the egg, and which is better, NY or Chicago pizza. There are some arguments that will never be settled.
Actually, the NY or Chicago pizza debate was settled fairly easily. Chicago style won.
Says who? As a native New Yorker, I assert otherwise. You’ve got some crust, RL!
Now we are on pizza in this thread? Sheesh. Besides, it is a basic fact of life that Chicago Deep Dish Pizza represents the summit of the culinary art! Res Ipsa Loquitur.
Dem’s fightin words, Don. I am willing to tolerate your comments about HLM, but to disrespect NY pizza is the final straw and cause for an official protest. I demand an immediate retraction or else I will refer this to my cousin Vinny in Queens for further action.
I would be shaking right now Joe, except there are plenty of Italian Americans in the Windy City who will form legions to fight under the banner of Chicago Deep Dish!
Maybe we need to have a “sit-down.”
Chicago Deep Dish? You mean the culinary equivalent of Starbuck’s coffee: overcooked and overrated?
And Joe I don’t have any relatives named Vinny, but I am from Queens.
Paul, of course, anyone with a vowel at the end of his name appreciates the superior taste of NY. I was born in Queens (Astoria) and thank you for your support.
Ah, people who do not like Chicago Deep Dish I pity rather than take umbrage against. They simply lack the taste buds for truly exquisite flavors, rather like people born color blind or those individuals who insist on dancing while having the sense of rythymn of a goat with palsy. I may establish a foundation for such poor souls. Perhaps I will call it Taste Buds Deprived Anonymous. 🙂
New York, Chicago, whatever. You’re all a bunch of damn Yankees, so who gives a crap? None of it holds a candle to pulled pork barbecue from Virginia or the Carolinas, some ribs from Memphis, or a slab of brisket from Texas.
😉
Food fight!
I’m from Detroit, home of Little Caesars and Dominos and have plenty of each. I have had frozen pizzas warmed while still resting on their cardboard disc. I know a thing or two about sub par pizza. I have also had NY style pizza. I would put NY style somewhere between Jeno’s and Little Caesars.
Ya know what New Yorkers call Chicago deep dish pizza? LASAGNA.
Think you can walk down the street eating one of them gooey messes?
Jay, a real Virginia Ham . . . Heaven.
We know that real Italians have tried to make pizza outside NY, NJ and Naples.
Impossible.
Either it’s the water or the rest of the world is cursed. Probably the latter.
New York style pizza does have one use, as long as one does not mind sticky coasters.
The funny thing is that real Italians probably wouldn’t recognize either NY or Chicago-style pizza.
I’ve had real Italian pizza Paul. I didn’t like it much which was a considerable let down for me. I think I would have enjoyed it if I wasn’t used to American pizza.
Check out this Wikipedia entry regarding regional variations of pizza in the U.S.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_in_the_United_States
Not only is there NY and Chicago style pizza, there’s Detroit-style pizza (Little Caesar’s), St. Louis-style pizza (which uses a strange amalgam of cheeses known as Provel), New Haven-style pizza (with white sauce and sometimes clams), Buffalo-style pizza (a cross between NY and Chicago styles), and California-style pizza (veggies, chicken, barbecue sauce, and God knows what else). There’s also “Greek pizza”, most popular in New England.
I’m also a Detroiter, and I call the NY-Chicago pizza fight as a TKO for Chicago style.
I’ve also had Italian pizza, and there’s a very, very good reason the popular pizza places in the United Kingdom call themselves “American-Style.”
California style is not bad at all–I was pleasantly surprised when I had some in Sacramento a few years back.
What a thread !!! 😆
So now, for something completely different.
I understand that Pelosi, Reid and Obama have commented on the DC earthquake, and confirm that it is a scarcely known geological formation known as “Bush’s Fault” 🙂
California style is not bad at all–I was pleasantly surprised when I had some in Sacramento a few years back.
Ach. A proper midwesterner’s id leads him here:
What was the original question? Oh Yea!
While after the fact it easy to note the Civil War cost he Union more money than buying the slaves, it was not a price that was up front in 1861 for comparison with the cost of buying the slaves.
Not only would the South have refused, but the Ron Paul’s of the day would have protested the cost.
Hank’s Eclectic Meanderings
“I understand that Pelosi, Reid and Obama have commented on the DC earthquake, and confirm that it is a scarcely known geological formation known as “Bush’s Fault””
Thanks for an early morning smile Don!
“Not only would the South have refused, but the Ron Paul’s of the day would have protested the cost.”
Quite right Hank. Of course I doubt if Mr. Paul has studied the issue carefully, if at all. He simply doesn’t like Lincoln or the outcome of the Civil War, a common feature in the paleocon circles where he is considered a great leader, and making ahistorical comments about compensated emancipation is a socially acceptable way for a minor political figure to attack one of the greatest of American statesmen.
Good one, Don the Kiwi. 🙂