Are Your Sources Trustworthy? Remember, The Winners Write History...

...at least in the short term. Things generally begin to be sorted out looking backwards several generations later. 

That is certainly the case with the Lincoln cult, i.e. the "church of Lincoln." He was a great man in many ways. He was also a self-serving pragmatist, the highest paid lawyer in the country who argued for "Massah" in his one and only case involving slavery. Thomas DiLorenzo has several books showing the other side of Lincoln which is not a pretty picture.

I was a Lincoln worshiper as a teenager and still have the report I did in high school. But I no longer look at him as a secular saint who "ended slavery" with his Emancipation Proclamation. He did no such thing. The only slaves freed by that document were those in the South, slaves over which Lincoln had no control. He simply, in pragmatic fashion, hoped to stir up a slave insurrection. In view of the bloody revolts in Haiti and Ned Turner's Rebellion, where entire families were wiped out like the genocide in Rwanda, Lincoln apparently had no concern about the possibility he would stir up genocide against southern families. 

He was thrilled with his generals who committed all-out war on non-combatants in the South. When you look at Sheridan and Sherman, you see war criminals, unbridled in their promotion of burning and looting even in cities that had no opposing forces. Read it and weep! Even they admitted their war crimes promoted by Lincoln! Sherman may very well have been a model for Hitler's "final solution" a term he himself used in describing the assault against the Plains Indians after the Civil War.

What instigated this post was one of my commenters who exhibits both Trump derangement syndrome and a hatred for the Confederacy that is visceral. I'm not a big fan of Trump, but would Hillary Clinton have been better? If she had been elected we would now have all three branches of government controlled by the party of death and destruction. We owe Donald Trump gratitude, not only for a Supreme Court that is only partly insane, but for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of decent judges at lower levels of federal jurisprudence.

My commenter often addresses Trump, Lincoln, slavery, the Confederacy, etc. on posts that have absolutely nothing to do with his pet themes. A recent post on the j@b elicited comments about "President warp speed," which at least was related to the issue and one of the things that I personally blame Trump for. But then he threw in a comment from "abolitionist" William Lloyd Garrison. That shifted the conversation to the Civil War (again):

"Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice.” William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist.

That generated a response from  another commenter:

Garrison was a raving anti-Semite. He was not a Christian. But a spiritualist. As such he did not deign to publicly pray to Almighty God to end slavery. He was also a warmonger. Garrison refused to follow the British example and simply purchase the freedom of southern slaves. Instead he insisted on war which produced an ocean of blood and created a post war serf class of small black farmers. 

The debate was on:

If Garrison was an antisemite, it is the first I've heard, though now I've even heard that Ulysses Grant was an antisemite. There are many baseless claims of antisemitism today. Even so, then Garrison was a broken clock.

If he was "not a Christian", then the same argument could be applied against following President warp speed. So often we have been asked to pray for Trump when awkward things burble up about his past...he's an "unfinished work". Indeed.

Garrison/ Lincoln was not the warmonger...this was the confederacy! Lincoln argued that the war must continue "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword". But the war was started by the illegal secession of the South, intent on the permanent continuation of the slave regime (see Cornerstone speech of the confederacy for proof on this "permanent" intention). Some argue that we began our descent to totalitarian with Lincoln. But Lincoln was not the first totalitarian...that was the slave plantations, the slave patrols that kept slaves in their place, and the state laws that blocked manumission!

I am not familiar with the Catholic migrant situation and Garrison, though I know there was an unfortunate distance between Protestants and Catholics antebellum. Witness the Catholic draft riots in New York. But there was also the bad example given by bishops who would not denounce slavery. Arguably, one could even trace this reticence back to Nicholas V and his "Dum Diversas" greenlighting of perpetual servitude for African pagans.

The "simple purchase of freedom" for the slaves would have been more difficult than in Britain because the American South was where the British banksters shifted their money, in the form of slave mortgages, when they couldn't have slaves themselves. Who knows how high the confederate ransom would have demanded. And the British banksters arguably continued their leveraging of black white conflict by backdoor promotion of segregation in the post war South.

Public shaming was indeed what was called for about slavery and is called for about abortion. Another Garrison quote: “The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead.”

Whew! That elicited a long response from me limited to the question of secession:

You put the accuracy of everything you say in question when you claim that secession was illegal. Three of the states explicitly included secession in their ratification of the Constitution. The colonies themselves seceded from England.
Lincoln obviously believed in secession because he allowed the secession of West Virginia from the state of Virginia making it clear that he also rejected the sovereign rights of the states. He was a federalist tyrant through and through.

There's a good article on the right to secession if you care to look at it. https://forloveofgodandcountry.com/2018/06/01/the-right-of-secession-as-reserved-by-the-states-in-their-ratification-of-the-us-constitution/

Here's a paragraph that explicitly discusses secession.

"Three of the original thirteen states were particularly skeptical of the government that the newly-drafted Constitution created and so they ratified it only conditionally. These three states were Virginia and New York, the great powerhouses of the New World, and Rhode Island (tiny, but very liberty-minded). In their ratification documents, adopted at their Ratification Conventions, they specifically and carefully reserved the right of secession. These are referred to as the “Resumption Clauses” or “Resumptive Clauses,” and they are exceedingly important to understand this topic. I attached Virginia’s ratification document at the end of this article. You will see that Virginia conditioned her ratification on several things, including the Right to Secede and on the addition of a Bill of Rights (for which she made a number of suggestions)."

One more comment about Garrison(which I didn't post because I ended the discussion), I'll post here because it shows how much we need to research our sources. This commenter whom I respect very much can always be depended upon to do that.:

Re: "Another Garrison quote: “The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal and hasten the resurrection of the dead.” 

What a hypocrite! Over 2-million men served not on pedestals but in the Union Army. Garrison was not one of them. Half of those who served were either killed in action, died or were disabled by diseased or injury, or were wounded or went missing. A quarter of the Union Army was composed of poor immigrants. The same suffering immigrants who were literally on his doorstep which Garrison ignored. Many men Garrison's age, North and South, went into harms way or at least in their local militias. Not Garrison, who never publicly acknowledged Christ as his savior, but lusted for blood. And he got it. But it was the blood of the workers and the working poor, not his own. He was a truly evil man who got a lot of good Christian men killed. But in the end he freed the slaves in name only. And a visit today to any major, American city will show that the descendants of slaves are still in bondage.

Many people simplify the Civil War into nothing but a fight over slavery, i.e., North-GOOD abolitionists/South-BAD slavers! 

That is incredibly simplistic and downright wrong. It also shows an incredible ignorance about both the history of slavery, the economics, the commitment to state sovereignty, and other historical realities. 

Before the Civil War there were more abolitionist groups in the South than in the North. Stonewall Jackson disobeyed Virginia law by teaching slaves to read in preparation for the end of slavery, the "peculiar institution." Jackson purchased several slaves at their request who wanted to work off their purchase price and be freed. He was truly a good and honorable man!

The Cornerstone Speech was made by Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, who was from the deep South was one man's opinion. Many in the deep South may have agreed with him. Many others particularly in the boarder states did not. Virginia, for example, would likely not have seceded if Lincoln had not forced the issue with Fort Sumter. How can one speech by one man be taken as the opinion of everyone in the South? It can't any more than Barack Obama or Joe Biden's views can be taken as the opinion of every American or even every Democrat. But that's a key argument for this commenter who brings it up over and over ad nauseum. 

Slavery was terrible. But can you find one single comment by Jesus in the Gospel saying Christians should have ended slavery by engaging in murderous war? No! In fact, he praised the centurion who begged him to cure his slave saying of the pagan, "I have not found such faith in Israel." That is not an argument for slavery; it simply points out that some evils are worse than others. And you don't hear much from the Confederacy haters about the slavery that still exists today.

At any rate, I try these days to check my sources. I want to know which historians are worth listening to and which have an agenda, i.e., critical race theory and the attack on white males who should be wiped from the pages of history! If someone is teaching hatred, don't trust him!

Critical thinking is sorely lacking in today's world. Those of us who love the truth should be diligent about trying to bring it back.  Jumping on bandwagons without thinking things through or really know what you're talking about is unfortunately too common today. 

Truth can set us free only if we are serious about pursuing it!