Thank you
Black_Zawisza and
Republic Now! for participating in my poll. I wondered if anyone would venture near. The topic of my poll looks like a camouflaged elephant trap with neon arrows pointing to it. The option that Lincoln was "WRONG" is surely sacrilege. History is clear, Lincoln was great! Experience tells us that hindsight is 20/20, right? And, historians have the advantage of mulling-over events and decisions. But there is something known as "The Historian's Fallacy." The top engineer of Chrysler's military defense division explained something to me called the hemi-bell curve. As a practical example, say your retail store's sales lobby has on average 12 customers waiting for 15 minutes. The hemi-bell curve graph might predict that adding another cash register changes the paradigm and the result is the customer count drops to three, with a wait-time of only three minutes. Since I managed a retail outlet for said engineer, his engineer's approach was more than abstract, and though it seems simple and easily understood as I present this, most people experience something we call,
"not seeing the forest for the trees." Our minds are trained to organize thoughts using idioms, phrases and stereotypes. We gladly subscribe to the "bandwagon effect and groupthink." That "Historian's Fallacy" I mentioned earlier falls prey to some of these thinking patterns. Are you still with me? Sorry I can't just jump into telling you WHY Lincoln was "WRONG." There's more prep still...
Analogies are useful to communicate. They're great. I find that when I look at politics, there's one analogy that "FITS" almost every situation. It's turned out to be my favorite 'analogy.' I call it, 'the train analogy.' Here it is:
You're going on a trip, so you take your shower, get dressed, take your suitcase to the train depot. Everything is going well, you board the train and it's clean and the passengers are friendly. You put your suitcase in the over-head compartment and take your seat. You see the conductor walking toward you, smiling and joking with the passengers, taking their tickets and using his "puncher" to punch their tickets and hand them back to the passengers. He arrives at your seat and smiles as you hand him your ticket. He jokes with you too, and punches your ticket and hands it back to you. The train gets underway and it's a beautiful day - the scenery is gorgeous today as the train steams down the tracks. The problem? It's the wrong train. It's not taking you where you really want to go.
O.K. There's all my groundwork, and now the movie, Why Lincoln Was "WRONG."
Top Five Causes of the Civil War
1. Economic and social differences between the North and the South.
2. States versus federal rights.
3. The fight between Slave and Non-Slave State Proponents.
4. Growth of the Abolition Movement.
5. The election of Abraham Lincoln.
This is where
"seeing the forest for the trees" enters. Being too close to "issues" has taken the "train" of our country OFF the tracks and into the woods more than once.
The first time our country's train was taken off the tracks and into the woods was 1798. Yeah, our country didn't go far before that happened, eh?
But you say, Lincoln wasn't born until 1809... Hold on, I'll explain.
The French Revolution's reign of terror was causing paranoia in Europe and it was bleeding over into the United States, calls for
secession reached unparalleled heights, and our young nation seemed ready to rip itself apart.
Kind'a sounds like our nation just before the Civil War, doesn't it? So what happened next? The Federalist Party passed some legislation designed to muzzle free speech, and deal with "THE ISSUE."
The Alien and Sedition Acts were four bills passed in 1798 by the Federalists in the 5th United States Congress in the aftermath of the French Revolution's reign of terror and during an undeclared naval war with Britain and France, later known as the Quasi-War. They were signed into law by President John Adams. Alien and Sedition Acts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The two founding fathers who basically started this country, the guys who wrote The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, flipped out. Yes, I said they "FLIPPED OUT!" Now we're getting to the heart of the matter. This is how I can be correct in my judgement of Abraham Lincoln, instead of doing what "everybody else" does and look at the retail store lobby being full of angry, waiting customers, I see the hemi-bell curve that the engineers, Jefferson and Madison, showed us. O.K., O.K., so when Jefferson and Madison flipped out, what did they do?
They started
Democratic-Republican Party to oppose the Federalist Party and the wrong direction the country was going.
The Democratic-Republicans denounced the Sedition Act as invalid and a violation of the First Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights, which protected the right of free speech.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison drafted the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which called on the states to nullify the federal legislation.
The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions reflect the Compact Theory, which holds that the United States is made up of
a voluntary union of states that agree to cede
some of their authority in order to join the union, but that the states do not, ultimately, surrender their sovereign rights. Therefore, under the Compact Theory, states can determine if the federal government has violated its agreements, including the Constitution, and nullify such violations or
even withdraw from the union.
It turns out, the MAIN cause for the Civil War was number two on the list from above:
2. States versus federal rights.
Not only was Lincoln not right,
"at least 618,000 Americans died in the Civil War, and some experts say the toll reached 700,000."
Casualties In The Civil War
There is
"ZERO" doubt that had
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison been in government, the most horrific war of our history would not have happened.
Oh, you say, "but what about slavery and the other forest trees, etc?" There's where "The Historian's Fallacy" comes in. As a historian, you can very easily say Pearl Harbor being bombed by the Japanese should not have happened, there was voluminous evidence, blah, blah, blah... But, in reality, when you add another cashier and cash register, you just can't imagine how happy your customers are and how many people they get you through word-of-mouth advertising. Likewise, every complaining customer REPRESENTS a couple of hundred unsatisfied customers that you never hear about.
Don't you just love the communication advantages of using analogies?
And hey, FDR was the opposite of what everybody thinks too. Don't even get me started. Lincoln was WRONG. The federal government was set up as a provider of specific services. When a service provider fails to do it's job, you fire it and replace it with another competing provider of services. The word "DEMOCRACY" does not appear in The Declaration of Independence or in The U.S. Constitution. It's a REPUBLIC, folks. The federal government "represents" we the people by doing what we authorize it to do. And, since we can't take money from our neighbor by threat of force to give to another neighbor, we CANNOT delegate that activity to government. It's called theft if we do it. It's called RULING us if government does it. (I know, I know, this isn't about Lincoln, but I thought I'd throw this in while I had your attention.) Lincoln was a scrapper and liked a good fight. His flaw. Forcing soverign states to stay in the union was not constitutional. Jefferson and Madison would have had none of it. Lincoln was wrong!