Barack Obama, the new Abraham Lincoln?
Continued. Read part I of the article here
So now we come to the rule of Lincoln himself.
I apologize, dear reader, if it took so long to get here, but one must understand what the party of Lincoln, the Republican party stood for and who manned the military and surrounded Lincoln.
Americans as a whole love the tired and worn out myth of loving their freedom, their constitution and their rights and being willing to die for them. Nothing could be further from the truth, well at least in the North.
In the 1850s, as the Republican Party came to power, they and their Whig allies, in order to help their Marxist oligarchs and financial backers, while building the Imperial Federal government, placed heavy export duties on American goods. At that point, most of those goods came out of the South. Thus it came to pass that 30% of the American population was paying for 70% of the Federal budget. The government was growing quickly, making an onerous yoke upon the people. However, the German/English stock of the North seemed to enjoy this, while the Scots Irish of the South chaffed. As such, at this point, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, a dedicated Red, the Southern states, in their individual assemblies voted overwhelmingly to secede, as was their right at the time under the US Constitution.
Lincoln and the Republicans would have none of that. The problem was, much of the North was against any kind of war and while choosing not to leave the Union, actively supported the South's rights. To that end, Lincoln suspended the right of Habeas Corpus and without charges, began the mass arrests of his enemies and critics. With Republicans and Whigs the majority of Congress, his edicts were rubber stamped, little different from those of another despot in the 1930s and 1940s, Adolph Hitler and his Reichstag.
In total, 48,000 people were imprisoned by Lincoln, without trial, their lands confiscated, their reputations destroyed, their lives ruined, all this by the "champion" of the Constitution, as he is now called. Amongst these were prominent journalists, editors and politicians. In short, Lincoln all but wiped out the old conservative press of America. He further forbade the post service from delivering any newspaper or magazine that dared to criticize him.
Military police would storm through doors in the middle of the night, arresting Lincoln's opponents with out warrant or charges. Military prisons were quickly filled up. Congressman Vallandigham from Ohio, who had made speeches defending the Constitution, had his own door busted down at 0230hrs on 3 May 1863. He was first imprisoned and tried by a military commission and than deported from the US. That is correct, a Congressman from the US Congress. It is rather interesting that in his last speech before his arrest, he stated that for those who supported Lincoln: Defeat, debt, taxation [and] sepulchers - these are your trophies. He further denounce King Lincoln.
You see, General Burnside had declared that there was a full suspension of the freedom of speech and assembly in the military district of Ohio.
Did the American public rise up? In majority no, though there were protests and draft riots, to which Lincoln answered with rank fire from his infantry divisions, mowing down protestors. Yet to all this, the country of 1860s did not rise up in rage.
When the state senate of Maryland voted to stay in the Union but not to condemn the Confederacy for leaving, Lincoln had half the senate arrested. They were soon joined by the mayor of Baltimore. This is the same Lincoln who at Gettysburg proclaimed: "A government of the People, by the People, for the People."
It is rather ironic that, the grandson of Frances Scott Key, Frances Key Howard, editor of a newspaper critical of Lincoln, was imprisoned at the very same prison as his grandfather had been by the British: Ft. McHenry, Baltimore.
Lincoln's audacity went so far as to even issue an arrest warrant for the 83 year old Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger Taney, who ruled that several of Lincoln's commands and orders were anti-constitutional. His arrest was never carried out, though, as the political whip lash may have been to great even for Lincoln to bare.
Lincoln, of course, as any good despot, had many willing sociopaths to go along with his plans. Amongst these were Oliver Hazard Perry Throck Morton, the Civil War governor of Indiana and a founding Republican. During the war he set up a secret police to monitor any pro-Confederacy sentiment and crush all opposition to Lincoln's decrees. The police were run under Henry B. Carrington, a Brigadier General in the Union Army. Arbitrary arrests, suppression of the Bill of Rights were the norm, resulting in a state wide repression.
Thus, Lincoln was a tyrant by no small degree. Even one of Lincoln's greatest apologists, the historian Clinton Rossiter, in the "Constitutional Dictatorship" writes: "Dictatorship played a decisive role in the North's successful effort to maintain the Union by force of arms...one man was the government of the United States...Lincoln was a great dictator. The great constitutional dictator was self appointed."
