One of the best US presidents X horribly overrated quy responsible for Civil war?
The civil war was inevitable by the 1850s.
>>362255
This.
Pierce and Buchanan did nothing to change the tide. Lincoln inherited the mess and I doubt could have performed more admirably.
I always wonder what reconstruction would have been like with him.
>>362255
It was Polk who essentially made it inevitable with his territorial acquisition.
He also alienated northern democrats by compromising his "54' 40' or fight" promise on the boundary of Oregon territory which exacerbated sectarian differences, shifting US politics to be less about 'democrats vs whigs' and more about 'northern interests vs. southern interests'.
He was only "responsible" in the sense that he got elected and certain slave-holding states immediately got paranoid. There were secessions before he even got into office.
Unless you think he should have just let them go, but that would have led to major instability.
From Kevin Peraino’s “Lincoln in the World”
“Marx had withdrawn from politics during much of the 1850s.. He was frustrated by the failure of the working class to rise up. Instead he focused primarily on journalism and his longer economic treatises.. He was ever on the lookout for signs of impending revolution.. A foreign crisis, Marx understood, could induce Manchester’s workers to take to the streets and demand change. “The times,” he wrote optimistically in 1856, “seem to me to be hotting up.”
“The growing tension in North America on the slavery question enthralled him. By the winter of 1860, Marx considered the rising conflict over slavery one of “the biggest things happening now in the world.” He recognized that a Civil War across the Atlantic could have profound consequences in Europe. English textile mills like the one Engles helped operate depended on a steady supply of raw cotton from the slaveholding states in America.. ‘If things get serious,’ Marx wrote Engels in January 1860, ‘what will become of Manchester?”
“Marx [despite losing his newspaper job and in bad health] remained obsessed with the with the Civil War. He continued to shift through newspapers at an American coffeehouse in London. The conflict was such a part of his daily life that his children began to share his enthusiasm. Marx’s daughter Eleanor.. later recalled, ‘I had the unshakeable conviction that Abraham Lincoln could not succeed without my advice.’ The six-year-old wrote the American president long letters, which Marx promised to take to the post office.”
>>364439
By the fall of 1861, Lincoln was coming under increasing pressure to pluck the pear... ‘No wonder Europe looks on the struggle with indifference,’ one Delaware resident wrote to Lincoln. Billy Herndon once again questioned his law partner’s judgement: ‘What is Lincoln doing?’... Charles Sumner grumbled that is was ‘vain to have the power of a god’ and ‘not to use it godlike.’... In London, Karl Marx was mystified.. ‘Lincoln,’ Marx complained, ‘in accord with his lawyer’s tradition, has an aversion for all originality clings anxiously to the letters of the Constitution, and fights shy of anything that could mislead the ‘loyal’ slaveholders of the border states’…The abolitionist Wendell Phillips, like Marx, lamented that the president, ‘is not fighting vigorously and heartily enough’.. [and that] the Union was lead by ‘a first-rate, second-rate man.”
"Marx had always considered the American president something of a backwoods dunce, thrust into power by the vagaries of demographics and buffeted by the unpredictable winds of democratic politics. Lincoln himself sometimes felt as if he had lost control. Once, when the president was asked to describe his policy, Lincoln replied, ‘I have none. I pass my life preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up.’ In the case of abolition however, Lincoln was actually shrewdly and quietly preparing the public for a major transformation of war aims.”
“Lincoln [in a personal letter] clarified his position by reciting a parable. If ‘out in the street, or in the field, or on the prairie I find a rattlesnake, I take a stake and kill him. Everybody would applaud the act and say I did right. But suppose the snake was in a bed where children were sleeping. Would I do right to strike him there? I might hurt the children; or I might not kill, but only arouse and exasperate the snake, and he might bite the children.’
>>364449
“In late August [1862], with a small force of only thirty-two thousand men, Union general John Pope attacked a unit of Stonewall Jackson’s rebel troops dug in around Manassas, Virginia. Reinforcements eventually arrived, but by the time the battles were finished, the Federals had taken more than sixteen thousand casualties. Rain poured down on Lincoln’s defeated troops as they streamed back toward Washington… Lincoln brooded around the Executive Mansion. ‘Well, John,” he told John Hay, ‘we are whipped again, I am afraid.’ … Lincoln complained that he felt like hanging himself.”
“The president had good reason for concern. In Europe the cotton shortages produced by the [Union] blockade were finally beginning to take their toll on workers… As the crisis deepened, Britain’s Lord Palmerston began to question the wisdom of nonintervention. The prime minister had long been reluctant to get involved. Yet momentum in the conflict seemed to be shifting. The Federal troops ‘got a very complete smashing’ at Manassas, Palmerston wrote to his foreign minister in September… If the North lost one more battle, the prime minister wrote, ‘the iron should be struck while it is hot.”
“Lincoln’s men seem to have at least dimly perceived the impending peril. John Hay boasted that, despite the Confederate troops on Washington’s doorstep, the capital remained safe. Hay attributed the city’s lack of alarm to the ‘truculent-looking’ fleet of Northern gunboats protecting the Potomac. Still, Hay recognized that if the Confederate forces did manage to capture Washington, European intervention was sure to follow. ‘We would find the whole world about our ears,’ Hay wrote.”
>>364459
“Near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17, Union and Confederate armies clashed in an epic fourteen-hour battle that produced more than twenty-thousand casualties… The battle at Antietam Creek was indeed a Union victory. Yet [General] McClellan’s men ultimately allowed the Confederate troops to escape rather than pursuing them and inflicting a crushing blow. The outcome, however, was good enough for Lincoln. He believed he finally found an excuse to issue his proclamation.”
“Five days after Antietam, on September 22, Lincoln sent his cabinet an urgent message instructing them to report to the Executive Mansion. The men were given only a few hours notice. When they arrived, Lincoln began by reading a comedic sketch by one of his favorite writers, Artemus Ward. Then he got down to business. The president told the men that he was ready to issue preliminary proclamation announcing that slaves in the Confederacy would be freed within a matter of months… Abolitionists responded with an outpouring of emotion... On the night of September 24, a huge crowd arrived at the White House and spilled onto the front lawn. John Hay looked on as revelers hurdled the iron gates and ‘filled every nook and corner of the ground entrance as quietly and instantly as molten metal fills a mold.’ … When Lincoln appeared at the window over the north portico, he appeared unusually dignified, Hay reported. The president obliged the crowd with a few brief remarks. ‘It is now for the country and the world to pass judgement, and may be, take action upon it.”
>>364466
“Lincoln badly needed help explaining his policy to Europeans… Palmerston complained that the document was a piece of “trash”. The London Times wrote that Lincoln was acting like some sort of “moral American pope.” Lincoln was infuriated by European reactions to his proposal. The president’s son Robert later recalled that “what chiefly astonished and grieved” Lincoln during the war was that “the organs of English opinion which had censured Americans for slavery, turned round and condemned them when actual steps were taken for putting it down’
“[Marx] remained frustrated by the failure of Britain’s working classes to revolt. Part of the problem, he was convinced, was that the nation’s newspapers remained in the hands of venal tycoons. Marx considered the London Times the worst offender. He derided the paper’s editors as “public opinion-mongers” and their reports as “paid sophistry.’ … Labor leaders in Britain’s industrial districts began looking for other methods of expressing their support for the Union. One solution was to organize “monster meetings” of workers. Prominent speakers would laud the Norther cause, and the raucous audiences could then vote on resolutions of support. Newspapers- even hostile ones- would be forced to cover the meetings.”
“Starting in November 1862, a cascade of popular demonstrations rolled across Britain. The Emancipation Proclamation, Charles Francis Adams observed, had ‘rallied the sympathies of the working classes.’ The London Times sniped the crowds consisted of ‘nobodies’... Marx wrote newspaper dispatches about the meetings, helping to bolster the impression that popular enthusiasm was building. He believed that such demonstrations were key to wresting concessions from Britain’s ruling class.”
>>364473
“Lincoln, too, did his best to encourage the demonstrators. The resolutions passed in at least some of the gatherings had actually been carefully crafted by Lincoln and his team… In some cases, the Lincoln government actually sent secret payments to help fund the meetings, which the president believed could help convince the British statesmen that intervention would be an unpopular policy. Lincoln, meanwhile, wrote public letters appealing to the sympathies of workers…”
“On March 26, 1863, British workers organized their most ambitious meeting yet, at St. James’ Hall in London. Marx was among the spectators in the throbbing , cheering crowd… Marx lauded the St James’ Hall demonstrators as the ‘labor kings of London’. The meeting, Marx maintained to a friend, ‘prevented Palmerston from declaring war upon the United States.”
I'm glad about the outcome of the Civil War for a variety of reasons but I can't find in myself justifications for punishing secession. I think every community has the right to secede.
So I have mixed feels.
>>365212
Yeah the book is well worth a read. He focuses on what he calls Lincoln's forgotten foreign policy. He frames Lincoln's presidency in six different conflicts (e.g. his arguments as a Congressman, his and Marx attempts at early mass media, and his chess game with Napoleon III in Mexico).
Presents a very interesting view of a humanized Lincoln
>>367226
>his chess game with Napoleon III in Mexico).
wat
Who won?
>>365459
The bestest way to solve the issue would have been to let the South secede, and stay seceded, and then to invade to repatriate the American citizens who were enslaved by this new country to the North.
>>365459
South attacked first and the supreme court rejected secession as a right :^)
>>367324
Proverbial chess, disappointingly.
"[In 1863] Washington was full of rumors that France sought to seize parts of Texas and the Mississippi River... Some diplomats whispered that Maximillian's representatives were plotting with Confederate agents. Lincoln tried to turn a deaf ear to the gossip... Secretly, however, some Americans with ties to the State Department were quietly working outside standard channels to aid the Mexican liberals... American Mexico expert Edward Lee Plumb urged [various wealthy Americans] to sponsor between 25,000 and 50,000 mercenaries that could be slipped into Mexico to support the liberals."
"Napoleon urged Maximillian not to worry so much about an American invasion... The United States could not send its armies south into Mexico 'without at once making an enemy of us.' In the meantime, Napoleon urged Maximilian to begin thinking about how he might bring greater order to chaotic Mexico.. 'A state which is sunk in anarchy is not to beregenerated by parlimentary liberty,' Napoleon wrote. 'What is wanted in Mexico is a liberal dictatorship.'
"With [one of Lincoln's favorite officers, General Nathaniel] Banks' troops camped out along the Mexican border, the risk of miscalculation on both sides posed a serious threat. 'If raids were to take place on Mexico from Texas,' Napoleon worried to Maximilian, 'I might suddenly find myself at war with the Americans- a war which would spell disaster to the interests of France and would have no possible object.'
"Lincoln and Seward shared the French emperor's fears. [In one incident] Banks trained his guns on the Mexican castle just opposite his encampment. An exasperated Seward later briefed the president. 'Firing on the town would involve us in a war with Lord knows who.'
"Or rather,' the president shot back, 'the Lord knows who not."
>>364449
>there are people now that wouldn't applaud killing the rattlesnake because "IT WASNT EVEN BOFERING U OMGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!1
>>367463
Supreme Court can't reject that right because the Supreme Court was a part of the Northern Usurper conspiracy ;^}
>>367643
>all potentially dangerous animals must be killed on sight
Cool
>>368567
If it was good enough for Honest Abe....
>>367463
I wasn't talking about secession as a legal right. I'm talking about the idea of secession.
