This is what happens when bloated “defense” spending as well as mismanaged defense contracts both for new construction and maintenance go south. Your assets get blown out of the hanger and into the neighborhoods.
Here we have the situation in Florida where out of 55 F-22 stealth fighters, only 33 could be flown to safety in Ohio as articulated by the New York Times article:
Tyndall is home to 55 F-22 stealth fighters, which cost a dizzying $339 million each. Before the storm, the Air Force sent at least 33 of the fighters to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
Air Force officials have not disclosed the whereabouts of the remaining 22 planes, other than to say that a number of aircraft were left at the base because of maintenance or safety reasons.
An Air Force spokeswoman, Maj. Malinda Singleton, would not confirm that any of the aircraft left behind were F-22s.
Well, those in the air can account for some of those F-22s still in hangers on the base according to this Zero Hedge article:
F-22s are notoriously finicky and, as the Times puts it “not always flight-worthy.” The Air Force reported earlier this year that just 49% of F-22s were mission ready at any given time – the lowest rate of any fighter in the Air Force. The total value of the unaccounted-for fighters is around $7.5 billion.
My guess is, just like the trillions of American tax dollars “lost” on 9/11 when the accounting office was hit at the Pentagon by that “757” (i.e. cruise missile) .. this $7.5B can just be “written off”:
If the US were truly a republic, it would be much more responsible with the money that taxpayers trust Washington DC with and be purely defensive in it’s military vision and mission.
As an example, when Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers after he successfully manipulated the Confederate States of America and South Carolina into firing first at Fort Sumter, there were only just over 16,000 men in the US Army. By the war’s end over two MILLION would have served.
How different would the attempt for secession could have been if there had been no standing army but state/republic militias.
Fact is those, we are in an empire and we will continue to see the blatant disregard for all the taxpayer money and debt that has been squandered on this empire’s non-honoring policing of the globe.
Note that the two countries that fought from 1861-1865 (one fought for independence, the other fought to retain seven states worth of land, people, and especially economy) had very different ethics, noted below:
List of towns burnt or pillaged by Confederate forces:
ZERO
List of towns burnt or pillaged by Union forces:
Osceola, Missouri, burned to the ground, September 24, 1861 – The town of 3,000 people was plundered and burned to the ground, 200 slaves were freed and nine local citizens were executed.
Platte City – December 16, 1861 – “Colonel W. James Morgan marches from St. Joseph to Platte City. Once there, Morgan burns the city and takes three prisoners — all furloughed or discharged Confederate soldiers. Morgan leads the prisoners to Bee Creek, where one is shot and a second is bayonetted, while the third is released. ”
Dayton, Missouri, burned, January 1 to 3, 1862
Columbus, Missouri, burned, reported on January 13, 1862
Bentonville, Arkansas, partly burned, February 23, 1862 – a Federal search party set fire to the town after finding a dead Union soldier, burning most of it to the ground
Winton, North Carolina, burned, reported on February 21, 1862 – first NC town burned by the Union, and completely burned to the ground
Bledsoe’s Landing, Arkansas, burned, October 21, 1862
Hamblin’s, Arkansas, burned, October 21, 1862
Donaldsonville, Louisiana, partly burned, August 10, 1862
Athens, Alabama, partly burned, August 30, 1862
Randolph, Tennessee, burned, September 26, 1862
Elm Grove and Hopefield, Arkansas, burned, October 18, 1862
Fredericksburg December 11–15, 1862 – town not destroyed, but the Union army threw shells into a town full of civilians
Napoleon, Arkansas, partly burned, January 17, 1863
Mound City, Arkansas, partly burned, January 13, 1863
Hopefield, Arkansas, burned, February 21, 1863 – “Captain Lemon allowed residents one hour to remove personal items, and the men then burned every house in the village.”
Eunice, Arkansas, burned, June 14, 1863
Gaines Landing, Arkansas, burned, June 15, 1863
Bluffton, South Carolina, burned, reported June 6, 1863 – ”
Union troops, about 1,000 strong, crossed Calibogue Sound and eased up the May River in the pre-dawn fog, surprising ineffective pickets and having their way in an unoccupied village. Rebel troops put up a bit of a fight, but gunboats blasted away as two-thirds of the town was burned in less than four hours. After the Yankees looted furniture and left, about two-thirds of the town’s 60 homes were destroyed.”
Sibley, Missouri, burned June 28, 1863
Hernando, Mississippi, partly burned, April 21, 1863
Austin, Mississippi, burned, May 24, 1863 – “On May 24, a detachment of Union marines landed near Austin. They quickly marched to the town, ordered all of the townpeople out and burned down the town.”
Columbus, Tennessee, burned, reported February 10, 1864
Meridian, Mississippi, destroyed, February 3 to March 6, 1864 (burned multiple times)
Washington, North Carolina, sacked and burned, April 20, 1864
Hallowell’s Landing, Alabama, burned, reported May 14, 1864
Newtown, Virginia, May 30, 1864
Rome, Georgia, partly burned, November 11, 1864 – “Union soldiers were told to burn buildings the Confederacy could use in its war effort: railroad depots, storehouses, mills, foundries, factories and bridges. Despite orders to respect private property, some soldiers had their own idea. They ran through the city bearing firebrands, setting fire to what George M. Battey Jr. called harmless places.”
Atlanta, Georgia, burned, November 15, 1864
Camden Point, Missouri, burned, July 14, 1864
Kendal’s Grist-Mill, Arkansas, burned, September 3, 1864
Shenandoah Valley, devastated, reported October 1, 1864 by Sheridan. Washington College was sacked and burned during this campaign.
Griswoldville, Georgia, burned, November 21, 1864
Somerville, Alabama, burned, January 17, 1865
McPhersonville, South Carolina, burned, January 30, 1865
Barnwell, South Carolina, burned, reported February 9, 1865
Columbia, South Carolina, burned, reported February 17, 1865
Winnsborough, South Carolina, pillaged and partly burned, February 21, 1865
Tuscaloosa, Alabama, burned, April 4, 1865
Sick when you think about it, and which flag do you honor more?
Fifty years ago I was a 10 year old who had just moved cross-country to a new state just in time to start 5th grade. I was not the only new kid at school but very soon, at recess, the playground bully was in my face almost on a daily basis. I just wanted to play football with my new friends, I preferred he just leave me alone.
This went on for a week or so before out on the football field once more, he was in my face just itching for a fight. I looked down, and he looked to the crowd for looks of admiration, and never saw the punch coming under his chin. He lifted up in the air a bit and landed on his back with the wind knocked out of him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a teacher approaching and I melted back into the crowd while I heard “hey, what is going on here?” My new friends had seen this day AND every day prior and responded: “he must have slipped on something” and as everyone else nodded, the bully was left to get himself up off the ground.
Now I admit, I was a bit lucky because this bully could have come after me WITH some friends any day after school to settle the score, but he didn’t. And for that I am grateful.
I do hope that you are asking yourself, WHY did he write all this? Well, I just wanted to point out that while I was guilty of throwing the first punch, I was not guilty of being the first aggressor.
So like in my previous post about Pearl Harbor and getting behind the “well-known” story of the “surprise” that day, so too must we look into other events that might have been misinterpreted. This article, from Abbeville Institute, walks one through the days and months that led up to the South Carolina forces firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and rightly highlights the aggressor as well as the one who “threw the first punch”.
Carl Jones starts with the narrative believed by 95% of Americans here in 2018 when he states:
Too often a narrative is passed from one person to the next until it becomes accepted as fact or “common knowledge.” In the society that we live in critical analysis is rarely applied, and so a notion that if scrutinized would be exposed as silly (or worse), instead becomes “fact.” Such is the case with the situation at Ft. Sumter in 1861.
The narrative goes something like this- “The South fired the first shot, and thus instigated the war. The end.”
While it is true that the South did indeed fire first, there is a much deeper question to be answered. Namely, who committed the first act of hostility?
As in the case of my playground incident, one must rewind the relational history of the parties and assess properly where the responsibility of conflict rests with. In the case of South Carolina, New England colonies as well as other norther colonies were at odds in 1775 which almost led to New England battling the British Empire alone!
In Charleston harbor itself, there had already been some actions that had produced several severe irritants months before the “first shot”. More on that in a minute, but just note that South Carolina aspired to secede peacefully, after their 20DEC1860 secession decision. South Carolina’s governor Francis W. Pickens said after the bloodless victory at Fort Sumter on 13APR1861:
.. When I was called upon to preside over the destinies of this State, after an absence of three or four years from home, I felt that the heaviest and most painful situation of my life had come. But so far as I was concerned, as long as I was Chief Magistrate of South Carolina, I was determined to maintain our separate independence and freedom at any and every hazard. [Great applause.] I felt that the State was in a peculiar position; that we were immediately and at first thrown upon the most scientific and expensive branches of modern warfare. We were then but ill-prepared to meet the sudden issues that might be forced upon us, so that our cause had to present firmness and decision on the one side, with great caution and forbearance. We were, in fact, walking alone over a dangerous gulf. The least misstep or want of coolness might have precipitated our great cause into endless ruin. With the heavy ordnance we had to procure, and the heavy batteries that we were compelled to erect, I felt under these circumstances it required time, exact calculation and high science, and it would have been madness, it would have been folly, to have rushed the brave and patriotic men in my charge upon a work that was pronounced the Gibraltar of the South…
The truth is that the governments of South Carolina and the Confederate States of America had made repeated efforts to resolve the crisis of Fort Sumter, where the Union army had moved to on 26DEC1860, peacefully before any shots were fired. So some background is in order:
During the transition period from the Presidency of Buchanan to Lincoln, there had been two occurrences that had raised the ire of South Carolinians.
First was the fact that Major Robert Anderson, who commanded the US troops at Sumter, had of his own discretion moved the troops from Ft Moultrie, an indefensible position, to Ft Sumter. He had done so without the direction of President Buchanan, and because the Carolinians were unaware of this, they received the information as a signal that the US intended to forcefully maintain possession of the Fort. Although they refrained from attacking the fort, this action by US troops was regarded as an act of war.
Second, President Buchanan had ordered a reinforcement of the Fort and the USS Star of the West, loaded with supplies and additional troops, set out for Charleston. Cooper says that Buchanan attempted to rescind the order, but it was too late. The ship was already underway so word of this never reached the command. As with the relocation of troops to Sumter from Moultrie, this attempted resupply was likewise received as a hostile act by the Carolinians whose forces fired warning shots at the vessel.
The South Carolina government as well as the Confederacy already had two occurrences where they were deceived by Northern aggression.
Once Lincoln came into office in early March 1861, with William Seward as his Secretary of State, this is what transpired:
.. Correspondence between the Confederate government and Seward went on for several weeks with Seward continually stalling and assuring the South that he was in favor of avoiding hostilities. Although he assured the Confederates that Sumter would be evacuated, he deflected any attempts by their officials to ascertain specifics or details.
South Carolinians were becoming more and more alarmed as the weeks went on, especially due to the fact that Lincoln had delivered in his First Inaugural Address what the seceded States regarded as a Declaration of War:
“.. No State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union; that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, and that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances…”
Lincoln had no intention of surrendering, or selling the forts to the Confederacy because doing so would have necessarily signaled to the world that he was recognizing the South’s independence and sovereignty.
Those in Charleston harbor reading the words of Lincoln’s must have wondered what would happen next. Little did they know that only Lincoln and Postmaster Montgomery Blair were for war with the Confederate States of America while the balance of Lincoln’s cabinet wanted peace in March 1861. This all changed later that month when the reality of the United States Congress, reacting to the Confederate States of America’s decision to set tariffs at <10%, raised their own tariff rate TWICE what it was to up to 50% on some items. Having a literal free trade country adjacent to the United States threatened them economically as a majority of the tariff revenue had been collected in Southern ports.
Personally, nothing helps to know a person’s character than hearing what was said by them years ago and compare it to what they do today. Bullies have no character. Compare this quote of Lincoln’s from 1847 to what he was willing to do in 1861:
Interesting, because in 1847 in relation to the secession of Texas from Mexico, Lincoln had recognized the principle upon which America’s War for Independence had been established:
“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.” – Abe Lincoln
But, faced with losing the “duties and imposts” afforded to the US government by virtue of the booming Southern economy, he was forcefully retracting his belief in this “most sacred right.
So bent was Lincoln to reject the attempt of 7 states to leave “the union” of 33 states, that he attempted to do so in a way that he would not be seen as the aggressor.
.. The only question in his mind was how to initiate the war, and his efforts to resupply Sumter were an attempt to maneuver the Confederacy into firing the first shot while simultaneously attempting to not appear as the aggressor. This was obvious to everyone on both sides. Two of Lincoln’s trusted secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay, disclosed that:
“President Lincoln in deciding the Sumter question had adopted a simple but effective policy. To use his own words, he determined to ‘send bread to Anderson’; if the rebels fired on that, they would not be able to convince the world that he had begun the civil war.”
The ploy was that Lincoln was to resupply Fort Sumter with food, however he directed the US Navy to send troops as well.
Lost in all this was the fact that until Lincoln’s inauguration speech threatening invasion, from December of 1861 when Union General Anderson had informed by then President Buchanan that due to his relationship with the mayor of Charleston and businessmen in the harbor, he (Anderson) had access to all of the food necessary to keep his troops fed.
Bully tactics yield aggression, and aggression leads to distrust. As a result, US Naval ships were sent to Charleston and on 12APR1861 South Carolina troops under the direction of Confederate General Beauregard aware that the fleet was in route, were given the command to fire on the fort.
Many Norther newspapers (soon to be censored or shutdown by Lincoln, occasionally imprisoning the editors and writers) offered the unvarnished truth in the days that followed:
The New York Evening Day-Book opined:
“We have no doubt, and all the circumstances prove, that it was a cunningly devised scheme, contrived with all due attention to scenic display and intended to arouse, and, if possible, exasperate the northern people against the South…. We venture to say a more gigantic conspiracy against the principles of human liberty and freedom has never been concocted. Who but a fiend could have thought of sacrificing the gallant Major Anderson and his little band in order to carry out a political game? Yet there he was compelled to stand for thirty-six hours amid a torrent of fire and shell, while the fleet sent to assist him, coolly looked at his flag of distress and moved not to his assistance! Why did they not? Perhaps the archives in Washington will yet tell the tale of this strange proceeding…. Pause then, and consider before you endorse these mad men who are now, under pretense of preserving the Union, doing the very thing that must forever divide it.”
While most people have been indoctrinated to think that Lincoln “saved” the union, he in fact killed the “experiment” in this republic held together by a federation of sovereign states:
The Lincoln presidency was a catalyst for many negative developments in the ever-increasing powers of the executive office. His Presidency haunts us to this day, although far too many fail to recognize this fact. Lincoln overturned the outcome of the Philadelphia convention by forcefully relegating the “States” to “provinces” of an all-powerful Central government. He shredded the 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th and 10th Amendments, concocted the blatantly dishonest notion that the union was somehow older than the States, unilaterally invaded a sovereign country- which desired peaceful relations -without consulting congress, and extended Presidential powers well beyond anything delegated, or even hinted at, within the confines of Article II of the Constitution. As well, Lincoln committed the constitution’s own definition of treason by making war against the seceded States, shut down over 300 Northern newspapers and jailed the owners, arrested Maryland legislators who he “suspected” were sympathetic to secession and used the Federal military to effect re-election of political allies. Considering his numerous actions in defiance of the constitutional restraints on his office, as well as direct assaults against personal liberty, any rational observation must conclude that Lincoln was a dictator.
Conclusion: When you wonder where the swamp comes from in the government we have today, with a foreign policy that asserts that the US exceptionalism enables it to bully sovereign nations all across the globe, bullying independent nations that resist tyrannical forces supported by the US military directly or via the CIA indirectly, know that the source of this sociopathic character comes directly through Abraham Lincoln and what he pulled off in April 1861.
Notice that in this June 1861 map, the Confederate States of America are represented in gray. Look closely and you will see a part of Virginia that reaches within 100 miles of Canada almost slitting what is left of the “Union” in two.
If you could look closer you would see the railroad lines that go through that region that connect the east with the west (current Midwest) … and now you start to see how nervous Lincoln was about this area.
Lincoln already had cannon aimed at Dover, DE to prevent that state from considering secession, and in MD Lincoln placed all who were suspected of voting for secession in jail. Dealing with those counties in Virginia that had the railroad lines, coal and timber would take a little bit longer. However, being a new dictator has its privileges.
To know why Virginia seceded, you have to know what happened. The first time Virginia voted, they said NO to secession. Then Lincoln attempted to resupply two southern forts still under his control (Fort Sumter in South Carolina and Fort Pickens in Alabama) there was cannon fire in Charleston Harbor BUT no one was killed. The fort surrendered and then Lincoln called up 75,000 volunteers from all his states (36 minus the 7 that had left the union) to put down an “insurrection” (he took care not to call them states) and he did not fathom the fallout from that fateful decision. Four more states would leave the union with Virginia voting again and this time in favor of leaving. If the reason was to keep slavery, don’t you think the vote would have been the same both times? If it was the high tariffs, the vote should have been the same as well. Maybe, just maybe, these regions did not want to be a colony of another empire yet again!!!
One look at the demographics will reveal a lot about the area south of Wheeling that had ZERO say in what happened next according to quotes below from the Abbeville Institute article from June:
.. In 1860 the mountainous counties of northwestern Virginia cared little about slavery. Even in the southern counties McDowell had 10% slaves, Mercer 150 of a total population of 4500. …. The B & O Railroad, running across northwestern Virginia, provided a vital link between the Yankee states and the West. This explains why the first battle of the War took place at Philippi ‘West’ Virginia…
People generally can tell when the weather is changing .. no different by 1860 when those in western sections of Virginia and the rest of the south saw this:
… western Virginians were horrified by the hijacking of the federal government by Northern industrialists and bankers in 1860. Money had totally bought out the law. A railroad corporate lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, president, swore to defeat the Democratic states even in the North, i.e., New York State, Ohio and the so-called Copperhead states in the West. To the so-called Radical Republicans this was a real civil war. They had to subjugate the Democratic Party representing the workers’ interests. The world was shocked. Even the pope called Lincoln a “tyrant and a usurper” and sent President Jefferson Davis a crown of thorns…
Yes, they sensed what had been coming for several generations, something Patrick Henry prophesied about that rule by a corrupt majority to the north was coming true.
Then, the fallout continued as key US Army personnel had to make some big decisions based on selfish interests OR on principle:
.. General Lee (today called a traitor in the national media) had to resign his commission in the US Army so as not to help subject his native Virginia to the rule of Northern bankers. In the Sound of Music, Captain von Trapp was similarly forced to flee the Nazis…
Since this “Union” that Lincoln professed to keep seemed so very fragile, (actually, it was his party’s inability to hold on to political power indefinitely) it was decided to manufacturer another state for electoral votes needed in 1864 (they admitted Nevada prematurely for the same reason). The method they used is found no where in the Constitution .. but like all things of the Republican party at that time .. you just make things up because the ends justify the means:
.. Just create a “Restored Government of Virginia” in federally controlled areas near Washington. Appoint a governor, Francis Pierpont, and of course an ad hoc legislature. Propose one bill, devoted to the question of secession of the northwestern counties. Vote for it, get paid and go home. Democracy was somewhat crushed, of course. Twenty-two counties did not vote. One county “sent” one representative, some guy who elected himself, etc. But the whole thing worked like a charm, at least in the Union media. The cover-up was well under way. As of June 20, 1863 the federal government declared West Virginia a new state. ..
So even after the war, West Virginia was kept from being part of Virginia again .. politics:
… In legal limbo, ‘West’ Virginia did not democratically or legally secede. Neither was it annexed with any real popular support. Like India as a British colony, our people are seen as second-class citizens, if that. We are berated for our accents and behavior. And we are blamed for a system we did not create. Like the rest of the Confederate states we are in fact a colony…
I contend that except in the big political power centers of major metro areas, the rest of this country is treated as colonies … taxed to feed the federal beast. The American Empire.
Sick I know, but true. Now you know what your high school history teacher forgot to tell you.
Then you will experience for yourselves the truth, and the truth will free you. (John 8:32 The Message – paraphrase of the Bible)
You see, for some time now I have been “incensed” at the lies I have been told all my life. This started when as a young man attending a church that had a culture where everyone showed up on Sunday mornings with no smiles, with no joy, almost like a gathering of people doing their duty. The “dominie” (Dutch word for pastor, Scottish for schoolmaster) was pressed to ensure that everyone was very aware of their sins and their performance for the past week which seemed to be within the Calvinist tradition. In this environment, I opened the Bible in front of me and read from the books of the New Testament about people following Jesus who were full of joy, and hope and laughter, even in the middle of the storms of life while living in an oppressive empire!
In hindsight, it seems that there were times when I took it upon myself to dig for the truth. When given Child-craft encyclopedias as an 8 year old I read the World Book encyclopedias instead. Later in life, when studying towards a Bachelor of Science degree in Ministry and Leadership I expanded my research far beyond the text books supplied. A bit later in life, after hearing contrary thoughts to the political view of President Bush’s “War on Terror”, I looked beyond the US government/media spin and to source material on what really happened both BEFORE and after 9/11! Of course once you have doubts about the government/media story about 9/11, you go on to other events like The Gulf of Tonkin incident and Vietnam War, JFK’s assassination, Pearl Harbor’s “surprise”, sinking of the Lusitania, the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, the events leading up to the first shot at Ft. Sumter, the War of 1812, the transition from the Articles of Confederation to the US Constitution coup d’tat and even events during and right after the American Revolution.
Looking back, I find myself “Gratefully Disillusioned”, a term that reflects satisfaction in turning over so many “sacred cows” in life, that I do feel very free to say and do what my heart encourages me towards in my everyday life. I no longer have to measure what I hear and see with a “holy narrative” that someone (government/media/religion) has propped up as “truth” to be preserved, I can in fact entertain a thought without accepting it!
So what does this all have to do with Abraham Lincoln? Everything. Of all the presidents we have had in the United States, there is none other that has received such a “holy place” in our political understanding of America than this man. His assassination in fact was the major turning point in this because before the day he died, he in fact was not well like at all both in the South and in the North or Western regions of the United States. The timing of his assassination, just before Easter, setup the political mouthpieces (including many New England clergy) to seize this moment to deify a man for political means that has lasted over 150 years. How appropriate for this man to be chosen for this USE by all political parties, for as a man he was at his core a political animal!
While there have been over 10,000 books written about Lincoln, only a minority have really unpacked his real effect, his real life and his real character. These include Edgar Lee Masters’ 1931 classic, ‘Lincoln the Man‘, a 1943 book, ‘The Deification of Lincoln‘, by historian Ira D. Cardiff and lately the books ‘Lincoln Unmasked‘ and ‘The Real Lincoln‘ by Thomas DiLorenzo.
This week, another epic truth-telling book was released, ‘Lincoln As He Really Was‘ by Charles T. Pace in which Thomas DiLorenzo writes the Forward. Some context setting quotes follow as this book may consume the balance of my Labor Day weekend!
So here are a few quotes that reflect on the character of Abraham Lincoln before his death in 1865:
Murray N. Rothbard once said about Lincoln in an (online) essay entitled “Just War”: Lincoln was a “master politician,” said Rothbard, defined as one who is a masterful “liar, conniver, and manipulator.” He makes any “master politician” or our time look amateurish by comparison.
.. about his personal life, while there is nothing inherently wrong with not going to church EXCEPT if a majority of authors on Lincoln have led many to believe that all Lincoln’s Bible references infer that he was in fact a Christian, they have led you down the wrong path. One needs to hear what those closest to Lincoln said about him:
Lincoln never joined a church, and both his law partner William Herndon and his wife Mary Todd said he was not a Christian. His White House assistant, Colonel Ward Lamon, called him “an infidel.” His close associate Judge David Davis, whom he appointed to the Supreme Court, wrote that Lincoln “had no faith, in the Christian sense of the term.” But his mother read him Bible stories as a child, and later in life he studied the Bible for political purposes – to use religious rhetoric to sway the masses to favor his political positions.
Political animals, like the ones we have in the 21st century, tend to be crude in their day-to-day life:
[Lincoln was] a “zealous party man” who honed his skills, such as they were, of personally attacking his political opponents with often over-the-top ad hominem assaults ..
None of Lincoln’s family members voted for him, nor did 20 of the 23 ministers in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. He did not even carry his own county in the 1860 election. These are the people who knew him best.
Lincoln invited no family members to his wedding; chose not to attend his own father’s funeral; and is said to have never had a real friend.
Lincoln was a master story teller, many of which were notoriously vulgar and crude. He never passed up an opportunity to make a speech, writes Pace, as he spent years honing the skills of the master politician. He could sound like an abolitionist in front of a Massachusetts audience, and the exact opposite in Southern Illinois. His speeches were always vague and his positions hard to pin down, the hallmark of a successful politician. He viewed politics as “life itself” and was intensely partisan, routinely denouncing his political opponent as “villains.” He was a “born politician,”
By 1864, what did people think?
During his lifetime Lincoln was actually the most hated and detested of all American presidents, as documented by historian Larry Tagg in ‘The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: The Story of America’s Most Reviled President‘. For example, on page 435 of his book Larry Tagg cites an 1864 Harpers Weekly article that compiled a list of terms that the Northern press used to describe Lincoln including “Filthy Story-Teller, Ignoramus Abe, Despot, Old Scoundrel . . . Perjurer, Liar, Robber, Thief, Swindler, Braggart, Tyrant, Buffoon, Fiend, Usurper, Butcher, Monster . . .”
After Lincoln’s April 14th, 1865 assassination:
New England pastors who had excoriated Lincoln for four years all of a sudden “rewrote their Easter sermons to include a new, exalted view of Lincoln as an American Moses, a leader out of slavery, a national savior who was not allowed to cross over into the Promised Land” himself. Senator James Grimes of Iowa boasted that the Republican Party’s deification of Lincoln “has made it impossible to speak the truth about Abraham Lincoln hereafter.”
Even 80 years later in 1943 historian Ira D. Cardiff wrote:
… that by then Americans were not even “interested . . . in the real Lincoln. They desire a supernatural Lincoln, a Lincoln with none of the faults or frailties of the common man . . . a savior, leading us to democracy and liberty – though most said readers are not interested in democracy or liberty.” Moreover, said Cardiff, “a biography of Lincoln which told the truth about him would probably have great difficulty in finding a publisher.”
Hopefully I have your attention, and if you are ready and like me have been:
.. incensed that you have been lied to all your life by the politically-controlled/politically-correct education establishment. If so, ‘Lincoln as He Really Was‘ is a must-read as a first step in your rehabilitation as an educated American citizen – or as the citizen of any other country. It will be especially helpful in allowing your children and grandchildren to have an opportunity to learn the truth about this important aspect of American history.
So now I am off to my reading nook .. take care this holiday weekend (in the United States) .. talk to y’all again next week!
-SF1
PS About the author of this book:
Apologia MY EDUCATION IN COLLEGE was scientific — mathematics, physics, chemistry, zoology; in medical school it was the study of man’s structure, his form, his gross and microscopic qualities, his function, his diseases. There not a mention was made of Lincoln — the course of study being only a steady search for scientific truth. The doctor, like the farmer, is, in his limited sphere, looking for reality. In clinical experience, both in training years and in my own practice, I saw men and women who served to the best of their ability the needs of the sick. In my mature years I finally had time to read outside my profession. I read of America’s supreme figure: “Honest Abe.” I learned that whatever he was, he was certainly no doctor. He lived a different life.
There were two Lincolns — the myth and the man.
Charles T. Pace Greenville, North Carolina
Pace, Charles T.. Lincoln As He Really Was (Kindle Locations 165-172). Shotwell Publishing LLC. Kindle Edition.
