WEBVTT

NOTE Lincoln vs. the Constitution

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Welcome back. I tried my best to scare everyone off yesterday, but it didn't work.

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I usually do that with my classes, but on the first day I punch a hole in the blackboard.

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So they think I'm crazy, but there's no blackboard here.

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I have a short announcement to make.

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She reminded me.

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Today is 6606, and so naturally we'll talk about Lincoln today.

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So yesterday the major emphasis of what I had to say was about economics, Lincoln and economics.

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The tariff issue and the mercantilism issue, that was topic for yesterday.

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Today, it's more going to be on an emphasis on liberty, Lincoln and liberty, and Lincoln

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and the Constitution and states' rights, but they are all ultimately linked to economics

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as well.

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After all, economic liberty is arguably the most important form of liberty.

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Without economic liberty, we can't really have any other kind of liberty.

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And so it's not as though these are mutually exclusive topics.

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And that's, by the way, that's one of the things I always admired and was fascinated

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by when I, as a student, I was your age, ran across the Austrians, like Ludwig von Mises

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and Murray Rothbard, in that they understood this, they understood that to understand economics

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took more than just economic theory.

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You had to understand something about history, philosophy, mathematics, statistics, as well

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as well as a body of economics, and there are different schools of thought of economics.

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So I would urge you to think of your educational experience, those of you who are students,

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I guess you're all students, one way or another, as more interdisciplinary, and look at the

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Austrian School that way too.

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And so, Lincoln and the Constitution, there are a number of books I'll tell you about,

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And one of them, but first I want to ask you a question, I think Lew Rockwell just came

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in a little late and he didn't see my introduction, I don't think.

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Can you read that, Lew?

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But as far as books go, I'm going to be giving you names of some books on Lincoln and the

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Constitution, but I wanted to ask you, since everyone here is presumably a student and

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I'm a student of the Constitution, I think.

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What part of the Constitution allows for a dictatorship?

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Who can tell me that?

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I'll buy you a milkshake at Tumors, if you can tell me that.

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That's right, he got the right answer.

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There is no provision of the U.S. Constitution

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that allows for a dictatorship.

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Well, one book I'll mention is,

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there's a man named Clinton Rossiter

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who taught Cornell for many, many years, decades, I think.

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He wrote a book called Constitutional Dictatorship,

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which sounds, in the American tradition,

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it sounds like an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp,

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military intelligence, and so forth.

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But in Constitutional Dictatorship,

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he devoted a chapter called The Lincoln Dictatorship,

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where he says this, dictatorship played a decisive role

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in the North's Successful Effort to Maintain the Union by Force of Arms.

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One man was the government of the United States.

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Lincoln was a great dictator and a true democrat.

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And so those are two words you don't usually put together, dictator and democrat, but that's

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the sort of thing you run into in this literature.

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And he also went to say, Lincoln's amazing disregard for the Constitution was considered

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by Nobody as Being Legal, end quote.

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And so I've read all this literature, you can read, the history is out there.

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It doesn't make it into the textbooks that you use in high school or maybe even college,

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but the scholarly works are out there like this.

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And when I debated one of the big shot Lincoln, I call them idolaters, I don't call them scholars,

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idolaters, Harry Jaffa, he sort of angrily announced that Lincoln never did anything

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anything that was unconstitutional which is a flat contradiction of what

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generations of scholars have said and he didn't provide any explanation of why he

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thought that but I'm going to I'm going to tell you why he was wrong you know

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with some historical facts. Other authors have said similar things James

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Randall another book if you're interested in his whole topic is

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constitutional problems under Lincoln by James Randall. James McPherson the

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A well-known historian at Princeton calls Randall the preeminent Lincoln scholar of the last generation.

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He wrote in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s for the most part.

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He was the academic mentor of David Donald, who was another well-known Lincoln biographer.

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He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on Lincoln.

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But here's what Randall says.

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He says, if Lincoln was a dictator, it must be admitted that he was a benevolent dictator.

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He doesn't say why it must be admitted. When I read that, I had a vision of James Randall pointing a gun at me saying it must be admitted, it must be admitted, but there's no explanation why it must be like that.

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He wishes he was a benevolent dictator. But I would think that if you asked somebody in, say, South Carolina in 1865 if Lincoln was a benevolent dictator, he would probably disagree with James Randall.

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So in another book that talks about the Lincoln dictatorship is Freedom Under Lincoln by Dean Sprague and also I mentioned this yesterday, Emancipating Slaves and Slaving Free Men by Jeffrey Hummel surveys some of this literature and the preeminent scholar of the copperheads, the northern opposition is Frank Clement, K-L-E-M-E-N-T and he wrote a book called Lincoln's Critics and it contains a couple of chapters

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on Civil Liberties Issues during the war.

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So that's, as far as constitutional issues,

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that's another good source.

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He has a good discussion of that.

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So the question is, why is it that all these generations

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of scholars, and these are all pro-Lincoln scholars,

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by the way, in my favorite book of all of these

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is Freedom Under Lincoln because of the information

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that's in it by Dean Sprague, but still the last chapter

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is called Lincoln the Humanitarian.

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So he writes a whole book about the trashing of the Constitution, and then the last chapter is why it was a good thing that he did this. He's a pre-humanitarian.

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Why did they do this? Why did they say these things? Well, among the things that he did was to launch a military invasion without the consent of Congress, first of all.

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George W. Bush was not the first president to do that.

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He blockaded southern ports without first declaring war,

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and he unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus.

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The Congress eventually came around and played its role in suspending habeas corpus.

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Of course what habeas corpus is, is what gives American citizens due process.

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If you're accused of a crime, you have a right to confront your accuser,

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of a Right to a Speedy Trial, and so forth.

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But when that is lifted, Lincoln just announced that this was no longer to be, then the military

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could arrest anybody without even telling that person why and then it could drag them

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off and they did not feel obligated even to tell their family or anybody where they were.

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So there were some people who were dragged off and thrown into prison by the Lincoln

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Administration, who their families had no idea what happened to them for months, months

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and months at a time and over a year in some cases.

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And so that was the suspension of habeas corpus.

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And there were, William Seward, the Secretary of State, was put in charge of a secret police

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force and there were thousands of these people who were spies, it was sort of like in Eastern

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in Europe under the Soviet Bloc, where people would spy on their fellow citizens, and if

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they were overheard saying something that was construed as being not friendly to the

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Lincoln administration, then they could be hauled off in jail.

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And as I told you yesterday in one of Lincoln's speeches, he actually said that if a conversation

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is being held about his policies, the war, and so forth, and a man remains silent and

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not taken, judges did not sit, juries were not impaneled, convictions were not obtained

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and sentences were not pronounced. The Anglo-Saxon concept of due process, perhaps the greatest

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political triumph of the ages, and the best guardian of freedom, was abandoned."

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As I said, there were thousands of political prisoners in various places like the Port

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Lafayette and New York Harbor. Sprague said that it was sort of strange that the only

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One place in the northern states where there was genuine free speech was in Port Lafayette

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because once you're in prison for speaking freely, what have you got to lose?

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What are they going to do?

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Put you back in prison?

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You're already there.

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And so men could speak and women could speak freely if they were in one of these gulags

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that the Lincoln administration administered.

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And these were not spies and traitors as you may have read somewhere else.

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There may have been some spies in there, but they were all northern citizens, including

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the mayor of Baltimore, Congressman Henry May from Maryland, about 20 members of the

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Maryland legislature were thrown in this prison, newspaper editors from all over the country,

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ordinary people, so it was a lot of people like that.

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Hundreds of newspapers were shut down.

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I think that James Randall, he mentions that over 300 of newspapers were shut down and what usually happened was they were shut down or they were denied the use of the mail and in those days newspapers were all delivered by mail.

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There were no paper boys or paper girls. In those days they were delivered by mail. So if you can't use the mail, the government monopoly on mail, then you can't have a newspaper and that's a good argument against the government monopoly on mail.

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and which is why I'm going to mention in a little bit Lysander Spooner by the way

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and his comments on all of this and one of the things he is known for is

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trying to break up the government mail monopoly. He started up a private mail

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service and underpriced the government mail monopoly. It was illegal to do that

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but he gave it a try. So these newspapers were shut down. Now

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imagine this, imagine if George W Bush issued this order to one of his military

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Generals, which is not too hard for me to imagine, but imagine he said this, you, the

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general, you will take possession by military force of the printing establishments of the

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New York Times and the Washington Post and prohibit any further publication thereof.

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You are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison the editors, proprietors and

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publishers of the aforesaid newspapers, end quote.

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Now, wouldn't you think that would be a horrible affront to freedom of speech, the President

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of the United States ordering a military general to shut down some of the biggest newspapers

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in the country and put the editors and owners in jail?

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Oh, of course.

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Well, what I was reading was an exact order given to General John Dix by Lincoln, but

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But I substituted Washington Post and New York Times for the New York World and the

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Journal of Commerce, which were two big New York City newspapers at the time.

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So this is the sort of thing that went on.

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Generals were giving these orders.

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There were also mobs of Republican Party hacks, and sometimes including soldiers, who would

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literally destroy the printing presses.

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And I mentioned a new book yesterday, it was a new book called Lincoln's Wrath, that I

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I reviewed it on lewrockwell.com a month or so ago. If you're interested in this whole topic, it's written by a journalist and a historian who just got interested in this whole topic and it centers on events in Pennsylvania, but it also has some nationwide implications.

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and I was happy to see that. It's the first book that I know of in probably 25 years or so

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by scholars that have actually taken on this whole issue of the

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demolition of civil liberties during the Lincoln administration

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and his wrath was the shutting down of all the newspapers,

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the opposition press,

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and one of the reasons why this is important is it abolishes the myth of

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northern unity during the war.

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All the textbooks will talk about the great unity there supposedly was.

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Well, of course, if you jail all the opposition, then whoever's left is going to be pretty unified.

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And so, and this, of course, had a big censorship.

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You know, a lot of newspapers who weren't shut down, that weren't shut down, got the message.

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They didn't have to shut down every last newspaper in America.

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They just had to rough up a few of the owners and editors of the bigger ones and make sure everyone knew about this.

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And that would intimidate everybody else away from speaking up against the Lincoln administration.

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So you can find some criticisms in northern newspapers at this time, but the thing is

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you don't know that maybe a week later Seward showed up for one of his secret police and

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shut them down.

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I was in a debate with a Lincoln idolater from North Carolina State University in Richmond

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and he thought he found proof that I was lying about all this and he found one newspaper in Ohio I think it was and he found they had a criticism of the Lincoln administration and he thought that was proof that this is all a myth, they didn't shut down newspapers, which is ridiculous, probably a couple of weeks later they probably did that very newspaper as far as we know, but that was how they operated. All telegraph communication was censored. This kind of reminds me of the Bush administration

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Domestic Spying Program, we have high technology now, but censoring the telegraphs achieved the same thing, listening in on everybody's messages.

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The railroads were nationalized. Federal troops were ordered to interfere with Northern elections. This happened quite a bit.

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Federal troops would flood into an area and instructed to vote Republican to make sure that the Republican candidate would win.

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Lincoln was known to have his generals furlough soldiers to go and vote if they were Republican, keep the Democrats out in the field, that sort of thing.

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And in my book I cite David Donald, the Lincoln biographer, as saying that Lincoln won New York State in the 1864 election by 7,000 votes,

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quote, with the help of federal bayonets, end quotes. They literally intimidated the Democrat voters with bayonets.

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They sometimes used different color ballots. The Democrat ballot would be one color and the Republican would be another color.

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Today, maybe the Republican ballot would be red and the Democrat would be blue, so the soldiers would know who to intimidate.

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If you had a certain color ballot in your hand, they would intimidate you out of voting.

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We mentioned yesterday that somebody asked about Clement Volandegam, the congressman from Ohio,

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and I mentioned that this was another affront to the Constitution,

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and that one of the essential elements of the Constitution is supposed to be the separation of powers.

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And so here is the President essentially deporting the most outspoken member of Congress, Clement Volandegam,

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I mentioned how 67 armed Federal soldiers broke into his home in Dayton, Ohio.

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One of the best renditions of this story is in that book by Frank Clement that I mentioned, called Lincoln's Critics.

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But I thought it would be worthwhile reading to you a few things that Volandegam said that got him in trouble.

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He got him in trouble. He was a congressman who made speeches criticizing all of these acts that I've been talking about on the floor of the House of Representatives.

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And then when he retired from Congress to run for governor of Ohio, he went back home to Dayton and said many of the same things.

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And the Lincoln administration accused him of discouraging enlistments in the Army or encouraging desertion by criticizing the government.

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Think of it in today's context.

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That would mean if a politician like Ron Paul

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is out there criticizing the war in Iraq,

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the argument would be made, well, he's encouraging desertion

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because these soldiers may be listening,

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reading Ron Paul's speeches on lewrockwell.com.

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They've got the internet over there in Iraq.

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That's the same kind of thing that was going on.

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What was he saying?

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Well, here are some of the things.

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There's a whole book of the Landegam speeches

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that's been published by a Crown rights publishing company.

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He said that Lincoln's first inaugural address was, quote,

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spoken with the forked tongue and crooked counsel

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of the New York politician, leaving 30 millions of people

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in doubt whether it meant peace or war, end quote.

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So you can see how that would have gotten under Lincoln's skin.

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He denounced the tariff, the moral tariff,

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which we talked about yesterday, as, quote,

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obscure, ill-considered, ill-digested,

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and unstatesmanlike.

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He condemned the whole administration for its, quote, persistent infractions of the Constitution,

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its high-minded usurpations of power, which formed any part of a deliberate conspiracy

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to overthrow the present form of federal Republican government and to establish a strong centralized

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government in its stead, end quote.

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He also went on to say, he called the administration wicked and cunning, and he said, starting

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Condemning a war without the consent of Congress was the kind of dictatorial act that would

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have cost any English sovereign his head at any time within the last 200 years.

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So he was a fiery orator, if you will, to say the least.

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We don't have anybody like this anymore.

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Then he went on to say, condemning Lincoln for the quartering of soldiers in private

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homes without the consent of owners, that's one of the things that was mentioned in the

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Declaration of Independence and the Train of Abuses by Jefferson, and without any manner

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having been prescribed by law to the subversion in part at least of Maryland, of her own state

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government and of the authorities under it, to the censorship over the telegraph and the

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infringement repeatedly in one or more of the states of the right of the people to keep

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and bear arms for their defense, free speech too has been repeatedly denied, end quote.

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That was the Landy Gamm again.

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And finally, and this is, in my view, this is what really had to be stopped.

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The landigam was letting the cat out of the bag.

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He was going all over the place saying things like this.

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The purpose of the war, he was saying, was, quote, national banks, bankrupt laws, a vast

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and permanent public debt, high tariffs, heavy direct taxation, enormous expenditure, gigantic

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and stupendous peculation.

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means stealing or embezzling, and strong government, no more state lines, no more state governments,

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and a consolidated monarchy or vast centralized military despotism."

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That's what the Landegam was saying was the real purpose of the war, to establish all

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of that.

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And so for doing this, he was accused of treason, and as I said, they wanted to make a big show

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The border states were systematically disarmed in violation of the Second Amendment.

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In fact, you can make an argument that the whole invasion of the southern states was

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an abolition of the Second Amendment, because if you understand James Madison's rationale

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Now for the Second Amendment, it was that an armed populace would be a deterrent to a central government invasion that would deprive them of their liberties.

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That was the whole purpose of an armed populace, according to James Madison.

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And so the disarmament of the border states did this, disarmed them and allowed them to come and run roughshod over the whole country.

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There were two confiscation acts passed by the Lincoln administration that allowed for the confiscation of private property of dissenters, essentially.

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And they included lines like this, any U.S. citizen, this applied to the citizens of the North as well as anywhere else.

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And keep in mind, Lincoln never said that the southern states had legally seceded.

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He always considered them to be part of the United States and that all the people would be citizens of the United States.

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And so if a federal law was passed, they always considered that this applies to everyone, north and south.

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But these confiscation acts, a U.S. citizen could have all of his private property confiscated for such crimes as,

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and I'm quoting directly from the law, falsely exalting the motives of the traders.

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So, if you were to, if somebody were to say, well you know, if you read the Declaration of Independence, it says, governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and these Southerners are saying, we no longer consent to being governed by Washington D.C., so maybe they have a point.

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In fact, in my book, I talk about how the majority of the northern newspapers said this at the time.

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But with the confiscation laws that were passed, that would be a crime,

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and you could have all of your property confiscated by the state by saying that, by saying something like that,

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by falsely exalting the motives of the traders.

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So, you know, no free speech there.

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Or this, this is the exact words of the law, overstating the success of our adversaries.

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If you were heard to overstate the success of the Confederate Army, you could be hauled

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into prison and have all your property confiscated.

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Like if in 1861, this law passed after that, if someone were to say something like, damn,

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we really got our butts kicked at Manassas, didn't we, and I suppose that would qualify

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as overstating the success of our adversaries and you could have all your property.

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For this, this is another of the exact wording of the law,

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inflaming party spirit among ourselves.

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No party dispirit permitted.

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What party could that be?

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I would guess the Republican Party would be my guess.

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Party spirit among ourselves.

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And there was a charming little part of this law

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that said that informers who turned in their neighbors

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or whoever, you turn somebody in,

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and they were prosecuted.

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They did have a due process after a while with these cases.

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If they were convicted, you, the informer, could keep 50% of that person's property.

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And so they understood incentives, I guess they understood incentives like we economists

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do back in those days.

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And so this was very similar to totalitarian communism that we've all learned about during

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in the 20th century, countries like Albania, places like that, Bulgaria, very similar.

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And so these are some of the things that are the reasons why all these historians I mentioned

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refer to the Lincoln dictatorship.

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And for a long time, if you get into this literature, you'll find that a lot of historians

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have praised Lincoln for this, praised him for this.

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In Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, James Randall devotes hundreds and hundreds

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of pages to describing what happened, and I encourage you to read this book if you're

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interested in this topic.

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It's really well worth it, it's about this thick, a big, fat book, but then he makes

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excuses for it all at the end by saying things like, great social purposes can be promoted

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by abandoning constitutional barriers.

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And so, you know, why do we have constitutional barriers if great social purposes can be

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promoted by abandoning them?

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You know, when I mentioned also that Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and Congress then

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went along with it.

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He did it unilaterally.

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The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney, did issue a ruling that this was

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was unconstitutional, and his reasoning was very sound. His reasoning was the Constitution

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talks about the suspension of habeas corpus in the section on congressional powers, not

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executive powers. He went back to British law as well as American law. It is very clear

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that the President cannot unilaterally do this in Tawny's view. And Lincoln's response,

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which I'm going to talk about shortly, was to issue an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice.

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So, demolishing the other side of the separation of powers by intimidating the Supreme Court.

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But after the war in 1866, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling that neither

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branch can legally suspend habeas corpus as long as the civil courts are operating.

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In fact, in this decision in 1866, they made the argument that a crisis like a war is the

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It's the most important time of all to keep the Constitution intact.

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It's just the opposite of this argument that you often hear that, well, this is an emergency, things are different.

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For example, if you were to listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity on this topic, they'll repeat ad nauseam.

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Everything has changed since 9-11.

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What they're saying is if the Bush administration wants to suspend habeas corpus, torture prisoners, spy on us, that's okay.

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Everything has changed.

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In 1866, I think the Supreme Court did get it right by saying if the purpose of this Constitution is to protect the liberty of the people, that's the most important time of all, in times of emergency or war, to enforce the Constitution, not to suspend it.

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If not, governments will constantly be fabricating crises, they're talking about phony crises to justify watering down the Constitution and grabbing more power and destroying more liberty.

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and they understood that back then but you know who expects Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity to

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understand this? I wouldn't. So Randall went on to say that the Constitution should be looked at as

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a vehicle of life and a matter of growth, development, and interpretation and he sort of

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denigrated the founding fathers by saying we should not tolerate excessive reliance upon the

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and the Political Wisdom of a Bygone Generation, and so that was sort of, he was our so-called progressive, Randall was, and so that was sort of a way of defining what's called the living constitution, and more recently there was a man named George P. Fletcher who wrote a book called Lincoln's Constitution, and I was kind of surprised by this title because I didn't know Lincoln had his own constitution, I always thought we had one for all of us, but apparently he had his own, and he comes right

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Lincoln's Casual Attitude Toward Formal Constitutional Institutions

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and maybe fascism and socialism combined.

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And in my book, I contrast this to what George Washington

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had to say about this sort of thing,

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this casual attitude toward the Constitution.

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In his farewell address, he said,

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if the Constitution is to be altered, he said,

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quote, let it be corrected by an amendment

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in the way in which the Constitution designates.

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There is a process for this.

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And then he goes on to say,

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but let there be no change by usurpation,

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For though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is a customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.

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So you might agree with it now.

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You might think that, well, let's let George W. Bush violate the Constitution in this or that way.

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But you might think it's a good thing now.

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But who's to say there won't be a tyrant in office next year who will not be quite as benevolent?

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Now, on the business of Judge Taney and the suspension of habeas corpus, you know, I didn't actually, I didn't go in my, in the real Lincoln, I didn't mention this on purpose, because I knew that there was a lot of dispute over this, and at the time, I only knew of one source of the story that Lincoln issued an arrest warrant.

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All I mentioned was that Tawny did issue a statement that this was unconstitutional,

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but I didn't say in the book that Lincoln issued the arrest warrant,

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because the first source was a book by Ward Layman,

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who was Lincoln's close friend, law partner,

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and he worked in the White House in the Lincoln administration, who said this.

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He wrote a biography, and he said this.

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He said that Lincoln issued an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice.

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And so the Lincoln cult, or the Lincoln idolaters as I call them,

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they respond to this by saying, well, Ward Layman was a drunk.

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You can't believe him.

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And how could you disprove that?

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He's a drunk.

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They also acknowledged that Ulysses S. Grant was a notorious drunk.

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But they don't question much of what he says.

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But they said, well, he's a drunk.

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And usually, you know, with the Lincoln cult, that's sufficient. Personal smear, ignore him.

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Okay, that's the way they operate. But since then, I've uncovered several other sources that are much better than Ward-Layman's.

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And not that I buy the drunk explanation. I think Ward-Layman was right on in what he said.

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In fact, Charles Adams, who wrote the excellent book, When in the Course of Human Events, tried to get a copy of the manuscript of Ward-Lehman's book, which is on microfilm at the Huntington Library, and they wouldn't allow him. They apparently knew who he was, and so they wouldn't give him access to it.

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However, a graduate student at George Mason, about two years ago, is doing research on the whole tariff issue, the LinkedIn tariff issue, dissertation research. He has got a copy of it.

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He's an unknown graduate student, they don't know who he is, so he got the actual thing from the Huntington Library, and the last I heard from him, he's trying to get somebody to put it on the internet, the whole thing, because it's on microfilm now, it has to be transferred from microfilm to the internet, so the whole thing might be out there.

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But another source is George W. Brown, the wartime mayor of Baltimore.

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He wrote a book called Baltimore in the 19th of April, 1861, where he talks about this.

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He talks about a conversation he had with Judge Tawny, and where Judge Tawny told him that he,

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the judge, knew about the arrest warrant for him in response to his opinion, his opinion.

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And there's a, by the way, about a mile down Charles Street from my office,

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This is a big statue of Roger B. Taney, he's a Baltimore native.

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Another one, another source is a book called

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A Memoir of Benjamin Robbins Curtis.

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Benjamin Robbins Curtis was on the United States Supreme Court.

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He defended Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial.

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He wrote the dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case

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and resigned from the court over the Dred Scott case.

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and but nevertheless he refers to the arrest warrant for the Chief Justice as quote a great crime,

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a great crime in his memoirs so that's yet another source so I think these are unimpeachable sources

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as far as sources go that this did happen you know the Lincoln administration could have appealed

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this this opinion they could have gone to court but they chose not to they chose to just ignore it

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and to continue to suspend habeas corpus and another thing that I found that was going on

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here was not just the intimidation of Judge Taney but the intimidation of many judges federal judges

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who were attempting to issue writs of habeas corpus to four people that were accused of being

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traitors by simply disagreeing with the Lincoln administration and here's something I dug up

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and this is all in my forthcoming book that's going to be published in October, but what I dug up was a if anybody's interested I can give you the actual law case citations for this, but there was a federal judge in Washington DC, his name was W.M. Merrick, M-E-R-R-I-C-K, and he was going to court the next day and he was going to issue a writ of habeas corpus to

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This is a letter that he wrote to his fellow judges on the Federal District Court in Washington D.C. as to why he did not show up in court that day. He never made it.

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He says this, quote,

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After dinner, I visited my brother judges in Georgetown and returning home between half past seven and eight o'clock found an armed sentinel stationed at my door by order of the provost marshal.

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I learned that this guard had been placed at my door as early as five o'clock.

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Armed sentries from that time continuously until now have been stationed in front of my house.

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Thus, it appears that a military officer against whom a writ in the appointed form of law has first threatened with and afterwards arrested in prison the attorney who rightfully served the writ upon him,

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So they arrested the attorney who served the writ.

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He continued and still continues in contempt

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and disregard of the mandate of the law

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and has ignominiously placed an armed guard

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to insult and intimidate by its presence

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the judge who ordered the writ to issue.

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So they had armed guards stationed outside of the house

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of the judge so that he couldn't leave and go to court

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and issue writs of habeas corpus.

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And I found that numerous instances like this

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and several different law cases and things.

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So this apparently was going on

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not just with the Chief Justice.

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And as far as the Constitution goes,

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this is another attack on the separation of powers

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because it's the intimidation of judges.

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And like I said with the newspaper,

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you don't have to intimidate every last judge in America.

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Just a few well-publicized acts of tyranny will do.

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It will intimidate most of them

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And the final thing I want to mention here, with regard to the Constitution, and then I want to say something about Lysander Spooner and his take on all of this, was that there has been a lot of

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and all of this, was that there has been a myth that has been created to justify all

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of this, and to justify really the perversion of the Constitution.

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And the perversion of the Constitution that I'm referring to is the supposed illegality

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of secession, and I'm going to talk more about this in my next lecture on states' rights,

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But all I'll say about it for now is that the states were sovereign.

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They did hold conventions to ratify or not ratify the United States Constitution.

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And New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia, as conditions of ratifying the Constitution,

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reserved the right to withdraw at any future date if this new central government became

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abusive of their liberties.

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And they were all three accepted into the Union with that understanding.

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And under the Constitution, no state has more powers or more rights than any other state.

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So that if they accepted those three in, then I think it had to have been presumed that

416
00:39:18.960 --> 00:39:24.560
all the states would have this right to withdraw from the Union if they wanted to, in some

417
00:39:24.560 --> 00:39:29.720
future date, if they decided the government was abusive of their liberties.

418
00:39:29.720 --> 00:39:36.120
And the idea that they had to get the permission of all the other states, I think, is kind

419
00:39:36.120 --> 00:39:43.120
The State of America is kind of absurd because if you have a right of secession, you don't have a right of secession if it's subject to somebody else's approval.

420
00:39:43.120 --> 00:39:50.120
Either you have that right or you don't. But if it's subject to somebody else's approval, you don't have that right.

421
00:39:50.120 --> 00:39:59.120
Further evidence that it was understood that states had a right to secede was in the weeks after Lincoln's inauguration,

422
00:39:59.120 --> 00:40:05.480
There were three bills put before Congress to make secession illegal, and so why would

423
00:40:05.480 --> 00:40:11.840
they propose legislation to make secession illegal if they thought it was already illegal?

424
00:40:11.840 --> 00:40:15.320
Well, obviously, they didn't think, the U.S. Congress didn't think it was illegal.

425
00:40:15.320 --> 00:40:18.640
They thought it was perfectly illegal for that to happen.

426
00:40:18.640 --> 00:40:27.240
And so the whole invasion, the whole invasion of the Southern states, I argue, was unconstitutional,

427
00:40:27.240 --> 00:40:37.240
and that is probably also why they never brought Jefferson Davis to trial after the war.

428
00:40:37.240 --> 00:40:47.240
They destroyed the right of secession at gunpoint, but then they held him in prison for several years, Jefferson Davis, after the war, but they never brought him to trial.

429
00:40:47.240 --> 00:40:54.240
A man named Frank O'Connor, who was a well-known New York lawyer, offered to defend Davis,

430
00:40:54.240 --> 00:40:59.240
And that was apparently enough to intimidate the entire U.S. government out of going to trial

431
00:40:59.240 --> 00:41:05.240
because they didn't want to resurrect the right of secession in the courts after destroying it on the battlefield.

432
00:41:05.240 --> 00:41:10.240
And so I think that's further evidence that they did have this right.

433
00:41:10.240 --> 00:41:16.240
But there's a whole body of theory that has been developed to rationalize this,

434
00:41:16.240 --> 00:41:21.240
to rationalize the notion that there never was such thing as state sovereignty.

435
00:41:21.240 --> 00:41:27.680
2020. And this theory actually developed before Lincoln. It was developed by Daniel Webster

436
00:41:27.680 --> 00:41:34.280
and then Joseph Story, the Supreme Court Justice, also popularized this notion. And it was the

437
00:41:34.280 --> 00:41:44.680
notion that the Constitution was created by the whole people. If you read Alan Key's speech,

438
00:41:44.680 --> 00:41:48.200
you'll probably see the words the whole people in there. And if you're wondering, what the

439
00:41:48.200 --> 00:41:56.200
The whole people, the half people, the quarter people, this is what he's talking about, he's talking about nationalism, nationalism, the whole people.

440
00:41:56.200 --> 00:42:03.200
You know, if this were true, if the whole people created the government, the Constitution, then the states were never sovereign.

441
00:42:03.200 --> 00:42:07.200
It was this thing called the whole people that were sovereign.

442
00:42:07.200 --> 00:42:15.200
James J. Kilpatrick, who was a syndicated columnist, he retired some years ago, he was an excellent writer.

443
00:42:15.200 --> 00:42:20.880
and he wrote a book called The Sovereign States and he says this about this idea, he says

444
00:42:20.880 --> 00:42:25.400
the delusion that sovereignty is vested in the whole people of the United States is one

445
00:42:25.400 --> 00:42:29.440
of the strangest misconceptions of our public life.

446
00:42:29.440 --> 00:42:30.440
Where did this come from?

447
00:42:30.440 --> 00:42:36.400
Well, one of the things the modern proponents point to is the preamble of the Constitution

448
00:42:36.400 --> 00:42:42.480
which says we the people of the United States do ordain and establish this constitution

449
00:42:42.480 --> 00:42:47.480
and so they will usually say, aha, there it is, it's the whole people, we the people.

450
00:42:47.480 --> 00:42:53.720
Well, if you read James Madison's notes of the debates in the Federal Constitution,

451
00:42:53.720 --> 00:43:00.240
which is the source that we have of what went on during the Constitution,

452
00:43:00.240 --> 00:43:07.880
what you will learn is that the reason why it says we the people in the preamble to the Constitution

453
00:43:07.880 --> 00:43:12.920
is that when they proposed the Constitution, they originally had a different preamble.

454
00:43:12.920 --> 00:43:16.960
The preamble originally read this, I'm quoting it,

455
00:43:16.960 --> 00:43:21.640
We the people of the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Providence,

456
00:43:21.640 --> 00:43:25.560
Plantation, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia,

457
00:43:25.560 --> 00:43:30.760
North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, do ordain, declare, and establish the following

458
00:43:30.760 --> 00:43:34.120
Constitution and so forth.

459
00:43:34.120 --> 00:43:37.560
But then they realized, well, wait a minute, we don't know that all these states are going

460
00:43:37.560 --> 00:43:47.560
How can we put them all in the preamble? Some of them may vote no. So let's just leave it at we the people of the United States. So that's what they did.

461
00:43:47.560 --> 00:43:57.560
But it was understood by everyone that the states were sovereign. And when they talked about we the people of the states, they didn't mean state legislatures. They meant the citizens of the states.

462
00:43:57.560 --> 00:44:03.560
That's who's sovereign. We are creating this central government as our agents. That's what they were saying.

463
00:44:03.560 --> 00:44:12.560
James Madison himself, everyone calls the father of the Constitution, was very clear on where sovereignty resided. It wasn't the whole people.

464
00:44:12.560 --> 00:44:21.560
Here's what he said in his notes on ratification. He says, the Constitution would be ratified by the people, I'm quoting,

465
00:44:21.560 --> 00:44:31.560
the people composing those political societies in their highest sovereign capacity, political societies of the states, is what he's referring to.

466
00:44:31.560 --> 00:44:35.560
So it was not state governments, as I said, but the citizens of the states.

467
00:44:35.560 --> 00:44:38.560
So even James Madison was very clear on that.

468
00:44:38.560 --> 00:44:46.560
And so it's hard to understand how anyone could honestly make this argument of something called the whole people.

469
00:44:46.560 --> 00:44:50.560
There was never any national referendum on the Constitution. That never happened.

470
00:44:50.560 --> 00:44:56.560
North Carolina took well over a year to ratify the Constitution.

471
00:44:56.560 --> 00:45:00.560
And the way the ratification went, it only required nine states.

472
00:45:00.560 --> 00:45:08.560
And so the nine states voted and they had a new constitution and North Carolina waited another year or so before they went in.

473
00:45:08.560 --> 00:45:20.560
But believe it or not, nobody at the time suggested that North Carolina be invaded and one out of four men of military age be killed and the cities burned down.

474
00:45:20.560 --> 00:45:27.560
Honestly, God, that didn't happen. Everyone, how was the opinion? Well, they're a separate country. Leave them alone. Good luck to them.

475
00:45:27.560 --> 00:45:50.560
When Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address when he said a new nation was created, it's not true. They didn't create a new nation in 1776. They created a confederacy. They created a confederacy of states.

476
00:45:50.560 --> 00:45:58.560
The very words of the Declaration of Independence contradict this theory about the whole people. Just read it.

477
00:45:58.560 --> 00:46:06.560
Someone asked yesterday about the Straussians. They tend to harp on a few words of the Declaration.

478
00:46:06.560 --> 00:46:15.560
They claim to be the experts on the Declaration of Independence, and they focus on the all-men are created equal language.

479
00:46:15.560 --> 00:46:21.300
and they have their own unique definition of equal also, we can talk about that later,

480
00:46:21.300 --> 00:46:23.160
but they tend to ignore the rest of the declaration.

481
00:46:23.160 --> 00:46:28.640
If you read the rest of it, well first of all, it was a declaration of secession from

482
00:46:28.640 --> 00:46:31.340
the British Empire, that's what it was.

483
00:46:31.340 --> 00:46:35.280
It wasn't a declaration of revolution, it was a declaration of secession, they used

484
00:46:35.280 --> 00:46:43.280
the word separation from the British Empire, and the founders were all secessionists, every

485
00:46:43.280 --> 00:47:04.040
The Declaration is a statement of state sovereignty.

486
00:47:04.040 --> 00:47:10.960
These colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.

487
00:47:10.960 --> 00:47:16.720
They have full power to levy war and conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce,

488
00:47:16.720 --> 00:47:21.400
and to do all other acts and things which independent states may have right do.

489
00:47:21.400 --> 00:47:23.720
So they thought of themselves as separate countries.

490
00:47:23.720 --> 00:47:29.800
In fact, until the 1860s, it was common for Americans to refer to their state as my country.

491
00:47:29.800 --> 00:47:34.920
When the American Revolution ended, the King of England signed a peace treaty with the

492
00:47:34.920 --> 00:47:36.720
individual states.

493
00:47:36.720 --> 00:47:40.280
There was no such thing called the United States of America that was involved in the

494
00:47:40.280 --> 00:47:44.280
The Peace Treaty with the King of England at the end of the American Revolution.

495
00:47:44.280 --> 00:47:52.280
And in every one of the founding documents, the U.S. Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence,

496
00:47:52.280 --> 00:48:01.280
the word United States is always in the plural, meaning the states, the free and independent states are united in doing this.

497
00:48:01.280 --> 00:48:09.280
It doesn't say that there's some organization called the United States. It says the states which are united.

498
00:48:09.280 --> 00:48:13.280
It's always in the plural, never in the singular, in any of the founding documents.

499
00:48:13.280 --> 00:48:17.280
In the Treaty with Great Britain, it says this,

500
00:48:17.280 --> 00:48:21.280
His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the United States,

501
00:48:21.280 --> 00:48:25.280
these New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, Providence Plantations, Connecticut,

502
00:48:25.280 --> 00:48:29.280
he listed all the states, the colonies, individually.

503
00:48:29.280 --> 00:48:33.280
That's who he thought he was signing a peace treaty with, not with something called

504
00:48:33.280 --> 00:48:37.280
the United States government.

505
00:48:37.280 --> 00:48:46.820
So anyway, this idea that the whole people created the Constitution is part of the myth

506
00:48:46.820 --> 00:48:52.560
that has been around since the days of Daniel Webster to justify a consolidated monopolistic

507
00:48:52.560 --> 00:48:58.200
government and to deny states' rights, essentially state sovereignty.

508
00:48:58.200 --> 00:49:02.480
And the final thing I want to mention before I take questions is, since many of you know

509
00:49:02.480 --> 00:49:08.480
I want to let you know who Lysander Spooner is, or who he was, and even if you don't, I'd like to pique your interest.

510
00:49:08.480 --> 00:49:15.480
He was a well-known libertarian philosopher, legal scholar in the mid and late 19th century.

511
00:49:15.480 --> 00:49:24.480
There are a couple of good books of his readings, readings of Lysander Spooner that the Liberty Fund, I think, publishes one.

512
00:49:24.480 --> 00:49:31.200
and the Foundation for Economic Education has published a couple of his books of readings.

513
00:49:31.200 --> 00:49:37.080
His essay, No Treason, is a famous libertarian publication.

514
00:49:37.080 --> 00:49:41.620
And he was also an abolitionist from Massachusetts.

515
00:49:41.620 --> 00:49:47.500
And he wrote a book in 1845 called The Unconstitutionality of Slavery.

516
00:49:47.500 --> 00:49:53.180
He also wrote a book that was sort of a guide to lawyers for how to go about nullifying

517
00:49:53.180 --> 00:49:54.940
and the Fugitive Slave Law.

518
00:49:54.940 --> 00:50:02.100
So he was considered to be a hero to the abolition movement from the 1840s on in Massachusetts

519
00:50:02.100 --> 00:50:04.300
and throughout New England.

520
00:50:04.300 --> 00:50:10.780
And yet, he really despised Lincoln and his entire administration, and I'd like to bring

521
00:50:10.780 --> 00:50:13.100
to your attention some of the things.

522
00:50:13.100 --> 00:50:20.140
I dug up a letter that he wrote to William Seward in 1860, and I also dug up, I'm not

523
00:50:20.140 --> 00:50:30.140
I'm not going to mention both of them. An 1862 letter that he wrote to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who was also one of the leading Republican big shots at the time.

524
00:50:30.140 --> 00:50:42.140
And Seward was known to have publicly admitted that Spooner's argument in his book, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, was impregnable. It was unassailable.

525
00:50:42.140 --> 00:50:47.140
Sumner said that, and so Spooner wrote to him and said this,

526
00:50:47.140 --> 00:50:51.140
Why then, in heaven's name, do you not take that position?

527
00:50:51.140 --> 00:50:53.140
Why don't you come out and say this?

528
00:50:53.140 --> 00:50:59.140
He accused him of only opposing slavery in the abstract, not in reality.

529
00:50:59.140 --> 00:51:05.140
And what Spooner believed was that had these people,

530
00:51:05.140 --> 00:51:11.140
Seward, Lincoln, Sumner, all these people who made all these grandiose speeches about liberty and freedom,

531
00:51:11.140 --> 00:51:20.700
Freedom and Condemning Slavery thought in terms of a practical way of ending slavery,

532
00:51:20.700 --> 00:51:25.220
they could have avoided the war. But all they wanted to do, in Spooner's view, was to talk

533
00:51:25.220 --> 00:51:31.580
about it only in the abstract, which everyone did. I said yesterday, Robert E. Lee said

534
00:51:31.580 --> 00:51:38.740
slavery was a moral and political evil wherever it was practiced. Everyone condemned it that

535
00:51:38.740 --> 00:51:53.740
But the thing was, why was it not possible for America to do what every other country on earth, the British, the Spanish, the French, the Danes, the Dutch, did, and end slavery peacefully through compensated emancipation of some kind?

536
00:51:53.740 --> 00:51:58.740
Only in America was there a war that was involved in the ending of slavery.

537
00:51:58.740 --> 00:52:01.740
And here's what Spooner said about this.

538
00:52:01.740 --> 00:52:20.740
He said, had all those men at the north who believed these ideas, that is the unconstitutionality of slavery to be true, promulgated them as was their plain and obvious duty to do, it is reasonable to suppose that we should long since have freedom without shedding one drop of blood.

539
00:52:20.740 --> 00:52:27.740
So he was saying he thought this war was totally unnecessary and he didn't believe that the war was being fought to end slavery anyway, Spooner didn't.

540
00:52:27.740 --> 00:52:43.740
And he went on to say that the South could consistently and with honor and probably would long before this time and without a conflict have surrendered their slavery to the demand of the Constitution and to the moral sentiment of the world.

541
00:52:43.740 --> 00:52:52.740
You and others like you have done more according to your abilities to prevent the peaceful abolition of slavery than any other men in the nation.

542
00:52:52.740 --> 00:52:59.740
Spooner was not a friend of the Lincoln administration. He said even nastier things to Seward, and he was not finished. He went on to say,

543
00:52:59.740 --> 00:53:06.740
In your pretended zeal for liberty, you have been urging the nation to the most frightful destruction of human life,

544
00:53:06.740 --> 00:53:12.740
and through a series of years betrayed the very citadel of liberty which you were under oath to defend.

545
00:53:12.740 --> 00:53:19.740
There has been no other treason at all comparable with this. Treason to the Constitution is what he was referring to.

546
00:53:19.740 --> 00:53:27.820
and so in his in his famous 1870 essay No Treason, Spooner wrote that the war

547
00:53:27.820 --> 00:53:32.260
erupted for purely pecuniary considerations and not for any moral

548
00:53:32.260 --> 00:53:37.860
reason. He said that the war was being fought for northern bankers, manufacturers

549
00:53:37.860 --> 00:53:42.300
and railroad corporations who we call lenders of blood money who had for a

550
00:53:42.300 --> 00:53:46.500
long series of years previous to the war been willing accomplices of the

551
00:53:46.500 --> 00:53:51.500
of Slaveholders in Perverting the Government from the Purpose of Liberty and Justice.

552
00:53:51.500 --> 00:53:54.500
And he was really on a roll in this article.

553
00:53:54.500 --> 00:53:57.500
If anyone wants to read this, I'll give you the web address.

554
00:53:57.500 --> 00:54:02.500
It's on the web if you want to print it out or read the actual article.

555
00:54:02.500 --> 00:54:08.500
And he called Grant the chief murderer of the war in this essay.

556
00:54:08.500 --> 00:54:14.500
And he interpreted the crushing of the Southern secessionists as saying,

557
00:54:14.500 --> 00:54:25.500
Here's what the government is saying, saying submit quietly, submit quietly to all the robbery and slavery we have arranged for you, and you can have your peace.

558
00:54:25.500 --> 00:54:32.500
That's Spooner's rendition of what the U.S. government, what the Lincoln administration was saying to the Southerners.

559
00:54:32.500 --> 00:54:40.500
And he went on to say that the Republicans did not end slavery as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only as a war measure.

560
00:54:40.500 --> 00:54:52.500
They did this because they wanted his, the black man's, assistance in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial and industrial slavery.

561
00:54:52.500 --> 00:54:56.500
He was talking about the tariff, primarily, industrial slavery.

562
00:54:56.500 --> 00:55:03.500
He said it eventually enslaved everybody, north and south, to pay more for goods and services.

563
00:55:03.500 --> 00:55:08.500
That's about enough of Spooner.

564
00:55:08.500 --> 00:55:15.060
the message about Spooner. He didn't like Lincoln and his administration. And the final

565
00:55:15.060 --> 00:55:21.060
thing I'll mention about this in regard to Spooner is that after the war, the deification

566
00:55:21.060 --> 00:55:26.300
of Lincoln occurred, which sort of allowed Americans to accept all of this. It's a good

567
00:55:26.300 --> 00:55:32.260
thing. It still exists. And one good example of how this deification proceeded. I have

568
00:55:32.260 --> 00:55:37.320
in my files, by the way, I have my files of magazine articles, copies of magazine articles

569
00:55:37.320 --> 00:55:44.440
from the 1870s and 1880s that have pictures of Abe Lincoln being resurrected from his tomb

570
00:55:44.440 --> 00:55:46.000
with angel's wings.

571
00:55:46.000 --> 00:55:51.760
He's rising up to the heavens and there's this tomb with a door open on the bottom and

572
00:55:51.760 --> 00:55:54.200
this all throughout New England this sort of thing happened.

573
00:55:54.200 --> 00:56:00.760
And here's what a Unitarian minister named Henry Bellows said after the war was over,

574
00:56:00.760 --> 00:56:07.160
you know, he said this, the state is indeed divine as being the great incarnation of a

575
00:56:07.160 --> 00:56:11.320
Nations' Rights, Privileges, Honor and Life."

576
00:56:11.320 --> 00:56:16.040
So it wasn't just the deification of Lincoln, it was the deification of the state in general

577
00:56:16.040 --> 00:56:20.440
that we eventually got from the deification of Lincoln.

578
00:56:20.440 --> 00:56:24.660
And if you read this literature, read Harry Jaffa, for example.

579
00:56:24.660 --> 00:56:30.540
Not too much though, it'll make you sick, but he calls Lincoln Father Abraham.

580
00:56:30.540 --> 00:56:33.660
They compare him to Jesus Christ.

581
00:56:33.660 --> 00:56:42.160
They say things like Lincoln died for the sins of his country, just like Jesus died for the sins of the world.

582
00:56:42.160 --> 00:56:46.160
There's a book that was published last year called Redeemer Presidents.

583
00:56:46.160 --> 00:56:51.660
That's the theme, Redeemer Presidents. He's redeeming our sins for us.

584
00:56:51.660 --> 00:56:58.660
They compare him to Moses also. They say he led his people to the promised land but didn't make it there himself, just like Moses.

585
00:56:58.660 --> 00:57:07.660
And so they compare him to Father Abraham, Jesus Christ, Moses, and that began with the New England Preachers of the late 19th century.

586
00:57:07.660 --> 00:57:18.660
And it continues today with the Claremont Institute and people who write books with titles like Redeemer President that try to, and it's idol worship.

587
00:57:18.660 --> 00:57:24.660
Someone asked me recently if I thought Lincoln should be sandblasted off of Mount Rushmore.

588
00:57:24.660 --> 00:57:30.660
That's a loaded question for me, but my answer was I think the whole thing should be blown off.

589
00:57:30.660 --> 00:57:35.660
I don't like the idea of any politician being a big stone head, whoever it is.

590
00:57:35.660 --> 00:57:39.660
It's the deification of politics, no matter who it is.

591
00:57:39.660 --> 00:57:42.660
So I would sandblast all of them is my answer.

592
00:57:42.660 --> 00:57:44.660
And maybe that's all I'll say for now.

593
00:57:44.660 --> 00:57:53.660
So that's it for now, and I'll be glad to take questions, comments, brilliant commentary, or snide remarks, doesn't matter.

594
00:57:57.660 --> 00:58:01.660
Anybody have any burning questions on their minds?

595
00:58:01.660 --> 00:58:20.860
Well, treason was what was always stated, treason was the idea.

596
00:58:20.860 --> 00:58:25.780
It was an opinion that he issued as a circuit court judge.

597
00:58:25.780 --> 00:58:30.860
In those days, Supreme Court judges also had duties as circuit court judges and he was in

598
00:58:30.860 --> 00:58:35.620
and that circuits around DC, Baltimore and he issued this opinion that this is where

599
00:58:35.620 --> 00:58:40.020
this was going on. They were arresting the Maryland legislature and not arresting them,

600
00:58:40.020 --> 00:58:44.580
imprisoning them. There were no charges ever filed and that sort of thing. And they simply

601
00:58:44.580 --> 00:58:51.020
said it was treasonous to stop them from doing that because they considered the people they

602
00:58:51.020 --> 00:58:58.020
were imprisoning as traitors, spies, the enemy. And so if you're aiding the enemy by stopping

603
00:58:58.020 --> 00:59:15.020
It seems outlandish and unbelievable today, but this is all part of the historical record.

604
00:59:15.020 --> 00:59:21.020
It's the same way for the newspaper editors.

605
00:59:21.020 --> 00:59:29.100
So you have to understand that Lincoln, he identified himself as the Union, so you criticize

606
00:59:29.100 --> 00:59:35.740
me, you're criticizing the Union, and he made a sort of sacred thing out of the Union.

607
00:59:35.740 --> 00:59:42.500
But most people at the time the war broke out, thought, well this Union is a convenient arrangement

608
00:59:42.500 --> 00:59:50.560
whereby we can provide for say the national defense in case of an invasion, and if we

609
00:59:50.560 --> 00:59:58.560
If we all band together, we have a better chance of fending off a military invasion by some foreign power than if we all act individually.

610
00:59:58.560 --> 01:00:04.560
So we have these few delegated powers we're going to give to the central government, but they didn't think of it like Lincoln did.

611
01:00:04.560 --> 01:00:10.560
He made speeches about the mystic cords of memory is what tie the union together and things like this.

612
01:00:10.560 --> 01:00:18.560
So he used this religious language and sort of psychic language, actually, to talk about this union.

613
01:00:18.560 --> 01:00:27.560
The first Americans didn't think of the Union that way at the time. That was propaganda to justify what they were doing, the crushing of the secession movement.

614
01:00:27.560 --> 01:00:37.560
And so he did identify the Union with himself, I think, and so if you criticize me, you're criticizing the Union, and this is this glorious thing.

615
01:00:37.560 --> 01:00:46.560
The whole idea of a perpetual union, you know, the Articles of Confederation, the official title was the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.

616
01:00:46.560 --> 01:00:52.800
Then, when the states seceded from that and adopted the Constitution, they dropped the

617
01:00:52.800 --> 01:01:00.000
words perpetual union. It's not in the Constitution. They said something about a more perfect union,

618
01:01:00.000 --> 01:01:08.160
but that doesn't mean a perpetual union and that we will kill you if you leave. That was

619
01:01:08.160 --> 01:01:27.160
The Constitution was barely ratified by a hare as it was. What chances would there have been of it ever being ratified if it was understood that you could never leave under any circumstances, no matter how tyrannical the central government became?

620
01:01:27.160 --> 01:01:35.860
No one would have, that would never have been ratified like that, but that was Lincoln's theory of what went on at the ratification of the Constitution.

621
01:01:35.860 --> 01:01:46.060
That was his theory of the understanding that the whole people decided that after fighting a war of secession, a revolution, a war of secession against the tyrannical government,

622
01:01:46.060 --> 01:01:53.760
they would tie themselves forever to a different central government that they were sure would never be abusive of liberty.

623
01:01:53.760 --> 01:01:57.760
I think that's just too tall a tale to believe.

624
01:01:57.760 --> 01:02:01.760
You mentioned the Pacific Act spending there.

625
01:02:01.760 --> 01:02:05.760
Do you have any plans for other Pacific Act spending?

626
01:02:05.760 --> 01:02:07.760
Oh, sure.

627
01:02:07.760 --> 01:02:10.760
Do you have specific plans for those?

628
01:02:10.760 --> 01:02:12.760
Yeah, I do in my writings.

629
01:02:12.760 --> 01:02:15.760
This sort of thing went all over.

630
01:02:15.760 --> 01:02:17.760
I could cite Dean Sprague again, I guess,

631
01:02:17.760 --> 01:02:23.760
I guess is talking about how wide this was, how widely spread this was.

632
01:02:26.760 --> 01:02:29.760
It was everywhere. Let's see.

633
01:02:31.760 --> 01:02:35.760
Well, the newspapers were shut down. In my writings, I list them from all over the country.

634
01:02:35.760 --> 01:02:39.760
It wasn't just the New York City newspapers. It was everywhere.

635
01:02:39.760 --> 01:02:42.760
I'm not going to spend time looking through the index here.

636
01:02:42.760 --> 01:02:47.520
here but one of the statements Dean Sprague made was that he was he talked

637
01:02:47.520 --> 01:02:52.880
about what this meant for governmental power he said yeah I can paraphrase him

638
01:02:52.880 --> 01:02:58.360
I don't have the exact quote he said father Abraham was born it was the last

639
01:02:58.360 --> 01:03:02.020
line of his quotation of his I'm thinking of and he was saying that when

640
01:03:02.020 --> 01:03:07.440
the US government could snatch a man from Maine from his home for criticizing

641
01:03:07.440 --> 01:03:13.280
and then do the same to another man from Pennsylvania or Ohio. Then it

642
01:03:13.280 --> 01:03:17.280
demonstrated that he had real power, whereas previous to this it didn't have

643
01:03:17.280 --> 01:03:22.200
that kind of real power. The time the war broke out, the average American paid

644
01:03:22.200 --> 01:03:27.920
about $45 a year in taxes and the only contact he or she ever had with the

645
01:03:27.920 --> 01:03:32.880
central government was through the post office. So it was pretty much in terms of

646
01:03:32.880 --> 01:03:36.680
the central government, a libertarian society, that the government was local

647
01:03:36.680 --> 01:03:47.680
And the central government, there wasn't even a standing army to speak of. A few thousand troops in the Indian forts here and there. But it was minuscule as far as standing armies go.

648
01:03:47.680 --> 01:04:00.680
But that all changed, Dean Sprig, when the government could snatch men everywhere, shut down newspapers in Ohio, Minnesota, New York, all over the place. So this wasn't just Maryland in the DC area. This happened all throughout the north.

649
01:04:00.680 --> 01:04:13.680
All the border states, Missouri, as well as Maryland and Kentucky, the firearms were confiscated by the army, and people were sent to prison from all over, so this wasn't a localized thing.

650
01:04:13.680 --> 01:04:28.680
The Lincoln cult, the number they put on the number of people in prison was 13,000, but there is a Columbia University Law Journal article that says that it's probably closer to 30,000,

651
01:04:28.680 --> 01:04:34.120
And I think it's probably even more than that, as far as individuals from the North thrown in jail.

652
01:04:34.120 --> 01:04:38.240
And James Randall says about 300 newspapers were shut down.

653
01:04:38.240 --> 01:04:44.040
That's a lot of newspapers considering how small the country was then compared to today.

654
01:04:44.040 --> 01:04:46.640
Population of 30 million in total.

655
01:04:46.640 --> 01:04:50.080
That's one-tenth the size of the population today in the United States.

656
01:04:50.080 --> 01:05:07.080
Well, I know during Reconstruction, the Republican Party actually subsidized with tax dollars

657
01:05:07.080 --> 01:05:16.320
pro-Republican newspapers, and I don't know that they intimidated the opposition newspapers

658
01:05:16.320 --> 01:05:46.320
like they did during the war, Lincoln was gone and so it takes a real dictator and a tyrant and a brute to go through with this and I don't think Andrew Johnson or Ulysses Grant were like that as much as Lincoln was and so I'm not aware that there was a big crackdown on the newspapers but I do know that they did subsidize with tax dollars the pro-republican papers especially in the south

659
01:05:46.320 --> 01:05:48.320
after the war.

660
01:05:48.320 --> 01:05:53.320
How was the press in the South?

661
01:05:53.320 --> 01:05:55.320
The press in the South?

662
01:05:55.320 --> 01:06:02.320
Yeah, there was some of that.

663
01:06:02.320 --> 01:06:06.320
But I don't think there was much of a need for it.

664
01:06:06.320 --> 01:06:12.320
The Richmond newspaper is probably the biggest paper in the southern states.

665
01:06:12.320 --> 01:06:19.600
and it was just reporting on the war and it was supportive of course of the whole

666
01:06:19.600 --> 01:06:23.720
effort so there would never have been any need for the government to censor them

667
01:06:23.720 --> 01:06:28.480
if Jefferson Davis wanted to censor that but I'm not aware of any

668
01:06:28.480 --> 01:06:33.240
literature that talks about a widespread censorship in the southern state there in

669
01:06:33.240 --> 01:06:39.360
fact there there were a lot of debates that went they did go on a lot of the

670
01:06:39.360 --> 01:06:46.480
States governors and state governments disagreed with Jefferson Davis's war policies and would

671
01:06:46.480 --> 01:06:53.120
sometimes refuse or delay sending more troops when he would ask for to run to send more militia

672
01:06:53.120 --> 01:06:57.840
troops and so this was widely known that there was disagreement there's a man named George Rable who

673
01:06:57.840 --> 01:07:04.240
wrote a book I think it's called the Confederate Republic I think Confederate something like that

674
01:07:04.240 --> 01:07:08.320
and it was about the dissent and differences of opinion between the

675
01:07:08.320 --> 01:07:14.280
different groups within the Confederacy and so that that was expressed they did

676
01:07:14.280 --> 01:07:19.320
have arguments and it wasn't crushed like it was in a Lincoln administration

677
01:07:19.320 --> 01:07:33.320
You mentioned that in one of your debates that one of these Lincoln idolaters denied that Lincoln ever did anything unconstitutional.

678
01:07:33.320 --> 01:07:42.320
How would one of these idolaters then deal with the suspension of KB's court? What would their response be?

679
01:07:49.320 --> 01:07:56.320
He's not a political scientist by training, he's not a historian by training, he's not a civil war historian, he's not an economist, he's rhetoric.

680
01:07:56.320 --> 01:08:01.320
And he's written two books 50 years apart on Lincoln's speeches, basically.

681
01:08:01.320 --> 01:08:09.320
And so you can read this whole book, his latest book, you can read the whole book, and there's no mention anywhere of anyone dying in the book.

682
01:08:09.320 --> 01:08:16.320
It's about Lincoln and the Civil War and so forth, but there's no blood, there's no war, there's very little real history in it.

683
01:08:16.320 --> 01:08:21.320
and the history in it, it's all rhetoric and interpretations of rhetoric,

684
01:08:21.320 --> 01:08:30.320
clever interpretations of rhetoric, and so it's sort of like the Bill Clinton style of historical research

685
01:08:30.320 --> 01:08:35.320
by focusing on speeches and what people say as opposed to what they do,

686
01:08:35.320 --> 01:08:39.320
and if you do that, if you look at Lincoln's speeches on the Constitution,

687
01:08:39.320 --> 01:08:44.320
well you could probably make a very strong argument that he was a big supporter of the Constitution

688
01:08:44.320 --> 01:09:14.320
and Human Action because he said he was, he hears his speeches, and I think that's what Jaffa would do, that's what he does, he focuses on not all of Lincoln's speeches, but the prettier sounding ones, especially the ones that invoke God, even though Lincoln was not a believer in God as far as anybody knows, but he did know the Bible, he read the Bible, he read Shakespeare, his library consisted of the King James Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and all the rest were books on rhetoric and speech making,

689
01:09:14.320 --> 01:09:44.320
Library. There's no evidence that he ever read the Federalist papers as far as I'm concerned. There's nothing hard landing at all, nothing at all in political philosophy, history, his rhetoric and speech making, the law. He was a lawyer. He was a trial lawyer in Shakespeare and the Bible. And that was a great way to, he was a genius at using, you know, the stories from Shakespeare and the Bible to persuade audiences of his points. But I think that's what Jaffa would

690
01:09:44.320 --> 01:09:52.880
to do it. He would look at his speeches. He has these followers that repeat. He puts out

691
01:09:52.880 --> 01:09:58.880
the mantra, Lincoln never did anything constitutional, and he'll give a re-explanation based on Lincoln's

692
01:09:58.880 --> 01:10:03.200
speeches. And then his followers will all repeat this over and over and over and over

693
01:10:03.200 --> 01:10:08.200
again. They seem to hope that repetition will make it true. That's why when I debated him,

694
01:10:08.200 --> 01:10:13.160
I mentioned facts. This is what happened. And he got very angry. That's why he keeps

695
01:10:13.160 --> 01:10:18.160
Lincoln never did anything that was unconstitutional, but I can't see how you can do that.

696
01:10:18.160 --> 01:10:24.160
In fact, there was an audio of that, and I don't know if it picked it up, but there was a lot of laughter in the audience when he said that,

697
01:10:24.160 --> 01:10:33.160
because I had just recited all these facts, and even during my debate with him, I cited that same thing from King George,

698
01:10:33.160 --> 01:10:39.160
where he had listed the individual states that he was signing a peace treaty with, and he denied that that was true.

699
01:10:39.160 --> 01:10:57.160
and I actually had a photocopy of the actual treaty with Great Britain in my hand and read from it and then he denied that that was true and I was mystified at that point, how could he deny this but I think I did figure it out though that it's all based on rhetoric.

700
01:10:57.160 --> 01:11:03.160
If you read Lincoln's speeches, he'll deny that any such thing as state sovereignty ever existed.

701
01:11:33.160 --> 01:12:03.160
University, who wrote an article that was on lewrockwell.com, critical of the Strausians and Jaffa in particular, and they've had a whole debate on the Claremont Institute's website over this, and Professor Rind sent the whole thing to me online, and he said he was sort of taken aback at how so many of the comments were personal, just personal attacks. It was not just Jaffa, but he has this stable of followers that do the exact same thing.

702
01:12:03.160 --> 01:12:16.160
Jaffa himself accused Professor Wren of being, he said he's not just criticizing me and my fellow Straussians, but he's criticizing Jesus Christ himself.

703
01:12:16.160 --> 01:12:32.160
And Jaffa's logic was Professor Wren was criticizing people who claim that it's just for the American military to wage war in foreign lands on the basis of some abstract principle that has nothing to do with justice or national defense.

704
01:12:32.160 --> 01:12:36.160
and National Defense, like Democracy in the Middle East, for example.

705
01:12:36.160 --> 01:12:42.160
And that's what Jaffa is known for, spouting off these abstract principles to justify interventionism.

706
01:12:42.160 --> 01:12:50.160
And one of Jaffa's responses in this recent exchange between him and Professor Rin, the RYN is outspilt,

707
01:12:50.160 --> 01:12:56.160
was that, well, Jesus Christ believed in absolute principles, you know, do unto the Bible,

708
01:12:56.160 --> 01:12:59.160
do unto others as you would want others to do unto you.

709
01:12:59.160 --> 01:13:04.160
So I suppose Professor Wren is calling him a Jacobin, just like he's calling me a Jacobin.

710
01:13:04.160 --> 01:13:09.660
So it's a semantic BS is what they specialize in. It has nothing to do with history or reality,

711
01:13:09.660 --> 01:13:16.160
but that's the sort of thing you get. Fortunately, very few people in the academic world pay attention to these characters.

712
01:13:16.160 --> 01:13:21.160
That's why almost none of them has a real academic job. There are very few of them.

713
01:13:21.160 --> 01:13:25.160
That's why they're all at think tanks in the AEI and the Claremont Institute.

714
01:13:25.160 --> 01:13:52.160
I've heard very good examples for reasons why Lincoln didn't maintain the Union. I think the most preferred I've heard is that if Lincoln didn't maintain the Union because he never fought Hitler during World War II. So we have to thank Lincoln for defeating Hitler.

715
01:13:55.160 --> 01:13:57.640
It was a coalition, wasn't it?

716
01:13:57.640 --> 01:14:03.160
Why wouldn't the southern states join the coalition with the northern states, for one

717
01:14:03.160 --> 01:14:04.160
thing?

718
01:14:04.160 --> 01:14:12.240
And I also think, you look at history, another book I'll recommend to you is Wilson's War

719
01:14:12.240 --> 01:14:13.240
by Jim Powell.

720
01:14:13.240 --> 01:14:15.000
He was a friend of the Austrian School.

721
01:14:15.000 --> 01:14:19.000
He was a student of Friedrich Hayek at the University of Chicago, among other.

722
01:14:19.000 --> 01:14:25.080
Hayek wasn't his dissertation advisor, but Hayek was there when Jim Powell was a student.

723
01:14:25.080 --> 01:14:55.080
He was a classmate of Ralph Rakos, Jim Powell, and he argues that Woodrow Wilson was probably the worst American president ever, because he plunged us into World War I when it wasn't any of our business, and he explains his theory of why he thinks that event, American entry into World War I, ended up strengthening the hand of the Bolsheviks in Russia and led to Hitler in Germany.

724
01:14:55.080 --> 01:15:06.080
because of the Versailles Treaty was so oppressive to the Germans that the German people fell for a dictator who promised, you know, great things for Germany after that.

725
01:15:06.080 --> 01:15:15.080
And so he makes a book-length case of this. And I would add to that, I would make the case that if the South had seceded peacefully,

726
01:15:15.080 --> 01:15:21.080
It would have been the one counter-example in the entire world in the early 20th century

727
01:15:21.080 --> 01:15:27.080
of a government that was not a highly centralized, consolidated, monopolistic state.

728
01:15:27.080 --> 01:15:32.080
Because after this, we had the Russian government and the German government.

729
01:15:32.080 --> 01:15:39.080
The trend was massive consolidation of the government's forming empires that became imperialistic.

730
01:15:39.080 --> 01:15:46.080
And had the South peacefully seceded, this would have been a counter example to all of that government.

731
01:15:46.080 --> 01:15:53.080
And I think it would have not only been a counter example to the world, but it would have greatly weakened the U.S. government.

732
01:15:53.080 --> 01:16:01.080
The U.S. government, if nothing else, it wouldn't have been able to tax a big chunk of the population, the southern states.

733
01:16:01.080 --> 01:16:13.080
And it would also have known that if it would engage in unconstitutional actions like the Spanish-American War that had nothing to do with the defense of the United States, that there might be another threat of secession.

734
01:16:13.080 --> 01:16:23.080
You know, the War of 1812 in New England essentially seceded from that by not participating, by refusing to send troops in any significant degree.

735
01:16:23.080 --> 01:16:38.080
If they even went so far as to put men in debtors' prison, if there were recruiting officers coming around trying to recruit militia for the War of 1812, and then when they would leave, the guy would get out of debtors' prison, things like that.

736
01:16:38.080 --> 01:16:48.080
And so I think that sort of thing might have happened, that there would have been a bigger break on these unconstitutional usurpations of power that the United States government had.

737
01:16:48.080 --> 01:16:53.080
and if that had happened, there may never have been an American entry into World War I

738
01:16:53.080 --> 01:16:57.080
and if not, there may not have been a World War II.

739
01:16:57.080 --> 01:17:01.080
If you want to speculate about the Nazis and things like this, I can speculate too,

740
01:17:01.080 --> 01:17:09.080
but I think my story is much more plausible than we wouldn't have been able to defeat the Nazis without this.

741
01:17:09.080 --> 01:17:17.080
I give a talk at Grove City College and some of the history and political science people there came up to me afterwards

742
01:17:17.080 --> 01:17:43.080
I gave it on Lincoln's birthday last year, February 12th, and said, well, isn't it a good thing that Sherman's march, where he bombed cities, burned cities to the ground, and did all this, that it sort of established a precedent for the bombing of Dresden and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, isn't that a good thing?

743
01:17:43.080 --> 01:17:48.080
And I said, no, mass murder of civilians is mass murder of civilians, no matter who does it.

744
01:17:48.080 --> 01:17:51.080
And so, but that's the way some people think.

745
01:17:51.080 --> 01:17:54.080
It's a thank goodness Sherman mass murdered civilians

746
01:17:54.080 --> 01:17:59.080
because it established a precedent for future U.S. governments to mass murder civilians.

747
01:17:59.080 --> 01:18:01.080
And isn't that a good thing?

748
01:18:01.080 --> 01:18:03.080
And this is at a religious school.

749
01:18:03.080 --> 01:18:06.080
These are, this growth city is supposedly a religious school.

750
01:18:06.080 --> 01:18:09.080
There's still mandatory chapel there.

751
01:18:09.080 --> 01:18:22.080
And that's how a lot of modern evangelical Christians think, apparently, that it bombs away, somewhere in the Bible, they apparently believe, I don't know.

752
01:18:22.080 --> 01:18:24.080
Yes sir, he had his hand up.

753
01:18:24.080 --> 01:18:27.040
Let me ask you first...

754
01:18:27.040 --> 01:18:35.040
He was referring to the decoration in a tennis court less defensible I think.

755
01:18:35.040 --> 01:18:36.040
Oh yeah.

756
01:18:36.040 --> 01:18:41.040
Why wouldn't he have chosen something more different from the look of the hand?

757
01:18:41.040 --> 01:18:45.040
Yeah, well, he made a big deal.

758
01:18:45.840 --> 01:18:47.340
And the decoration didn't.

759
01:18:47.340 --> 01:18:49.340
Yeah, that's why, nothing...

760
01:18:49.340 --> 01:18:51.340
we mentioned, Harry Jeff, I don't think anything

761
01:18:51.340 --> 01:18:55.980
Like anything he has ever written in his 60-year career, he's been around a long time, is any

762
01:18:55.980 --> 01:19:00.520
different than Lincoln's own propaganda.

763
01:19:00.520 --> 01:19:05.020
It might use different language slightly, but it's just book after book written, article

764
01:19:05.020 --> 01:19:09.740
after article, essentially the same, rendition of the same propaganda.

765
01:19:09.740 --> 01:19:17.260
But he certainly chose 1776 to make his point that the country was founded there because

766
01:19:17.260 --> 01:19:29.260
I think because he knew that the Constitution, which occurred much later, there were state ratification elections, and so the states were sovereign.

767
01:19:29.260 --> 01:19:37.260
They chose to join the Constitution or not, and that would have been too obvious that he was in the wrong and the South was in the right if you mentioned the Constitution.

768
01:19:37.260 --> 01:19:50.260
So he chose the Declaration and he chose not all the Declaration though, he chose the all men are created equal slogan in the Declaration, but ignored the rest of it, which is a classic states' rights doctrine.

769
01:19:50.260 --> 01:19:56.260
It refers to the states as free and independent sovereign states all throughout.

770
01:19:56.260 --> 01:20:04.260
Read the last paragraph, the very last paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, it doesn't say anything about the whole people in there.

771
01:20:04.260 --> 01:20:14.260
But that was his tactic and rhetoric, I think, is to focus on that one line, that all men are created equal, and that's what Jaffa has done his whole life.

772
01:20:14.260 --> 01:20:26.260
Although, clearly, Lincoln did not believe in equality, equality of rights for black people. He was against it every step along the way.

773
01:20:26.260 --> 01:20:31.260
He was opposed to giving them the right to vote, allowing them to be jurors.

774
01:20:31.260 --> 01:20:44.260
He supported the Illinois Black Codes. He was a manager of the Illinois Colonization Society, which succeeded in getting the legislature to allocate money to deport the free black people out of the state.

775
01:20:44.260 --> 01:20:57.260
And as president, he actually got millions of dollars allocated to increase the colony in Liberia of American blacks, and he sent 500 of them there.

776
01:20:57.260 --> 01:21:10.260
Joe Sobran, the columnist, once remarked that if Lincoln believed in equality, he only believed that black people could be equal somewhere else, not here, somewhere else other than the United States.

777
01:21:10.260 --> 01:21:24.260
But that's been the whole schtick of the Claremont Institute and Harry Jaffa, that Lincoln supposedly was a champion of equal natural rights for all people.

778
01:21:24.260 --> 01:21:28.260
That's based just on the Gettysburg Address Statement.

779
01:21:28.260 --> 01:21:35.260
It's not based on Lincoln's lifelong behavior and his many other statements of other kinds everywhere.

780
01:21:35.260 --> 01:21:40.260
They ignore all these other statements where he even used the word superior

781
01:21:40.260 --> 01:21:45.260
to describe what he thought should be the proper relation between the white and black races.

782
01:21:45.260 --> 01:21:49.260
The white race should have the superior position as his exact words.

783
01:21:49.260 --> 01:21:52.260
And so that's not equality.

784
01:21:52.260 --> 01:22:04.260
But again, you know, the slick use of rhetoric and the careful selective choosing of out-of-context quotes can help you make the case that he was an advocate of natural rights for everybody.

785
01:22:04.260 --> 01:22:10.260
And that's basically what they do. I think that's why he chose 1776 in the Gettysburg Address.

786
01:22:10.260 --> 01:22:17.260
A good critique of the Gettysburg Address is one by H.L. Mencken, which you can find online.

787
01:22:17.260 --> 01:22:32.760
And another one is Charles Adams. In his book, When in the Course of Human Events, he has a whole chapter dissecting the Gettysburg Address, almost line by line, and raising big questions over what it all is saying.

788
01:22:32.760 --> 01:22:39.760
Mencken's main point was, it was all backwards. It was the South that was fighting for the right of consent.

789
01:22:39.760 --> 01:22:55.760
The question about this topic, or maybe a comment. You were talking about the South, because of the Senate, if you're talking about the right-wing.

790
01:23:09.760 --> 01:23:19.760
The extension of slavery into the territories was another issue, but it was related to the economic issues, like the tariff and the bank, because...

791
01:23:19.760 --> 01:23:27.760
Well, I had a look at the South Carolina administration, and it's all about slavery, so no mention at all about the tariffs.

792
01:23:27.760 --> 01:23:37.760
Yeah, right. Well, that's one statement. And the war, though, the war is different. I mean, the question is, what is the reason for the war?

793
01:23:37.760 --> 01:23:47.760
No one says, not even historians today say the war, the North attacked the South to free the slaves.

794
01:23:47.760 --> 01:24:02.760
The purpose, the reason Lincoln gave, the reason the U.S. Congress gave and anyone else in the North was to save the Union or to destroy the secession movement.

795
01:24:02.760 --> 01:24:15.760
The thing is, the two are related. Without the Union, with the South out of the Union, there was no hope of having a continental empire.

796
01:24:15.760 --> 01:24:24.760
The South was declaring itself essentially a free trade zone with minimal tariffs, whereas the North had 50% tariffs.

797
01:24:24.760 --> 01:24:30.560
And so even before the war broke out, there were northern newspapers calling for the bombardment of the southern ports

798
01:24:30.560 --> 01:24:39.000
because they thought much of the commerce of the world would flow to New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina and away from Boston and New York.

799
01:24:39.000 --> 01:24:49.680
And so these plans that the Republican Party had for high tariffs to finance railroads and all that would have been crushed by the secession of the South.

800
01:24:49.680 --> 01:24:57.180
So that's why I say that the two things, the saving the Union or keeping the South in the Union and these economic issues are not separate.

801
01:24:57.180 --> 01:25:03.680
That was the reason for keeping, in their eyes, for keeping the South in the Union and going to war over it.

802
01:25:03.680 --> 01:25:13.180
The Deep South mentioned slavery and I think what they were most afraid of was its slave insurrections that might have been encouraged by the North.

803
01:25:13.180 --> 01:25:17.180
I don't think slavery was a secure institution at that time.

804
01:25:17.180 --> 01:25:22.180
They weren't seriously concerned about the demise of slavery at that time.

805
01:25:22.180 --> 01:25:26.180
The whole debate was only about the extension of slavery.

806
01:25:26.180 --> 01:25:31.180
I think what they were saying is that we'll do with slavery what the people of New England did

807
01:25:31.180 --> 01:25:37.180
and get rid of it on our own terms, but they didn't want what they did about it to be dictated to them.

808
01:25:37.180 --> 01:25:42.180
They didn't dictate to the New Englanders how they should deal with their slavery.

809
01:25:42.180 --> 01:25:56.180
And slavery existed in New England for over 200 years, beginning in the 17th century, and so that's another one of the myths, the myth of the morally superior North that existed.

810
01:25:56.180 --> 01:26:01.180
But slavery existed beginning, I think, in the early 1600s in New England.

811
01:26:01.180 --> 01:26:08.620
The Transatlantic slave trade was centered in Newport, Rhode Island, in Boston, Massachusetts.

812
01:26:08.620 --> 01:26:13.100
Even after the Civil War, they were still building slave ships that were used to gather

813
01:26:13.100 --> 01:26:19.140
slaves from Africa and ship them to the Caribbean, because their slavery didn't end in places

814
01:26:19.140 --> 01:26:23.740
like Brazil until 1887.

815
01:26:23.740 --> 01:26:30.800
And how they ended slavery in the North was they began in 1794 with phased-in, emancipated

816
01:26:30.800 --> 01:26:38.080
Proclamation, they would pass laws saying that any babies born of slaves will be free

817
01:26:38.080 --> 01:26:42.120
upon reaching age 21 or 25.

818
01:26:42.120 --> 01:26:49.080
And so what that did was they phased out slavery and took them until 1865 to finally get rid

819
01:26:49.080 --> 01:26:51.200
of slavery in New Jersey.

820
01:26:51.200 --> 01:26:55.080
And so it's kind of a complicated issue of that.

821
01:26:55.080 --> 01:26:58.440
They issued these statements about slavery.

822
01:26:58.440 --> 01:27:01.400
You can also look at Jefferson Davis' first inaugural address.

823
01:27:01.400 --> 01:27:02.400
He didn't mention slavery.

824
01:27:02.400 --> 01:27:06.680
He mentioned economic issues, but not slavery in his first inaugural address, like Lincoln

825
01:27:06.680 --> 01:27:07.680
did.

826
01:27:07.680 --> 01:27:12.160
Lincoln's first inaugural address doesn't mention slavery as a reason for the war.

827
01:27:12.160 --> 01:27:13.160
Just the opposite.

828
01:27:13.160 --> 01:27:19.360
He denies that it has anything to do with his intentions at all, but he did promise

829
01:27:19.360 --> 01:27:25.800
an invasion in his first inaugural address over tax collection, like I said yesterday.

830
01:27:25.800 --> 01:27:34.080
The Upper South seceded, which was Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee.

831
01:27:34.080 --> 01:27:40.440
They originally voted to stay in the Union, but then after Lincoln began invading their

832
01:27:40.440 --> 01:27:47.020
sister states, they took a re-vote and re-voted and changed their minds and seceded.

833
01:27:47.020 --> 01:27:52.840
And so it's hard to make the case that slavery had a lot to do with that because they originally,

834
01:27:52.840 --> 01:27:59.360
Mises' position was, you can keep your slaves if you're in the Union, but if you secede,

835
01:27:59.360 --> 01:28:04.200
we're going to do whatever we can to disrupt this and take your slaves away from you because

836
01:28:04.200 --> 01:28:09.080
the slaves will help you in your war effort, in the war effort against us.

837
01:28:09.080 --> 01:28:12.280
And so his policy was always, you can keep your slaves as long as you stay in the Union

838
01:28:12.280 --> 01:28:14.320
and continue to pay taxes to us.

839
01:28:14.320 --> 01:28:21.320
In fact, all throughout the war, like I said yesterday, there were Southern non-slave-owning

840
01:28:21.320 --> 01:28:27.160
soldiers who fought against northern slave-owning soldiers in every major battle of the war,

841
01:28:27.160 --> 01:28:31.240
because the northern states and the border states that were allowed to keep their slaves

842
01:28:31.240 --> 01:28:37.320
as part of the Union had soldiers in all the major armies, in all the major battles.

843
01:28:37.320 --> 01:28:40.180
That's sort of an irony there.

844
01:28:40.180 --> 01:28:46.380
But those secession documents aren't proof of the cause of the war by any means.

845
01:28:46.380 --> 01:28:49.380
The Theory of Money says that's what the cause of the war was.

846
01:28:55.380 --> 01:28:58.380
Any other questions or brilliant commentary out there?

847
01:28:58.380 --> 01:29:03.380
Like I said yesterday, this historian I debated in North and South magazine,

848
01:29:03.380 --> 01:29:11.380
I did get him to admit that no respectable historian today will say that the North invaded the South to free the slaves.

849
01:29:11.380 --> 01:29:14.380
That's kind of preposterous to believe that.

850
01:29:14.380 --> 01:29:25.380
You know, I doubt that a single person who voted for Lincoln in 1860 thought that if I vote for him, he'll raise an army and go down and kill 300,000 people and free the slaves.

851
01:29:25.380 --> 01:29:28.380
That just wasn't on the radar screen at all.

852
01:29:33.380 --> 01:29:36.380
No, they've been getting worse and worse every year.

853
01:29:36.380 --> 01:29:39.380
There's no saying that it'll cooperate with you at all.

854
01:30:06.380 --> 01:30:11.020
Robert is a foil last year, right, with how not to study history, which I think is a compliment

855
01:30:11.020 --> 01:30:16.560
to me because I, when Lincoln is concerned, you know, how to study history as a Lincoln

856
01:30:16.560 --> 01:30:21.880
scholar is to take all these devious deeds he did and if you can dream up five or six

857
01:30:21.880 --> 01:30:26.020
excuses for them, then you're a respected Lincoln scholar.

858
01:30:26.020 --> 01:30:30.220
And so it's sort of a compliment to me that they use my book as a foil as how not to do

859
01:30:30.220 --> 01:30:35.900
it because thank God, I don't want to be an example of how to be a Lincoln scholar.

860
01:30:35.900 --> 01:30:52.900
The textbooks usually take 20 years to incorporate new knowledge anyway, of any kind, but who knows, I have another book coming out in October, and I know there are other people that are writing books like this.

861
01:30:52.900 --> 01:31:02.900
Professor Clyde Wilson just has an edited book of readings that I just had him send to my publisher for their consideration.

862
01:31:02.900 --> 01:31:12.900
So who knows, in a few years things might change a little bit, but it's pretty much extraordinarily politically correct right now.

863
01:31:12.900 --> 01:31:21.900
It's probably the most extreme case of political correctness there is, is this whole area of Lincoln and the Civil War and states' rights and all that.

864
01:31:21.900 --> 01:31:44.220
The Confederate Constitution forbade the transatlantic slave trade.

865
01:31:44.220 --> 01:31:50.120
The U.S. Constitution, it was 1808 when the slave trade was ended and the Confederate

866
01:31:50.120 --> 01:32:20.120
Constitution did the same thing. There are a number of ways you can interpret that. One way to interpret it is, you know, there were existing slave owners who had big plantations and owned many slaves, and it would benefit them economically to have a ban on the importation of slaves because it would prop up the price of their slaves in a sort of protectionist argument. So you could make a moral argument for that, and you could also make a purely economic protectionist argument

867
01:32:20.120 --> 01:32:50.120
for the Ban on the Importation of Slaves, and there probably were people who believed, on both sides, but being an economist, I would tend to think it was mostly the economic argument is why they put that in there, because it enhanced the value of the slaves of the existing slave owners, just like if it was banning the importation of automobiles, it would let you sell your automobiles for a higher price here in the United States.

868
01:32:50.120 --> 01:32:56.000
sort of a similar kind of thing there was an article about this on the Mises.org

869
01:32:56.000 --> 01:33:05.240
a couple weeks ago on this very topic so by who it was you remember mark who yeah

870
01:33:05.240 --> 01:33:11.560
Norman van Cot yeah if you did a search of Norman van Cot two words B-A-N-C-O-T-T

871
01:33:11.560 --> 01:33:17.880
they got that article and I think it had to do with the the US Constitution's

872
01:33:17.880 --> 01:33:23.880
Prohibition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but it's the same principle, same economic principle.

873
01:33:23.880 --> 01:33:31.880
I don't think it's the same principle, but I've said that for the last 20 years, that the country's been certified, and it's had some relations with them and the slave trade.

874
01:33:31.880 --> 01:33:34.880
No, I'm not going to have to recheck that. It's been...

875
01:33:34.880 --> 01:33:39.880
I don't think it's been rechecked. I think you can't say that it's still lasted 20 years.

876
01:33:39.880 --> 01:33:46.880
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So it lasted a while. It lasted a while.

877
01:33:46.880 --> 01:34:16.880
Well, they did end it for the most part, although, you know, the transatlantic slave trade, it was run out of New England, it wasn't run out of the South, it was Boston and Rhode Island is where it was the epicenter, in fact, they even used slaves to build the slave ships in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, you know, in the early 1800s and 1700s, and so that's where the slave trade existed, and so the fact that there might have been laws against it didn't mean they didn't do it.

878
01:34:16.880 --> 01:34:22.240
do it, we're still engaged in it, even if they transported slaves not here, somewhere

879
01:34:22.240 --> 01:34:23.240
else.

880
01:34:23.240 --> 01:34:27.240
The shipping part of it was centered in New England.

881
01:34:27.240 --> 01:34:30.720
This is about time to quit.