Stand and Deliver
by digby
I’m not sure whether Ron Paul has a bigger beef with Lincoln for freeing the slaves without compensation to their “owners” or the issuing of “fiat money” to pay for the war, but he sure doesn’t think the Union was on the right side:
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
I’d like to think that the Confederate Flag in the back was photo-shopped. At any rate, what’s amazing is the frame here–It’s not the firing on federal property that inaugurated the War, it’s Bull Run, or some such. It’s as if I punch you in the face and then accuse you of bullying me after I get the crap kicked out of me. Except worse.
Actually that’s how Abraham Lincoln at the Cooper Union put it exactly:
Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.
This, plainly stated, is your language. Perhaps you will say the Supreme Court has decided the disputed Constitutional question in your favor. Not quite so. But waiving the lawyer’s distinction between dictum and decision, the Court have decided the question for you in a sort of way. The Court have substantially said, it is your Constitutional right to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. When I say the decision was made in a sort of way, I mean it was made in a divided Court, by a bare majority of the Judges, and they not quite agreeing with one another in the reasons for making it; that it is so made as that its avowed supporters disagree with one another about its meaning, and that it was mainly based upon a mistaken statement of fact – the statement in the opinion that “the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.”
[…]
Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action?
But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”
Some things never change in this country. This is one of them.
Oh, and here’s a little known factoid from David Brock’s book “Blinded by the Right”
Grover kept a pet boa constrictor named after anarchist Lysander Spooner. He fed the snake mice, all of them named David Bonior the outspoken liberal House whip.
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