Pennsylvania paper retracts 1863 editorial critical of the Gettysburg Address

After 150 years they decided it was ok after all.

The original editorial is worth a read. It reminds us how divisive a figure Lincoln was at the time.

Was Abraham Lincoln really a vampire killer?

That's your call, but we briedly discussed the new movie in one of the classes yesrterday. Then I stumbled across this story which claims that slaves were concerned that southern slave masters were cannibals and - yes - vampires.

Slaves in the colonial era created a complex folklore about the southern master class, worrying that slave traders were cannibals. My research uncovered at least one case in Louisiana which newly imported slaves became convinced that the masters were witches and vampires (after watching them drink red wine).

These tales of terror illuminate rather than obscure important truths. Slavery did represent a kind of dark magic in which legal fictions transmogrified the bodies of human beings into property. The institution of slavery did become a kind of cannibalism, swallowing millions from the African continent, digesting them in the rice and cotton fields in the relentless pursuit of wealth that characterized the alleged southern "aristocrats."

America needed a vampire hunter in 1860. 

Lincoln, the Suspension of Habeas Corpus, and Roger Taney

A new book details the conflict between Abraham Lincoln and Roger Taney over what it took to allow for Habeas Corpus to be suspended in the early years of the Civil War. Here is a summary of and commentary on the book's argument.

A Blast From the Past: Will the South Secede?

From the NYT, November 11, 1860.

The Artlantic Monthly Recommends ...

... Abraham Lincoln. Here is the reasoning for their support for Lincoln in 1860.

Inherent Powers: Did Lincoln Have the Constitutional Power to Emancipate the Slaves in the South?

Yes, because it was during a civil war and he claimed it to fall under his war powers:

The Civil War transformed Lincoln from a president into the constitutional commander in chief of the army and navy. What that meant, exactly, was far from clear. But that status might also give him yet another route toward emancipation. International law recognized that, in time of war, military commanders had the authority to suspend the normal operations of civil law and rule by decree. Only one American general—Andrew Jackson—had actually ever done this on American soil. But there had also never been a civil war in America before. And so Lincoln began gradually flexing his “war powers”—he suspended the writ of habeas corpus, he called up armies of volunteers into federal service, and he imposed a blockade of the Confederacy.

Of course, at each point, Taney and the Supreme Court hotly contested Lincoln’s use of these “war powers.” And this made him leery of pressing the “war powers” to the point of emancipating the South’s slaves. But by the summer of 1862, the military aspect of the war was going very badly. Relying on the labor of its slaves, the Confederacy was able to field armies that could easily hold their own against Lincoln’s armies. And his own generals—chief among them George B. McClellan, the commander of the Army of the Potomac—were politically unsympathetic to emancipation and sulky in taking orders from Lincoln. And to make matters worse, Delaware turned down the buy-out plan. If Lincoln waited longer, he might have victorious rebel armies surrounding Washington; or he might have mutinous generals threatening to seize the government for themselves. We “must change our tactics or lose the game,” Lincoln announced, and on July 22, 1862, Lincoln read to his cabinet a draft of an emancipation proclamation, threatening to decree the freeing of the slaves as a “fit and necessary war measure for suppressing” the rebellion. When McClellan and his army finally defeated the Confederates at Antietam in September, Lincoln published the proclamation and gave the Confederates 100 days to end the rebellion or the emancipation would take effect. The 100 days came and went without any repenting on the part of the Confederates, and on January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law.

Into military law, that is. Lincoln had no more civil authority as president to emancipate slaves in 1863 than he had had at the beginning of the presidency, and every lawyer in the country knew it. This is why the proclamation did two very peculiar things: first, it based its emancipating authority strictly on Lincoln’s “power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief . . . in time of actual armed rebellion.” Second, it limited the reach of emancipation only to the slaves in “the States and parts of States . . . this day in rebellion against the United States.” The four slave states that had not joined the Confederacy (Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri) were not “in rebellion” and so Lincoln’s “war powers” had no reach over them.

143 Years Ago Today

Given events in Pakistan and scenario I drew up for something similar happening today, here's something from The Writer's Almanac.

It was on this day in 1864 that Abraham Lincoln was elected to his second term as president of the United States, one of the few elections in world history to be held in the middle of a civil war. Lincoln might have tried to cancel or postpone the election until the war was over, but he said, "If the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us."

The Confederate Army had recently gotten so close to Washington, D.C., that Lincoln himself was able to watch a battle, standing on top of a parapet with field glasses. On July 30, 4,000 Union soldiers were killed in a disastrous attempt to invade Petersburg, Virginia. The army needed 500,000 more soldiers, Lincoln would probably have to call for another draft, and the war debt was becoming unsustainable. On August 23, Lincoln wrote a memo to his cabinet that said, "This morning, and for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected."

The Democratic Party was running on a platform of ending the war. But this turned out to be a huge mistake when news arrived in early September that the Union Army had captured Atlanta and Mobile. Suddenly, the Democratic Party looked like the party of surrender when Union forces were winning the war. Lincoln carried every state except New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky.

This could have been Lincoln's most important decision, not to try to suspend the Constitution by delaying the election. He could have done it. History would have been on his side, but posterity would not. This story does not mention that Lincoln was running on a ticket--the National Unity ticket--with a member of the other party. Andrew Johnson was a Democratic.

Imagine that being done today. His reputation is deserved.

Lincoln?

As much as I like to complain about student ignorance abotu basic facts about government and history I wasn't quite prepared for yesterday. A small group of my fellow faculty and staff types gathered for a demonstration of clickers which can be used to assess what students know and whether certain concepts are being learned.

As a quick example of how it works the demonstrator asked the gathering to click yes or no to the following: "Lincoln was the first Republican president."

The results: 7 yes, 8 no.

I'll lay off my students from now on.