The Meaning of the Gettysburg Address

[Bill Richter]

Tom, et al.

I think that calling my statement Beardian is too limiting. The North and South did know that this was a political power struggle.

The South had been in charge of the US Government from the beginning when President Washington and Sec of St Jefferson apportioned the numbers of representatives in the House of Reps giving the South two extra because of rounding off the figures in 1789. The appointments of all presidents except for the two Adamses favored people living in the DC MD and VA, all slaveholding areas. This was known during the Nullification Crisis from 1828 to 1833. This was known when Northern reps complained of the Slave Power Conspiracy that dominated the Federal government from 1820 to 1860.

I would prefer to call it a problem between people who were in favor of loose construction of the Constitution (we call it a living Constitution today) and strict construction of the Constitution (people we call originalists today).

This was a problem that came up during Washington's first administration in Alexander Hamilton's economic program, funding and assumption, and the bank of the US.

It was manifested primarily in internal improvements (bridges, roads, canals, and later railroads) in the early 1800s.

It was the assumption behind Henry Clay's American System of 1824, and part of the Whig party platforms from then to 1860.

It was part of Abraham Lincoln's adulation of Clay and his not joining the Republican party until it adopted Clay's program in the mid-1850s and making it part of the party's first platforms in 1856 and 1860.

It was a part of why Lincoln felt it necessary to move slowly against slavery in the Civil War. His actual program was not the Emancipation Proc but his plan of Dec 1862, that called for a gradual ending of slavery by 1912, in his annual message of that year.

When we look at Thomas DiLorenzo's, The Real Lincoln, this is what he is talking about. But to dismiss DiLorenzo as a Libertarian is to miss his Real Lincoln and to read his newer stuff which is much weaker and damages his original argument--because he is a Libertarian there.

As usual, I refer you all to my Sic Semper Tyrannis, chapter I, for a fuller discussion of this topic, of Masters, Bradford, Bennett, DiLorenzo, and others. (I know, I should be abashed to market my own junk writings. . . . But I am a shameless self-promoter).

Both sides knew what the stakes were, or their leaders did. The average guy went to war with his neighbors, regardless of how we see the issues 150 years later. And wars do settle things--look at our own Civil War. Then reread what I wrote a couple of days ago again and see if does not make more sense in a non-Beardian sort of way.