1619 JAKE TROTS OUT ERIC FONER, AGAIN! TURN AND FIRE!

 

Friday, September 25, 2020

ERIC FONER THE FIERY TRIAL RETAILING THE MYTH OF LINCOLN'S GROWTH THE IDEA OF NEGRO PROGRESS THE 1619 PROJECT BLM

 Having started reading this, this is my first impression.

He is going to make a Whig interpretation hero out of Lincoln no matter what.

His material leads in the opposite direction, including the few quotations and references from his youth.

Lincoln gradually grows into Abolitionism, and gradually grows into or at least toward Radical Republicanism.

Very fussy mannered historian's nonsense.

Reminds me of Werner Jaeger's Aristotle, The Fundamentals Of The History of His Development, highly regarded in its day.

Stephen A Douglas had his number right from the beginning.

Foner calls it growth, Lincoln out in front of the mandate of his electorate, thinking morally and righteously for them, gradually becoming the abolitionist and radical republican all northern whites should also have been as well from the start. 

I still call it hypocrisy and betrayal.

He was the chosen leader of a party founded on abolitionism which could not say its name, "a secret society established in broad daylight", as Arendt cites to Koyre in her chapter The Totalitarian Movement. 

Lincoln always denied that he was an abolitionist, anathema to Northern white voters who wanted to be rid of negroes not free them and keep them.  So Lincoln was always ostensibly for colonization,  especially in public, but among the elite of his own party there was never support for that. And once they recognized the voter bonanza of freed negroes, the colonization jig was up.

In my view, the secret strategy was always, and had always been, merely to render illegal any movement of negroes into Northern states. As Foner recounts, Ohio, Illinois, and Kentucky, and probably the rest, already had such laws on their books, and it's fair to say, having read Tocqueville, that the white northerners adored them. 

Thus the Republican secret plan was to free the negroes, but force white Southerners to deal with them into eternity. The corrollary was that no negroes were going to be allowed into the territories or into new states as formed.

It was going to be a Southern problem for Southerners. And that was in fact the way it remained for about fifty years.

In order for Foner to make his case of growth into abolitionism he has to deny or undercut Douglas' arguments about the abolitionist conspiracy to form the Republican Party, arguments Douglas made against Lincoln, and Lincoln denied, in the debates.

Let's read those sections of Foner's book to confirm that he does that!

Why not smoke him out!

After all, when the South seceded, more or less upon Lincoln's election in 1860, they didn't resort to that desperate measure for their health, thinking him a moderate gradualist who might some day grow dangerous! Insiders like Douglas knew the score.

As I suspected, Foner discusses the debates, makes Lincoln look mostly good, Douglas mostly bad, Dred Scott an abomination of jurisprudence, the Republican conspiracy, discussed only in isolated sentences here and there is never seriously scrutinized for its veracity. 

It is a rambling shambling account, more Foner, and his emplacement of a brand on Southern losers, Taney, and Democrats, his vindication of Jefferson and New England regarding slavery, than either Lincoln, Douglas, the substance of the debates and the basis for their mutual allegations, or history as it was lived. It is a pastiche.

For Foner's theory, Lincoln cannot have been a secret and conspiring abolitionist politician early, in 1854, as Douglas had laid out, because he then cannot grow into one late. 

But Foner does not even give a real sniff of this huge Republican bi party abolitionization issue. Foner, p.106. Yet his footnotes show that he was familiar with the sources, even Zarefsky.

One important point that Douglas made, even in the first debate as well, that is often glossed over in claiming that Lincoln was no abolitionist, was that Liincoln's grounds for abhorring Dred Scott were identical to those of the abolitionists, that it deprived negroes of the rights and priviileges of citizenship. 

Foner admits that it had not been the jurisprudence of any state, except one, or of the federal government, to grant negroes the right to vote, and for the rest negroes had always been denied rights and privileges by everyone, but fails to draw Douglas proper conclusion, even from this obvious example, that Lincoln and the Republican Party were a secret abolitionist society.

Only a very radical immediate abolitionist would have thought that negroes should be immediately freed and given full rights of citizenship. But that was Lincoln's fundamental objection to Dred Scott and to the whole Supreme Court. Foner has to try to avoid this interpretation by dancing all around the concept of citizenship, turning it into a complex fantasmagoria within which Lincoln's remark recedes into the murky distance, but no American back then doubted that white people could have or get citizenship in variious states but that negroes could not, even if freed by their owners, and many states put restrictions on that.

Douglas' claim of a Republican conspiracy, and Lincoln's part in it, to abolitionize both parties was true. 

Lincoln's of a Democratic conspiracy to nationalize slavery was false, but it scared his electorate into electing him in 1860. 

Foner's account of A House Divided is not an early signal of the secret society program the Southern Democrats recognized when he won in 1860.

Rather, according to Foner, it was a very different message for the rank and file, it was rhetoric which all Americans, in Arendt's vast deceived electorate front organization, were each supposed to individually struggle with, in their own broken hearts.

Lincoln needed to grow, through long struggle, to overcome his own institutional racism, and aberrant urge to colonize them,  to later become the good abolitionist radical republican racial equalitarian Americans all now and should admire.

Saturday, October 10, 2020

HOLZER FONER AND THE LINCOLN TRUMBULL CONSPIRACY

 See prior posts below on this theme.

I note, in reviewing Holzer, p 88, 89, he thought it ludicrous that Lincoln should have considered anything he was doing in 1858 to have anything to do with his ultimate candidacy for President. I will just point out that what Holzer reounts on these pages clearly is more evidence of the conspiracy i have alreeady described based on Douglas' accounts and other sources.

RE LINCOLN TRUMBULL SECRET PACT 1854 1858 RE DOUGLAS' ASSERTIONS IN THE DEBATES 1858

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

THE SECRET SOCIETY IN BROAD DAYLIGHT AND WHAT IT CAN ACCOMPLISH THE 1619 PROJECT

ERIC FONER THE FIERY TRIAL RETAILING THE MYTH OF LINCOLN'S GROWTH THE IDEA OF NEGRO PROGRESS THE 1619 PROJECT BLM

Saturday, September 26, 2020

LINCOLN REPUBLICAN PARTY SECRET SOCIETY IN BROAD DAYLIGHT ARENDT KOYRE BOBBITT FONER

Friday, September 25, 2020

ERIC FONER THE FIERY TRIAL RETAILING THE MYTH OF LINCOLN'S GROWTH THE IDEA OF NEGRO PROGRESS THE 1619 PROJECT BLM

Saturday, September 26, 2020

LINCOLN REPUBLICAN PARTY SECRET SOCIETY IN BROAD DAYLIGHT ARENDT KOYRE BOBBITT FONER

This is a note following on the recent posts below.

I have cited Bobbitt in the past, who had noted that Lincoln's Union was what Bobbitt termed the first nation state of terror. The Shield of Achilles

Bobbitt, reviewing Civil War material, and in view of his remarks on the jurisprudential legitimacy of Dred Scott, Constitutional Fate, Constitutional Interpretation, appears  also to have thought this was hardly as innocent or as benevolent a regime as it has since been painted by Whig interpretations, including Foner's.

Here is another important piece of the puzzle, brought out publicly in broad daylight, already by Douglas in the First Debate Opening Speech, the issue of how the secret agreement between Lincoln, the Whig and Democrat abolitionists, and Trumbull, had turned out, at first. It had turned out not as agreed. 

The account, as told by Douglas, is on p 52 of Holzer and probably retold in later debates.

Why is this discussion important? Because it shows facts proving the existence of a secret abolitionist society of politicians of both parties, of a conspiracy among them, of a perceived or actual conspirators' double cross of Lincoln by Trumbull and others, and about the retribution Lincoln then later exacted for that double cross. 

Trumbull, as Douglas describes, after the double cross, had then become Lincoln's thorough paced tool, traducing Douglas, to get Douglas' spot for Lincoln "in order to quiet Lincoln".  

They had to pass a resolution that Lincoln was the first choice of the Republican party.

That was also why the Republican Convention were compelled to instruct for Lincoln and for nobody else, when they nominated him, according to Douglas. 

See Zarefski, Lincoln Douglas and Slavery, p. 42. Zarefski seems to have had no clue why this was the case, called it confusing, and doesn't think to question what may have lain behind this fact situation. 

(For the preponderance of northern white racism requiring a secret society abolitionism candidate, see Zarefski p. 19. Northerners did not want negroes free or slave, and voted for Lincoln thinking he would remove them, gradual extinction accompanied by removal was Lincoln's story. Frankly, it involved keeping them bottled up only in the South until removed. There was never, from the northern electorate perspective, any possibility of allowing free negroes in the north or in the territories.  Removal is the word the electorate was thinking, not emancipate, or enfranchise. Lincoln's expressed view of Dred Scott was thus his most dangerous and exposed admission for his secret society plan, the one most likely to not get him elected.  This was also why Douglas pounded Lincoln's Dred Scott view so very hard, in the very first speech, after exposing the secret society. Only an immediate abolitionist would object to 

Dred Scott on the ground that it had denied the rights and privileges of citizenship to negroes, slave or free.)

As Douglas said, they had nobody else in the Republican Party, except Lincoln, for the reason that Lincoln demanded that they should now carry out "the arrangement". 

Why therefore, did they, a political party convention, summarily bypass even from consideration, as Douglas even listed some of them, Archy Williams, Orville Browning, John Wentworth, Norman Judd, all fellow Republicans?

One word: Fear!

Maybe there was another word: Greed!

Why were they afraid? 

For the same reason Douglas said Trumbull  was then traducing against Douglas, to get Douglas' spot for Lincoln, because Trumbull and the fellow abolitionists had either failed or double crossed Lincoln already, and Trumbull was doing it "in order to quiet Lincoln".

What do you think "in order to quiet Lincoln" might have meant to Trumbull, and to Lincoln's fellow Republican party abolitionists?

I am telling you now, it meant one very big thing: 

That if Trumbull and the Republican party secret society did not make amends, and seal the deal with Lincoln at its head now, he would not hesitate to now rat them all out, as being a secret society of radical abolitionists, not gradualists, not even actual colonizers, and he would let the chips fall where they might in the aftermath of his disclosures. See Arendt, Origins, The Totalitarian Movement.

Compare Trumbull's comments on Lincoln, his secretiveness, unwillingness to share any more information with anyone than he thought necessary at the time, cited in a webpage in a post below,

 

http://www.mrlincolnandfriends.org/members-of-congress/lyman-trumbull/

with Arendt, Origins, pb, p. 376, fn. 90, '.....Hitler to his General Staff 1939, "...a primer for a secret society."

Even great historians like J G Randall, whom I have cited many times here, and on whom Nevins admitted he had later relied heavily, failed to see that Lincoln was an abolitionist from the beginning and involved in a secret agreement with other abolitionists of both parties to form the Republican Party. Randall had thought Lincoln a moderate, a gradualist, had taken him at his word, so to speak.

Why was the new Republican Party secret society so interesting? Because it involved and combined abolitionist renegades from both the Whigs and Democrats! 

It was the wholesale party betrayal of both the majorities of elected politicians of each party, and of the great majority of the constituents of each major party, by the immediate abolitionist rogues joining the Republican secret society party. 

As Douglas put it, Holzer p. 52, "...having formed this new party for the joint benefit of deserters from Whiggery and deserters from Democracy---..."

Why did these scalawags and carpetbagger traitors to their parties and people do it?

It ended up being by far the biggest political and financial bonanza for these politicians and their party this nation ever saw or ever will. 

They won the Civil War, reaped the proceeds in all directions, didn't pay the bills, and kept themselves, their successors, assigns, puppets, and their cronies in power from 1860 all the way until 1932, (ignoring Wilson as a Democrat), 72 long sad years. Lincoln's Immigration Act, the most ambitious in American history was not for the South. it was not really designed to replace negroes, who weren't now going anywhere. The Immigration Act was for importing foreign whites for the North and the West. 

For the South, it was Lincoln's Morgenthau Plan, keep control for a time, keep freed negroes voting Republican, and let white southerners do something about negroes if they could. It was not the job of the federal government, after the Reconstruction Northern occupation. Not its job to repatriate them, not its job to assure them any source of livelihood. Not its job. Only to make sure that southern whites did not reinstitute negro slavery, or try to export negroes either north or west. That was when the fat really finally hit the fire.

The Republicans' colonization plan for negroes turned out to have actually meant this: the South was to now become an isolated colony of Africa, cut off from the rest of America. And that is largely what it remained for a long time. 

Even when a left Democrat finally took over, (ignoring Wilson as a Democrat), in 1932, after 72 years, he did almost nothing to change that whatsoever.

ERIC FONER IS A STOKELY

Sunday, October 18, 2020

RE DRED SCOTT

 It is useful to contrast Lincoln's concept of citizenship, which is a rhetorically reductionist one, with the history of the concept as recounted by Taney. 

The Constitution certainly never considered negroes as citizen material, although the concept of citizenship as between federal and states was hardly uniform. 

Certainly Lincoln, despite his 1858 campaign rhetoric, and the Republican abolitionist platform, himself never considered negroes citizenship material, as shown by his later remarks and recorded activities, especially his meeting in the White House with free negro representatives regarding transportation. See Foner, and other posts here.

Although he vigorously espoused equality and citizenship for all men based on the Declaration, such concepts never made it into the Constitution, and in fact as Taney pointed out, an obvious fact known to all at the time, never intended by their authors to extend to the kind of position for negroes which Lincoln and the abolitionists espoused. 

Lincoln's attack on Dred Scott was intentionally misguiding and disingenuous, in that Dred Scott had already been Congressionally repealed by Kansas Nebraska, a bill Douglas himself had drafted.

In many of these matters, the First Lincoln Douglas Debate, Holzer's unexpurgated version, is very illuminating, but only an introduction of sorts. I have posted other material and my arguments. 

Lincoln's available prior speeches are most illuminating, including one claimed to have been lost, as well as the original Republican Platform, Springfield I believe. It is also useful to read his law partner's memoirs, himself a devout abolitionist. 

Lincoln's meeting in the White House, see post here, is what I consider the stake in the heart of Foner's theory of the gradual transformation of Lincoln into an abolitionist and a radical Republican. 

Lincoln was a Republican Party Abolitionist Conspirator of Convenience. 

He never himself actually believed, either early or late, in Jeffersonian Declaration of Independence racial or humanity-wide equality, racial mixing, equal or full citizenship for subordinate races. He adopted this stance for purely political advantage purposes for himself. 

He was perfectly willing to use the conspiracy, and the abolitionist backed Republican party on the one hand, and the anti abolitionist electorate of the North and of Illinois, on the other, for his own personal political advancement the entire time. 

No other explanation, frankly, makes any sense and is also consistent with his role from 1854 forward. 

Foner's interpretation is frankly ridiculous.

He was even willing to use the negroes he had freed as cannon fodder, without for a moment considering them equals, or favoring their continued presence here or even nearby. 

There was plenty of almost vacant land in the West he might have suggested they be sent to, not as a foreign nation like the Indians, but as a subordinate race to be resettled elsewhere. 

He failed to do that. One reason may be that he knew that open frontier borders would have leeched negroes all over the West had he done so. 

He did not make a move in that direction as far as I know.

There have been only two other great power political radicals  since the French Revolution, in the Age of the Democratic Revolutions. They are Adolf Hitler and V I Lenin. 

Had Lincoln not been assassinated, one can only wonder at what other enormities he might have been able to accomplish. 

My own view is that states' rights and states' sovereignties, over against the federal government, which had been the rule contemplated by the Constitution text and by most of its framers, and which survived the Civil War mostly intact, even with all the unconstitutionalities of the Radical Republicans and Reconstruction that followed, would then have been terminated by Lincoln with extreme prejudice, had he survived. Trust me. 

He was already moving in that direction against Northern states which disobeyed his wishes regarding slavery or anything else.

This post is dedicated to Hannah Arendt. I cannot think of anyone else in modern history.

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

THE SECRET SOCIETY IN BROAD DAYLIGHT AND WHAT IT CAN ACCOMPLISH THE 1619 PROJECT

FOLLOWING ON SEVERAL RECENT POSTS

I want to advert to the passage below, in the context of the accomplishments of the Republican Party, and of Lincoln.

"...In the last half century, many, though not all, historians, other academics, and now, journalists and op-ed writers, have gone in a different direction, arguing that hypocrisy was really the defining feature of what the American revolutionaries accomplished, and that none of it had (or will have) any real meaning until it has been extended to everyone on a fully equal basis...."  DK

In the long transformation of the contagion of liberty, fallout from the Reformation, in 17th through 19th Century British politics, emancipation of this or that minority became expeditient, in a struggle between aristocratic factions and commons, neither of a majority of whom were either Catholic, or later, Jews. The Reform Acts, etc.

This to some extent is background.

Douglas went over in the First Debate the outline of background to creation of the secret abolitionist Republican party out of some Whigs and some Democrats. 

Neither Whig nor Democrat majorities wanted a much stronger federal government. 

Neither wanted to see much of a decline in the several states' individual rights and prerogatives. 

Neither Whigs nor Democrats wanted to see the institution of slavery nationalized, or either mandated, or prohibited ab initio for new territories by federal fiat over existing states' rights, or territories existing or emerging wishes, even though there had been precedent for federal exclusion of slavery in territories, as distinct from states. 

Only handfulls of abolitionists of either party objected to states' rights, and mainly only on the issue of slavery and trade. 

Let's just put it this way: Other than for that, they mostly were, and would have remained, as good states' rights Whigs or Democrats as any other manjack wanton white grifters in Congress ever were.

Moving on to the issue of sectional strife, that had existed for a long time, but it had been mediated in a bi partisan way since there were some members of Congress from both sections.

Neither party majority, or its constituents, wanted or had voted for war to settle the slavery or any other issue. 

They certainly did not think, and had certainly not been told, that they were in fact voting Republican in order to start, one way or another, immediately, an abolitionist war with seceding Southern states over the issue of slavery. 

Furthermore, if they had been asked, a large majority of them, they also would have said that they believed that Southern states, or any states, had a right to secede from the USA if their people (the ones that counted) properly so chose. 

There had been examples already in American history of a threat of secession by Northern states, and it was opposed but the balance of opinion probably favored the right to secede as well.

Turning to the Supreme Court, Justice Taney set out at length in Dred Scott the well established existing situation regarding the legal and constitutional position of negroes, a quite complex one, having to do even with counting and balancing inhabitants for Congressional representation, and characterized also in other contexts by racial inferiority and subordinate status in white society, none of which was the slightest bit reactionary or contentious for most all of those whites with some knowledge, regardless of the state they inhabited, except the few extreme abolitionists in either party. 

The Court, no less than most congressmen of both parties, was merely towing a powerful states' rights theme struck in the Constitution, and as modified by existing legislation, and it had been mostly quite properly adhered to by the Court since 1787 in Dred Scott and before. 

When scholars such as Foner join Lincoln's chorus dubbing Dred Scott an abominable decision, they expose either their ignorance, their guile, or both.

So, taken together, not only Congress, but also the Supreme Court, had generally viewed abolitionism with abhorrence, states' rights as the norm, and secession as legitimate.

It is only once the existing background of this separation of powers stage has been set, and it is seen that Lincoln's Republican secret society then upends by underhanded political manoeuvres the main positions, and so called checks and balances of all three branches of government at the same time, that the enormity of this electoral coup d'etat by fraud can finally be brought into high relief. 

The conspiring Republicans could never have come to power legitimately by open admission of their actual agenda.  They all knew that.

I want to return to Foner's account, not the nonsense high sounding parts about Lincoln gradually coming to abolitionism or toward radical republicanism, or the even more nonsense passages where Foner calls Lincoln on the racist carpet, of which there are plenty, but rather those passages, sometimes heartbreaking, sprinkled here and there throughout the book, some early experiences, see also late, p. 223, 224, (his full White House meeting with free negroes account is online, and posted elsewhere here) 225, 256, 257, where Lincoln's actual experiences and feelings, or lack of feelings, (I am not suggesting he need have actually had any) for negroes, early and late, in various contexts, shows through again and again, the pathos of these passages, of his superior and dismissive attitude toward those whom he publicly claimed should be treated as equals according to the Declaration, but denied it to the audiences who rejected it. Condemning Dred Scott but equivocating when convenient.

But in reality, behind even all of that dissembling rhetoric, he did not hesitate, as a very cold blooded politician, to use them mainly, one might almost say, exclusively, as his personal political pawns and later as cannon fodder, for his own political purposes, as one might use an old broken rake, a bent but usable shovel, or a dependable expendable farm animal. 

Had some benevolent God of Negroes offered to pay the bill for them to all be returned, against their will,  to Africa, free and slave, trust me, he would have jumped on it.

Lincoln's white only Immigration Act followed closely his negro Emancipation Proclamation, both during the Civil War.

So, in concluding, at least for the night, i have to say that DK's term hypocrisy hardly captures what Lincoln's secret society accomplished. 

Rather, it was an actual Republican coup d' etat, a traitorous and fraudulent abuse of the electoral system, used to bring them, a radical fringe group, to power under totally false pretenses, so that they could then foment a civil war with the slave holding states and share the spoils among themselves under our spoils of office system. And that is exactly what they did, holding power from 1860 until 1932, 72 long years.

The secession of Deep South states, upon Lincoln's electoral victory, ironically, itself had the Republican party's desired effect, among many Northern racist but hardly abolitionist whites, of confirming his prior and extensive false claims that Southern whites intended to nationalize slavery not merely into new territories but into the Northern states themselves, so that the very Northern fears that Lincoln had previously fraudulently stoked to get elected now seemed to be being confirmed on the ground.

As we see even today, sometimes arguably routinely legitimate actions, so called non violent protests, sometimes government sanctioned, although now often interspersed with subversive elements both domestic and foreign, can play into the hands of radicals on the other side, espousing concepts of law and order and national unity not so very different from Lincoln's radical abolitionist program itself. 

Think of the Democrats as a more diverse group of Douglas' moderates, but also now some radical and secessionist STOKELY ANTIFAS and BLM Black Power negroes espousing the original sin of the white West and white male America, confronting a stalwart unionist white Republican now in the White House.

In certain ways, Lincoln's coup was not so different from what Hitler had done to Weimar Germany, and was conducted by politicians in broad daylight only slightly less cynical or hypocritical.

This post is dedicated to DK's friend, Thomas Childers, whose Teaching Company lectures on Hitler I most enjoyed.

Friday, September 18, 2020

ERIC FONER IMBIBED A BULLSHIT LEFTIST EDUCATION FROM HIS MARXIST FATHER AND RAMS IT UP YOUR ASSES

 deprived of his livelihood while I was growing up, he supported our family as a freelance lecturer. ... Listening to his lectures, I came to appreciate how present concerns can be illuminated by the study of the past—how the repression of the McCarthy era recalled the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the civil rights movement needed to be viewed in light of the great struggles of Black and White abolitionists, and in the brutal suppression of the Philippine insurrection at the turn of the century could be found the antecedents of American intervention in Vietnam. I also imbibed a way of thinking about the past in which visionaries and underdogs—Tom Paine, Wendell Phillips, Eugene V. Debs, and W. E. B. Du Bois—were as central to the historical drama as presidents and captains of industry, and how a commitment to social justice could infuse one's attitudes towards the past.

Foner is a Soviet asset.