Lincoln Memorial question

[Valmy]

I love my favorite internet troll.

Oh so it was a joke? Good one I guess.

[Razgovory]

He encouraged me to read, "The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War"  I found a review  http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=79

Despite its provocative insights and obvious rhetorical skill, however, The Real Lincoln is seriously compromised by careless errors of fact, misuse of sources, and faulty documentation. Although individually these flaws may seem trivial and inconsequential, taken together they constitute a near-fatal threat to DiLorenzo's credibility as a historian. A few examples indicate the scope of the problem: DiLorenzo's own article on Lincoln as "The Great Centralizer" appeared in the The Independent Review in 1998, not in 1988 (p. vii); Lincoln advised sending freed slaves to Liberia in a speech in 1854, not "during the war" (pp. 16–17); Lincoln was not a member of the Illinois state legislature in 1857 (p. 18); the commerce clause was not an "amendment," and Thomas Jefferson was not among the framers of the Constitution (pp. 69–70); Thaddeus Stevens was a Pennsylvania representative, not a senator (p. 140); and Fort Sumter was not a customs house (p. 242).

Unfortunately, these lapses are more than matched by a clumsy mishandling of sources that violates the presumed trust between author and reader. DiLorenzo claims, for example, that in the four years "between 1860 and 1864, population in the thirteen largest Northern cities rose by 70 percent" (p. 225). On the face of it, this statistic is absurd and defies common sense, and sure enough, the source DiLorenzo cites says that the growth occurred "in fifteen years." Page 11 says that Lincoln's law partner and biographer William Herndon was quoting his own recollections of Lincoln, but he really was quoting another biographer. A few pages later (p. 14), DiLorenzo claims that Lincoln, in his eulogy for Henry Clay, "mustered his best rhetorical talents to praise Clay," but all of the examples that follow come from the "beautiful language" of a newspaper that Lincoln was quoting at length. Moreover, Lincoln's supposed comment about the "deportation" of blacks in his Cooper Union speech was in fact a quotation from Thomas Jefferson, as Lincoln himself says (p. 18). In chapter 3, DiLorenzo claims that in a letter to Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln "admitted that the original [Emancipation] proclamation had no legal justification, except as a war measure" (p. 37). His source, however, is the recollections of a conversation (not a letter) that portrait artist Francis B. Carpenter (not Chase) had with Lincoln, and at no point do these recollections sustain DiLorenzo's summary of them. Moreover, in the reference for this section, DiLorenzo misidentifies the title of his source as Paul Angle's The American Reader, when in fact the jumbled material comes from Angle's The Lincoln Reader. Other errors include misplaced quotation marks, missing ellipses, and quotations with incorrect punctuation, capitalization, and wrong or missing words.

I think I found the source of the problem here.

[dps]

I love my favorite internet troll.

But it seems at least 4 or 5 people who frequently post on your wall are some deluded hardcore racists.

He lives in Mississippi and hangs with libertarians.  You do the math.  I know Valmy will but upset with me on the last part but the guy goes on about FIAT CURRENCY!  and the involuntary servitude of the draft.  Two common Libertarian themes.  Shipping African Americans to Africa because they are illegal aliens is a new one on me, though.  There really weren't any illegal aliens in the US during the civil war period.  There wasn't any law restrict who could come in or not.  The status of former slaves was a bit of a hot topic, but it was addressed by the 14th amendment which Johnson tried to Veto.  It was bullshit like that resulted in him being impeached.

FWIW, I don't see how anyone can argue that being drafted into the military isn't a form of involuntary servitude.  Maybe someone needs to point out to the wackier type of libertarian that we don't have a military draft right now, so it's not really an issue.  Don't see how having a fiat currency is a libertarian issue, but then again, while I lean libertarian in a lot of ways, the more extreme ones are just nutjobs and I don't understand half of what they talk about.

[Razgovory]

I said that they are common libertarian themes.  Fiat currency is a pretty common issue, particularly by Ron Paul gold bugs.  I'd say that non-wacky libertarians are the minority.