Jefferson Davis - He should've died in prison. He was responsible for so much death, destruction, misery.

[Robert W]

If you did all that, then your mind handles facts and logic much differently than most literate, educated minds.

When Studying the Civil war, compare it to the revolutionary war. Do you think Washington was wrong. I am satisfied that the South at the time saw it like that.
Davis did not invade the North to start the war, Lincoln invaded VA. That is accurate history.

 

[Robert W]

Do you even know how many are as stupid you are, even having all of that you claim?

I regret not telling you that. You are fixated on something that I am not fixated on.

 

[jacksonlamb]

You are fixated on falsehoods.

The South fired on federal property in Charleston property.

The South was legitimately executed by Lincoln.

 

[Robert W]

He said he considered that and obviously changed his mind.

My Library is boxed up for shipment to my daughters. I wish you will read the excellent book called Lincoln by David Herbert Donald, the best of all books on this topic.

 

[Robert W]

You are fixated on falsehoods.

The South fired on federal property in Charleston property.

The South was legitimately executed by Lincoln.

Reclaiming my time. The south told Abe to leave Ft. Sumter. If you told a party to leave your house, would you let him stay in your house?

 

[Correll]

Regarding the southern vote, Home Town Boy. What is it you don't get about that?

Lightweight, low-info posters like you - Dante is always holding out hope that when he spanks you, something of his brilliance gets through (not what Ropey seeks).

The Campaign and Election of 1976​

Carter's anonymity turned out to give him an advantage in the 1976 election. In response to the twin nightmares of Vietnam and Watergate that had shattered public confidence in government, Americans gravitated toward leaders who were outside the Washington sphere. Answering the nation's need, Carter's slogan was "A Leader, For A Change."

Nine other Democrats were seeking the nomination in 1976, most of them better known than Carter. But he approached the race like so many challenges before—with energy and determination. Portraying himself as an outsider who could "clean up the mess in Washington," Carter simply outhustled his competition.

I read your link.

Seems RACE was a moot point, in their description of the campaign.

After all, both FORD and CARTER were supportive of civil rights and Affirmative Action.

 

[Dante]

My Library is boxed up for shipment to my daughters. I wish you will read the excellent book called Lincoln by David Herbert Donald, the best of all books on this topic.

OF course, you have most likely misunderstood things in that book.

Some of the crazy crap you post here suggests that as the likelihood.

You often state things as if an expert, that fly in the face of reality.

 

[Dante]

I read your link.

Seems RACE was a moot point, in their description of the campaign.

After all, both FORD and CARTER were supportive of civil rights and Affirmative Action.

Race was NEVER a Moot point with the GOP and tehir Southern Strategy of that era and time.

 

[Dante]

Reclaiming my time. The south told Abe to leave Ft. Sumter. If you told a party to leave your house, would you let him stay in your house?

The analogy is so ridiculous. Go teach a Junior High School Class on it

 

[Dante]

My Library is boxed up for shipment to my daughters. I wish you will read the excellent book called Lincoln by David Herbert Donald, the best of all books on this topic.

Before He Became a Saint
By Geoffrey C. Ward Oct. 22, 1995

Before He Became a Saint
Credit...The New York Times Archives

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LINCOLN By David Herbert Donald. Illustrated. 714 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $35.



DAVID HERBERT DONALD began his distinguished career in 1948 with "Lincoln's Herndon," a life of Abraham Lincoln's law partner and early biographer, William Herndon, so comprehensive -- and so entertaining -- that no one has ever bothered to write Herndon up again. Now, nearly half a century later, after writing, editing or collaborating on 15 more volumes and winning two Pulitzer Prizes for biography, he has produced a life of Lincoln himself. He cannot expect Lincoln to belong to him the way Herndon does, of course; no biography of the 16th President can ever be definitive; each new generation will insist on redefining him, just as all its predecessors have. But Mr. Donald's "Lincoln" is so lucid and richly researched, so careful and compelling, that it is hard to imagine a more satisfying life of our most admired and least understood President, at least for the foreseeable future.

No one knows how many books have been written about Lincoln -- one prominent collector estimates there have been more than 7,000. But the authors of all but a handful of them began by assuming that he was a Great Man, then dutifully worked their way back through his life in search of clues to how he got that way. Mr. Donald's life of Lincoln is different and therefore more rewarding; it unrolls, as Lincoln's real life did, as a series of abrupt twists and turns, triumphs and setbacks, after any one of which, had he made the wrong choice, he would never have had his chance at greatness.

How might American history have been altered, for example, had Lincoln decided to become a blacksmith instead of a lawyer, as he almost did at the outset of his political career? Or if he had accepted the governorship of the far-off Oregon Territory, offered to him by his fellow Whigs as a consolation prize when he left Congress in 1849? Or had his enthusiastic friends succeeded in winning for him the Republican Vice-Presidential nomination in 1856, only to see him go down to defeat with John C. Fremont?

There are no startling revelations here -- Mr. Donald is too scrupulous ever to push the evidence farther than it should go -- and all of Lincoln's familiar avatars are present: the awkward youth and canny lawyer, grieving father and tormented husband, master of English prose and amateur military strategist, Man of Sorrows and life-long champion of what he called "cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason." But Mr. Donald's portrait of Lincoln is nonetheless a good deal grittier than those produced by most of his predecessors. This will come as no surprise to those who remember his "Lincoln Reconsidered," a book of elegant essays, published in 1955, in which he stressed his subject's tough-mindedness and tactical skills.

 

[Dante]

"The secret of Lincoln's success is simple," he wrote then: "He was an astute and dexterous operator of the political machine." This distinctly unsentimental view caused a considerable stir at the time -- in those days the sites associated with the Emancipator in Springfield, Ill. were still officially designated the "Lincoln Shrines" -- and in "Lincoln in American Memory," published just last year, Merrill D. Peterson took Mr. Donald to task for having so heavily emphasized "Lincoln's political flexibility, opportunism and pragmatism that he was left with no ideological undergirding at all."

In Mr. Donald's new full-length study, Lincoln is amply undergirded with principles, but he remains wily and elusive in his pursuit of them. The key to understanding him, Mr. Donald writes, is his blazing political ambition, what Herndon called his "little engine that knew no rest." Lincoln was just 23 years old in 1832, and a relative stranger to his New Salem neighbors, when he first declared his candidacy for the Illinois state legislature; he had attended school only sporadically, had not yet opened a lawbook, did not even own a suit, but was already determined to be at the center of things.

Much of the first half of "Lincoln" is given over to a vivid account of the fierce, sometimes squalid local political infighting that consumed its subject for the nearly three decades that followed, first as a canny leader of the minority Whigs in predominantly Democratic Illinois and then, when that grand old party splintered over slavery, as one of the founders of the Republicans.

As every schoolchild used to know, Lincoln met with more than his share of disappointments along the way, but he was helped through them by what Mr. Donald argues was a second distinctive trait, "the essential passivity of his nature." "I claim not to have controlled events," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "but confess plainly that events have controlled me." His conviction that human events were ultimately controlled by an unfathomable Higher Power did not preclude his exhausting himself trying to attain the goals that meant the most to him -- first the betterment of himself and his family, and then the maintenance of the American Union, which he believed literally a sacred bond and "the last best hope of earth," in large measure because it was the only government in all the world that would have allowed a man like himself to rise so far. (He loathed slavery too, but until the war was well under way saw little he could do about it under the Constitution except make certain it did not spread farther.)

But his belief that the "Almighty has His own purposes," Mr. Donald contends, did sustain him during a life of constant striving that might otherwise have crushed him. It helped rescue him from self-righteousness, allowed him to be forbearing when others made mistakes, and encouraged in him the realistic caution that served him and his country so well during its gravest crisis, but that also profoundly irritated his more systematic and single-minded contemporaries -- and still troubles some of the more unforgiving students of his career in our own time.

"You know," Lincoln once told a group of quarrelsome Pennsylvania Republicans, "I never was a contriver. I don't know much about how things are done in politics." In fact, as Mr. Donald's new account makes clearer than ever before, he knew all there was to know about how things were done; he could not have survived so long or done so well as President if he had not.

Few men ever moved into the Executive Mansion less apparently well prepared than he: mostly self-educated and still largely unknown to his fellow citizens, he had not held public office of any kind for more than two decades, had never overseen anything larger than a two-man law office, was thought a countrified embarrassment even by members of his own Cabinet. It was lessons learned in country courtrooms and the grimy corridors of the Illinois Statehouse that finally made the difference: hard lessons about the value of keeping one's own counsel, the pace at which public opinion could safely be shaped, and the uses of delay and flattery and the miraculous power of patronage to change men's minds.

This Lincoln is quite capable, when necessary, of acting with the kind of guile and sinuousness more often ascribed to, say, Franklin D. Roosevelt. When Congressional investigators seemed on the trail of damning evidence against his first Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, for example, Lincoln cheerfully whisked him off to Russia as his Minister to the Czar. And when he decided that the forthright antislavery opinions of his first Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, might harm him among moderate voters in 1864, he managed to drop him from the ticket so soundlessly that Hamlin himself was never sure what had happened. Still later, meeting in secret with the Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens aboard the steamboat River Queen in Hampton Roads on Feb. 3, 1865, Lincoln apparently went so far as to be deliberately vague about whether or not the Peculiar Institution might still somehow be permitted to survive in parts of the South, provided all of it surrendered.

LINCOLN'S convictions about slavery's evil had clearly not altered -- his behind-the-scenes lobbying had just helped win passage of the 13th Amendment in the House, in fact -- but he was quite willing to imply that they had, Mr. Donald believes, if by doing so a "campaign of misinformation" would further undermine the battered Confederacy.

Mr. Donald refrains from speculating about what sort of Reconstruction policy Lincoln might have sought had he stayed home from the theater on the evening of April 14, 1865. Like other nagging questions about Presidents who were snatched from the scene too soon -- Would F.D.R. have dropped the atomic bomb? Would J.F.K. have pulled us out of Vietnam? -- it remains unanswerable. But Lincoln did leave one characteristically oblique clue. "The pilots on our Western rivers steer from point to point as they call it -- setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see," he told one senator who asked him what was going to happen when the fighting stopped; "and that is all I propose to myself in this great problem." As this remarkable new biography demonstrates, Abraham Lincoln was a master at point-to-point navigation because, unlike a good many of his successors, he never forgot toward which harbor he was steering.

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 22, 1995, Section 7, Page 11 of the National edition with the headline: Before He Became a Saint.

 

[Dante]

Judging by what he posts, There's just no way Robert W saw any of this in what he believes he's read:

In a significant contribution to Lincoln scholarship, distinguished historian and Pulitzer Prizewinning biographer Donald (Harvard; Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe, 1987, etc.) draws a richly detailed, absorbing portrait of our 16th president.

The Lincoln that Donald gives us is an inexperienced, ill- prepared, and essentially passive man who nonetheless quickly grew into greatness as president during the nation's worst crisis.

Lincoln, Donald argues, was by temperament and philosophy fatalistic and reactive, with a lifelong belief in the Doctrine of Necessity (human destiny controlled by a higher power) that finds expression in his assertion that ``the Almighty has His own purposes.'' Nonetheless, Lincoln was from childhood insatiably ambitious.

Donald deftly traces Lincoln's rise from his hardscrabble frontier beginnings through his growth into an important local legislator and lawyer.

Although Lincoln, a conservative Whig and devotee of Henry Clay, was for many years as unsuccessful as a politician as he was wealthy and prominent as an attorney, Lincoln's brilliant debating performance in his 1858 Senate race against Stephen A. Douglas catapulted him to national renown in the infant Republican party.

Donald devotes most of his account to the story of Lincoln as war presidenthis at first inept, and gradually more skillful, stewardship of the armies, diplomacy, and other national affairs during the Civil Warthrough his assassination.

Donald makes his case for his subject's passivity. However, Lincoln emerges as a chief executive who, with steadfastness of purpose and constant humor, resisted political pressures and personal attack from Democrats and Republicans alike, made bold decisions, and, although flexibly pragmatic about means, remained faithful to his inner vision of popular government and indissoluble union. A magisterial work, destined to assume its place with those of Beveridge, Sandburg, Thomas, and Oates as a standard life of Lincoln.

(Book-of-the-Month Club split main selection; History Book Club main selection)

LINCOLN | Kirkus Reviews

In a significant contribution to Lincoln scholarship, distinguished historian and Pulitzer Prizewinning biographer Donald (Harvard; Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe, 1987, etc.) draws a richly detailed, absorbing portrait of our 16th president. The Lincoln that Donald gives us is an...

www.kirkusreviews.com

I believe Robert W is one of those who reads things and then makes crap up in his mind and puts it forth as credible because of a book he's read. His appeals to any authority usually ring hollow. Believe me? Search his inane posts.