[Straight, gay, bi -- who cares what Lincoln's orientation was? His cardinal trait was megalomania. I would rate Lincoln with GWB as the nation's worst president -- the guy who forever blighted the prospects of the North by keeping it shackled to the hopelessly backward South. There's an interesting article in NY Press that notes it was the *North* that originally wanted to secede from the slave-holding South. The article recommends that New York City secede today:]
LONG LIVE THE FREE REPUBLIC OF GOTHAM
Don't say it can't be done. But first, we need to get over our Abe Lincoln obsession and revisit the Constitution.
By Christopher Ketcham
For anyone watching history and thinking ahead in the wake of November 2, the secession of New York City from the United States of America is no longer a question of ambiguities but practicalities, not a question of why but how. ...
Secession dreams are nothing new in New York. Mayor Fernando Wood argued the case in 1861, kowtowing to king cotton's collusion with the city's merchants, who feared the effects abolition would have on business. The Norman Mailer/Jimmy Breslin ticket hung their 1969 mayoral run on the idea, hanging their political careers in the process.
There is a reason for the recent failures: After nearly 150 years of propaganda, the centerpiece of which is the deification of Abraham Lincoln, secession has been branded in the popular imagination as something ridiculous, illegal, treasonous. The Declaration of Independence states otherwise. "Governments," wrote Thomas Jefferson, "are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive…it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government." Such is the call to self-government in the founding documents: Secession is the primal American act.
The Constitution itself is silent on the matter of secession. Up until the Civil War, this silence implied consent. Among antebellum constitutional scholars, it was axiomatic that if the states were once sovereign entities that acceded to join the union in a mutually beneficial treaty, they implicitly retained the right to rescind the treaty and withdraw. The Tenth Amendment appears to back such a right: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States," the amendment reads, "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
William Rawle, a constitutional scholar and friend of George Washington, typified the common thinking when he observed in 1825 that to deny the right of state secession "would be inconsistent with the principle on which all our political systems are founded, which is that the people have in all cases, a right to determine how they will be governed."
Secession was once taught at West Point. Petulant states constantly threatened it, with New Englanders early on showing an especial fondness for cutting loose from a Union that increasingly catered to Southern slaveholder interests. In 1804, New England lawmakers, in channels with New Yorkers, plotted a failed secession movement, which nonetheless had the approval of Aaron Burr and would have comprised today a perfect blue-state swath. The war of 1812, which threatened New England's trade with England, catalyzed wider secessionist threats in the Northeast. On the eve of the Civil War, secession was such an entrenched American principle that dozens of Northern newspapers spoke on behalf of the legality of the Southern independence movement and the newly born confederacy.
All this had changed by 1865, when, as historian James Ronald Kennedy puts it, "the moral persuasion of bloody bayonets" rewrote history and the Constitution.
The persuasion persists today, though even a casual review of the anti-secession argument reveals a mess of fabrications, confusion and casuistry.
Consider Lincoln's 1861 inaugural address: No American state had the right to secede, Lincoln claimed, given that "no government proper, ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination."
This is an interpretation of the silence of the Constitution, attempting to make noise where there is none. Worse, it speaks, absurdly, to the metaphysical: Somewhere, out there, beyond the letter of the law, Lincoln tells us, the "organic law" of the abstract thing known as "government" provides somehow for the Union as an infinite entity, "indestructible" and "perpetual."
Lincoln advances what at first appears to be solid thinking. There was in fact a "perpetual union"—so went the clause—established in 1781 under the Articles of Confederation, grandfather to the Constitution, and the "perpetual union" was indeed rendered, in the words of the Constitution's preamble, "more perfect" in the abiding document that was at last ratified in 1791. The "perpetual union" clause, however, was dropped from the Constitution's final language because the sovereign states refused to accept indissoluble bonds under the new government. (Some states were so skittish of joining the federal power that three of them—Virginia, Rhode Island and, key to our cause, New York—wrote escape caveats explicitly preserving the secession right.) Moreover, the real significance of "more perfect union," at its core a near meaningless abstraction and probably a rhetorical flourish, has never been clear—of what exactly did the founders conceive as "perfection"?
Lincoln repeatedly compared the Union to a marriage, but befitting his odd habits of mind it was a deranged and benighted marriage, where once married, no divorce was possible (who would ever get married under such a gallows?). Otherwise, Lincoln warned, the Union, "as a family relation," would amount only to "a sort of free love arrangement—to be maintained on what that sect calls passionate attraction." But the argument can be made that free love among the states is exactly what the founders envisioned, with states divorcing when the relationship turned empty, unfulfilling, abusive. Today, all three characterize New York City's relations with the red states.
The heavy hand of Lincoln's contempt for constitutional law fell especially hard on New York City, where there operated a great number of the hundreds of newspapers Lincoln shut down for their criticisms in a time of war (nationwide, Lincoln mass-arrested thousands of political dissenters, censored telegraph communications and even deported a Congressional opponent). When Fernando Wood, the secessionist mayor, denounced Lincoln as an "unscrupulous chief magistrate," Lincoln punished Wood's brother, New York Daily News editor Ben Wood, by illegally denying use of the federal postal service for the News' circulation. Other editors who preached peace found their papers denied use of the postal service by direct order of the Lincoln White House. In New York, these included Walt Whitman's old employer, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
Luckily for Lincoln, the U.S. Supreme Court, stacked with his hacks, stepped into the post-war fray to seal the issue of secession by eliding it. Lincoln apologists today turn to the 1868 case of Texas v. White, in which Lincoln's ex-treasurer and court appointee Salmon P. Chase, who wrote the legislation that financed the war, issued the judicial coup de grace to secession. Chase's decision in the highest court, though established law today, was as fundamentally weak in reasoning as Lincoln's on the brink of war.
"There must have been an overwhelming fatefulness in Chase's mind," observes John Remington Graham, author of The Constitutional History of Secession. "This enormous conflict had cost something like three-fourths of the assessed value of all taxable property in the United States in 1860, and had multiplied the national debt fifty-three times in only four years. Under the circumstances, [Chase] could not write the truth, so he wrote something else."
Thus began a century and a half of whitewash. ...
<http://www.nypress.com/17/52/news&columns/feature.cfm>
Carl