You do concede that the 14th Amendment came into existence after Lincoln’s assassination. You do concede that the unintended beneficiary of the 14th Amendment was not the non-Caucasian American citizen but an entity not even mentioned in the U.S. Constitution — the corporation.

The 9th and 10th Amendments exist, in my opinion, as a residuary clause in a will that the Framers left for posterity, to ensure that the national government had limited powers and the people and the states kept the rest.

You have not discussed the perverted use of the 10th Amendment by monied oligarchs as a pretext to keep the national government from breaking up trusts. Jefferson favored another clause in the Bill of Rights, to maintain freedom from commercial monopoly. Have you seen it recently?

You have not discussed the perverted use of the 10th Amendment as a pretext for maintenance of de jure racism.

You have not discussed that the 9th Amendment gets no discussion whatsoever, even though it is a repository of people’s power against all government and private power oppression. I know that Justice Goldberg discussed the 9th Amendment in his concurrence in Griswold v. Connecticut. I know that one Professor Black discussed it in his book that saw the 9th Amendment, 2nd paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, and the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment as the passages in America’s law that needed real resurrection. Do you favor the 9th Amendment as a buttress to the 2nd? I do.

Fort Sumter was national property, you conceded.

Robert E. Lee foresaw oppression at the hands of the national government. The national government has oppressed people in this nation and the rest of the world. Over what was Lee complaining? Was he forecasting imperialist wars that ought not to be fought? He helped to win one — the Mexican War. Had he changed his mind about war like Smedley Butler? What light have you to shed on these questions?

Have you any refuting evidence against the fact that Lincoln sought a conciliatory approach after Appomattox, but was assassinated too soon to implement it? He did order the band to play “Dixie” at the celebration of the surrender.

Are you going to address the nature of money, Jeff?

Do you favor a constitutional amendment that declares corporations not to be persons under the Fourteenth Amendment or any other provision of the United States Constitution or any inferior state or local law?

The Gulf of Tonkin and 9/11 were false pretexts for war and oppression as much as the Reichstag Fire of 1933. I concur with you on the Gulf of Tonkin.

I have not read your response on my comments on British lenders. You do not disagree then?

You speak long and emotionally against the oppression a strong national government brings in its train. Strong national governments have the means to oppress, and the track record of oppression in many, many cases. So does strong, concentrated private power — in spades. Why do you not complain about strong, concentrated private power? Concentrated private power is much more resistant to accountability as a strong national government, unless, as the present situation shows, concentrated private power hijacks the national government. Jefferson made the point of diffusing both private and government power. He did that as governor by favoring the allotment of 50 acres to every adult free male, for the sakes of self-sufficiency, diffusion of private wealth, and a check on government power.

How best to check private power than to abolish the Fed, reissue greenbacks, and promote local currencies? How best to check national power than to encourage local currencies and the payment of taxes therein! Comments, Jeff?

Thank you for proving my point. Anyone in a rebuttal who uses tired canards of “Scarlett O’Hara bewailing the Lost Cause.”, ridiculous Nat King Cole quotes as substantiation, “Robert E. Lee got over it. Why don’t you?” and then accuse me of pettiness and strawman never really had much to say in the first place.

You stated: “Southern states kept Republican Lincoln off the ballot. I have read as many as ten states kept him off the ballot. The South refused to deal with the newly elected Lincoln.”

Abraham Lincoln was not “off on the ballot” in ten states in 1860. It is a victor’s myth, an uncomfortable truth for you that you ignore or were not aware, A victor’s orthodoxy that you swallowed hook, line and sinker. “Actually, back in 1860, “on the ballot” had no meaning. Private ballots were legal (in fact, no other ballots existed; parties printed their own ballots and distributed them to whomever wanted one). Lincoln didn’t receive any votes in ten southern states, not because he was kept off any ballot, but because his campaign didn’t nominate any presidential elector candidates in those states.”

You might go back and read to comprehend the Jefferson’s DoI’s preamble and read the political activities that Vermont and New Hampshire are currently attempting in this very day and time and their touching “pratings of republicanism”. What Lincoln inaugurated and martially imposed chickens are coming home to roost. I suspect Article V has probably been discussed more in the last ten years than in the preceding 234 years. The debt of the Federal government government is irrevocably unsustainable as currently designed. A change will come sooner than later.

As to Lincoln’s lawful authority, he had none as secession, interposition nullification were active in thought, politics and memory. They were not unreasonable nor ill thought. The eleven Southern states had no designs on the north and acted legally and democratically. Is there no higher action? Only the north viewed their separation as a threat and as a loss of revenue. Lincoln said so. West Point and Annapolis taught secession as lawful until the 1840′s which explains the class loyalties along State lines they took at the beginning of Lincoln’s unconstitutional and unnecessary war.

As to you “gubmint indoctrination” of ‘Pres. Lincoln exercised his lawful authority and refused to surrender federal property at Ft. Sumter and other points south of the Mason Dixon Line.’

It was not Federal property. In fact Ft. Sumter was ceded to the United States government which was South Carolina’s assigned agent as South Carolina (no compensation occurred and SC’s revenues more than paid for the structure). They were rebuked when they even offered to pay for it by Seward on Lincoln’s instructions. It was Lincoln’s red herring and how do you explain his invasion of Maryland? and imprisonment of legally elected legislators. He unilaterally and selectively changed the agreed upon compact of all the States for a few. That’s Lincoln’s real legacy. It’s no accident it is never taught except at higher academic levels.

England made and signed peace with 13 separate colonies, not a nation nor any national government but to those State’s agents. The issue of sovereignty is the whole key to our discussion. “We the People or the “Government” or the Nation. All are distinct. It used to be always the former until Lincoln nor did anybody ever vote for the latter by ballot, convention or amendment. Any mention of the 10th Amendment draws indoctrinated contempt and bumper sticker wisdom. Who really benefits from this?

You still continue to ignore the Founding Father’s arguments, designs and intentions, sovereignty, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, Lincoln’s martial coercion and ignore that his despotism against the ” honest, law-abiding laboring people in the north and the south” and alignment with financial interests. After all who financed Lincoln?

As to Robert E. Lee ‘getting over it’ as you so ludicrously stated. Lee is quoted in 1867: “The consolidation of the States into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which will overwhelmed all that preceded it.”

I have no wish to re-fight the war. But the victors do write the history and we are all a product of it. Some of us ignore the revisionism and the political correctness and inbred knee jerk nationalism that is too easily accepted without question yet some realize that the American Experiment did not end with Andrew Jackson and certainly not with Abraham “Root Hog or Die” Lincoln anymore than I beleived the Gulf of Tonkin or WMD’s in Iraq or that the Federal Reserve has only the nation’s best economic interest at heart.

Lincoln laid the cornerstone and destroyed the Republic by imposing the primacy of the Federal government over the states, eliminating checks, balance and competitive accountability and limits to his newly centralized National government to even fewer and fewer unaccountable interests. It has always been the natural inclinations of all governments since antiquity to do so as John C. Calhoun predicted. Even the most rabid revisionist and the the most dogmatic nationalist patriot/scholar have never refuted him, Jefferson Davis or Alexander Stephens despite their best efforts.
I choose the strict construction and the Rule of Law as solutions over bloodletting and fratricide based on the folly of Lincoln’ or Jackson’s without fault nationalism bypassing all reason, using as true and honest history and interpretation of it. IMO, you proved little.

Agree to disagree.

I read your remarks.

You are not being straight with your analysis. You show pettiness that does not befit you. I do not claim Greenbacks caused the war. I do not claim the Department of Defense existed during the War of the Rebellion. If one reads publications from today’s Dep’t of Defense, one sees this title for that four year conflagration on the North American continent. Refrain from shooting at straw men of your own creation.

Southern states kept Republican Lincoln off the ballot. I have read as many as ten states kept him off the ballot. The South refused to deal with the newly elected Lincoln. Your pratings on republicanism are touching, but, as Nat King Cole said, “they sound like a lie.” Rather, they sound more like Scarlett O’Hara bewailing the Lost Cause.

I do not claim that northerners were all moral and all northerners abhorred slavery. Indeed, northern aristocrats had much in common with southern aristocrats — a love of money at the expense of as many people as possible by any means necessary, and a desire to divide, disrupt, and deceive honest, law-abiding laboring people in the north and the south.

Pres. Lincoln exercised his lawful authority and refused to surrender federal property at Ft. Sumter and other points south of the Mason Dixon Line. Rebels fired the first shot. Federals fired the last. Robert E. Lee got over it. Why don’t you?

I love Jackson for doing what he did to the bank, but he was a monster in other respects, such as the final solution for indians. Being native american, it leaves me torn. Like our country.

Why are you avoiding the central issues with your pedantic adjuct history lesson that were neither discussed nor a part of the subsequent discussion? I am well aware of European designs and hopes during the war but how can you excuse Lincoln’s unconstitutional and unnecessary war which still awaits any clarification or justification from you. And my statement still stands unrefuted that ‘greenbacks’ were a by product of the war not a cause as you stated. Cart before the horse is still valid.

“The battle lines formed with President Lincoln and the American Greenback on one side and the British system of “Money as Debt in the Hands of the Oligarchs””

“”The Greenback Act of 1861 was an act of President Lincoln’s administration, not his predecessors. One estimate has that the issuance of greenbacks saved the nation about $400 million in interest. For the 19th Century, that was REAL money.

yet the war produced America’s first “millionaires” whose families are still iconic today, the war cost more than any interest saved, all were in the Northern states, instituted and profited Northern industrial and financial interests who directed and motivated Lincoln’s war. Politically as iwas its design, it imposed a GOP party monoply that existed for almost 8 decades. It martially and permanently imposed the “Hamiltonians” completely over the Jeffersonian view and institutionalized Federal corruption for special interests geginning from the “Big Shoddy” to the DoD’s procurement scandals known and unknown of today aka ‘Empire’. That was the real legacy of the 14th amendment as well. The pig trough was opened and no one today dares go back. Lincoln would have approved, no doubt Andrew Jackson as well

Had not Lincoln invaded and blockaded the Confederate States of America in an unnecessary war that essentially martially imposed centralization and primacy of a central government of a few and the institutionalization of Northern financial interests aka Wall Street via the US treasury and ‘money for votes” into Federal permanence and domination, your argument IMO is baseless. The government and Empire we have today had its cornerstone laid by Lincoln and to a lesser extent Jackson. Yet even Lincoln later realized his bargain with the devil and commented on it whether genuine was a part of what he accomplished. An income tax was first implemented as well as the selling of US debt in Europe including his minimizing financial as you stated by using greenbacks where US banks first inoculated themselves in European imperial financial systems. Nor will any historian argue that reconciliation and compromise would not have eventually occurred in the future required by mutual benefit.

Not to be nit picking either but there was no “Department of Defense” another federal PR carrnard in 1861 and the use of term of the “War of the Rebellion” was subsequently used to justify the war and minimize that it was a war of coercion. Much like Texas v White (1869) ruled secession illegal constitutionally after the fact. Sholdn’t Lincoln have asked the Court before invading nuetral Maryland? As to Dred Scott as posed by historians, who paid the enormous legal bills that would have been required to vaunt such a legal front for a slabve? It would change the whole argument. No one still knows then again, the “Secret Six” and their fascism were kept secret for decades nor are they or their motivations even discussed in American secondary educational levels. Gubmint always be right.

Hardly democratic by any means based on the words in the Declaration of Independence that the uSA was created. There was no rebellion as the Southern States followed the existing and accepted democratic and legal processes of withdrawing from the Union along the same procedures as when said same States ratified the Constitution. Nor did they have any designs on the United States. It negates the whole iconcept of a “Civil War”. It was a war of money and power like all wars are. The idea that it would “destroy the United States of America” as so often stated is nonsense as well. It would have still existed for a time, just fewer in number until a reconcilliation. Lincoln saw the South as a competitive threat to the interests he served and acted for and was financed by.
Lincoln was a Whig above all else and all that entailed. He believed in the centralization of a National government and vigorous application and use of its treasury for “internal improvement” aka graft, corruption, deals, etc. of which the South financed by 60 to 70% according to Taurig tariff tax tables, (1896). It must also must be remembered that slaves represented the second largest liquid source of open capital in the US with land being first. The North destroyed slavery not for humanitarian reasons but financial ones. The Federal government did not need to compensate slave owners as done elsewhere all over the world where slavery was eliminated bloodlessy and northern banks and financial houses were relieved of millions and millions of dollars in liabilities. The biggest slave owners in the US were the banks of New York, Philadelphia, Newport and Boston. Their cities were developed and flourished by their mercantilism, shipping of slavery of the Middle Passage for 150 years. Jim Crow is eternally demonized yet no one mentions the black codes of northern states or New York banks financing African slavery via the ivory trades until the 1940′s . Please don’t shill that “phony baloney” Great Emancipator ‘altar of Lincoln ” altrusistic crapfest. It holds no water anymore than the 8 northern born and educated US Supreme Court judges who witnessed the war between the states and voted for Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. The one dissenting vote was the Southerner with slave holding family heritage or that the Klan Revival of the 1920′s originated and were incorporated in southern Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania with their idea of the morality of slavery.

He destroyed the Founder’s Republic and he did so by force of arms without benefit of ballot, amendment or convention. That was Lincoln’s real legacy. He cared little about slavery. Licolnn remarked AFTER his Emancipation Proclamation in Jan 1965, a wartime PR measure now lionized for his duplictious and dishonest humanitarism when asked what would become of the newly freed slaves, Lincoln’s disingenuous concern about slavery was they could “root, hog or die”. No one in mid 1860′s beleived in racial equality and those that did could be counted on two hands so please spare me the “PC morality” issue or that slavery would go westward because there were less than a 100 slaves in total in the territories/future states and the non-issue of “slave power” are diversions because the climatology west could not support it. As the American industrial revolution taught us, it was far cheaper to pay low wages than cradle to grace and legal responsibilities and extremely high costs of slavery. Remember Massachussetts first legalized slavery in the colonies. I don’t apologize or condone the South’s pats but your victor’s view of history won’t scour.

As H.L Mencken (no friend of Southern States) and who coined the term “Bible Belt” said on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

Note on the Gettysburg Address

by H.L. Mencken

The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history…the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.

And no legal or educational authority has ever proven Alexander Stephens or John C. Calhoun constuitional writings to this day …wrong. I will not bow at your Altar of Lincoln nor subscribe to its blasphemies. Deo Vindice.

I do not wish you one of General Sherman’s neckties that he named after you. That said, here are a couple of points in rebuttal.

No doubt exists that European monied oligarchs wanted a divided United States before Abraham Lincoln’s election. They wanted a north and a south, and a further subdivided south, to divide, rule, and exploit the continent. Take it from Rothschild of London.

When Lincoln won the election, one idea presented to him by Sec’y of State-in-waiting Henry Seward was war against England. Lincoln, of course, declined this rash approach at unifying the nation against a foreign foe. England, however, was the biggest foe of the Union with its rapacious bankers offering to loan the United States money at 24 to 36 percent interest to fight the war.

The Greenback Act of 1861 was an act of President Lincoln’s administration, not his predecessors. One estimate has that the issuance of greenbacks saved the nation about $400 million in interest. For the 19th Century, that was REAL money.

Pres. Lincoln’s creation of the greenback was the recommendation of Henry Carey, an economic theorist who favored public works, internal improvements, high tariffs, and publicly controlled credit, in contrast to the Bank of England’s system of privately controlled credit with a crown charter. Carey’s system was called “The American System”, in contrast to the British System. Carey was a Whig. When you say Lincoln continued Whig policies, you state the facts accurately in large part.

Slavery was immoral then, and it is immoral now. Slavery was dying institution, and it was not not dying fast enough in the decade leading to the election of Abraham Lincoln. It took the war and the 13th Amendment to overrule the Dred Scott case of 1857. In my opinion, however, slavery was a powerful pretext for magnification of differences between north and south, in the hands of moneychangers desiring the division for their own exploitation. To mirror Lincoln, the moneychangers would have fought to keep slavery, or they would have fought to abolish slavery, so long as they could divide and exploit the union.

The Fourteenth Amendment, in my opinion, did two things. It created national citizenship that rested upon the privileges and immunities of individual human rights, with the guarantees of due process and equal protection of the law. On the down side, section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment shackled the people to the national debt, by stating for the first time that the “debt of the United States shall never be questioned”. The amendment did so by repudiating the debt of the states formerly in rebellion.

End the Fed.
Every man a king.
Every woman a queen.
Every state with its own Bank of North Dakota.
Long live local currencies.