Sometimes when one 's life is cut short (MLK, JFK, etc) we tend to make them into Gods.... They are not. Often they are quite terrible human beings... On our message board, several months ago, we published an article on Lincoln's Crimes. Today we are following up with another history lesson on the subject...
Consider a few rarely spoken facts:
- -Northern General U.S. Grant continued to hold a slave for nearly a year after the war. In fact, it took an act of Congress to finally free the man from Grant’s possession.
- -Northern General Tecumseh Sherman was arrested many times for brutally abusing several of his slaves.
- Conversely, Confederate General Robert E. Lee freed all of his slaves prior to the start of the war. That act by the military leader of the South truly displays that for the Confederacy, the war was only about states’ rights and a just rebellion against tyranny–not about slavery!
President Lincoln, who is considered by most historians (or at least the politically correct ones) to be the best and certainly the most important U.S. President, wielded power in a fashion never seen before nor since. The fact that he died as a martyr is why history has viewed him in such a kind albeit sanitized light.
During the Civil War, Lincoln continuously circumvented the law and in many cases suspended the Constitution altogether. In doing so, Lincoln denied the rights of citizens he was sworn to protect. He suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus, closed courts by force, and arrested citizens and elected officials without cause. Lincoln also raised troops without the consent of Congress, closed-down newspapers whose writers displayed any dissent to U.S. policy.
Lincoln’s troops razed the South and doomed to poverty–generations of Southerners for many years to come. General Sherman‘s “March to the Sea” was nothing more than a marauding rampage filled with robbery, rape, and murder. These men were less soldiers on a military mission and more common thugs on a crime spree. Northern armies brought war to women, children, and privately held property as a matter of official policy (rather than as so-called “collateral damage”).
Lincoln ordered the arrest of Baltimore police chief George P. Kane, police commissioner Charles Howard, as well as fellow commissioners: William H. Gatchell, John W. Davis, and Charles D. Hinks. Baltimore Mayor George W. Brown was arrested and sent to Fort McHenry. The men were incarcerated because they dared to publicly disagree with Lincoln and refused to carry-out the President’s tyrannical orders.