Campfire Tracker
Joined: Apr 2019
Posts: 6,083 Likes: 3 |
Y'all are ignoring that Slavery was Legal at the time. miles That is the one thing that is forgotten by those who love and defend Lincoln. Moral implications aside, it was a legal institution. If a president today were to declare gun ownership as illegal, demand that they all be turned in, and go to war with the citizens that refused to comply with his demands and instead set up their own government..............the same people who defend Lincoln for what he did, would be ready to do to that president what Wilkes did to Lincoln. Slavery was legal in the South. It was not legal in the northwest territories and importation of slaves was illegal after 1808. Moreover, the voters, in a free and fair election elected a president running on a party platform which promised to prohibit the expansion of slavery into new territories. At the same time, Lincoln was adamant that slavery, where it was then and there practiced (viz., in the South) should not be molested or interfered with. But chattel slavery (the owning of and exploitation of other human beings as if they were chattel) is morally wrong. Gun ownership is morally right. Slavery, unlike gun ownership was not a positive moral good. The Founders universally viewed it as an evil but one that had to be accommodated by the brute fact of its prevalence in the colonies. (In fact, in the Declaration, Jefferson blamed the British for foisting slavery on the colonies.) The concessions to slavery in the Constitution of 1787 were prudential concessions, meaning they were concessions made to the existence of an evil (slavery) in order to achieve a greater good. Specifically, those concessions permitted the adoption of a Constitution and hence the formation of a Union of sufficient strength to, as Lincoln said, "put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction". Lincoln said of Jefferson (speaking of the Declaration of Independence): "This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression."
I would say gun ownership is following the path of slavery pretty precisely. From common in almost every society, to being frowned upon in many, to being heavily restricted, to campaigned being against and heavily restricted in the majority. It's rather astonishing that you are oblivious to the absurdity of that statement. Gun ownership is the sine qua non of the preservation of all rights (the right and hence the ability to use force to resist tyranny) whereas chattel slavery (the denial of the obvious fact of the humanity and free will of others and the claim to ownership of those others as if they were mere chattels [viz., dogs, hogs, cattle and chairs---items of personalty without free will]) is the quintessence of tyranny. You are some one whose moral relativism and commitment to legal and logical positivism has rendered him morally illiterate and utterly unable to distinguish what is in the world from what ought to be. You have nothing in common with the Founders, but would make pleasant company with the likes of Stalin, Pol Pot and Hitler, to say nothing of the Democrat Party, all of whose premises are identical with your own. Moral relativism? Sir, I’m just trying to understand what you actually believe. I happen to believe in “A Supreme God of the Universe”. What did said God say about killing and war? When is it permissible to ignore one thing you believe the Supreme God of the Universe advocates in favor of another? And I suppose you must surely believe Abraham Lincoln was sent by this Supreme God of the Universe to proclaim and reveal his will. Because, whereas the Founders had surely failed in their duty to bring fire and sword to the wicked who in his words, “…did not deserve freedom” Lincoln did not, but instead brought the righteous judgment of heaven down upon their heads. Lincoln's statement that "[t]hose who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it" is absolutely true and a Lincolnian gloss upon (a paraphrase if you will) of Jefferson's statement (also pertaining to slavery) that "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever." Do I believe that Lincoln's election was providential? Yes. As I also believe the Founding was providential and ordained by the Almighty.
Last edited by Tarquin; 02/14/24.
Tarquin
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