Post by RS Davis on Mar 2, 2004 3:32:18 GMT -5
[glow=red,2,300]Anthony Gregory Wrote:[/glow]Critics of the Bush Administration’s domestic measures in the War on Terrorism often claim that the erosions of the Bill of Rights we see today are unprecedented. Although President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft are indeed stretching the envelope in many ways, to call their policies unprecedented is to ignore history. For every civil liberty currently being violated and for every amendment in the Bill of Rights currently being ignored, there is a long and rich legacy of similar abuse.
More violations of the Constitution probably occurred during Abraham Lincoln’s four years as president than during any other cohesively defined era in American history. Many have pointed out that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to jail war protesters, shut down hundreds of newspapers that disagreed with his war, established a draft for the first time in American history (except in the seceded South, which had a draft a year earlier), instituted restrictions on firearms, and sent troops to violently suppress the New York draft riot. He also used the war to push through the "American System," a program of de facto nationalization of the transportation industry via massive subsidies to corporations that would agree to build "internal improvements" – railroads, waterways, and canals. The victory of the Union in 1865 not only established that, contrary to popular political theory in the antebellum era, the federal government was completely supreme over the states; it also established that a president could do literally anything he could get away with, no matter how many liberties were suspended, innocents jailed, and people killed in the process.
It is, in fact, almost silly even to refer to "Constitutional rights" during the Lincoln Administration. Even historians who obsessively admire the sixteenth president sometimes admit that his regime was dictatorial (though, of course, they regard him as having been a benign despot). During the War Between the States, the Bill of Rights wasn’t eroded or compromised; it was ignored completely. But though the Bill of Rights gained strength immediately after the Lincoln Administration, it remains useful to examine where and how it has taken a comparable beating in the many years since then.
More violations of the Constitution probably occurred during Abraham Lincoln’s four years as president than during any other cohesively defined era in American history. Many have pointed out that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus to jail war protesters, shut down hundreds of newspapers that disagreed with his war, established a draft for the first time in American history (except in the seceded South, which had a draft a year earlier), instituted restrictions on firearms, and sent troops to violently suppress the New York draft riot. He also used the war to push through the "American System," a program of de facto nationalization of the transportation industry via massive subsidies to corporations that would agree to build "internal improvements" – railroads, waterways, and canals. The victory of the Union in 1865 not only established that, contrary to popular political theory in the antebellum era, the federal government was completely supreme over the states; it also established that a president could do literally anything he could get away with, no matter how many liberties were suspended, innocents jailed, and people killed in the process.
It is, in fact, almost silly even to refer to "Constitutional rights" during the Lincoln Administration. Even historians who obsessively admire the sixteenth president sometimes admit that his regime was dictatorial (though, of course, they regard him as having been a benign despot). During the War Between the States, the Bill of Rights wasn’t eroded or compromised; it was ignored completely. But though the Bill of Rights gained strength immediately after the Lincoln Administration, it remains useful to examine where and how it has taken a comparable beating in the many years since then.
- Rick
