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Congressman
Clement L. Vallandigham (D-Ohio) was the original American "whistleblower."
Serving as a member of Congress from Dayton, Ohio during the War
to Prevent Southern Independence, his criticisms of the Lincoln
regime earned him the reputation as the leader of the Democratic
opposition. The Republican Party smeared him (and all other opponents
as a "copperhead" (a.k.a. snake in the grass). On May
5, 1863, sixty-seven heavily-armed soldiers broke into his home
in the middle of the night and dragged him off to a military prison.
This was done without any due process, as Lincoln had long ago illegally
suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus. He was said to be guilty of
"discouraging enlistments" in the army with his criticisms
of the Lincoln regime. A military order issued in the state of Ohio
declared all such speech to be illegal, and military officers were
to have dictatorial powers in deciding what kind of speech would
be permitted there. All of this was of course done at the direction
of Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln apparently
wanted Northerners to believe that all such critics were spies and
traitors, so Congressman Vallandigham was deported to the state
of Tennessee and placed in the hands of a Confederate Army commander.
The Confederates considered him to be an "enemy alien"
and imprisoned him in Wilmington, North Carolina for a short time.
Vallandigham was released and made his way via blockade runner to
Canada, where he spent the rest of the war.
The words that
got Congressman Vallandigham deported are found in Speeches,
Arguments, Addresses and Letters of Clement L. Vallandigham,
first published in 1864 and reprinted and for sale today at Amazon.com.
Vallandigham's first salvo against the Lincoln administration was
a July 10, 1861 speech delivered on the floor of the U.S. House
of Representatives entitled "Executive Usurpation." In
the speech he condemned Lincoln for "the wicked and hazardous
experiment of calling thirty millions of people into arms among
themselves, without the counsel and authority of Congress."
As for Lincoln's
newly-invented theory that the American union was never voluntary,
and that the founding fathers supposedly understood that if any
state seceded the government would have a "right" to invade
that state, murder its citizens by the tens of thousands, and bomb
and burn its cities and towns to a smoldering ruin (as was the policy
of the Lincoln administration), Vallandigham gave the Congress a
history lesson. "He [Lincoln] omits to tell us that secession
and disunion had a New England origin, and began in Massachusetts,
in 1804, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase; were revived by
the Hartford [Secession] Convention in 1814; and culminated during
the [War of 1812] in [New Englanders] sending Commissioners to Washington,
to settle the terms for a peaceable separation of New England from
the other States of the Union."
Congressman
Vallandigham described Lincoln's first inaugural address as having
been spoken "with the forked tongue and crooked counsel of
the New York politician [New York politician Thurlow Weed having
been Lincoln's campaign manager], leaving thirty millions of people
in doubt whether it meant peace or war." He condemned the Republican
Party for opposing "all conciliation and compromise" with
the Southern states, and surmised that the reason for it was "the
necessities of a party in the pangs of dissolution." They wanted
a war to rally the people around their disintegrating party.
But a "more
compelling" cause of the war, said the Ohio congressman, was
"the passage of an obscure, ill-considered, ill-digested, and
unstatesmanlike high protectionist tariff act, commonly known as
the 'Morrill Tariff.'" At about the same time, he noted, the
Confederate government had outlawed protectionist tariffs altogether
in its new Constitution. "The result was as inevitable as the
laws of trade are inexorable. Trade and commerce . . . began to
look South . . . . Threatened thus with the loss of bot political
power and wealth, or the repeal of the tariff, and, at last, of
both, New England -and Pennsylvania . . . demanded, now coercion
and civil war, with all its horrors . . ."
Republican
Party newspapers from all throughout the North had been calling
for the bombardment of Southern ports before any state seceded,
and Lincoln literally threatened war and "invasion" of
any state that declined to pay the newly-doubled (two days earlier)
federal tariff tax in his first inaugural address. "Honest"
Abe threatened war over tax collection, and kept his word.
Another hidden
purpose of the war was to "overthrow the present form of Federal-republican
government, and to establish a strong centralized government in
its stead. Thus, Vallandigham charged that this was not just the
effect of the war, but its primary objective all along. All of this
was being done, he said, to "revive and restore the falling
fortunes of the Republican Party."
The congressman
harshly condemned Lincoln's unconstitutional, illegal, and dictatorial
actions, especially the suspension of Habeas Corpus, waging war
without the consent of Congress, the mass imprisonment of Northern
political dissenters, censorship of the telegraph, and the shutting
down of hundreds of opposition newspapers in the North. Such behavior,
he said, "would have cost any English sovereign his head at
any time within the last two hundred years."
Congressman
Vallandigham mocked Lincoln's contention that "he is only preserving
and protecting the Constitution" by destroying it. This, he
said, is "the tyrant's plea." "The Constitution cannot
be preserved by violating it." It was "an offense to the
intelligence" of Congress for Lincoln to argue that "gross
and multiplied infractions of the Constitution and usurpations of
power were done by the president . . . out of pure love and devotion
to the Constitution." [This of course is still part of the
mantra of the neocons at the Claremont Institute, National Review,
and elsewhere).
Vallandigham
also understood that the Republican Party was using the war as an
excuse to ram through Congress the old Hamiltonian mercantilist
system of massive economic interventionism and corporate welfare.
He described it as "national banks, bankrupt laws, a vast and
permanent public debt, high tariffs, heavy direct taxation, enormous
expenditure, gigantic and stupendous peculation . . . No more state
lines, no more state governments, but a consolidated monarchy or
vast centralized military despotism." In today's language all
of this would be called "national greatness conservatism."
Congressman
Vallandigham would continue his public criticisms of the Lincoln
administration for the next two years, before finally being deported.
On December 23, 1861, he informed his congressional colleagues that,
just as he had predicted, a high protectionist tariff could reduce
tariff revenues by diminishing trade from abroad too severely. "I
predicted that the result of increasing the duties would be a great
. . . diminution of the importations, and by consequence of the
revenue from customs." But that of course is always the intent
of protectionist tariffs - to cut off trade and competition from
abroad, not to raise prodigious amounts of revenue.
On May 8, 1862
Vallandigham returned to the floor of the House of Representatives
to draw sharp distinctions between the Democratic and Republican
parties, which had become virtual opposites in their announced platforms.
The Democrats differed from the Republicans in that they were in
favor of: "The support of liberty as against power; of the
people as against their agents and servants; and of State rights
as against consolidation and centralized despotism a simple government;
no public debt; low taxes; no high protectionist tariff; no general
system of internal improvements [i.e. corporate welfare] by the
Federal authority; no National Bank; hard money for the Federal
public dues; no assumption of state debts; expansion of territory;
self government for the Territories . . . " Nothing could be
further from the "national greatness conservatism" policies
of the Lincoln administration. It is little wonder that Vallandigham
was deported.
The congressman
destroyed Lincoln's argument that the American union was being "saved"
by war by stating on August 2, 1862 that: "The president professes
to think that the Union can be restored by arms. I do not. A Union
founded on consent can never be cemented by force. This is the testimony
of the Fathers." On February 23, 1863, Vallandigham threw another
rhetorical bomb at the administration by pointing out in another
speech that the administration's conscription law "is a confession
that the people of the country are against this war. It is a solemn
admission . . . that they will not voluntarily consent to wage it
any longer." Two weeks later, in a speech in New York City,
Vallandigham was met with loud cheers when he declared that "instead
of crushing out the rebellion," the "effort has been to
crush out the spirit of liberty" in the Northern states.
Six weeks before
his imprisonment and deportation Vallandigham made some remarks
at a March 21, 1863 meeting in Hamilton, Ohio, that must have been
he last straw for the Lincoln dictatorship. The dictatorship had
issued yet another military "general order" (General Order
Number 15) - this time one that condemned the private ownership
of firearms as "unnecessary, impolitic, and dangerous"
and "a violation of civil law" as defined by the military
authorites then occupying Ohio. "Are we a conquered province
governed by a military proconsul?", Vallandigham asked, "And
has it come to this, that the Constitution is now suspended by a
military General Order? "Yes" would have been the appropriate
and obvious answer.
Congresman
Clement L. Vallandiham was deported by the Lincoln dictatorship
because every word of his eloquent critiques of their tyranny and
his defenses of constitutional liberty was true. Every word and
every speech disproved the false propaganda lines invented by the
Republican Party to "justify" its power - that the Constitution
must be first destroyed in order to save it; that the voluntary
union of the founders could be "saved" by mass murdering
hundreds of thousands of citizens who no longer consented to being
governed by Washington, D.C.; that high tariffs, high taxes, out-of-control
government spending, and stupendous public debt would cause prosperity;
that corporate welfare was good for taxpayers; that a national bank
run by politicians was in the public interest, etc., etc. All of
these lies are still repeated ad nauseam today under the rubric
of "Lincoln scholarship." It is no mere coincidence that
so many of those who still repeat these hoary government propaganda
tales are also busy defending the spying and prying police state.
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