Johanna Markind: Lincoln's Potential Presidency
[Johanna Markind is an attorney specializing in criminal law and a part-time journalist specializing in religion.]
I wonder sometimes about Lincoln's other presidency. You know, what he hoped to accomplish during his presidency, before the South seceded.
His 1860 platform called for free homestead legislation, internal improvements - especially a transcontinental railroad, also river and harbor improvements, daily mail service, a protective tariff, a prohibition on changing naturalization laws, and, yes, a ban on extending slavery into the territories and suppression of the African slave trade. It also (and somewhat contradictorily) called for a "return to rigid economy and accountability... to arrest the systematic plunder of the public treasury by favored partisans" because "the people justly view with alarm the reckless extravagance which pervades every department of the Federal Government."...
But -- how shall I put it? -- these government programs were not on the front-burner when Lincoln assumed office. By that time, seven states had seceded from the Union. Confronting that new reality became the polestar of Lincoln's presidency. As John Lennon might have said, a presidency is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. Or better, it's what you make of it while you're busy making other plans....
Read entire article at American Thinker
I wonder sometimes about Lincoln's other presidency. You know, what he hoped to accomplish during his presidency, before the South seceded.
His 1860 platform called for free homestead legislation, internal improvements - especially a transcontinental railroad, also river and harbor improvements, daily mail service, a protective tariff, a prohibition on changing naturalization laws, and, yes, a ban on extending slavery into the territories and suppression of the African slave trade. It also (and somewhat contradictorily) called for a "return to rigid economy and accountability... to arrest the systematic plunder of the public treasury by favored partisans" because "the people justly view with alarm the reckless extravagance which pervades every department of the Federal Government."...
But -- how shall I put it? -- these government programs were not on the front-burner when Lincoln assumed office. By that time, seven states had seceded from the Union. Confronting that new reality became the polestar of Lincoln's presidency. As John Lennon might have said, a presidency is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. Or better, it's what you make of it while you're busy making other plans....