Skyler, I would describe Di Lorenzo's camp as a Paleo-Conservative-Anarcho-Libertarian Camp.  It is a small camp, but vigorously patrolled and defended.  Di Lorenzo begins, like most ideologues writing about the past, with asking "what do I hate about the world around me, and who in the past is responsible for this state of affairs?"  The result is what Alan Guelzo skewers in the essay cited by M'sieu Lux.  It has led Di Lorenzo to claim both Lincoln and now Alexander Hamilton as progenitors of the progressive state and Barack Obama. 

As for the secession of the upper five states, you are entitled to your opinion, but not the facts.  I challenge you to read through the secession debates and continue to claim that it was preventable.  The choice Lincoln faced was to admit that a federal installation was under state control.  No President could admit to such a thing.  Andrew Jackson would not have.

You are right, of course, that excellent and useful discussions can be ruined with cries of racism.  This need not be one.

Now, hang on a minute.  It is...kind of both.  Originally it was an electric car with a very small gasoline (or diesel, or whatever) engine that simply charged the batteries to avoid any feelings of "range anxiety".  In development they somehow geared in the gasoline engine to allow nippier acceleration; for some reason this made me feel cheated of  its original simplicity. 

To be honest, I thought it was a very cool technology when it was unveiled in 2007.  The bailout of GM, and its transformation into Government Motors, soured me on everything about it.  But that doesn't mean that it didn't begin as a cool idea. But Mark is right; the Cruze Eco (which uses some of the aerodynamic designs of the Volt) is a much better deal.  They should have sold the Volt as a Caddy, which would have made them a little profit on every unit.

Look Away:

•  Lincoln would have been ruthless in suppressing the white nationalism that eventually led to the Jim Crow regime of the 1890s. I think that he would not have hesitated in arming the formerly enslaved so that they could defend themselves and vote.  John Wilkes Booth believed this.

•  Lincoln made numerous errors throughout the war.  But in the end he made fewer than Davis.

•  I have thought a lot about this, and I am not sure there was anything that could Lincoln could have done about Virginia seceding.  But as Carwardine demonstrates, most of the next two years were spent ensuring that Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland did not.  Had they, the war would have been lost.

•  Lincoln, IMO, did not ever envision something like Total War, nor authorize it.  And the idea that Sherman did is not supported by evidence.  See Grimsley's The Hard Hand of War, and all the letters, newspaper editorials, etc., by Southerners in 1865 and for about fifteen years after praising Sherman for his toleration and sympathy for the South.  The Sherman myth did not develop until later as a necessary corollary to the Myth of the Lost Cause.

Skyler, I take it that you are not of the Thomas DiLorenzo camp, which means that we can actually have a conversation about Lincoln. 

I agree with the direction of your statement--humans are of course neither saints nor demons--but not with your facts.  For one thing, historians treat him "realistically" all the time, if you mean find him to be bigoted, racist, power-hungry, depressed, gay, power-hungry, excessively interested in the Constitution, etc., etc.  Believe me, I can give you some titles to read if you doubt this; and I'm an early American historian, so I really am not up on the topic.

What is fascinating to me about Lincoln is that he is at one and the same time the most crafty politician to ever occupy the White House and at the same time the most profound philosopher to occupy the White House; and that these two parts of his personality are intimately related.

If I recall correctly, Hooker showed the letter to members of his staff, saying with tears in his eyes that it was the sort of letter that a father would write his son.  But what the reference is for that, I do not know.

The letter to Hooker is, btw, dated January 26, 1863.  It is a marvelous piece of writing, in just 350 words or so.  It contains these among other marvelous sentences:

I have heard, in such way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the Army and the Government needed a Dictator. Of course it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.

Carwardine's book is titled Lincoln:  A Life of Purpose and Power.  I think it's so good because it was written for a series on leaders and how they achieved and used their power.  It gave the book a focus, but not a thesis statement.  That said, the book transcended the series in which it was appeared because Carwardine is a sensitive and insightful historian. 

I like Guelzo's Redeemer President very much, as well. It does such a wonderful job of teasing out the complexity of religious thought and belief in Lincoln, his milieu, and in the middle of the 19th century.

Totally agree.  If a list was compiled with the question, "which president best fulfilled his campaign promises?", Polk would rank first.

The problem with all these polls is that it supposes that modern Progressive views of "power of executive" should apply to Franklin Pierce or Millard Fillmore, either of whom would probably horsewhip anyone who suggested the President should have such powers.  Calvin Coolidge would indeed be proud to be so far down on such polls; they show that he succeeded in his goals.  Or, as H.L. Mencken observed: "Counting out Harding as a cipher only, Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver and followed by two more. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant? There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance."  I would say that he had ideas, but they were geared towards modesty in the executive.

"Vanished Kingdoms" is great; I've just dipped into it, but like it a lot.  A wonderful history lesson, with the point that what we think is inevitable and enduring probably isn't. 

Wapakoneta, Ohio.  Hometown of Neil Armstrong.  Natives of the region call it "Wapak", which sounds to me like a really bad Indian cuss word.  My nieces so delight in the full name that they sometimes shout it for no reason in particular. 

When I was a kid my family and I were in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan on a Bank Holiday morning.  Which has led to the family expression of something boring and/or completely vacant "a Bank Holiday in Moose Jaw."  A friend from Regina tells me Moose Jaw is like that even when it's not a Bank Holiday.  But who is he to talk...

For memoirs, Joseph Plumb Martin (published under various titles) on his experiences as a 16 year old who went off to fight in the Revolution and ended up returning for the duration. Smart, dry, perceptive, anti-authority; one of the great American autobiographies. My favorite memoir of World War II is probably George Macdonald Fraser's "Quartered Safe Out Here" which covers his service in Burma in '45, in the last grand campaign of the Indian Army under the Raj. Fraser is best known for his Flashman series, the chronicles of the un-Victorian cad, bounder and coward Sir Harry Flashman, VC; some of these are splendid war novels. In perhaps a deliberate contrast to Flashman we have Ricochet's own James Delingpole's "Coward" series (Coward by name not by nature). I wish James would stop all this global warming frivolity, and swiftly write another: I'm suffering from withdrawal. (And I heartily give three cheers for Howard Bahr, the greatest living American novelist. No, really, I think he might be, and would be as celebrated as inferiorities like Jonathan Safran Foer.)

A couple of random comments. I think the primary system is an OK thing as it now exists. But note how it's changed in the last 50 years. Once the California primary meant something. Now it seems that "everyone" (talking heads and Ricochetariat alike) assumes iit should all be over by Florida. There is nothing particularly democratic about that, nor is there anything particularly holy about the primary system. Brokered conventions were a feature, not a bug, of a very long period in American history when a plurality of Americans were as interested in politics as the Ricochetariat. If they return, it is not necessarily a descent into a Dark Age. Also: of course people can choose not to run if nominated. It was to forestall that humiliating event that Southern sympathizer and former Union General William Tecumseh Sherman announced "If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve." He was preventing a brokered convention from choosing him on a 23rd ballot or some such. Usually, though, home state delegations knew if a favorite son didn't want to throw his hat in the ring.

Hey, Antiphon, as someone born in Philly, and whose mother was once a public health nurse in Fishtown, I want to know:  is Fishtown still Fishtown?  I know and appreciate the image that Murray is using for his thought experiment, because that's a memory of Old Philadelphia.  But hasn't Fishtown, like everything else, changed?

As for the point that Murray is making, it's hard to disagree.  Yes, there is an increasingly disconnected new upper and new lower class, perhaps because both of them (not just the elites) are disconnected from common cultural preferences and institutions.  When (for example) baseball is really by far the most popular sport, boxing and racing the closest competitors, it's a lot easier to have a common cultural language.

Sirs, of the advice offered by Jessica Hagy, why, it is very like watching a dog walking on its hind legs; it is not that it is done well, it is that it is done at all.

My favorite quote about Wheat's Louisiana Tigers comes from Stonewall Jackson, who was at first not too well disposed to them when they joined his command in the Shenandoah. "Thoughtless fellows," he said, "for such desperate work." And arguably LSU's roots extend to the pre-war Louisiana Seminary of Learning and Military Academy in Alexandria, whose first superintendent was William Tecumseh Sherman.

AmishDude, James Madison in Federalist #47 writes: "One of the principal objections inculcated by the more respectable adversaries to the Constitution, is its supposed violation of the political maxim, that the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments ought to be separate and distinct... No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."