America's Forgotten History, Part Two Quotes

“Every major war in American history, except the Mexican and Spanish-American, has either led to central banking or resulted from it. Central banking and government have a symbiotic relationship that is often mediated by war. Central banking gives government a way to tap the productive power of the private sector and borrow from the future without the need to rely overmuch on unpopular tax increases. Government gives central banking the extreme profits that derive from immense borrowing to finance wars and other government projects.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“Any people anywhere have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Later, when such rising-up and shaking-off threatened his own Hamiltonian agenda, Lincoln’s thinking would change.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“For fear of upsetting Hitler, Roosevelt refused to allow Jewish immigration into America. He turned back a ship called the St. Louis filled with Jewish refugees, guaranteeing death for many of them. Roosevelt also refused to allow 20,000 Jewish orphans into America even though they all had sponsoring families through Jewish, Catholic, and Quaker aid organizations. Virtually all eventually died in Nazi death camps. Roosevelt’s refusal, according to historian Thomas Fleming, was the act that convinced Hitler that the world would not care if he pursued his final solution. And yet all that is easily brushed aside when historians judge Roosevelt to be a great president. Much is forgiven activist, big government”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“The Panic of 1819 sounded a wakeup call to some that the founders had been right after all in separating State and Commerce. Having experienced both state religion and state mercantilism under the British, the founders recognized the importance of separating the three power centers of Commerce, Church, and State. Commerce or Church, combined with State, produced both corruption and power too great to oppose – a condition of tyranny.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“Lincoln started the war over tariffs but in no way can tariffs justify what has happened. So Lincoln has transformed the war into an epic moral struggle of biblical proportions. If that moral struggle had been his initial concern, though, all he had to do was let that original Deep South fringe secede.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“The other party would accept war rather than let the nation perish. Accept war! These two seemingly simple and innocent words are pregnant with a terrible meaning: if the North invades the South, it is not making war. It is merely putting down insurrection. If the South defends itself against that invasion, it is making war. The beautiful language stripped of its slippery switches of meanings puts responsibility on the South for a war made by the North.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“Lincoln, though, was able to fight the war as he liked because he had shackled the press, arrested dissidents, and smothered the antiwar movement.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“This could not be accepted. Four of those states – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas - joined the Confederacy. For good measure, so did the southern Indian tribes now in Oklahoma.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“President Lincoln had made it clear by his unilateral militia call-up that he meant to give those states no chance to vote on the need in Congress, that he meant to ignore their revered Constitution, and that he meant to wage war on the heretofore sacred right of secession.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“The second to the last paragraph must be one of the most powerful pieces of rhetoric ever penned. In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it." This is such a fine piece of writing we are almost willing to forgive Lincoln the war. It is quite a stretch, though, to call Fort Sumter an aggression great enough to make the South the aggressor, though it was certainly enough to give that appearance to a North trembling for its economic well-being. The foolish attack, though it killed no one and injured no one, was the convenient first shot the North needed. And that last line! It is almost wonderful enough to move us to ignore its obvious flaw. Lincoln’s assertion is so amateurish (as he certainly knows) that his only chance is to phrase the assertion in language of such beauty and sublimity that we ignore the middle school debating trick. But Lincoln has not sworn an oath to protect the government but rather to protect the Constitution. And the South never intended to destroy the government but simply to leave it. Lincoln could have perfectly fulfilled his oath of office without ever making war on the Confederacy.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“Lincoln said it and he meant it. Though he denied the South’s right to secede, he assured it there was no need. He will protect the southern system of slavery. If the South, then, was honest in its claim that it was seceding over slavery, there was clearly no need for secession with Lincoln as president. Lincoln is no dunce so we can assume he actually knows there is more to secession than slavery. There is the 35-year struggle over tariffs, the struggle that started this secession crisis back in 1832. But Lincoln is a Whig, a Clayian Whig, who needs that tariff more than anything else to support his vision for the future. Rather than trying to argue southern claims away, like he argued away the right to secession, he chose to accept the claims at face value. He would give the South slavery. He always had been and always would be willing to compromise on that. But he would not give them free trade. Here he would never compromise.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“In other words, the speech is a failure, at least for its time. Such a speech could not stop the war. If any speech could have, it would have been a speech with mass appeal, with simple straight-forward unencumbered declarations assuring the South that the North had no designs on it, none at all. That speech, though, was not possible. Lincoln did have designs. So, to preserve his designs, he was obliged to write a speech that would make his case for the future, impress historians and intellectuals to come, but do little for the present. The bulk of the speech is a case against himself, against his declaration in 1846 that, Any people anywhere have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form one that suits them better.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“War has always been the biggest stimulus to government-business collusion in America. War creates the collusion. Then the collusion creates a new kind of businessman happy with and dependent on the government.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“Buchanan may even have agreed with Lincoln that “the Union of these states is perpetual.” But, unlike Lincoln, he understood that that belief is not enough to justify war. He understood that even if one agreed that splitting a perpetual union is wrong, preserving it by force is a greater wrong. Lincoln knew as well as Buchanan that “the sword” is placed not in the hands of the President but of Congress. Which is why Lincoln had to take the sword for himself and make war inevitable before Congress was back in session. He could have negotiated if he truly wanted peace and of course he should have immediately called Congress to emergency session. But he precipitated the crisis at Fort Sumter, blockaded the Confederacy, and called up 75,000 militia to invade the seceded states, all while congressmen were still on their spring break.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“Yes, juries clearly have the power, but history shows they also have the right and duty, no matter what the legal profession claims. Jury Nullification has long been a critical last defense against authoritarianism. It has a history of blocking the arbitrary power of the state and turning society in the direction of freedom.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“Of course the constitutional challenge to slavery was made moot when slavery was ended through war. But the challenge was real and part of a complex of forces that likely would have brought slavery down without the need for war or the cycles of suspicion and hate engendered by war.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“Violence begets hate; hate begets violence, and both are passed down the generations into the unforeseeable future. In America, the violence of war to end slavery, for example, nurtured the hate and violence that infects American society down to this very day. It did not matter that ending slavery was not the reason for the violence until several years had passed and hundreds of thousands had already been killed. Reasons are trumped by passions when the ultimate violence of war takes hold of society.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“Leadership for peace may make less exciting reading than leadership for war but for those who truly love peace – and freedom – the story of Martin Van Buren’s presidency deserves a new telling. He was firm in his dedication to protecting the nation and the Constitution; he was equally firm in his belief that involving the nation in unnecessary war would destroy republican virtue and ideology.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“For fear of upsetting Hitler, Roosevelt refused to allow Jewish immigration into America. He turned back a ship called the St. Louis filled with Jewish refugees, guaranteeing death for many of them. Roosevelt also refused to allow 20,000 Jewish orphans into America even though they all had sponsoring families through Jewish, Catholic, and Quaker aid organizations. Virtually all eventually died in Nazi death camps. Roosevelt’s refusal, according to historian Thomas Fleming, was the act that convinced Hitler that the world would not care if he pursued his final solution. And yet all that is easily brushed aside when historians judge Roosevelt to be a great president. Much is forgiven activist, big government war presidents.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“Lincoln stuck doggedly to colonization until virtually the day he died, one of the last in government to give up on this forlorn idea. For Clay and Lincoln, slavery was abominable but a multi-racial society unthinkable. Blacks must be removed.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“With the help of a civil war fought in pursuit of his belief in a single and powerful centralized government, Lincoln was able to turn America a few more clicks of the compass away from the defense-oriented libertarianism of Jefferson to the warlike mercantilism of Hamilton.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“Central banking gives government a way to tap the productive power of the private sector and borrow from the future without the need to rely overmuch on unpopular tax increases. Government gives central banking the extreme profits that derive from immense borrowing to finance wars and other government projects.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture

“Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, political entrepreneurs would haunt the halls of governmental power, finding ways to enrich themselves at the expense of the common man. Market entrepreneurs, on the other hand, would bring the perks and comforts of kings to the common man but bear the brunt of condemnations slung through two centuries by intellectuals who simply could not accept their motives or personalities.”
― Mark David Ledbetter, America's Forgotten History, Part Two: Rupture