Read what Abe Lincoln said in 1864: it will run shivers up your spine

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign . . . until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war."

Will we ever learn from our history? All the great empires of the world were destroyed by excessive greed and wealth concentrated in the hands of the ruling class. And so it goes again. Wake up Sheeple!

And my father is still here to tell the story of it.

The Civil War isn't as far away in our national memory as you might think.

:)

fought in the Civil War. I'm 41 and my great grandfather fought in the war. He was born in 1842 and my grandmother was born in 1903. My mother was born in 1943 and I came along in 1964.

My grandfather's halfbrothers died at sea in WWII and I'm twenty-three so I'm sure.

his discharge papers born in 1840 dad born in 1897 I born in '48
edited to add: I was born on easter '48

Her grandfather was a private in the Confederate Army at the siege on Petersburg.

It was 140 years ago, which is two lifetimes back-to-back. It is not that uncommon for our elders to have had grandparents in the Civil War.

served with honor.

at Gettyburg in a MA regiment

...older brother was captured following Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, and was sent to Ft. Delaware as a POW. He died there of dysentery, and was buried across the River at what is now the Finn's Point National Cemetery in Salem. NJ. He was born in 1840, and my great-grandfather was born in 1843. My grandfather was born in 1873, my mother was born in 1925, and I was born in 1951.

<http://www.cem.va.gov/nchp/finnspoint.htm>

that the last surviving spouse of a Civil War vet died. She had married the man when he was in his 70's and she in her teens. She then lived a quite long life.

But, I'll add that I am personally acquainted with the great-grandson of a very famous Civil War general, and he is in his 50's. His mother, the granddaughter, is still doing very well and is quite a pistol. I have pictures if you'd like.

As an side, several children of Civil War veterans fought in WWII. Macarthur's father was a Civil War veteran, for instance, and some of those were who very young at the time of the war had fathers who were very old when they were born, meaning their descendants are only one or two generations removed from the Civil War.

I believe a handful are still getting a Civil War pension...

Someone should send this to the site that shall remain nameless and watch their "brains" explode. I also like the Lincoln quote below. Quite a progressive, that guy.

nt

This quote is often attributed to Lincoln, but it is not known for certain that he in fact said it. Because of our image of him, many consider it the kind of thing he would say, but it would be best not to forget that Lincoln was a self-declared Whig in the spirit of Clay's American System, the very economic system that sought to empower the corporations in the first place.

East India Trading Company, Hudson Bay Trading Comapny...

I ran it on my website for a while until someone pointed it out to me.

He never said this.

Harvard's David Donald, a biographer of Lincoln, found no evidence of its truthfullness.

Sorry it's a great line

http://www.ratical.org/corporations/Lincoln.html

"We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end.
It has cost a vast amount of treasure and blood. . . .
It has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic; but
I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes
me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war,
corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places
will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong
its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth
is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety
of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.
God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."


The passage appears in a letter from Lincoln to (Col.) William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864.
For a reliable pedigree, cite p. 40 of The Lincoln Encyclopedia, by Archer H. Shaw (Macmillan, 1950, NY). That traces the quote's lineage to p. 954 of Abraham Lincoln: A New Portrait, (Vol. 2) by Emanuel Hertz (Horace Liveright Inc, 1931, NY).

No one has ever reproduced an original copy. It was not included in any of the original collections of letters between Lincoln and various correspondents. A quote from this supposed letter showed up in 1931, although, as mentioned, the letter itself has never been reproduced for anyone else to see. The quote had appeared before in newspapers and various literature pushing a political agenda. In response, Robert Lincoln himself said the quote did not come from any letter his father had ever written that he had seen and that it did not express the thoughts his father had expressed to him about anything.

Lincoln became an image after his death, and that image was used by various factions to further their agendas.

Lincoln was also known to be quite ticked off at all the corporations that were gouging the Union government for millions in shoddy uniforms, spoiled rations, defective ammunition, and a host of other near-worthless commodities and equipment. Therefore, I feel that it is quite possible that Lincoln actually did write the letter, and that it was lost over the ages through fire, theft or neglect. I think the next step should be to try to find the source for the 1931 reference, rather than relying on a self-proclaimed debunking site (which might have its own agenda).

Lincoln was irritated at the lack of *innovation* and general resistance to that innovation in developing new equipment, adequate clothing, etc. due to the lack of an immediate profit motive. He was not opposed to profit for the sake of profit. He was opposed to undeserved profit, by which he meant profit acquired by a company that was not providing the buyer with adequate product. Put another way, he was opposed to incompetence and profiteering in its traditional sense, i.e. gouging people for a price not commensurate with the quality of the merchandise.

This is not in any sense a comment on corporations, which were in their infancy at the time as we commonly understand them. Lincoln, as mentioned, was a Clay Whig. He as strongly in favor of corporate control of the economy and never expressed a single view in writing or in known speech that contradicted this earlier expressed philosophy.

As for trying to find the origin of the 1931 quote, that has been done. I am acquainted personally with a noted Lincoln scholar who spent the better part of 30 years authenticating various Lincoln comments, and this was one for which he was never, on any level, able to find authentication beyond its original appearance in pro-labor, anti-corporate publications. We may agree with the agenda of those who seemingly fabricated the quote -- and I do -- but we should not accept such tactics merely because of that agreement. The burden of proof lies with those who claim the quote is genuine. One cannot prove a negative, and without genuine evidence the comment was expressed by Lincoln, the only logical conclusion is that he did not make it.

He was strongly opposed to war profiteering-- so much so that he fully endorsed the passage of the Federal Civil False Claims Act of 1863, otherwise known as "Lincoln's Law", which gave individuals the right to sue those (i.e., profiteering companies) who defrauded the Government and receive 50 percent of any recovery from the defendant. That hardly sounds like someone who was merely trying to encourage companies to innovate.

False claims was all about the lack of innovation or more practically, the lack of honest advertising.

Lincoln was a honest businessman in the sense he believed in providing the consumer with promised goods and promised quality of those goods. What was taking place during the Civil War that prompted anti-profiteering laws was that companies were providing the army with sub-standard equipment and support at a price and with a contract that suggested a guarantee of such quality that was not delivered. This quite rightly pissed Lincoln off. He had grown an attachment to the military, in part through his connections to people who like Elmer Ellsworth, that had not existed before, and he did not want the soldiers themselves suffering or exploited. But this did not translate to anti-corporate positions. It merely generated a political position that sought to force corporations to act in a certain way with regard to the *products* they produced.

It's only an introduction to the subject, but when you have the time, I'd suggest reading George Frederickson's _The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union_. It's a varied narrative on the concept of Union among different factions of Unionists, and among these factions was a strongly conservative, pro-capitalist, pro-proto-corporatist faction who decried the then current state of business and how they operated. But the end-result of what those included in this group advanced was the corporate world we see today. George Templeton Strong, for example, a noted diarist whose selected eloquent words were used to good effect in Ken Burns's PBS series on the Civil War, was fiercely conservative and saw the Civil War as an opportunity for corporations to advance themselves and take ultimate control of the government. One could quite reasonably argue they were proto-fascists. One may also see quite clearly how Lincoln's policies were directed toward these ends. He may be forgiven, in part, because he did not seem to understand the ultimate expression of corporate control, but he was an ally of it while he lived.

:)

I admire Lincoln to a great degree, but I am also aware of his less publicized yet highly infulencial opinions and policy positions. The modern Republican Party does in fact have a pedigree that extends back to Lincoln and even before to the Whigs under Clay. But that's not a good thing for them to promote when focusing on swaying public opinion, so they try to focus on the civil rights positions of Lincoln or more precisely the radical Republicans who often opposed Lincoln on these issues.

And no doubt he likely had a different view of things before he became President. But I believe he became truly peeved at his era's version of corporations, just as Eisenhower became disillusioned with the military-industrial complex at the end of his career. I also believe that this may have been one reason why the more corporo-radical elements in Lincoln's party decided to do away with him, once his role (defeating the South) had been fulfilled.

And I don't claim to know the answers nor Lincoln's mind. I claim only to know what he expressed and appeared to believe based on his writings and speeches that we know are genuine.

The problem, literally, is that Lincoln died. He was first and foremost a practical politician, a genius in the "art" of politics, and he was also a benevolent ruler. He truly wanted peace and was ultimately willing to sacrifice personal ideals for the sake of peace among all Americans. He did not, in other words, believe his opinion was an ultimate truth, rather that he had been presented with the burden of enforcing the popular will, even when that will did not agree with his own. Because of these inconsistencies in expressed opinion and action, however, we're not able to understand truly what kind of President he would have been had he lived outside the context of a civil war. He wanted the Union to survive, and he understood beyond the capabilities of many intellectuals of the day what it meant for that Union to fail. But what the means is that he was not always open about his opinions with regard to the future. For instance, he accepted -- created actually -- a process by which states could be readmitted to the Union that was in no way truly democratic, but it served his political ends, and it was positive in the effort to advance the ideal of Union. He strongly pushed the idea of eradicating slavery after having previously refused to claim authority to do so. In the context of war, he was an enigma.

Outside that war, some believe he would have reverted to his Whig roots, which is obviously what I believe. Others believe he had advanced to different sorts of opinions that led him in different philosophical directions. Both the fascists and the communists of early 20th century America claimed him as allies. We simply do not know with which faction he would have fallen had the war not helped dictate his positions. That's unfortunate because I do believe he was a great American that, unlike many politicians of the modern era, could learn from mistakes, and perhaps he might have been a strong force against the corporatist state. But, we don't know, and based on what we know he said and wrote, we can't uniformly come to that conclusion.

Jeez, read the friggin' posts.

Now it's on the greatest page.

We just need to make sure the content of the thread is directed to evaluating the validity of this "quote."

“These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people."
--Abraham Lincoln

... and more unfortunately, there's not been a significant attempt to clear up things; rather, many of those disputing the quote have depended upon a letter from Lincoln's son, Robert Todd Lincoln, as authoritative. The original Lincoln letter has been variously described as written to a Tom Elkins and a William Elkins and as an address to Congress, and Lincoln's son said in a letter to someone inquiring that he could not recall an Elkins among his father's friends, though he admitted at the time that those of his father's papers in his possession were not available for him to check.

http://www.alincolnassoc.com/Newsletters/1-1.pdf

Curiously, though, the first draft of the letter by his son was defensive of corporations. One might expect him to be--he was a corporate lawyer by profession.

But, thus far, neither an original or an emanuensis copy has been found. More's the pity, because corporations were busy stealing the Republic blind through war production, and some of the worst examples of the Robber Barons got their foothold in the corporate world selling arms and supplies to the Union Army.

I disagree with the characterization of no "significant attempt to clear up things." With matters related to historical scholarship, clearing things up involves finding the original source, and since the early 20th century, when this quote first appeared, many people have attempted to find the original. No one has. Thus, one does not authenticate a comment from a historical personality unless siginificant evidence exists that this person wrote/said it, and in fact no primary evidence does exist in this matter. Viewed another way, this is a variation of "innocent until proven guilty." Just because someone said Lincoln said this or that does not prove that he did so, particularly when the assertion that he did comes over half a century after his death.

Those who first publicized the quote had a vested interest in associating Lincoln with their cause, and it was common at the time to align Civil War personalities with contemporary political and social issues. Depending on what one was trying to advance, that person would invent or mutate a quote from Lee, Lincoln, Grant, etc. because those names had become the stuff of legends and were considered authorative on all matters. A enormous number of bogus quotes from this time period exist, and this, as far as we know positively, is among them.

... then-authoritative texts as early as 1931 (it was the editor of a later 1950 collection of writings, Caroline Harnsberger, who said that Emanuel Hertz had been been taken in by a forgery and so did not include the letter in her collection) there's a chain of history--which, as I say, unfortunately stops with Robert Todd Lincoln--it's reasonable to assume that a definitive determination would include finding any truth to original claim--there was a William Elkins who was known to Lincoln, and to whom Lincoln might have written without aid of official secretaries. To my limited knowledge, no one's tried to determine that, and have left the matter with Robert Todd Lincoln's letters. I don't find Robert Lincoln's assertion that he had traced the quote back to an Iowa seance persuasive--that seemed more snarky than truthful.

Yes, it's easy to manufacture a quote and put it into circulation--that's always a given--hell, look at the internet. :) But, the Civil War, from Lincoln's perspective, is still of interest. I'd like to see historians do the detective work to determine if the William F. Elkins who was politically associated with Lincoln in Illinois is the Elkins persistently mentioned as the recipient of this letter (even if spuriously). Robert Todd Lincoln recalled no friend of his father by that name, but Elkins' association with his father was around and before his date of birth.

Of course, if that work's been done, and ancestors of Elkins have commented, I'd be interested in that. I just don't know if they have.

Cheers.

And pretty much everyone knows it. What's not known is whether his father would be considered an ass for the same reasons had he survived the Civil War. My larger point here, mentioned earlier in the thread, is that anti-corporatism was not among "Lincoln's virtues." A good portion of the modern concept of corporatism can in fact be traced to the Lincoln/Clay faction of the Republican Party. Lincoln was not a radical in that sense. He was very much motivated by profit and the emerging corporate control of the economy.

As for the work being done, one must ask to what extent the work needs to be done to have it considered authorative. How hard should the historical community work to prove a negative? In historical scholarship, everyone knows or should know that the possibility of error exists, meaning no "final" answer is ever final. We may in fact one day turn up a document in Thomas Jefferson's own hand that shows he wrote the Declaration of Independence as a big joke. I could claim that, in fact, but I would have no standing for that claim until I provided evidence of it. Such is the case with the supposed Elkin's letter, the difference being more circumstantial evidence exists that such a letter could have been written due to the reasons you state. They did know each other and did exchange correspondence on political matters. The problem is that *this* letter has never been produced whereas many others between the two have, none of which even hint at the substance of the conversation that supposedly took place with this letter. David Donald, for example, did exhaustive research into various Lincoln quotes. Of this one, he found absolutely no evidence that pointed to it being genuine. It is one of those quotes that appeared suddenly years after the supposed speaker/writer died, amid a political atmosphere in which such a quote from that particular individual could carry a lot of weight. One should then question it from the beginning, and if no evidence is found that it is genuine, which again no one has, then it should not be advanced as such.

I got slammed on another site for this 2 years ago,
I did research it and the evidence that he said it
is not there or debatable
almost like the sharud of Turin (which I find interesting and haven't come to a conclusion)
but the evidence points to that Lincoln didn't say it.


Though it would have been nice if he said it and was a socialist
Lincoln was well read and would have paid attention to
the revolutions that were happening in Europe in 1848
but I have never read anything on how he addressed these revolutions that
changed the face of Europe from addressing one system vs. another.
He had to address Slavery which Europe had outlaw way before us.

... mixed, in that Lincoln is quoted variously, elsewhere, as saying that he approved of "capital" as he called it, as long as it was not so prominent as to overwhelm the work and rights of individuals and small business owners. Might he have, toward the end of the war, begun to reappraise his notions about capital from its effects on the war? Maybe, maybe not.

But, I still remain curious about how someone known to Lincoln came to be associated with that letter. That's an historical anomaly, too, even if it might have a simple explanation.

Maybe we're not ever going to know that. The record is replete with revisionist history of all stripes. :)

Cheers.

Seriously the gop has deevolved into a quasi religous money pumping chicken hawk trash bag feeding entity it bears no resemblence to the "Party of Lincoln."