TrueTomHarley

Ha! Look what I have found in Grant, by Ron Chernow [large print edition]:

Chapter 40 begins with: “Upon quitting the fish residence in late March, Ulysses and Julie Grant conducted a sentimental tour of familiar haunts . . . “

It was the Fish residence, not the fish residence. What! Does the editor think they lived in an aquarium? Fish was his Secretary of State. The two came to be close friends. 

I can’t tell you how happy I am to see this. Do you have any idea how devilishly hard it is to chase all blips and typos away in a manuscript, especially if it was your own writing and you read, not what is there, but what you think is there? I still have a few typos in ‘Go Where Tom Goes.’ Probably the blips I have would completely escape the notice of anyone but an obsessive, OCD, picayune, nitpicking person, but even so, there are some. Nothing as egregious at this, however! The ‘fish residence,’ indeed! And this is from a commercial outfit that is not a one-man show, as I am. Oh yeah, I am vindicated. 

I am all but done with Grant—not completely, but almost—and have expanded into some of Douglass’s writing. The feeling floated in the first post of this thread intensifies. Lincoln freed the slaves. Grant strived to complete the job. He was relentless in defending southern Blacks. He broke the back of the original Ku Klux Klan. He came to be known as a champion of human rights in general. The feeling grows that he would have completed the job were it not for Andrew Jackson sandwiched in between he and Lincoln. 

This is speculative, hardly a sure thing. The racism Grant faced in the South was fanatical, sustained, and virulent. No end of incidents occurred in which Blacks were attacked and murdered by white mobs, not clandestinely, but out in the open and with boasting. 

Ten years into Reconstruction, the zeal of Northern reformers was waning. People will devote themselves to a cause for only so long until they get discouraged by reversals and go elsewhere. Time and again Grant would send federal troops South to enforce peace. The moment he withdrew them, anti-Black violence would erupt as before. The Black vote drove white Southerners apoplectic. Though a constitutional amendment guaranteed Blacks the vote, reigns of terror became the order of the day so that few of the former slaves dared exercise it. There are elections on record in which the Black vote numbered less that 10.

Meanwhile, Grant was increasingly undercut by his Northern base. The freed-slave sentiment had not been overwhelmingly strong to begin with—to some it was, but not enough—so that in the face of Southern intransigence, the sentiment in the North became ‘time to move on.’ With his support eroding, once in a while—not routinely, but once in a while—Grant took his eye off the ball. Whenever he did so, violence unresisted took heart and escalated.

So maybe the fact that history sandwiched Johnson in between Lincoln and Grant doesn’t matter. Maybe racial hatred would have prevailed for 100+ years in any event. On the other hand, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the racist Johnson sandwiched in between represents the time you ceased taking your antibiotics after you started feeling a little better instead of finishing the bottle like you were supposed to, and the sickness came roaring back, stronger than before. Had you finished the bottle straight off like the doc said, the plague might have vanished for good.

Moise grumbled about this thread, ‘What does this have to do with the Bible?’ when it was initially posted in the open JW club. Maybe he has a point. At any rate, now it is in neutral Topics, where I meant to put it in the first place, so who cares if it’s not stuffed with Bible references? On the other hand, maybe he doesn’t have a point. Some publication of ours that I no longer recall has described the Bible as a record of human history covering times when A) people paid attention to God’s will, B) people did not pay attention to God’s will, and C) people were oblivious or ignorant of God’s will.

With Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant we have history in the C category. Specifically, it was history before the wheat began to be separated from the weeds. It was history before ‘the true knowledge became abundant,’ per Daniel 12. People did the best they could. Lincoln and Douglass both cited scripture frequently. What! You expect everyone to patiently sit on their hands and say, ‘Maybe someday we’ll know exactly what to do but since we don’t now we’ll do nothing?’

Then, too, someday I want to return to the sentiments of the Gettysburg Address—that ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from this earth.’ Why was that such a big deal, so that it would be the cause that would push the North into fighting mode against secession but the abolition of slavery would not? 

Lincoln’s two-minute speech was not the highlight of that day. He had been invited almost as an afterthought, with no surety that he would even come; presidents didn’t travel much back then. ‘Maybe he’ll just tell jokes,’ was the attitude another of the GC professors attributed to him. The Grant book has some cabinet participant—I think it was Chase—grumbling that all Lincoln did was tell jokes during cabinet meetings. Of course, Chase was not one to joke himself; he wore his piety on his sleeve. Even from within Lincoln’s first-term cabinet, he promoted himself as the next president, which made other cabinet members livid. However, Lincoln said he still got the better use of him. Besides, he knew what it was to be smitten by the presidential bug. Besides again, he thought it well to apply the adage, ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’

The main event was a two hour speech from a Harvard orator by the name of Everett. Two hours was standard fare for a speech back then; 3 or 4 hours was not unheard of. Lincoln’s speech was two minutes. He had worked hard on it;  it wasn’t jotted down hastily on the back of an envelope as folklore has it. He dismissed it himself as a pretty meager effort upon taking his seat. Many newspapers accustomed to tonnage savaged it. But Everett himself said, ‘You said more in two minutes than I did in two hours.’ So what is this ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’ that carries the day? Why does it do that?

It’s because it is a breakthrough advancement in human rule, the issue that is on front and center burner from the days of Genesis 3. With the founding of the U.S representative democracy, here was something significantly new, a major advancement in the evolution of self-rule. It was the ‘human experiment’ that must be nurtured and encouraged to thrive at all costs. Slavery, on the other hand, was NOT at first considered a violation of ‘natural law’ (this, according to another GC professor) Steeped in evolution, the framers of natural law initially considered slavery an advancement. Historically, nations had killed those vanquished in war. Making them slaves instead was an improvement!

Up till that time, human government had consisted of straight-up monarchy. Some variation in the quality/durability/benevolence or malevolence of that monarchy, but one-person-rule it had always been. Supposedly, Jefferson succeeding Adams was the first peaceful transfer of power in history between opposing political factions; up till then it has always been ‘King of the Mountain,’ with one king prevailing only by pushing the previous king off. The ‘human experiment’ of government of, by, and for the people finds roots in Greece and Rome, before resurfacing in England, then blossoms full with the U.S. That’s the long tradition that Lincoln could draw on, as he could not with a straight-up abolitionist stance.

The early adherents to the Enlightenment were ecstatic at the American innovation. With it, ‘the people’ had revolted, thrown off their ‘shackles,’ and discarded ‘tyranny’ for something presumed better—democratic rule. Proponents of the Enlightenment cheered this development. They kept an embarrassed, even horrified silence, at the other product of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, which descended into mayhem and murder. Historian Guelzo makes a big deal over this fork in the road in his lecture series on the History of Freedom. You can envision him waving the flag, but it still seems the idea has merit. After the dust had settled in France came Bonaparte, then the cradle of the first Communists, and in the modern day [it is just me who says this, not Guelzo] FECRIS and MULVIDES. The country is the birthplace of the current craze to stamp out as ‘cults’ those thinking outside of the box; it can be nothing but mainstream human thinking for them. Human rulership without God is the innovation to be nurtured. Throw God into the mix and you are a cult. If He knows His place maybe you are not, but if He doesn’t, you are.

Guelzo considered the American Revolution the triumph of emerging humanism, and the French Revolution the embarrassing defeat. However, one might note that the American Revolution did not get the job done. It would be some time before it became ‘self-evident’ that ‘all’ men were created equal. The War that would press toward that goal, and succeed, before being largely reversed, would spill more blood than 100 French Revolutions. And the virulent racism that came to typify the Southern US had no parallel in France. In his seventies, Frederick Douglass toured Europe. He reports no instance of prejudice at all. Nor did anyone look askance on account of his second wife, a white woman.

Civil War/Reconstruction Era consideration therefore makes a great platform for proclaiming how we need God’s Kingdom. If two of the most noble humans who have lived, with worldwide reputations to that effect,  both enjoying positions of foremost power, could have their best efforts so easily unraveled, what says that about human rule? At the very least, War/Reconstruction is the death-knell to those who insist God works through human rule, for He couldn’t possibly muck up the job more that was done in those handful of years. A decade after the Civil War’s conclusion, Grant would express misgivings that it had been fought in vain. Conditions had reverted to before. Slavery was gone, but the feudal system of sharecropping imposed by regional laws, to be reinforced Jim Crow policy, that would replace it was little better and in some ways worse. 

You don’t have to regard Lincoln and Grant as noble, though most of the world does. In these days of revisionist history, there are those who label them butchers, for they both presided over the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. Both were frequently called butchers, especially Grant. It’s the best human rule can do. It did preserve the ‘human experiment.’ It did free the slaves—though just barely, and with myriad caveats.

When I was in college, before my Witness days, I took an elective course on public speaking. The professor ragged continually on the virtues of voting. Student elections were coming up. He would not let up on his insistence all must vote, and I got fed up. Though I was by no means a rebel, when it was my turn to make a speech, I chose to highlight all the reasons you might not want to vote—not just for the student election, but for any election. 1) the candidate might be lying. 2) He (or she) might be sincere but prove powerless once in office. 3) He/she might change his mind, making one’s vote pointless. I did not then add, 4) how many of them go down to corruption. (The professor was sporting about it, acknowledging valid points had been made, even though he disagreed with the thrust, and he gave me an adequate grade—not like one of those ideologue professors of today that you have to agree with or they flunk you.)

It only takes one torpedo of the four to sink the ship. Neither Lincoln nor Grant has serious problem with 1 or 3, but they both got stymied by 2. Lincoln did pretty well by 4, but Grant well-neigh lost his entire reputation to it. His administration was known for its corruption, even as he himself was always thought honest. He wasn’t the greatest judge of character. He would express shock when presented incontrovertible proof that ‘friends’ had betrayed him—a frequent occurrence. Other times he would stand by ones who anyone else would have abandoned because he had not yet been presented incontrovertible proof. One one occasion, his incontrovertible proof was an empty bankbook. He had been sweet-talked into a scheme that proved fraudulent.

When faced with certain ruin at the end of his life due to crooks leading him astray, he at last steeled himself to dictate his memoirs. Some of these strutting generals started in on the memoirs almost the moment the Civil War ended. Grant had steadfastly refused. When on his post-presidency world tour, dignitaries would ask him to review their troops. Grant would reply that he had seen enough troops to last a lifetime; he didn’t want to see any more.

At the time, he was all but on his deathbed. He would die just days after completing them. It wasn’t for himself that he did it, nor for ‘posterity,’ but for his wife, so that she would not be left destitute. 

Mark Twain was a frequent guest and witnessed him at work. Twain was amazed that for hours on end, up to the entire day, Grant could dictate his notes just once and they would be near-perfect prose, with no need of revision. He would neither eat during this time, nor drink beyond the bare minimum, because his rapidly deteriorating health was aggravated by both, and he wanted to finish.

Both Lincoln and Grant were honest men who, when in office, did not line their pockets. The idea of a president having to sweat his financial future plays absurd today, but it was not so then. The problem was best alleviated by dipping one’s hand in the till, as is routine today—people emerge from government service with far more than their salaries would suggest. 

In contrast, Mary Todd Lincoln (who spent heavily) complained that her president husband was “too honest to make a penny outside of his salary.” And Grant immediately felt the financial sting upon leaving office—though not enough to forestall a round-the-world tour so long as the money held out; he was not overly given to fretting about the future. Imagine! Grant’s memoirs of the Civil War would not exist had he not faced financial ruin at the end of his life.

All these ideas I hope to expand on some day.

The reason my libertarian relative can be forgiven for thinking Lincoln cared only about preserving the union and not freeing slaves was that the man said just that. You can’t fault a person for taking another at his word, can you? True, Lincoln was just being cagey as he built a consensus, without which he knew his emancipation project would go up in smoke, but how is the casual onlooker to know that?

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln wrote in response to a New York Tribune editorial. “if I could save the union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

The New York Tribune had no way of knowing that Lincoln had already committed himself to a course that would eclipse anything they might have dreamed of, but it was too soon to tip his hand. Too many people cared only about preservation and not a whit about freeing slaves. They would not buy into a program focused on the latter. Toward the end of his life, Horace Greeley, the Tribune editor who penned the letter prompting Lincoln’s reply, would tire and retreat from his own abolition/reconstruction crusade, but Lincoln never did, nor did Grant, his successor after Johnson.

The best way to measure a man’s racism or lack thereof back then was to gauge Frederick Douglass’s reaction to them. Douglass, the escaped slave who had taught himself to read and write, then went on to take his place among the best writers of any age, was a frequent critic of Lincoln in his early (and later) presidency. Then they met. 

Douglass dropped by the White House, unannounced, at the suggestion of allies, and presented his card. He had expected to wait hours. Instead, he was ushered in within minutes “I was never more quickly or more completely put at ease in the presence of a great man than in that of Abraham Lincoln,” he later said. 

From Doris Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: “The president was seated in a chair when Douglas entered the room, surrounded by a multitude of books and papers, his feet and legs were extended in front of his chair. ‘At my approach he slowly drew his feet in from the different parts of the room into which they had strayed and he began to rise.’ As Lincoln extended his hand in greeting Douglas hesitantly began to introduce himself. ‘I know who you are Mr Douglass,’ Lincoln said. Mr Seward [Secretary of State and 60-mile-away neighbor] has told me all about you. Sit down, I am glad to see you.’ Lincoln’s warmth put Douglas instantly at ease. Douglass later maintained that he had never seen a more transparent countenance.”

"Here comes my friend Douglas!" Lincoln later loudly proclaimed at his second inaugural ball to which Douglass almost didn’t gain admittance, due to a long-standing policy of barring Blacks. “I am glad to see you.” He pressed him for his reaction to his talk (previous post). Douglass demurred, embarrassed to be monopolizing the president when there were hundreds pressing to see him. “You must stop a little, Douglass,” Lincoln said. “There is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what you think of it?” Douglass said at last the it was a “sacred effort” and Lincoln beamed.

Frederick Douglass would later recall that “of all the men he had met, Lincoln was the first great man that I talked with in the United states freely who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.” It is a statement, Goodwin observes, that is all the more remarkable when one reflects that Douglass had interacted with dozens of while abolitionists.

It was the same with the 18th president as it was with the 16th. Douglass had frequent access to Grant. But not with the 17th president. Douglass, heading a Black delegation, met Johnson only once. “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap!” Johnson gloated afterwards. “I know that damned Douglass; he's just like any n****r, and he would sooner cut a white man's throat than not.” God works through human governments? In two sentences, all that Lincoln had accomplished was undone. 

Thus, William Seward’s retort to Stephen Douglas, who was then angling for the job, proved wrong: “No man will ever be President of the United States who spells 'negro' with two g’s.” Then, again, it’s not as though Johnson was elected president. They had to kill a better man to get him in. An impeachment, which failed by a single vote to convict, almost got him out.

Yeah, he works like that here, too, shifting commenters around, not cars.

23 minutes ago, xero said:

In fact both seemed cheerful the weeks previous.

Often this happens when the person has reached a resolution to follow through, given their first opportunity. Their paralyzing dilemma resolved, they can give the appearance that all is completely well.

5 hours ago, Moise Racette said:

If the pair was working together to harm Witnesses at the Kingdom hall, like Bonnie and Clyde, they would have died like Bonnie and Clyde, not murder-suicide.

It’s when we read that the congregation all suddenly ducked down in the toll booth that I’ll know someone’s been holding out on me.

5 hours ago, Anna said:

What was he trying to say is what I would like to know.

When a guy shoots his wife to death, I’m beyond wondering what he was trying to say. Had it been only himself, maybe.

But even then, not especially so. Suicides are endemic today. Some spill over into the congregation, many members of whom were like the fellow Jesus refered to, ‘those who know they are sick and need a physician.’ He means spiritually sick, of course, but there is an overlap between mental illness and spiritual sickness.

Do I have to know the details of a suicide? No more than I have to know the details of someone smitten with cancer. Will I hear either out if they come my way? Yes. Do I feel I must seek them out? No.

These days in the overall world it’s common to hear that people ‘died of depression.’ Always it is a tragedy, but there is no particular ‘shame’ in it anymore, nor is there usually a hunt to find ‘guilty’ parties, even when such parties exist. 

Do I feel deprived when it doesn’t make the website? Are you kidding me? Even the miscreants @Amidstherosesmentions are only there because they directly impact the line leading to the Messiah or the apostolic spread of the good news. If every troubled soul and experience was specifically written of in the Bible, the book would be heavy as the Titanic.

45 minutes ago, Amidstheroses said:

 

Apparently the ‘message‘ was not for you, Tom, because you don’t seem to have a clue! LOL

If it makes you feel any better, I’ll concede that this statement was probably window dressing:  

4 hours ago, Amidstheroses said:

it was announced that the murder was carried out by people who were not Jehovah’s Witnesses and it was coincidence that it occurred on Kingdom Hall property.

maybe not pure coincidence. I’ll leave it to someone better qualified at math—maybe an engineer who got all the toilets to flush in his city—to calculate the precise odds.

2 hours ago, Amidstheroses said:

I posit that it would be more constructive for the members of the two congregations that use that Kingdom Hall to ask themselves:

• Do I need to be supplicating Jehovah for mercy in any neglected shepherding or lack of love shown to these desperate souls?

So what you’re saying is that the guy getting pummeled is the one at fault?

2 hours ago, Amidstheroses said:

The perpetrator was sending a message to Somebody (singular or plural) who attends THIS Kingdom Hall.

Or wants to. And he sent that person his message right between the eyes. If his primary beef was with some other oaf of.a neglectful shepherd, I would think that is the person who would have been plugged.

2 hours ago, Amidstheroses said:

Why else was this Kingdom Hall chosen to be set on fire?

Very likely because the wife was ‘returning to Jehovah’ and the hothead murderer was not going to stand for it. What better place to carry out his rage than at the house of Jehovah?

Of course, there could be more to the story, but I’d hate to assume it. Trouble in the guys life? I think a good default position to take is that of Proverbs 19:3

“It is a man’s own foolishness that distorts his way, And his heart becomes enraged against Jehovah.”

Crazies and murderers are a dime a dozen today. Though we are inching that way, thus far we have not reached the new normal of finding out who the fellow was angry with and punishing that one for setting him off.

It’s like the guy in Australia (cue @Thinking) who planted a bomb in a Kingdom Hall that killed the speaker and injured several others. They caught him decades later in connection with some other offense. He turned out to be a lifelong loser and hothead who terrorized everyone in his wake on any number of pretexts and had for his entire life. His wife at the time had been attending the Kingdom Hall—thus the brothers became that year’s target.

Any way you look at it the murdered one is a ‘former member.’

It will be $6.16 first however and @JW Insiderwill be celebrating and blowing off the prophesy cannons in when that happens.

13 hours ago, JW Insider said:

belong to a couple of small mostly JW Biblical discussion forums where you have to be invited

Where are these small JW discussion forums? I’ve never been invited to one. Not that I would accept, most likely. I have my hands full now—but still. I do get FB group invitations all the time but when I look them over few strike me as unique.

13 hours ago, JW Insider said:

If only a couple of posts deserved warnings and suspensions, that's no reason to destroy a history of work by that person.

Yeah, I guess that’s true. When the old hen took down the entire TrueTom vs the Apostates thread I was much put out, having taken for granted I could always go back there, as though it was a filing system.

13 hours ago, JW Insider said:

The only kinds of accounts I would like to see banned are those that come on here like "bots" just to sell a product,

Uh oh.

13 hours ago, JW Insider said:

Although I would hate to be the one involved in meting out warnings and suspensions, I think that the worse that should happen is a temporary suspension for those who have OBVIOUSLY broken the rules. Perhaps the suspensions should get a bit longer if a person breaks the rules more often. But the problem is about being fair,

Just look how it has turned out for Elon Musk

Why do I think with such admiration of JWI keeping up with old-time fellows Bethelites, some of whom have fallen into instability? It’s a personality trait that extends into other areas.

On 11/24/2017 at 12:02 AM, JW Insider said:

Around 2005, a fragment from Papyrus 115, taken from the Oxyrhynchus site, was discovered at the Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum. It gave the beast's number as 616 ????. This fragment is the oldest manuscript . . . of Revelation 13 found as of 2017.^[2][3]Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, known before the P115 finding but dating to after it, has 616 written in full: ????????? ???? ??, hexakosioi deka hex (lit. "six hundred and sixteen").^[17]

It is arcane reasoning like this that led the Jurassic Park scientists to attempt recreation of certain other wild beasts, with disastrous results, particularly in the sequels. 

1 hour ago, Pudgy said:

AND, while we wait for the New System, instead of paying some Sky Pilot good money for fake news, use that same money to buy pork chops, rub them on your clothes, lay flat on the floor, and have someone pour onto you a box full of puppies.

Why am I reminded of a certain local sister’s remark years ago about witnessing to her own former people, the Pentecostals? ‘When they’ve got their music on, you can’t touch em.’

In the background as I write this, family members play ‘Jehovah Give Me Courage’—it’s not only music, but video. 

7 hours ago, JW Insider said:

he interpreted dozens of political events, especially in Turkey and Europe, to be fulfillments of nearly every trumpet … he could find in Daniel, Revelation and Ezekiel. All of them are to be rejected because none of his expectations about any of them turned out to be true.

Flat notes they were.

7 hours ago, JW Insider said:

9 hours ago, Moise Racette said:

Therefore, to those historians, the 1915-1917 is still in play, unless anyone uses 49. Then the game changes.

What game?

For me, it is the 49 round boxing match of my great uncle, Joe Jennette against Sam McVey in Paris, both of whom used to routinely fight Jack Johnson, until the latter captured with World Heavyweight title and thereafter himself refused to face Black challengers.

As the 50th round began, Sam refused to budge from his corner, moaning, “This man ain’t human!”

The date was 1909, so it more or less matches prophesy, particularly if one isn’t fussy.

13 hours ago, Pudgy said:

42

Are you crazy?!

Posting your social security number is an invitation to identity theft!

***

I demand credit for this thread! Don’t give it to Moise. How unjust!

TrueTom writes about John Brown. JWI responds with John A Brown, the chronology writer.

What’s next?

TrueTom: Robert E Lee commanded the . . .

Anna: ‘There used to be a Bob Lee as I was learning the truth. What a character he was!’

TrueTom: Jefferson Davis presided over the . . . 

Pudgy: ‘Dave Jefferson, the Presiding Overseer of the Backwoods congregation, was a . . . 

TrueTom: Frederick Douglass spoke powerfully for . . . 

Amidstheheroes: ‘Fred Douglas, our table head, back when I . . . ‘

TrueTom: Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, was the one who . . 

JWI: ‘Brother Stewart Williams, a plumber by trade, was stuck with the task of cleaning out the sewars on one particularly . . .

“I will not run! If elected, I will not serve! I am not going to participate here at least to the end of the year. NOT! NOT! NOT! Get behind me Satan! You cannot tempt me for all the guns in Harpers Ferry!”

3 hours ago, JW Insider said:

If anyone wishes to discuss his books, I can join. I've read two of them, and that discussion will be moved to a JW-related forum.

I’ve no doubt that when I mention Frederick Douglass there will be a Frederick A Douglas who served in the Antarctic Branch.

4 hours ago, Moise Racette said:

Even in movies made about John Brown do they utter the name of God.

Even the crazed judge who wanted revenge on Lukas McCain (till he had a change of heart) declared he was but a servant of Jehovah. I have never seen a ‘Rifleman’ episode that said God’s name but I saw one this evening.

15 hours ago, Moise Racette said:

He … used his misunderstanding of scripture to justify his murderous rampage.

If you catch the drift of Matthew 13:24-30, there was no clear understanding of scripture to speak of till the separation of the wheat from the weeds. Brown was no ‘Patiently Sitting on my Hands.’ There was murder, though, and Lincoln approved of his death sentence. Henry David Thoreau however, called him after his death, ‘an angel of light.’

15 hours ago, Moise Racette said:

There is nothing good that can be said about the abolitionist John Brown. He profaned the name of God and used his misunderstanding of scripture to justify his murderous rampage.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63389806-john-brown

You’ll be happy to know you sold a book for this author—the prominent display of the Name on the cover is what did it. That, plus it is billed as a pictorial history. I found a print copy online for $7. I can afford seven dollars.

I already have plenty of print. Neither in that print nor our visit to Harpers Ferry, WV have I seen any use of ‘Jehovah’ (There is a Harpers Ferry chapter in ‘Go Where Tom Goes.’) It makes me wonder whether he himself identified with the name or whether it was assigned him by others.

In both ‘Team of Rivals’ (a Lincoln biography) and ‘Grant’ (guess who) there is but a single instance of ‘Jehovah’—that of an elderly black man ecstatic at liberation from slavery and shouting praise to God on that account.

On the day of his hanging, John Brown handed a note to a guard written the day before: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” 750,000-person’s worth of blood was spilled in that Civil War.” It was blood spilled in payment for a moral failing, is what John Brown was saying.

Both Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S Grant, the 16th and 18th presidents of the United States, came to hold and express that view. At Lincoln’s second inaguration, after four years of bloody war, the reelected president expressed hope that the fighting would soon end, “yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the [slaveholder’s] 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” He did not exempt himself from guilt. It was not an ‘us versus them’ speech. How could he condemn the South for not ending slavery when he knew of no easy solution himself? 

Says Ron Chernow, author of Grant, the 18th president, as both general and president, also “deemed the war a punishment for national sins that had to come sooner or later in some shape and probably in blood.” I am reminded of how, at the Martin van Buren home, a National Historical Park site, the hatted ranger told me that no president after Andrew Jackson served more than one term because “the challenges leading up to the Civil War were thought to be unaddressed by those presidents.”

They were “addressed” in that war. Per Brown, Lincoln, and Grant, they were addressed with plenty of blood. As a punishment for sins? You’d get no argument on that from those men. There is such a thing as ‘community responsibility.’ 

That inaugural address of Lincoln’s was overall praised, though the non-religious persons grumbled at his “substitution of religion for statesmanship." He himself allowed that the address would wear well over time, but not immediately, since “men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them."

Tom Pearlsnswine, the fellow who mortified me by muttering about the ‘wiles of Satan’ when I was dumb enough to invite him to tag along with us on a visit to the dinosaur museum, the fellow who puts the dog into dogmatic, was not at all happy with this above historical discussion. “What does this have to do with the Bible?” he spouted. “These men were all bloodguilty,” he fumed, as he took another bite of his Bible sandwich. “Stay on topic!”

Even given his confidence in preservation of the union, even given his confidence in emancipation, would Lincoln not have agreed with the ‘bloodguilty’ charge? North and South were appalled at the phenomenal loss of life—far eclipsing the walk in the park some had first envisioned the war would be—and Lincoln, a man with a conscience, was commander in chief. Couldn’t he have gotten the job done with less blood? Wasn’t it his fault if he hadn’t? “If there is a worse place than hell,” Lincoln remarked in the aftermath of a staggering slaughter under the leadership of a particularly incompetent general (Burnside), “I am in it.”

Ten days before his death, Lincoln related a dream to friend and bodyguard Ward Leman. He was in the White House. “There seemed to be a deathlike stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. . . . I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along.” At length, he came upon a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments, surrounded by mourners and guards. He asked who it was. “The President,” was the guard’s answer. “He was killed by an assassin.”

Ten days later Lincoln was killed by an assassin. Ones who regard such premonitions as impossible deny the dream report, but Lincoln was well-known for relating portentous dreams.

(Written first, though as yet unpublished, on my own blog)

I’m not reading up on Lincoln anymore. I’m reading up on Grant. Pudgy would like both, I think and may already be well-versed. They both were raised in lowly circumstances. They both were unusually humble and defenders of the lowly. They both were continually sneered at by elites. They both made emancipation of slaves their chief mission. And they both . . . wait for it  . .  found occasion to suspect habeas corpus. 

I have a younger relative who is libertarian. By far, that is his overriding philosophy, motivating everything he does. The first factoid he ever learned about Lincoln was his suspension of habeas corpus. That was enough for him to permanently put Lincoln on his evil-person list. From there, he immediately bought into the invective that Lincoln didn’t give two hoots about freeing slaves—his sole concern was preservation of the union.

In fact, from the very beginning, Lincoln purposed that quenching the ‘rebellion’—such it was called at the time—would go hand in glove with destroying the

institution of slavery. But he could not just outright say it. He knew he had to first build a consensus. Many were the northern abolitionists who did outright say it, and they were immediately marginalized into a minority camp. Minorities don’t win at the human game of government. William Seward (by far the front runner leading up to 1860–everyone supposed hewould be president, not Lincoln) also did say it, giving a lofty speech invoking a “higher law.” Not only was he marginalized by those to whom the sole mission of freeing slaves was insufficient motivation, but he was alsomarginalized by those who supposed there was no higher law other than the human experiment of ‘government by the people.’

The only way Lincoln’s Emancipation would fly in all the North, not just with the abolitionists, was for him to sell it as a military strategy. White northern troops fretted over who would mind the household while they were gone. White southern troops had no such concerns; their slaves could keep things humming. Free those slaves and the playing field was leveled. In fact, it was more than leveled: those slaves would begin to conspire against their masters.

Two sacrosanct, as human principles go—standards of justice took front and center stage in the Civil War years: state’s rights and habeas corpus. I can imagine Pudgy railing against any infringement of either:

Oh yeah, I can easily see it! And I’d tend to agree, in a relative sense—but only a relative sense. Fact is, such lofty human principles stood squarely in the way of a far greater good: the liberation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people. Robert E Lee personally loathed slavery. He had never owned a slave. But he took up the call of what he considered even more sacred. ‘State’s rights’ became the clarion call for him. Consequently, he signed on to command Southern troops, enshrining slavery as the ‘right’ of the state to decide, not some meddling Union to impose their standards from afar.

‘Man is dominating man to his injury’—even (and in this case, due to) when they run by their own self-invented concepts of justice. In the greater removed picture, looked at from our time, only the elimination of slavery matters. One Union should split into two? It’s like Bud said when he threw away the anti-rattle clip he couldn’t figure out how to reinstall—“What’s more rattle on a Ford?” So it is with human self-government. What’s one more division of mankind in a sea of many divisions?

Here the two bedrock principles of American justice, habeas corpus and state’s rights, stood squarely in the way of real justice for hundreds of thousand of Blacks—for Whites too, for that matter, since Jefferson wrote of the South: “The parent storms [in domination of his slaves]; the child looks on . . . puts on the same airs . . . and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, can not but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” 

One is reminded (a bone for science-fiction aficionados) of ‘Childhood’s End, in which the alien overlords paid no attention whatsoever to ‘state’s rights,’ immediately and decisively ending the cruel spectator sport of bullfighting. 

Lincolns’ suspension of habeas corpus was a measure he deemed essential to preserve the Union, which action would enable the freeing of slaves. Certain journalists were openly encouraging desertion from the Northern army. ‘I should shoot some guileless plowboy deserter and not the guileful propagandist who induced him to do so?’ he posed.

Grant’s suspension of habeas corpus during his presidency is more directly connected with the welfare of Blacks than was Lincoln’s. In the early days of Johnson’s presidency, the Ku Klux Klan arose. Reports were that it commanded the active participation of 2/3 of southern Democrats whites, and the tacit participation of the other third. By many measures, Blacks were worse off than during slavery. The white aristocracy manipulated them into situations just as oppressive but with no obligation to provide for them.

Unspeakable and well-documented atrocities became routine. Not only might blacks be easily beaten or killed, but also white Republican southerners who aligned with them. Murderers could not be brought to justice. Witnesses were too intimidated to speak out, and with good reason; no jury of peers would convict Klansmen, and the retribution against witnesses would be severe. Grant sent in federal judges, and suspended habeas corpus in enough instances that Klansmen would turn upon each other in efforts to get off or gain lighter sentences for the crimes that a non-federal judge would excuse. Within a few years, he had broken the back of the Klan. It’s later reemergence is in name and ideology only (just as Baal worship kept coming back, even though guys like Elijah would clean it out from time to time.)

Habeas corpus and state’s rights—noble as far as human principles go, but not a guarantee that evil cannot, not only exist, but prevail. 

Anyone thinking that God works through America (or any other country—America being the only topic of consideration here) is invited to look at the Andrew Johnson administration. “Be Like Abe” flies, as does (to a lesser degree, but still doable) “Be Like Ulysses,” but not “Be Like Andrew.”

By the end of the war, Abraham Lincoln succeeded in bringing justice to blacks. Andrew Johnson undid it all. Grant’s work was to undo the damage that Johnson had wrought and he largely succeeded. What justice might have prevailed if Lincoln had been immediately succeeded by Grant, with no Johnson in between? 

Like Lincoln and Grant, Johnson too was brought up in lowly circumstances. He too was a self-made man. There the similarities end. Johnson was intensely racist. He was intensely vindictive (at first) to the former Confederacy, favoring severe punishment (akin to that imposed on Germany after WWI?) in contrast, Lincoln had been completely non-vengeful. Worse, vengeance was personal with Johnson. Vengefulness was a way of getting back at the aristocratic elites who had ridiculed and looked down upon him all his life. Northern abolitionists, who also (unlike Lincoln and Grant) favored harsh punishment for the South, at first thought they had found an ally in Johnson. But in fairly short order, he gave up despising the southern white aristocrats, and began kissing up to them, as though hoping to be anointed king of their club, his racist orientation a perfect match for theirs. 

God works through human governments? What if there had been no Johnson, and Lincoln’s ideals carried directly over to Grant. Shortly after the war, General Grant’s man told local transport companies in New Orleans that if they continued their practice of segregation, he would ban all that company’s cars from the road. According to Ron Chernow, author of Grant, “once the original hubbub over desegregated streetcars subsided, the locals had cheerfully adopted the new system and the excitement died out at once.” Chernow cites it as an example of the “startling early revolution in civil rights [that] would be all but forgotten by later generations of Americans.” What if Johnson had not come along to poison the well? Don’t you think if God ran the show through human government, he would not have?

A little bit on roll here. Sorry. I just wanted to kick back a little at those who think human standards of justice from the Founding Fathers are the bee’s knees. They're better than their absence, generally speaking, but sometimes they get in the way of true justice. 

With a smattering of Vietnamese (because long ago we studied with a family and there was a makeshift group in our area—this was well before the organization began emphasizing foreign groups and congregations, Minh and someone were speaking Vietnamese in front of me. 

“Toi hue het” I said in my rudimentary way, which means roughly “I understand what you’re saying” (literally: ‘I understand all”—though I’m sure I have neglected accent marks here, which changes the meaning—sorry)

”You understand nothing!” Minh shot back in English.

2 hours ago, Arauna said:

11 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

ones more special still that even you don’t know about.

Super fine apostles - or those who are a cut above the other with research skills? 

In this case, I was just making a joke. The ‘American thinking cap’ strikes again. I don’t know of such groups. Just one scholarly one in which participants are not necessarily even Witnesses. It is invitation only and I have never been invited. Nothing scholarly about me. I just putter.

Other than that, there are groups and forums everywhere. People can get in simply by asking and meeting minimal qualifications. You never know for sure who the others are. I keep my distance, for the most part. It’s all I can do to keep up with my own stuff.

12 minutes ago, Pudgy said:

I suppose you are right …. that is why we now have The Super Extra Closed Club, with secret handshakes and everything ….. and you have to be wearing the secret magical underwear when you log in.

And there are ones more special still that even you don’t know about.

11 hours ago, Moise Racette said:

You mean odd names like TrueTomHarley and Matthtew9969? Or do you mean something more odd like "Neilr2096" and all those names that are usually posted, like Xero? What's so odd about my Canadian name, and what makes it funny as to be ridiculed by even funnier names?

Either way, what do odd names have to do with the topic? 

Picking a fight, are you? But I suppose you’re right. Lots of names are odd.

4 hours ago, Arauna said:

I usually to not reply to your hate-OCD aberrations but this person (now answering you), does not know that you are known to most of us as a person to avoid due to the fact that you are set one one goal..  to destroy....

I’m not so sure. Whenever a person with an odd name appears out of nowhere (especially when another of odd name has disappeared) and becomes intensely active, we can suspect another reincarnation of you know who. 

That’s not to say it’s a bad thing, necessarily. I mean, just look at who he is squaring off against—hardly a paragon of fair play or reasonableness.

That said, a couple of innocent people have been caught in that net, so you never know. Only ONE person—a certain wizard in internet technology who takes the place of ‘only your hairdresser knows for sure’—can be said to know.