Lincoln's Surveillance State

An anonymous reader writes "The N.S.A.'s program is indeed alarming — but not, from a historical perspective, unprecedented. And history suggests that we should worry less about the surveillance itself and more about when the war in whose name the surveillance is being conducted will end. In 1862, after President Abraham Lincoln appointed him secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton penned a letter to the president requesting sweeping powers, which would include total control of the telegraph lines. By rerouting those lines through his office, Stanton would keep tabs on vast amounts of communication, journalistic, governmental and personal. On the back of Stanton's letter Lincoln scribbled his approval: 'The Secretary of War has my authority to exercise his discretion in the matter within mentioned.'"

Comments

Re:Except, in that case there was an actual war

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a nit.

For the north, the war wasn't about slavery and the north certainly wasn't fighting to free four million slaves. The north was fighting to prevent the south from leaving. That's all. For the north, the war wasn't some moral crusade to free slaves - it was simply to prevent the south from leaving. (For the south, on the other hand, the notion to leave the union was driven by slavery although nearly everyone who fought in the war was not a slave owner - less than 2% of southern soldiers were part of families that owned slaves). There were a number of northern states that continued to support and allow slavery during and after the civil war until the 14th amendment was passed.

Lincoln essentially weaponized abolitionism. He used abolitionism as a strategic tool to help defeat the south by depriving them of their economic and logistical infrastructure. Painting the Union as moral crusaders freeing the slaves is revisionism at its best, and it's every bit as wrong-headed and dishonest as painting the southern motivation as purely states rights.

Re:Except, in that case there was an actual war

[bill_mcgonigle]

The simple fact is that, had the North lost, or not fought, millions of people would have been doomed to a life of slavery.

Complete and utter propaganda, entirely contradicted by the facts. The facts are that slavery was being abolished all over the world before the Civil War as mechanism replaced slaves, and economists have determined that slaves would have been unprofitable by 1890 without a war. Slavery ended in the rest of the world for that reason, not because they had bloody civil wars all over the world. Lincoln himself said that he would keep slavery if it would hold the Union together - his only concern was of keeping the economy of the North going by forcing the South to provide it with raw materials for its factories.

And those million people did die - the old estimates of 600,000 war casualties have been revised up over 900,000 based on recently discovered data.

And that's not counting the additional millions killed in subsequent wars by the all-power central government that arose from the end of the Republic of Republics and the beginning of the Corporate Empire.