Substituting Smooth and Ambiguous Terms

Lincoln and the Republican radicals made no effort after the election of 1860 to preserve the Union; Lincoln was vague and ambiguous at the February, 1861 Peace Congress and spoke his usual homilies without committing himself to peace. If slavery had been their concern, they advanced no practical or peaceful proposals for emancipation. The books of B.F. Grady can be found in reprinted form at www.confederatereprint.com.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net
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Substituting Smooth and Ambiguous Terms:

General Joseph Lane, of Oregon, replying in the Senate, March 2, 1861, to a speech of Senator Andrew Johnson’s advocating the “execution of the laws,” “protecting the public property”:

“Sir, if there is, as I contend, the right of secession, then, whenever a State exercises that right, this Government has no laws in that State to execute, nor has it any property in such State that can be protected by the power of this Government. In attempting, however, to substitute the smooth phrases ‘executing the laws’ and ‘protecting public property’ for coercion, for civil war, we have an important concession: that is, that this Government dare not go before the people with a plain avowal of its real purposes and their consequences. No sir; the policy is to inveigle the people of the North into civil war, by masking the design in smooth and ambiguous terms.”

(The Case of the South Against the North, Benjamin Franklin Grady, Edwards & Broughton, 1899, pp. 299-300)
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Substituting Smooth and Ambiguous Terms