Anti-Trump SCGOP Chairman Under Fire

Via Mike

 

S.C. “Republican” party chairman Matt Moore‘s alleged involvement in establishment efforts to deprive GOP frontrunner Donald Trump of the 2016 presidential nomination have created some serious backlash for the aspiring politico.

The leading edge of the storm?  Questions over Moore’s financial deals as chairman of the party – and whether he is supplementing his $100,000 annual salary with other income that could color his objectivity.

“Matt’s job is to referee the games,” one frustrated GOP activist told us. “His job is to ensure that the rules are fair for all candidates and to aggressively fight for the Republican nominees once they have been chosen by the voters.  If he’s getting paid by one of the teams, how can his judgment in party matters be trusted?”

Moore’s critics – notably the embattled neo-Confederate political empire of veteran GOP consultant Richard Quinn – believe his anti-Trump machinations and thinly-concealed support for establishment politicians like Marco Rubio mask a covert payday.

Or at the very least the promise of one to come …

“Everybody knows he’s stepping down in 2017 – is there any doubt who is going to hire him?” another activist noted.

More @ Fits News

American Music Is Southern Music

 

“American Idol,” a reality-based music singing competition on the Fox Network, has come to an end, and Yankees everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief, as their long, national nightmare is finally over.

Yankees haven’t been whipped this badly since Fredericksburg, and it’s a miracle they allowed the American Idol carnage to continue on as long as it did.  All totaled, there were 15 winners of American Idol, which included three from North Carolina, two from Alabama, one from Texas, one from Arkansas, one from Missouri, one from Georgia, one from South Carolina, and one from Mississippi.  Eleven of the fifteen winners were proud, Southern singers directly from Dixie.  But wait, it gets worse.  When you add all the contestants who came in second place, then you have nineteen out of thirty finalists representing the South.

At one point during this final season, five of the Top Six were from Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, and two from Mississippi.  In Season 1, the Top Three included two from Texas and one from Georgia. 

In Season 2, the Top Three included Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee.  Seasons 3, 10, 12, and 15 featured an all-Southern finale.  In fact, there were only two seasons out of all fifteen that DID NOT have at least one Southerner in the finale.

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Wendell Phillips Hands Drenched in Blood

 

Author Howard R. Floan noted the “tendency, stubbornly persistent even in our own time, to mistake the planter aristocracy for the entire South, to envision the Southerner simply as the slaveholder.” His study of the New England abolitionist aristocracy shows a radical, idealistic clique of utopians divorced from reality who had little, if any understanding of the slavery inherited from the English colonists. Their hands would be stained by the blood of a million Americans who perished in the war they did much to ignite.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Wendell Phillips Hands Drenched in Blood

“In the job of molding public opinion, [William Lloyd] Garrison needed help. The need of a platform personality to carry the cause directly to the people was answered, unsolicited, by Wendell Phillips. At a meeting in 1837, young Phillips rose from the audience, denounced the murderers of Elijah Lovejoy, the antislavery editor, of Alton, Illinois . . . A Bostonian once reported that during a Phillips speech he had heard a man in the audience applauding, stamping his feet, and exclaiming enthusiastically, “The damned old liar! The damned old liar!

Phillips strove to foster a public opinion hostile to slaveholding . . . Phillips battleground was the Northern mind. His eye was on the North, though his shots appeared to be aimed at the South. To arouse Northern awareness of danger, Phillips emphasized the political threat of the South by pointing to its wealth and its continued success in Washington.

For all practical purposes, Phillips said, the slave power was the South; there could be no other South until the North created one. The image of the South which Phillips labored to evoke in the Northern mind embodied deformities that were designed to call up repugnance, anger and fear. It violated the cherished ideals of the North. He conjured up a land of whipping posts and auction blocks, a feudal society in which newspapermen, politicians, and clergymen were vassals. “The South is the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.”

Phillips . . . often spoke of the possibility of armed rebellion in the South. “I can imagine the scenes of blood through which a rebellious slave-population must march to their rights.”

The agitator must continually intensify his attack if he is to maintain the appearance of vitality. With the years, Phillips grew more vitriolic. In 1853, surveying the achievements of the abolition movement, he said: “To startle the South to madness, so that every step she takes in her blindness, is one more step toward ruin, is much. This we have done.”

Nothing shows more clearly that Phillips had become a victim of his own program. BY this time he could summarize his view of the South in one image: the South was “one great brothel where half a million women are flogged to prostitution, or, worse still, are degraded to believe it honorable.”

By the time of the [John Brown] Harpers Ferry incident, Phillips was able to say that Brown had more right to hang [Virginia] Governor Wise than the Governor had to hang Brown. As Phillips grew more outspoken, some of his listeners became indignant, and the abolitionists were forced to form bodyguards.”

(The South in Northern Eyes, 1831 to 1861, Howard R. Floan, McGraw-Hill, 1958, pp. 11-14)

Lincoln’s Cotton Dilemma

                                                           Confederate Cotton Burners


To underscore that the war was fought by the North against secession – not to end slavery – Lincoln and his Secretary of State William Seward early sought the capture Southern ports to restore tariff collection and supply slave-produced cotton for starved New England mills. Also, if the ports were opened by force and cotton exported once again, the chance of European recognition of the new American republic was further diminished.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Lincoln’s Cotton Dilemma

“During the winter of 1861-62 Seward assured Britain and France that a significant volume of cotton would soon be exported to Europe through Confederate ports captured by Union forces. Lincoln thought that the United States should “show the world we were fair in this matter favoring outsiders as much as ourselves.”

Although he was “by no means sure that [the planters] would bring their cotton to the port after we opened it, it would be well to show Europe that it was secession that distressed them and not we.”

The Confederates soon demonstrated that they would rather burn their cotton than allow it to fall into Yankee hands. The French consul estimated that about a quarter of a million bales were burned at New Orleans just prior to its capture by Union forces in April 1862. In August of that year the British consul in Charleston estimated that “about 1,000,000 bales have been destroyed at various places to prevent them falling into the hands of Federals.”

The unsuccessful Federal effort to promote cotton exports through captured Confederate ports was described in a pamphlet published in England in 1862:

“No sooner did the Government succeed in regaining possession . . . of cotton markets, than it made provision for reopening of the cotton trade. The blockade . . . was removed from the ports of Beaufort in North Carolina, Port Royal in South Carolina, and New Orleans in Louisiana on the 12th of May 1862. Cotton agents accompanied the armies of the North, who were licensed to purchase cotton . . . The United States Government assured the British government of their anxiety to grant every facility for the obtaining of cotton, and gave the rebels every facility to sell it. But the net result has been what? Simply an order from Jefferson Davis to burn the cotton and starve the English.”

Seward was delighted by the increased cotton production in other countries: “The insurrectionary cotton States will be blind to their own welfare if they do not see how their prosperity and all their hopes are passing away, when they find that Egypt, Asia Minor and India supplying the world with cotton.”

Nevertheless, cotton exports made a major contribution to the Confederate economy and war effort. Lincoln’s frustration with the Union’s inability to eliminate this trade is indicated in a letter he wrote in December 1864:

“By the external blockade, the [cotton] price is made certainly six times as great as it was. And yet the enemy gets through at least one sixth part as much in a given period . . . as if there were no blockade, and receives as much for it as he would for a full crop in time of peace. The effect . . . is that we give him six ordinary crops, without the trouble of producing any but the first and . . . leave his fields and laborers free to produce provisions . . . This keeps up his armies at home and procures supplies from abroad.”

(One War at a Time, The International Dimensions of the American Civil War, Dean B. Mahin, Brassey’s, 1999, pp. 85-86; 90-91)

Foundations of Sharia Law: The Koran, Sira, and Hadiths

Part 1 of a series
Mike Scruggs

                      

Islam is a total worldview, and Islamic Law is a legal system encompassing every aspect of Muslim life—religion, politics, government, war, criminal and civil law, business, family, food, dress, social, culture, absolutely everything. Although criticism of Islam or Islamic Law can invoke the death penalty, there are many secularized or purely cultural Muslims who are not fully compliant with Islamic doctrines and Islamic laws.  But according to a 2008 survey reported by Ingrid Carlqvist with Dispatch International (Sweden) in 2015, 66 percent of European Muslims want to be under Sharia Law rather than Europeans laws.

Sharia is the Arabic word for Islamic Law. Although it is a redundancy, I frequently refer to it as Sharia Law to be better understood. Knowing some basic facts about Sharia is essential to understanding Islam. Just as the Bible is the foundational basis of Christian doctrines and teachings, the Koran, also spelled Quran and Qur’an, is the most sacred foundational text of Islam. However, Islam has two other foundational texts that are considered by Muslims to be almost as sacred as the Koran. The Koran is believed to have come directly from Allah (Arabic for god) and imparted to Muhammad, the foremost Prophet of Allah by the angel, Gabriel over 22 years. The two other collections of documents are the Sira, which is basically the biographical history of Muhammad, and the Hadiths, which are the sayings and example of Muhammad recorded by his close companions. Together the Sira and the Hadiths are termed the Sunna. The most important thing to know about Sharia is that each of its laws are documented by reference to the Koran or the Sunna.

The Hadiths and the Sira are especially useful in explaining the context and meaning of Koranic passages. By actual volume of words, the Koran, which is about the size of the New Testament, is only 14 percent of the combined doctrinal texts of Islam.

While many translations of the Koran use “God” referring to Allah, I prefer to use Allah. That is because despite common characteristics such as being all-powerful and all-knowing and being connected to the story of Abraham, the personalities of Allah of the Koran and Jehovah, the Lord God of the Bible, are quite different, leading to sharply contrasting theologies.

The easiest and most used Sharia Law text is Reliance of the Traveller (1,200 pages and spelled with a double l). In it, each law is indexed. For example Apostasy from Islam is indexed as o8.0.

o8.1 “When a person who has reached puberty and is sane, voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.”

The reference is given as Bukhari Hadith (9,83,17).

Muhammad: “A Muslim who has admitted that there is no god but Allah and that I am his prophet may not be killed except for three reasons: as punishment for murder, for adultery, or for apostasy.”

The Sahih (authentic) al-Bukhari Hadiths were collected by Muslim scholar Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari about 200 years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 AD. Bukhari is considered the most reliable of six canonical Sunni Hadith collections.

o9.0 covers Jihad.

“Jihad means war against Kafirs to establish Islam.”

 Kafir here means unbeliever or infidel or one who suppresses Islam. Note that both Christians and Jews, though sometimes referred to in the Koran as “people of the book” are Kafirs. Note that Sharia does not refer to Jihad as spiritual struggle as claimed by disingenuous Muslim apologists. Jihad is Holy War against any who have not submitted to Islam and Sharia Law. About 32 percent of the Koran and Sunna deal with Jihad, but it is not mentioned at all in the early chapters of the Koran recorded in Mecca (politicalislam.com). Note that the chapters in the Koran are not in historical order, but by the length of the text. I strongly recommend reading them in historical order.

One Jihad reference is Koran 2.216 “You are commanded to fight although you dislike it. You may hate something that is good for you, and love something that is bad for you. Allah knows and you do not.” Sometimes the word, Surah, chapter, is used rather than Koran, as Surah 2.216.

The Doctrine of ABROGATION is extremely important in interpreting the Koran and understanding Sharia. The Koran, despite its claim to divine origin, is filled with many contradictions. One reason for this is that Muhammad’s sayings became markedly more political and violent, when he moved from Mecca to Medina (both in the eastern portion of  modern Saudi Arabia), where he became a political leader and warlord. Whatever is revealed last through Muhammad effectively subordinates earlier sayings that contradict it. The new Medinan verses become strong verses, and the early Meccan verses they replace are known as weak verses. The contradictions and abrogations are explained in two ways. First, Allah can change his mind. Second, is that the weak verses were Allah’s advice, when the Muslims were weak politically and militarily, while in Mecca. When they became politically and militarily strong in Medina, Allah’s advice became more coercive and violent. This can easily be seen in Muhammad’s Biography, which is heavy in Jihadic narrative and example, 67 percent of the Sira. While in Mecca they had to be submissive and peaceful. When strong and dominant in Medina, they cut off the heads of 800 Jewish prisoners. Within a few years, all the Jewish men in Medina had been driven out or slaughtered. They kept their wives and children as concubines and slaves. The biography of Muhammad serves as a plan for Hijra (invasion by migration) and Jihad against non-Muslim host nations.

 Muslim immigration (Hijra) to Kafir lands is peaceful as long as their number remains small, and they are politically weak. As they grow stronger, they begin to demand that the host government make small accommodations to Sharia Law. The stronger they become the more demanding they are for larger host country concessions. When they become strong enough, they begin their Holy Jihad and demand that Sharia Law become the new law of the land, superior to any other law. That is why Sharia Law violates Article VI of the U.S. Constitution and why we should deny immigrant or visitor entry to anyone who embraces Sharia Law, Jihad, or the Islamic Doctrine of Supremacy:

 Muslim Hadith (001,0031) Muhammad: I have been ordered to wage war against mankind until they accept that there is no god but Allah and that they believe I am His prophet and accept all revelations from me…”

Sharia contains essentially two sets of laws, one for Muslims and one for all non-Muslims, and they are by no means equal. It allows for dualistic ethics. Treat Muslims as brothers and non-Muslims as they were treated by Muhammad: subject to robbery, rape, torture, slavery, and murder. Swedish politicians still refuse to believe their suicidal immigration and refugee policies  have any relationship to their new status as the rape capital of the world. Treat men as equals and women as inferiors with few rights. Keep your word to Muslims but freely lie to non-Muslims to advance Islam. This is Taqiyya, the doctrine of deception supporting subversion and Jihad.

Bukhari Hadith (4,52,268). Muhammad said: “Jihad is deceit.”

Bukhari Hadith (5, 59,369). Regarding the murder of Ka’b, the enemy of Allah and Muhammad, Bin Maslama said, “Give me permission to deceive him with lies so that my plot will succeed.” Muhammad replied, “You may speak falsely to him.”

Sharia dualism teaches the principle of loving what Allah loves and hating what Allah hates.

Thus we have sacred love and sacred hate, and all Kafirs and Kafir culture and institutions are subject to the zealous intensity of sacred hate, violence, and terrorism.

Koran 8:12 “Then your Lord (Allah) spoke to his angels and said, “I will be with you. Give strength to the believers. I will send terror into the Kafirs’ hearts, cut off their heads and even the tips of their fingers.”

Southern Honour and Southern History

 

In present day academia, one is guaranteed a celebrated career by inventing a new way to put the South in a bad light or a new twist on an old put-down. In the 1970s, Raimondo Luraghi, Eugene Genovese, and other historians were starting to pay some attention to the existence of a genuine aristocratic ethics in the Old South. Immediately a C. Vann Woodward student stepped into the breach and produced a book on “Southern Honor.” Now we would suppose that a book on Southern honor would have something to say about George Washington and Robert E. Lee and devotion to duty. Not a bit of it. “Southern honor,” it seems, is just a dishonest excuse for some backward folks in East Tennessee to suppress their non-comforming neighbours. Honour in the South is not what Jacob Burkhardt defined as an enigmatic mixture of ethics and ego; it is all about brawls and peasant chivarees. This same historian a few years later essayed a presentation on how Confederate soldiers were not really brave. A graduate student who actually knew something about the subject politely took him apart limb by limb.

More @ The Abbeville Institute

What Is Wrong With America?

Editorial, Libertarian Magazine, March 1924 "There was once indeed a time when Americans plumed themselves on their individualism; but the fine trait of self-help is not so common now, and what we hear nowadays is rather the enervating cry, "Let the government do it." So obsessed are the people with politics, so omnipotent in action and so all-sufficing in providence do they deem the government that to some of them it seems either that legislative statutes are a substitute for moral principles, or that virtue can be legislated into persons whether they want it or not. This acceptance of legislation as a species of miracle-performing leads to remarkable consequences. If legality can be substituted for morality, it follows that no one need have any character; and, if an individual could be terrorized into goodness by the penalties of man-made laws, why should a person put forth any effort to acquire the habits of goodness? But the law cannot make the people good; it can only make them pretend to be. Puritanical blue laws defeat their own object; the futility and perniciousness of such laws are the evidence of their essential quackery . . . There are many credulous Americans who can be interested in the League of Nations, for such a league of governments appears to afford an alternative to the duty of cultivating intelligence and morality and might work a miracle by the quick and east way of erecting more political machinery. Apparently therefore, it is not the saints, not the teachers, but the politicians who are going to save mankind. Although it was the statesmen who did nothing to prevent, but everything they could to bring about, the World War, yet such is the incurable gullibility of some Americans that they will doubtless enjoy the brief but false security when, by entrance into the League, the American masses are persuaded to imagine that they have succeeded in shifting off their own shoulders and onto the shoulders of a group of secret diplomatists, the responsibility of maintaining peace. Thus the adoption of a panacea will provide a welcome inducement to abandon the slow and hard work, [and] only adequate method, which is to go to the root of a matter and remove all the causes of the trouble." (Editorial, What Is Wrong With America? The Libertarian Magazine, March 1924)

What Lincoln Accomplished

“The world claims now, and rightly, that Lincoln made the United States of America a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Lincoln found the United States of America a government of the States, by the States and for the States. He changed it by force of a four-year war into a nation.

Up to 1861, the Federal government was a republic of sovereign States of such wisdom and power as to win the respect and love of all true lovers of political liberty, but too wise and not powerful enough to coerce sovereign States.

Now, since 1861, we are a nation with sovereign States reduced to provinces, State rights gone (for what rights have they who dare not strike for them?); a nation, admired still by the world, but feared and mistrusted as a nation boastful and overbearing, ready and willing to regulate, if not to rule, the world like old Rome. O what a fall was there, my countrymen!”

(What Lincoln Accomplished, Berkeley Minor, Charlottesville, VA, Confederate Veteran, September 1926, page 324)

Ronnie Davis, Injured in PDRA Spring Nationals, Passes Away

Whether in a full bodied stock car, open wheel race machine or a high powered drag car, any driver who slips behind the wheel each week is well aware of the risks associated with the sport that they love.

While the families, friends and fans of these drivers never hope that they will have to witness the day that their favorite drivers will either be unable to compete or otherwise, there are those times when we have utter the words…“So long my friend”.

More @ Racing Junk

 

2016 Nomination SuperPacs: Who has bought whom so far?

Via John

Donald Trump Is Outperforming Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders AND Hillary Clinton

Via Billy

Donald Trump is not only outperforming Ted Cruz in the election to date, he also outperforms Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as well.

The election results to date (as of Sunday April 17^th) show that Trump outshines all the candidates.

Donald Trump has:

** More primary wins (17)
** More overall state wins (20)
** The highest percentage of primary wins (81%)
** The highest percent of overall state wins (63%)
** The highest percent of primary delegates (65%)
** The highest percent of overall delegates (58%)
** And Trump ties Hillary for the highest percent of overall votes (57%).

More @ The Gateway Pundit

Donald Trump Warns RNC: Straighten up or Going to be a Rough July

Via Billy

Communists and Muslims turn Paris into a war zone

Via WRSA

 

It all happened on April 14, just two days ago in Paris. Between the destructive force of socialists communists and migrants, the once-beautiful city appears to be doomed if nothing changes. A brutal battle among migrant groups was caught on film by terrified residents, while on the same day students and workers led by labor unions continued their ongoing battle against extremely limited labor reforms proposed by the socialist government, leading to violence and arrests.

More @ New Zeal

Sheridan Hastens the Indians’ Demise

 Native American S/B American Indian

Grant, Sherman and Sheridan applied the same hard hand of war used on the American South to the Plains Indians. Northern Gen. Phil Sheridan endorsed the slaughter of western buffalo herds as a way to subjugate the Indians and break their will to fight – the same as he had done earlier in the Shenandoah Valley. Notably, one of the most successful western hunters was “New England Yankee Josiah W. Mooar, who killed nearly 21,000 buffalo in three years . . .”
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Sheridan Hastens the Indians’ Demise

“At the same time they were going hungry [on reservations], the Indians watched with impotent disgust as growing numbers of white hunters set up their forked rifle sticks on ancestral hunting grounds and slew the animals in staggering numbers with their .50 caliber Sharps buffalo guns.

In 1872-73 alone, 1,250,000 hides were shipped east to fashionable furriers. By the end of 1874, an estimated 4,373,730 buffalo had been slain, of which a grand total of 150,000 had been taken by the Indians.

The hunters’ intrusion on tribal lands was patently illegal, but the army did little to stop it. Despite the Medicine Lodge Treaty, which had outlawed white intrusion on Indian land, the unofficial attitude of the government toward the hunters was one of de facto cooperation.

Secretary Columbus Delano, whose department was charged with looking out for the Indian’s welfare, stated bluntly in his annual report, “I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies, in its effects upon the Indians, regarding it as a means of hastening their sense of dependence upon the products of the soil.”

Sheridan, who had rather less confidence in the farming capabilities of the Indians, nevertheless looked upon the slaughter of the buffalo as an effective means of subjugating the tribes and breaking their wills.

When the Texas legislature briefly considered passing a bill outlawing buffalo poaching on native lands, Sheridan made a personal appearance before the lawmakers in Austin. Rather than penalize the hunters, he said, the legislature ought to give them each a medal, engraved with a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged-looking Indian on the other.

In an attempt to keep closer watch on the wide-ranging Sioux, Sheridan received permission from Grant in late 1873 to mount an expedition into the Black Hills to scout locations for a new fort in the area. Custer and the Seventh Cavalry spent the better part of eight weeks exploring the sacred territory. As usual, Custer turned the expedition into a combination picnic, big-game hunt, and public relations extravaganza, sending back glowing reports of the region’s vast animal and mineral resources.

Injudiciously, he also fanned the flames of public greed by claiming, with some exaggeration, that pieces of gold could be plucked up from the very ground one walked on. At the first mention of gold, hundreds, then thousands, of ears pricked up. It was, after all, the Gilded Age, and fortune-making was the national sport.

[Though the 1868 treaty with the Sioux] “virtually deeds this portion of the Black Hills to the Sioux,” [Sheridan suggested] that miners and homesteaders try their luck further west in the unceded lands of Wyoming and Montana. The Sioux had hunting rights there, too, but Sheridan hoped to nullify these rights by encouraging the further depopulation of buffalo and other game. When there was nothing left to hunt, he reasoned, the Indians would have no more hunting rights to lose. Needless to say, the Sioux were unamused by this line of reasoning.”

(Sheridan: The Life and Times of General Phil Sheridan, Roy Morris, Jr., Crown Publishers, 1992, pp. 342-343; 348-349)

Lincoln a Talented Farmer and Stump Speaker

British public opinion of the North’s war upon the South was informed by their newspapers. The conservative London Dispatch viewed the true motives of the war as “the continuance in power of the North to tax the industry of the South and the consolidation of a huge confederation to sweep every other power from the American continent, to enter into the politics of Europe with a Republican propaganda, and to bully the world.”
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Lincoln a Talented Farmer and Stump Speaker

“The British aristocrats’ negative view of the U.S. system of government was enhanced by their negative reaction to Abraham Lincoln as president. His immediate predecessors – [Franklin] Pierce and [James] Buchanan – had had backgrounds that seemed familiar to those of British cabinet ministers. Pierce had been a congressman, a major-general in the Mexican War, and a senator while Buchanan had been a senator, secretary of state, and minister to Britain.

But in 1860 the nation had elected a man from the frontier whose only experience in the national government was a single two-year term in Congress.

The British minister in Washington, Lord Lyons, reported in May 1860 that the Republican nominee for president was “a rough Westerner, of the lowest origins and little education.” Two months later he still referred to Lincoln as a “rough farmer who began life as a farm laborer and got on by a talent for stump speaking.”

British journalists who met the president in 1861 and 1862 emphasized his rustic and ungainly appearance. Edward Dicey, correspondent for the Spectator and Macmillan’s Magazine, wrote a similar description in 1862 and added that “you would never say he was a gentleman.”

[Dicey] wrote that Lincoln “works hard . . . does little, and unites a painful sense of responsibility to a still more painful sense, perhaps, that his work is too great for him to grapple with.” Alexander J. Beresford-Hope, a wealthy ultraconservative, remarked that “nobody in this county, clever as he might be at rail-slitting, at navigating a barge, or at an attorney’s desk, would, without other qualifications, ever become prime minister of England, let alone county court judge.”

Richard Cobden, an important Radical leader in Parliament and a stout friend of the North, thought . . . [after] the emancipation proclamation [that] “Lincoln had a certain moral dignity, but is intellectually inferior.” A London correspondent reported to Die Presse in Vienna that Lincoln was “a plebian, who made his way from rail splitter to representative in Illinois, a man without intellectual brilliance, without special strength of character, not exceptionally impressive – an ordinary man of goodwill.” The correspondent’s name was Karl Marx.

A British scholar, Martin Crawford, described the [London Times] persistent belief that the North could not win the war and that continued separation of North and South was inevitable:

“The longer the [war] lasted, the more convinced The Times became that Lincoln’s government should accept disunion for what it was, a sad and irrevocable fact . . . Britain’s leading newspaper had established itself as a committed opponent of the [Northern] cause . . . “

(One War at a Time, The International Dimensions of the American Civil War, Dean B. Mahin, Brassey’s, 1999, pp. 28-29)