[Peace-discuss] young Lincoln on R3volution --

[C. G. Estabrook]

He can be said to have reiterated the point in his First Inaugural Address:

  "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. 
Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise 
their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to 
dismember or overthrow it.

   "I can not be ignorant of the fact that many worthy and patriotic citizens 
are desirous of having the National Constitution amended. While I make no 
recommendation of amendments, I fully recognize the rightful authority of the 
people over the whole subject, to be exercised in either of the modes prescribed 
in the instrument itself; and I should, under existing circumstances, favor 
rather than oppose a fair opportunity being afforded the people to act upon it.

   "I will venture to add that to me the convention mode seems preferable, in 
that it allows amendments to originate with the people themselves, instead of 
only permitting them to take or reject propositions originated by others, not 
especially chosen for the purpose, and which might not be precisely such as they 
would wish to either accept or refuse."

--he then goes on to say that he had no objection to the proposed Corwin 
amendment to the Constitution (which had already been approved by both houses of 
Congress to protect slavery in those states in which it already existed).

But did he "shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suited 
him better"?  I'd say so, to the benefit of capitalists: the Civil War was the 
second phase of the American version of the bourgeois revolution that circled 
the globe from the 16th to the 20th centuries.

Wayne would say that it was to the benefit of statists, and honest capitalists 
suffered from it.  --CGE


E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> Lincoln said this.  The question is if he rejected it or carried it out 
> on a grand scale.
> 
> 
> Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right 
> to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one 
> that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right--a 
> right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this 
> right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing 
> government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that 
> can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as 
> they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people 
> may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with or near 
> about them, who may oppose this movement. Such minority was precisely 
> the case of the Tories of our own revolution. It is a quality of 
> revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws, but to break up both, 
> and make new ones.
> 
> 
> 
> Abraham Lincoln
> 
> January 12, 1848.
> 
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