The relevance of a doctrine's being

[Michael Zimmer]

Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's first VP and a fierce abolitionist Senator from
Maine, was described by Lincoln in a joke as his insurance policy against
assassination. Once it was clear that he would not be on the ticket for the
second term, Hamlin left Washington for Maine where he joined the Maine
Coast Guard.  So he was VP of the USA and a private in the Maine Coast
Guard.  Five weeks after Johnson became VP, Lincoln was dead.  Had Lincoln
kept his insurance policy, perhaps, the course of events would have been
much different.

Michael J. Zimmer
Professor of Law
Seton Hall Law School
One Newark Center
Newark, NJ 07102
973.642.8833
973.642.8194 fax


                                                                                                                                       
                      Ilya Somin                                                                                                       
                      <isomin at fas.harva        To:       Mark Graber <mgraber at gvpt.umd.edu>                                            
                      rd.edu>                  cc:       hendersl at ix.netcom.com, zimmermi at shu.edu, conlawprof at lists.ucla.edu           
                                               Subject:  Re: RE: The relevance of a doctrine's being                                   
                      03/22/04 06:35 PM                                                                                                
                                                                                                                                       
                                                                                                                                       




Well, many of the Radical Republicans wanted to go well beyond "hanging
50 people" and instead wanted to 1) use federal troops to enforce the
rights of southern blacks (actually done to a certain extent by Grant), 2)
redistribute some of the slaveowners' property to the former slaves, and
3) use federal patronage to build political coalitions between blacks and
unionist southern whites. We can't know for sure whether a more aggressive
pursuit of 1-3 would have changed the course of history, but we certainly
can't dismiss the possibility out of hand. In particularly, having a
president sympathetic to this agenda in the 3 years immediately following
the Civil War might have made it easier to carry out than it was under the
hostile Andrew Johnson. It's hard to say how far Lincoln would have gone
in supporting 1-3 above, but he was certainly more sympathetic than
Johnson, a Democrat who had been put on the 1864 ticket for
ticket-balancing reasons.

Ilya SOmin



On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Mark Graber wrote:

> How much would malice toward the leaders of the Confederacy matter.  The
> Republican theory was that secession was sponsored by a few hotheads,
> and that lots of southern whites were really nascent Republicans.  If
> this was right, then maybe stringing up a few leaders would have worked.
>  But isn't it the case that a) you didn;t need to string up a few
> leaders to prevent a secession reprise, since that was settled at
> appomattox (spelling approximate), and b) you would need more like a
> KILLING FIELDS scenario to promote racial equality in the south, given
> how deeply entrenched and popular white supremacy was in that region.
> Alternatively, and more seriously than stringing up a few people, the
> better strategy might have been to disarm all Confederates, arm all
> former slaves and put them completely in control for a generation or so.
>  But hang the 50 people of your choice, and I don't think history is
> much different.
>
> Mark A. Graber
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