AW: Iraq Constitution

[Sanford Levinson]

My apology for inadvertently sending areply without a message.  My comment is this:  There was, as a practical matter, no way to exhibit "malice toward none and charity to all," since there was a critical mass of white Southerners prepared to resist full-scale regime change, and Northern elites ultimately had to choose between accomodating the resister or brutally suppressing them in the name of equality for the newly freed slaves.  

Lincoln was lucky,  in a grim sense, to have been assassinated, for we can tell ourselves that he surely would have been more enlightened than the egregious Andrew Johnson.  But of course we'll never know, but surely Johnson thought that he was acting in Lincoln's spirit and that it was the Radical Republicans who were being "malicious."

Sandy
- Sanford Levinson
(Sent from a Blackberry)

-----Original Message-----
From: conlawprof-bounces at lists.ucla.edu <conlawprof-bounces at lists.ucla.edu>
To: Scarberry, Mark <Mark.Scarberry at pepperdine.edu>
CC: 'conlawprof at lists.ucla.edu ' <conlawprof at lists.ucla.edu>
Sent: Tue Aug 30 01:13:48 2005
Subject: Re: AW: Iraq Constitution

I'd understood that Lincoln took a peacemaker approach designed to win 
Southern minds-and-hearts.  I recall reading his Second Inaugural, which 
my son found fascinating, while visiting the Memorial two summers 
ago..."with malice toward none, and charity toward all"...  Abe or Ilya, 
you get a choice.

rs

Scarberry, Mark wrote:

>I thought one reason there was relatively little guerilla activity in the
>South after Appomattox was that Lee told his soldiers to lay down their arms
>(instead of telling them to melt into the hills and continue the war).
>Executing him might have caused much more resistance. But others will know
>more about this than I.
>
>Mark Scarberry
>Pepperdine
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Ilya Somin
>To: Mark Graber
>Cc: bpwilson at princeton.edu; SLevinson at law.utexas.edu;
>conlawprof at lists.ucla.edu
>Sent: 8/29/2005 7:04 PM
>Subject: Re: AW: Iraq Constitution
>
>I certainly agree that racist values enjoyed broad support in the South
>in
>1868, and to an extent in the North too. Indeed, that explains - in part
>-
>the reasons why there was little support for executing Lee or Davis.
>
>However, executing top Confederate leaders guilty of treason surely is
>not
>the same thing as executing all white southerners who supported the
>Confederacy (much less all Northern Copperheads).  And strong measures
>against Confederate leaders (many of whom were also the leaders of
>resistance to Reconstruction) might well have undercut that resistance,
>even though many white southerners would still have sympathized with it.
>
>I also agree that Reconstruction failed in large part because of
>northern
>unwillingness to push it very far. But obviously, a counterfactual
>Northern majority willing to execute top confederates would probably
>also
>be more willing to push hard on Reconstruction more generally.
>
>Ilya Somin
>
>_______________________________________________
>To post, send message to Conlawprof at lists.ucla.edu
>To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/conlawprof
>
>Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private.  Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
>
>  
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/private/conlawprof/attachments/20050830/d08c7f2a/attachment.html