Snip of a long article:

Of course, the victors write the history books–even when they tell lies.

LINCOLN’S CRIMES

1. Lincoln waged a war that cost the lives of 620,000 Americans. Including the murder of 50,000 innocent Southern civilians.

2. He arrested several thousand Marylanders suspected of Southern sympathies, including 30 members of the State legislature, a US Congressman representing Maryland, the mayor and police commissioner of Baltimore, and most of the Baltimore city council. These political detainees were imprisoned in Fort McHenry and Point Lookout without trial, in many cases, for several years.

3. He suspended the writ of habeas corpus without the consent of Congress (as required by the Constitution).

4. He illegally shut down and confiscated the printing presses of dozens of newspapers that had spoken out against him.

5. He re-instated and summarily promoted an Army officer who had been court martialed and cashiered by the US Army for war crimes.

6. He even had an arrest warrant issued for the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court because said justice refused to back his illegal actions.

7. Chief Justice Roger B Taney ruled that Lincolns actions were illegal, criminal and unconstitutional.

8. He invaded the South without the consent of Congress as required by the Constitution.

9. He blockaded Southern ports without a delclaration of war, as required by the Constitution.

10. He imprisoned without trial, hundreds of newspaper editors and owners and censored all newspaper and telegraph communication.

11. He created two new states without the consent of the citizens of those states in order to artificially inflate the Republican Partys electoral vote.

12. He ordered Federal troops to interfere with Northern elections to assure his Parties victories.

13. He confiscated private property, including firearms, in violation of the Second Amendment; and effectively gutted the Tenth and Ninth Amendments as well.

14. He had his Generals attack US cities full of women and children and burn them to the ground.

Still not convinced? Well let’s look at some really really hard facts that will be hard for you to swallow. The follow was written by Thomas J. DiLorenz.

One hundred thirty-six years after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Americans are still fascinated with the War for Southern Independence. The larger bookstores devote an inordinate amount of shelf space to books about the events and personalities of the war; Ken Burns’s “Civil War” television series and the movie “Gettysburg” were blockbuster hits; dozens of new books on the war are still published every year; and a monthly newspaper, Civil War News, lists literally hundreds of seminars, conferences, reenactments, and memorial events related to the war in all 50 states and the District of Columbia all year long. Indeed, many Northerners are “still fighting the war” in that they organize a political mob whenever anyone attempts to display a Confederate heritage symbol in any public place.

Americans are still fascinated by the war because many of us recognize it as the defining event in American history. Lincoln’s war established myriad precedents that have shaped the course of American government and society ever since: the centralization of governmental power, central banking, income taxation, protectionism, military conscription, the suspension of constitutional liberties, the “rewriting” of the Constitution by federal judges, “total war,” the quest for a worldwide empire, and the notion that government is one big “problem solver.”

Perhaps the most hideous precedent established by Lincoln’s war, however, was the intentional targeting of defenseless civilians. Human beings did not always engage in such barbaric acts as we have all watched in horror in recent days. Targeting civilians has been a common practice ever since World War II, but its roots lie in Lincoln’s war.

In 1863 there was an international convention in Geneva, Switzerland, that sought to codify international law with regard to the conduct of war. What the convention sought to do was to take the principles of “civilized” warfare that had evolved over the previous century, and declare them to be a part of international law that should be obeyed by all civilized societies. Essentially, the convention concluded that it should be considered to be a war crime, punishable by imprisonment or death, for armies to attack defenseless citizens and towns; plunder civilian property; or take from the civilian population more than what was necessary to feed and sustain an occupying army.

The Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel (1714-67, author of The Law of Nations, was the world’s expert on the proper conduct of war at the time. “The people, the peasants, the citizens, take no part in it, and generally have nothing to fear from the sword of the enemy,” Vattel wrote. As long as they refrain from hostilities themselves they “live in as perfect safety as if they were friends.” Occupying soldiers who would destroy private property should be regard as “savage barbarians.”

In 1861 the leading American expert in international law as it relates to the proper conduct of war was the San Francisco attorney Henry Halleck, a former army officer and West Point instructor whom Abraham Lincoln appointed General-in-Chief of the federal armies in July of 1862. Halleck was the author of the book, International Law, which was used as a text at West Point and essentially echoed Vattel’s writing.

On April 24, 1863, the Lincoln administration seemed to adopt the precepts of international law as expressed by the Geneva Convention, Vattel, and Halleck, when it issued General Order No. 100, known as the “Lieber Code.” The Code’s author was the German legal scholar Francis Leiber, an advisor to Otto von Bismarck and a staunch advocate of centralized governmental power. In his writings Lieber denounced the federal system of government created by the American founding fathers as having created “confederacies of petty sovereigns” and dismissed the Jeffersonian philosophy of government as a collection of “obsolete ideas.” In Germany he was arrested several times for subversive activities. He was a perfect ideological fit with Lincoln’s own political philosophy and was just the man Lincoln wanted to outline the rules of war for his administration.

The Lieber Code paid lip service to the notion that civilians should not be targeted in war, but it contained a giant loophole: Federal commanders were permitted to completely ignore the Code if, “in their discretion,” the events of the war would warrant that they do so. In other words, the Lieber Code was purely propaganda.

The fact is, the Lincoln government intentionally targeted civilians from the very beginning of the war. The administration’s battle plan was known as the “Anaconda Plan” because it sought to blockade all Southern ports and inland waterways and starving the Southern civilian economy. Even drugs and medicines were on the government’s list of items that were to be kept out of the hands of Southerners, as far as possible.

As early as the first major battle of the war, the Battle of First Manassas in July of 1861, federal soldiers were plundering and burning private homes in the Northern Virginia countryside. Such behavior quickly became so pervasive that on June 20, 1862 – one year into the war – General George McClellan, the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, wrote Lincoln a letter imploring him to see to it that the war was conducted according to “the highest principles known to Christian civilization” and to avoid targeting the civilian population to the extent that that was possible. Lincoln replaced McClellan a few months later and ignored his letter.

Most Americans are familiar with General William Tecumseh Sherman’s “march to the sea” in which his army pillaged, plundered, raped, and murdered civilians as it marched through Georgia in the face of scant military opposition. But such atrocities had been occurring for the duration of the war; Sherman’s March was nothing new.