Below, Sir, is part of Mr. Lincoln’s Proclamation of 15 April 1861. In it, Lincoln is responding to the armed rebellion that Confederate President Jefferson Davis had initiated by bombarding Fort Sumter (12-13 April 1861). By then, seven southern states had already seceded, formed the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.) government, and adopted a new constitution. That new government disrupted the delivery of the mails and the federal judiciary’s proceedings in most of the South. It also had seized several federal forts and arsenals in the Confederate states. There was, however, no burning of cities, destruction of businesses, incarceration of pro-Unionists, or attacks on citizens who opposed secession. Indeed, the Confederate republic was created by states that had been authorized to secede by their citizens in democratic elections. In those elections, voters were free to vote for or against against secession.
The contemporary American republic has been facing the same kind of insurrection since 2016, perhaps even earlier, and now faces well-managed, armed riots that are the direct equivalent to, but far more destructive and deadly, than the immediate results of Mr. Davis’s attack on Fort Sumter. Many Democratic governed states, for example, long ago seceded from the Union and forbid their police forces from keeping the peace. In those states. the Democrats and their bureaucrats have rooted out republican government, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights to a far greater extent than the Confederate government ever thought of doing. Indeed, that C.S.A.’s Constitution created a republican government. It also contained several improvements that would not have been an embarrassment to the U.S. Constitution, such as a line item veto for the president’s use. (1)
Mr. President, you and we are clearly facing a rebellion that, as Mr. Lincoln said, is “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by law.” Do the necessary, Mr. President, and do it now. You have troops at hand, legal authority to act, and are facing an enemy far more dangerous to the republic than the Confederate States of America ever were.
You must get cracking, Mr. President. Democrats never change, except to become an ever-more tyrannical, violent, vicious, and inhuman threat to the life of the republic.
A PROCLAMATION
WHEREAS the laws of the United States have been, for some time past, and now are opposed, and the execution thereof obstructed, in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by law.
Now, therefore, I, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution and the laws, have thought fit to call forth, and hereby do call forth, the militia of the several States of the Union, to the aggregate number of seventy-five thousand, in order to suppress said combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed.
BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Abraham Lincoln (2)
–Endnotes:
–1.) https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/blog/looking-back-at-the-confederate-constitution
–2.) https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/civil_war/LincolnExtraordinarySession_Transcript.htm
