Abraham Lincoln Quotes
Are all the laws to go unexecuted and the government itself go to pieces, lest civil liberties be violated?
Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1865, 16th President of the United States (Republican, IL), Response when colleagues questioned his arrests of Southern supporters, Quoted in Joseph A. Ranney, “Civil liberties and the Civil War.”
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This was written during the George W. Bush Administration where the reaction to 9-11 was to curtail some civil rights and constitutional protections in favor of more national security. Bush was not the only President who eroded civil rights in a fear for National Security. FDR interned the Japanese Americans. Woodrow Wilson jailed pacifists who protested against the draft. John Adams passed the infamous Alien & Sedition Acts.
Mosley had been incarcerated without charges or trial under the “national emergency” of the Second World War. This prevented him from organizing his “Blackshirts.” When it was clear that Germany would lose the war, Oswald was released, but without the prospect of Fascism dominating continental Europe, there was little interest in Fascist movements in England.
In the aftermath of 9-11, a few government agencies violated the law and civil rights of a number of “Muslims” and/or “Middle Eastern looking” individuals and held them incommunicado with no charges and no warrants. The rationale of those agencies is that they “could not take a chance as lives were at stake. In most major wars in America, there has been an “overreaction” by some officials.
Sunday Excise Laws, sometimes called “Blue Laws”, prohibited commercial activity on Sunday, the day most Christians believe to be the Sabbath. Then such laws had not been constitutionally tested and when the were later were they were all found to be unconstitutional. Some Christian sects believe that Saturday is the Sabbath as do most Jews. Muslims believe Friday is the Sabbath. So any state determination on the Sabbath favors some religious viewpoint and discriminates against others. Today, decisions about Sabbath are left to individual consumers and store owners.
He was considered Massachusetts’ greatest Colonial orator. In almost every war or other national crisis every country’s government generally tries to expand its powers to act without the review of courts, and to claim that because of the necessity many laws should not even apply.
Abraham Lincoln was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War—its bloodiest war and its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis. In doing so, he preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the economy.
