-Caveat Lector-
~~for educational purposes only~~
[Title 17 U.S.C. section 107]
The Mythical Lincoln
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Every February 12 Americans think they are celebrating
Lincoln's birthday. But what they are really celebrating
is the birth of the Leviathan state that Lincoln, more
than anyone else, is responsible for bringing about. No
wonder federal politicos have made his birth date a
national holiday, engraved his face is on Mount Rushmore,
built a Venus-like statue of him in Washington, D.C.,
and put his mugshot on the five dollar bill.
More than 130 years of government propaganda has hidden
this fact from the American people by creating a Mythical
Lincoln that never existed. Take, for instance, the fact
that everyone supposedly knows that Lincoln was an
abolitionist. This would be a surprise to the preeminent
Lincoln scholar, Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer
David Donald, who in his 1961 book, Lincoln Reconsidered,
wrote that "Lincoln was not an abolitionist." And he
wasn't. He was glad to accept on behalf of the Republican
Party any votes from abolitionists, but real abolitionists
despised him. William Lloyd Garrison, the most prominent
of all abolitionists, concluded that Lincoln "had not a
drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins."
Garrison knew Lincoln well. He knew that Lincoln stated
over and over again for his entire adult life that he
did not believe in social or political equality of the
races, he opposed inter-racial marriage, supported the
Illinois constitution's prohibition of immigration of
blacks into the state, once defended in court a slaveowner
seeking to retrieve his runaway slaves but never defended
a runaway, and that he was a lifelong advocate of
colonization of sending every last black person in
the U.S. to Africa, Haiti, or central America anywhere
but in the U.S.
Garrison and other abolitionists were also keenly aware
that the January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed
no one since it specifically exempted all the areas that
at the time were occupied by federal armies. That is,
all areas where slaves could actually have been freed.
Historians have portrayed the Mythical Lincoln as a man
who brooded for decades over how he could someday free
the slaves. Nothing could be more absurd. According to
Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln's Collected Works,
Lincoln never even mentioned slavery in a speech until
1854, and even then, says Basler, he was not sincere.
When Lincoln first entered state politics in 1832 he
announced that he was doing so for three reasons: To
help enact the Whig Party agenda of protectionist
tariffs, corporate welfare subsidies for railroad
and canal-building corporations ("internal
improvements"), and a government monopolization of
the nation's money supply. "My politics are short
and sweet, like the old woman's dance," he declared:
"I am in favor of a national bank . . . the internal
improvements system, and a high protective tariff."
He was a devoted mercantilist, and remained so for
his entire political life. He was single-mindedly
devoted to Henry Clay and his political agenda
(mentioned above), which Clay called "The American
System."
Lincoln once announced that his career ambition was
not to free the slaves but to become "the DeWitt
Clinton of Illinois." DeWitt Clinton was the governor
of New York in the early nineteenth century who is
credited with having introduced the spoils system
to America and supervising the building of the Erie
Canal (which became defunct in a mere ten years
because of the invention of the railroad).
Lincoln is also portrayed as a champion of the principles
set forth in the Declaration of Independence, especially
the statement that "all men are created equal." Political
scientist Harry Jaffa has written an entire book along
this theme. But this is hard to square with his statement
during the Lincoln-Douglas debates that "I am sorry to
say that I have never seen two men of whom it is true.
But I must admit I never saw the Siamese Twins, and
therefore will not dogmatically say that no man ever
saw a proof of this sage aphorism." So, with the possible
exception of Siamese twins, Lincoln did not believe
that any two men were ever created equal.
Moreover, Lincoln destroyed the most important principle
of the Declaration the principle that governments derive
their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Southerners no longer consented to being governed by
Washington, D.C. in 1860, and Lincoln put an end to
that idea by having his armies slaughter 300,000 of them,
including one out of every four white males between 20
and 40. Standardizing for today's population, that would
be the equivalent of around 3 million American deaths,
or roughly 60 times the number of Americans who died
in Vietnam.
As H.L. Mencken said of the Gettysburg Address, in which
Lincoln absurdly claimed that Northern soldiers were
fighting for the cause of self determination ("that
government of the people . . . should not perish . . .":
"It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The
Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against
self determination; it was the Confederates who fought
for the right of their people to govern themselves. The
Confederates went into the battle free; they came out
with their freedom subject to the supervision of the
rest of the country."
Another Lincoln myth was that he "saved the Constitution."
But this claim is an outrage considering that Lincoln
acted like a dictator for the duration of his administration
and showed nothing but bitter contempt for the Constitution.
Even Lincoln's idolaters, like historian Clinton Rossiter,
author of the book, Constitutional Dictatorship, referred
to him as a "great dictator" who had an "amazing disregard
for the Constitution . . . that was considered by nobody
as legal."
The Dictator Lincoln invaded the South without the consent
of Congress, as called for in the Constitution; declared
martial law; blockaded Southern ports without a declaration
of war, as required by the Constitution; illegally suspended
the writ of habeas corpus; imprisoned without trial thousands
of Northern anti-war protesters, including hundreds of
newspaper editors and owners; censored all newspaper and
telegraph communication; nationalized the railroads;
created three new states without the consent of the citizens
of those states in order to artificially inflate the
Republican Party's electoral vote; ordered Federal troops
to interfere with Northern elections to assure Republican
Party victories; deported Ohio Congressman Clement L.
Vallandigham for opposing his domestic policies (especially
protectionist tariffs and income taxation) on the floor of
the House of Representatives; confiscated private property,
including firearms, in violation of the Second Amendment;
and effectively gutted the Tenth and Ninth Amendments as
well.
As Dean Sprague correctly pointed out in Freedom Under
Lincoln, all of these dictatorial acts were bad enough,
but their real, long-term effect was to "lay the
groundwork" for such unprecedented acts of coercion as
military conscription and income taxation.
Hundreds of books have been written about Lincoln the
humanitarian, a soft and gentle man. But from the very
beginning of his administration he intentionally waged a
cruel and unbelievably bloody war on civilians as well as
soldiers. As early as 1861, Federal soldiers looted,
pillaged, raped and plundered their way through Virginia
and other Southern states, completely burning to the
ground the towns of Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi,
Randolph, Tennessee, and others. Historian Jeffrey Rogers
Hummel estimates that some 50,000 Southern civilians were
killed during the war, and this number, even if it is
exaggerated by a multiple of two, most likely includes
thousands of slaves. In his March to the Sea, General
William Tecumseh Sherman boasted of having destroyed
$100 million in private property and that his "soldiers"
carried home another $20 million worth.
In his memoirs Sherman wrote that when he met with Lincoln
after his March to the Sea was completed, Lincoln was eager
to hear the stories of how thousands of Southern civilians,
mostly women, children, and old men, were plundered,
sometimes murdered, and rendered homeless. Lincoln,
according to Sherman, laughed almost uncontrollably at
the stories. Even Sherman biographer Lee Kennett, who
writes very favorably of the general, concluded that had
the Confederates won the war, they would have been
"justified in stringing up President Lincoln and the
entire Union high command for violation of the laws of
war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants."
Henry Clay's American System had been vetoed as
unconstitutional by virtually every president beginning
with James Madison. But as soon as Lincoln took office,
with the Southern Democrats absent from Congress, it
was finally put into place, literally at gunpoint. In
1857 the average tariff rate was 15 percent, according
to Frank Taussig's classic, A Tariff History of the
United States. The Morrill Tariff more than tripled
that rate to 47 percent and it remained at that level
for decades.
The National Currency Acts nationalized the banking
system, finally, and lavish subsidies to railroad-building
corporations generated the corruption and scandals of the
Grant administrations, just as Southern statesmen had
predicted for decades. Income taxation was introduced
for the first time, along with an internal revenue
bureaucracy that has never diminished in size. All of
these policies put a great centralizing force into
motion and were the genesis of the centralized, despotic
state that Americans labor under today.
The biggest cost of the Lincoln's war was the death of
federalism and states' rights, the value of which was
expressed by John C. Calhoun several decades earlier
when he said: "The great conservative principle of our
system is in the people of the States, as parties to the
Constitutional compact, and our opponents that it is
in the supreme court . . . . Without a full practical
recognition of the rights and sovereignty of the States,
our union and liberty must perish." And they did.
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