Lincoln lied, people died
By Ilana Mercer
Posted: February 11, 2011
1:00 am Eastern
Tomorrow is Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Familiar Lincoln idolaters will
gather to celebrate the birth, on Feb. 12, 1809, of the 16th president of
the United States and finesse his role in "the butchering
business" – to use professor J. R. Pole's turn-of-phrase. Court
historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is sure to make a media appearance to
extol the virtues of the president who shed the blood of brothers in
great quantities and urged into existence the "American System"
of taxpayer-sponsored grants of government privilege to politically
connected corporations.
On publication, in 2002, of the book "The Real Lincoln: A New Look
at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War," the
"Church of Lincoln" gave battle. The enemy was the author,
Thomas J. DiLorenzo, who had exposed Lincoln lore for the lie it was –
still is. DiLorenzo had dared to examine the Great Centralizer's role in
sundering the soul of the American federal system: the sovereignty of the
states and the citizenry.
Steeped as they were in the Lockean tradition of natural rights and
individual liberty, the constitutional framers held that the unalienable
rights to life, liberty and property were best preserved within a federal
system of divided sovereignty, in which the central government was weak
and most powers devolved to the states, or to the people, respectively,
as stated in the 10th Amendment. If a state grew tyrannical, competition
from other states – and the individual's ability to switch allegiances by
exiting the political arrangement – would create something of an agora in
government. This was the framers' genius.
The concentrated powers Lincoln sought were inimical to the founders'
loose constitutional dispensation. To realize his expansionist ideals,
Lincoln would have to crush any notion of the Union as a voluntary pact
between sovereign states and individuals.
Was
"Honest Abe" worthy of the moniker? In "Lincoln
Unmasked," Thomas J. DiLorenzo takes on historical assumptions about
16th president
By Lincoln's admission, he prosecuted the war between the Union States of
the North and the Southern Confederate States in order to maintain the
Union; he vowed to so do "by freeing all the slaves or without
freeing any slave," as Mark Bostridge conceded uncontroversially in
the Times Literary Supplement (Dec. 10, 2010). Duly, Lincoln's
"Emancipation Proclamation" guaranteed that slaves were freed
only in regions of the Confederacy still inaccessible to the Union army.
Union soldiers, for their part, were permitted to seize slaves in rebel
territory and put them to work. In areas loyal to the North, slaves were
not emancipated. After the war, Lincoln offered little land to the freed
men; parceling off the spoils to his constituent power base: the railroad
and mining companies.
The North was no more fighting to abolish slavery than the South was
fighting to preserve it: A mere 15 percent, or thereabouts, of
Southerners owned slaves.
The
"pseudo-intellectuals who [are] devoted to pulling the wool over the
public's eyes" have a lot to answer for. Lincoln's violent,
unconstitutional revolution took the lives of 620,000 individuals
(including 50,000 Southern civilians, blacks included), maimed thousands
and brought about "the near destruction of 40 percent of the
nation's economy." "The costs of an action cannot be dismissed
as irrelevant to morality," wrote the Mises Institute's David Gordon
in "Secession, State & Liberty." Almost every other country
at the time chose the path of peaceful emancipation. Yet today's
Americans look upon the terrible forces Lincoln unleashed as glorious
events, the native appetite having habituated to carnage over time.
Lincoln lovers like to claim that the Constitution ratified in 1788
forbade peaceful secession and authorized a federal government of
so-called limited, delegated powers to invade and occupy any seceding
state, declare martial law, subdue secessionists by force, burn and
ransack entire cities and then establish a military dictatorship over
those states lasting a dozen years.
Suppose this indeed is the case, and that it was perfectly constitutional
to intentionally wage war on civilians, to imprison without trial
thousands of Northern citizens, jail – even execute – people who refused
to take an oath of loyalty to Lord Lincoln, declare martial law,
confiscate private property, censor telegraph lines and shut down
newspapers for opposing the war, incarcerating their editors and owners.
Say, for the sake of argument, that it was indeed lawful to suspend the
Bill of Rights, the writ of habeas corpus and the international law.
If it endorsed, or even accommodated, what Lincoln did, including his
disregard for the Ninth and 10th Amendments, and his violation of the
Second, then the Constitution is categorically evil and
self-contradictory.
The more plausible explanation is that, in 1861, Lincoln kidnapped and
killed the Constitution. The Jacobins who lionize Lincoln's actions (by
referring to his billowing prose) have been covering up his crimes and
ignoring the consequences of his coup ever since.
Ilana Mercer is a libertarian writer and a fellow at the
Jerusalem Institute for Market
Studies, an independent, nonprofit, economic-policy think tank. By
popular demand, Ilana’s libertarian manifesto,
"Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society," is
back in print. To learn more about Ilana and her work, visit
IlanaMercer.com. To comment on
this column, go to Ilana's
blog.
Read more:
Lincoln lied, people died
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=262117#ixzz1Dry6rDI0
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=262117
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