Editor’s note : A nice little resume on Abraham Lincoln, The Great Emancipator and Defender of Freedom, Liberty and Justice for All.

It’s old “American History”, and of little interest to few people other than “Americans” who have been fed this myth for so many years: Abraham Lincoln the “Ideal” of leaders and defenders of human rights.

The writer, who published this in her blog, is right… as children they were all fed Abraham Lincoln, right up there after George Washington, just below God, as the Defender of Freedom and Liberty, the Savior of the Union.

“…we still await a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”…seven score and eight years later,” she writes.

Things look pretty messy and I am sure it is slippery going in the halls of the White House this morning.

“The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man.  There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.” ~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Using My Liberty

Mary Diane Goin

2/22/11

“The War between the States established …  this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers.”

~Woodrow Wilson~

Most Americans do not know the real history of their country. That’s because federalist educators have systematically employed revisionists to depict its people and events from a statist worldview, ensuring generations of patriotic nationalists who never question the decisions of their government.

This carefully crafted propaganda is especially disconcerting when it comes to Abraham Lincoln, our sixteenth President.  Esteemed by most Americans as the greatest man to ever hold the office, he is also known as “The Great Emancipator” and “Honest Abe.”

Lincoln is admired by leaders all over the world, and our schoolchildren are encouraged to emulate his greatness as a model statesman.  Even many Christians hold up Lincoln as an example of piety and godliness in the midst of trying times.

But history outside the classroom tell a disturbingly different story.  These facts cannot be successfully airbrushed or explained away to discerning freedom lovers.  As seen through the eyes of individual liberties and one’s oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, Lincoln’s shameful legacy is revealed.

Thomas DiLorenzo is a formidable Lincolnologist and author of the book Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe.

With DiLorenzo’s help and contributions from other researchers, let’s delve into history and separate the myth from the man:

Myth: Lincoln invaded the South to free the slaves.

Ending slavery and racial injustice is not why the North invaded.  As Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley on Aug. 22, 1862:

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery.  If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”

Congress announced to the world on July 22, 1861, that the purpose of the war was not “interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states” (i.e., slavery), but to preserve the Union “with the rights of the several states unimpaired.” At the time of Fort Sumter (April 12, 1861), only the seven states of the Deep South had seceded.^[1]

There were more slaves in the Union than out of it, and Lincoln had no plans to free any of them.

Myth: Lincoln championed equality and natural rights.

His words and, more important, his actions, repudiate this myth.  “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races,” he announced in his Aug.  21, 1858, debate with Stephen Douglas.  “I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.” And, “Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this.  We cannot, then, make them equals.”

Lincoln was also a lifelong advocate of “colonization” or shipping all black people to Africa, Central America, Haiti–anywhere but here.  “I cannot make it better known than it already is,” he stated in a Dec.  1, 1862, Message to Congress, “that I strongly favor colonization.”^[1]

William Lloyd Garrison, the most prominent of all abolitionists, concluded that Lincoln “had not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins.”

Garrison and other abolitionists were 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.^[2]

Secretary of State William Seward acknowledged that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in states in rebellion against the United States and not to slaves in states not in rebellion.

Lincoln admitted in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase: “The original emancipation proclamation has no legal justification, except as a military measure.“

In his book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett, Jr.  writes, “On at least fourteen occasions between 1854 and 1860 Lincoln said unambiguously that he believed the Negro race was inferior to the White race.

In Galesburg, he referred to ‘the inferior races.’ Who were ‘the inferior races’? African Americans, he said, Mexicans, who he called mongrels …”

For his entire adult life, Lincoln was a member of the American Colonization Society.  “There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children,” he said in his 1852 eulogy to Henry Clay..  He held these views until the day he died.  As Joe Sobran has remarked, Lincoln’s position was that black people could be “equal” all right, but not here in the U.S.^[3]

Myth: Lincoln was a defender of the Constitution.

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–roughly 60 times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam. 

Myth: War was necessary to end slavery

“During the 19th century, dozens of countries, including the British and Spanish empires, ended slavery peacefully through compensated emancipation.  Among such countries were Argentina, Colombia, Chile, all of Central America, Mexico, Bolivia, Uruguay, the French and Danish colonies, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela.

Lincoln did propose compensated emancipation for the border states, but coupled his proposal with deportation of any freed slaves.  He failed to see it through, however.^[1]

It’s time to face the truth and teach it to our children: Lincoln was neither honorable nor honest!

In “Beheading the Great Messiah”, libertarian Karen De Coster writes:

“Abraham Lincoln, as most of us were told in Mr. Smith’s 9^th-grade history class, was a God-sent savior, a brilliant, articulate, and diversity-loving individual, and the Messiah of the great “Union.” Most of us were brainwashed on enchanting quotations from the “great man from the little log cabin.”

Lincoln was a ruthless dictator of the most contemptible sort.  A conniving and manipulative man, and a scoundrel at heart, he was nowhere near what old guard historians would have us believe.

Lincoln has been transformed into the indomitable icon of the American Union.  But yet, this beast ruled the country by presidential decree, exercised dictatorial powers over a free people, and proceeded to wage war without a declaration from Congress.

Lincoln blocked Southern shipping ports, justifying his actions by saying “he would enforce all laws and collect all revenues due the North.”  The blockades were an act of war.

He set his Northern Army upon the South at Fort Sumter, and set in motion one of the most brutal attacks ever upon freedom by maneuvering the South into firing the first shot at their Northern aggressors.

Lincoln was the darling candidate of the moneyed industrialists of the North.  At the core of his political tenets was a government of high import taxes, and his Republican party, whom he lead, passed the Morrill tariff into law soon after taking office…Lincoln even promised in his First Inaugural Address to “launch an invasion of any state that failed to collect its share of tariffs.”

He was committing himself to collecting customs in the South, even if that meant they would secede.  The free-market economics of the South were up for assault.

Lincoln signed ten more tariff-raising bills throughout his agonizing administration.  He manipulated the American public into the first income tax, he handed out huge land grants and monetary subsidies to transcontinental railroads (corporate welfare), and he took the nation off the gold standard, allowing the government to have absolute control over the monetary system.

Then, he virtually nationalized the banking system under the National Currency Acts in order to establish a machine for printing new money at will and to provide cheap credit for the business elite.  This mercantilist tyrant ushered in central banking, our greatest economic curse to this day.

Furthermore, his “New Army” and the slaughter effort on the South put into motion an unprecedented profusion of federal coercion against free citizens, both North and South.  By way of conscription, he assembled a vast army by presidential decree, an act of flagrant misconduct, which drafted individuals into slavery to the federal government.

Additionally, any war dissenters or advocates of a peaceful settlement with the South were jailed, and, as even Mr.  Smith knows, Habeas Corpus was abolished for the duration of the war.  He then tossed into the slammer as many as 30,000 civilians WITHOUT due process of law for reasons of criticizing the Lincoln administration, and suppressed HUNDREDS of newspapers that did not support his war effort.

After his Army stopped secession in its tracks, Lincoln created provisional courts sympathetic to Northern aggression, invented the office of Military Governor, and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which became a propaganda tool for historians in later years, though it did not free the slaves in Northern-controlled areas.”^[5] The dishonorable conduct of Lincoln’s generals during the Civil War is well documented.  The most famous example was General William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea.”

Sherman wrote a letter to one of Lincoln’s cabinet members, ­claiming that all Southerners—­soldiers and civilians alike—were ­enemies of the Union and ­recommending that they be driven from their homes and treated as “denizens (inhabitants) of the land.  Their holdings, he ­suggested, could be forcibly ­repopulated as the British had done in Northern Ireland.

The city of Atlanta, after its surrender, was burned to the ground.  An eyewitness wrote, “The city’s infrastructure was completely ­destroyed—railroads, foundries, shops, mills, schools, hotels and business offices—and “from four to five thousand houses” burned.  A mere 400 homes were left standing.  Sherman had watched the scene from horseback as he rode out of town and later remarked, “Behind us lay Atlanta, smoldering and in ruins.”^[6]

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.”^[2]

Sherman used Southern prisoners of war to clear minefields by marching them back and forth across land outside Savannah where mines were suspected.  In his own memoirs, Sherman remembers trying not to laugh as the men stepped gingerly through the fields.^[7]

Southern prisoners were also herded in front of Northern troops under Confederate artillery fire in order to force Southerners to fire on their own men.^[8]

Alexandria, Virginia was occupied by Union troops immediately following the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the town remained subject to military occupation for the duration of the war.

Because the Episcopal prayer book service made distinct mention of both the executive and the legislative departments of the government, clergy who were loyal to the Confederacy were persecuted when they refused to pray for God to bless President Lincoln.

A notorious incident was the arrest of St.  Paul’s interim minister, the Rev. Dr. K. J. Stewart, in the sanctuary in Alexandria, Virginia, on February 9, 1862.  Union troops attended with the stated purpose of provoking an incident.

During the Litany, Dr. Stewart was ordered by an attending Union officer to say the Prayer for the President of the United States that Dr. Stewart had omitted.

Dr. Stewart proceeded without paying any attention to the interruption; but a captain and six of his soldiers drew their swords and pistols, strode into the chancel, seized the clergyman while he was still kneeling, held pistols to his head, and forced him out of the church and into the streets–in his surplice and stole–and committed him to the guard-house of the 8th Illinois Cavalry.

Dr. Stewart was soon released, but was not allowed to continue to officiate at services.  Immediately thereafter, the St. Paul’s sanctuary was closed.^[9]

Benjamin Butler was another notoriously wicked Northern general.  During his occupation of New Orleans, he was outraged when a Southern lady spit at a Northern soldier who kept making advances toward her.  In retaliation, Butler issued his Order Number 28:

As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women calling themselves “ladies” of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.^[10]

This order was a “right to rape”!

According to John K. McNeill, Southern Historian, women could also be violated for the following reasons:

1. Leaving street cars when Union soldiers boarded them
2. Walking across the street rather than passing Union soldiers
3. Singing “Dixie” in public
4. Turning their backs when Union soldiers walked by

When the Mayor of New Orleans protested this order, Butler had him arrested.

Are we really to believe that Lincoln knew nothing of Sherman’s and Butler’s atrocities?  The deeds were widely reported throughout Northern newspapers during the entire campaign.^[8]

In spite of this small sample of damning evidence, why do leaders, such as our current President Barack Obama, still admire Lincoln and seek to emulate him?  The question also puzzles Carl Wicklander:

“To listen to the epithets, one might think that Abraham Lincoln was a combination of Moses, Jesus, Buddha, and this dispensation’s messiah, Barack Obama.

Judging from the adulations heaped on him, Abraham Lincoln foretold the coming civil rights movement and the work of Martin Luther King, he was the savior of the black race, and his words of wisdom are constantly repeated to justify any government program or initiative, as if they were the words of Holy Scripture.

The words of praise are so over the top.  I can’t even estimate how many times I have read newspaper editorials and letters to the editor that find some way to incorporate both Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama.  There appeared cartoons of the specter of Lincoln standing next to Mr. Obama while the latter took the oath of office.  It is simply crass and beyond the scope of reality.

If only more people knew that Lincoln’s war was not so much about slavery but about centralizing his power.  If only more people knew that despite graceful anti-slavery rhetoric, Lincoln was just fine with the institution of slavery as long as he could prevent the southern states from successfully seceding.  If only more people knew that Lincoln thought blacks were inferior to whites.

If only more people knew that once the slaves had been freed, Lincoln intended to ship them back to Africa because peaceful coexistence between the two races was an impossibility in Lincoln’s mind.  I cannot speak for dead men, but taking those considerations into account, I would find it hard for Lincoln to be deliriously overjoyed at the election of Barack Obama.

Abraham Lincoln was admired by Adolf Hitler.  Why?  Because Lincoln dissolved the Union as a compact of states and turned it into one unified nation under a centralized government.

Hitler valued Lincoln’s crushing of the seceding states because it meant that the central government had power over all the other territories and states.  Lincoln destroyed the concept of divided sovereignty, something that existed in America until that time, and brought every state under his control.

Germany, like the United States before the Civil War, was a country that before 1871 was decentralized whose disparate provinces and territories were sovereign over their own affairs.

Ensuring that divided sovereignty, the principle that each state was sovereign, was a thing of the past, Hitler could have dictatorial control over the Teutonic lands.  It worked the same way 70 years before during the American Civil War.

The ultimate consequence of Lincoln’s war was that it crushed the old republic, one that was a voluntary union, embodied in the 10th amendment, stating that the individual states were sovereign.

The Civil War, which itself did not end slavery (again, it was the 13th Amendment that accomplished that) but did end the concept of a voluntary union.  The victory of the North over the seceding southern states made the federal government supreme over all matters, nullified the 10th amendment for all intents and purposes, and made the state governments little more than satraps for the central government.

There are many conservatives today who are wailing over the expansion President Obama is making regarding the federal government.  They should know that Republicans have been among the greatest expanders of the federal government.

Whether it was the most recent Republican president or the first, Republicans have a lot of blame to put on themselves for the expansion of government.

Conservatives who bemoan that federal growth should keep in mind that Abraham Lincoln was one of the main movers and shakers of big government.  And conservatives need to reconcile those ideas of loving Lincoln while hating big government because the two go hand-in-hand.^[11]”

Here’s a Lincolnian event in American history not widely known:

In 1851, the Santee Sioux Indians in Minnesota sold twenty-four million acres of land to the federal government for $1.4 million.  By August of 1862, thousands of white settlers continued to pour into the Indian lands even though none of the money had been paid to the Santee Sioux.

There was a crop failure that year, and the Indians were starving.  The Lincoln administration refused to pay them the money they were owed, breaking yet another Indian treaty, and the starving Sioux revolted.

A short “war” ensued, with Lincoln putting one of his favorite generals, General John Pope, in charge of federal forces in Minnesota.  Pope announced that “It is my purpose to utterly exterminate them… They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties or compromise can be made.”

(Similar statements were being made at the time by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who said that to all Southern secessionists, “why, death is mercy”).

The Santee Sioux were overwhelmed by the federal army by October of 1862, at which time General Pope held hundreds of Indian men, women, and children who were considered to be prisoners of war.  The men were all herded into forts where military “trials” were held, each of which lasted about ten minutes according to David A. Nichols in Lincoln and the Indians.

They were all found guilty of murder and sentenced to death even though the lack of hard evidence was manifest and they were not given any semblance of a proper defense.  Most were condemned to death by virtue of the fact that they were merely present during a battle, during a declared (by the Indians) war.

Minnesota political authorities wanted the federal army to immediately execute all 303 of the condemned men.  Lincoln, however, was concerned that such a mass execution of so many men who had so obviously been railroaded would be looked upon in a bad light by the European powers who, at the time, were threatening to support the Confederate cause in the War for Southern Independence.

His compromise was to pare the list of condemned down to 39, with a promise to the Minnesota political establishment that the federal army would eventually kill or remove every last Indian from the state.  As a sweetener to the deal, Lincoln also offered Minnesota $2 million in federal funds.^[12]

Thomas Dilorenzo brilliantly removes the rest of the revisionist overpaint on the Lincoln portrait:

Every February…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.

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,

• provide corporate welfare subsidies for railroad and canal-building corporations (“internal improvements”),

• and develop 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…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).^[2]

Lincoln spent his 25-year off-and-on political career prior to 1857 championing the Whig project of centralized government that would engage in a kind of economic central planning.   When the extension of slavery became the overriding issue of the day, he continued to hold the centralizer’s position.

And as soon as he took office, he and the Republican party enacted what James McPherson called a “blizzard of legislation” that finally achieved the “American System,” complete with federal railroad subsidies, a tripling of the average tariff rate that would remain that high or higher long after the war ended, and centralized banking with the National Currency and Legal Tender Acts.^[13]

It was a revolution against: free-market capitalism; the principles of the Declaration of Independence; the Constitution; the system of states’ rights and federalism that was created by the founders; and the prohibitions against waging war on civilians embodied in the international law of the time as well as the canons of Western Christian civilization.

After Thomas Jefferson was elected president, the New England Federalists plotted for over a decade to secede from the Union.  Their efforts culminated in the Hartford Secession Convention of 1814, where they decided against secession.  The movement was led by George Washington’s Secretary of War and Secretary of State, Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering.

All during this time, citizens never questioned the right of any state to secede because this was the Revolutionary generation, and they revered the Jeffersonian dictum that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.  Senator Pickering announced that, because of this belief, secession was “the” principle of the American Revolution.

The Declaration of Independence was, after all, a Declaration of Secession from the British Empire.  Lincoln’s war destroyed this fundamental tenet of the Declaration.

There was also a vigorous secession movement in the “middle states” — Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York — in the late 1850s, as described by William C. Wright in The Secession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States.

As H. L. Mencken sagely pointed out in an essay on Abraham Lincoln, it was the Confederates who were fighting for consent of the governed; they no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C., and Lincoln waged war to deprive them of that consent.

Again, the U.S. Congress declared on July 22, 1861 that the purpose of the war was to destroy the secession movement (i.e., the voluntary Union) and nothing more:

“Resolved: .  .  .  That this war is not prosecuted upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and all laws made in pursuance thereof and to preserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several states unimpaired; and that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease.”

Lincoln knew that the Confederates had constitutional history on their side and so, as a slick trial lawyer, he decided to rewrite history by claiming that the Union was older than the states, and that there was never any such thing as state sovereignty over the federal government.  He claimed that the government was really created by the Declaration of Independence, which of course had no force of law like the Constitution did.

The Declaration was a Declaration of Secession, period, which makes Lincoln’s claim even more bizarre.  It is also a colossal absurdity: It is impossible for the union of two things to be older than either thing that it is a union of.  This makes as much sense as saying that a marriage can be older than either spouse.

Lincoln’s rewriting of history also repudiated the constitutionalist thinking of James Madison and other founders, who held that “a more perfect Union” was created by the Constitution, not the Declaration.  Lincoln “proved” his false history “correct” by force of arms, not by logic and debate.  Generations of court historians have repeated this spectacular lie, so that it has become part of the Lincoln legend.

The U.S.  Constitution does not allow for a dictator, but generations of historians have described Lincoln as such.  In his book, Constitutional Dictatorship, Clinton Rossiter wrote that “Dictatorship played a decisive role in the North’s successful effort to maintain the Union by force of arms …  one man was the government of the United States …  Lincoln was a great dictator …  and a true democrat.”

“Lincoln’s amazing disregard for the Constitution,” Rossiter wrote, “was considered by nobody as legal.”  “Never had the power of a dictator fallen into safer and nobler hands,” James Ford Rhodes wrote in his History of the United States.  And James G. Randall wrote in Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln that “If Lincoln was a dictator, it must be admitted that he was a benevolent dictator.”  Why it “must be” was not explained.

The reasons why all these distinguished (and pro-Lincoln) scholars have labeled him a dictator can be found in the above-mentioned books, along with Freedom Under Lincoln by Dean Sprague, Fate of Liberty by Mark Neely, Jr., and Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men by Jeffrey Hummel, to name just a few references. 

The chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney, ruled Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus to be unconstitutional (only Congress has such power), but he was ignored by Lincoln as the mass arrests of political dissenters continued.

As described by Dean Sprague in Freedom Under Lincoln (p. 161):

“The laws were silent, indictments were not found, testimony was not taken, judges did not sit, juries were not impaneled, convictions were not obtained and sentences were not pronounced.  The Anglo-Saxon concept of due process, perhaps the greatest political triumph of the ages and the best guardian of freedom, was abandoned.”

Thousands of political prisoners languished in Fort Lafayette in New York harbor, which came to be known as “The American Bastille.”

Dozens of Northern newspapers were shut down and their editors and owners were imprisoned if they opposed the Lincoln administration.

On May 18, 1864 Lincoln sent the following order to General John Dix: “You will take possession by military force, of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce … and prohibit any further publication thereof … you are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison …  the editors, proprietors and publishers of the aforesaid newspapers.”

All telegraph communication was censored, the railroads were nationalized, and federal troops were ordered to interfere with Northern elections to ensure Republican victories.

Lincoln won New York state by 7000 votes “with the help of federal bayonets,” wrote Pulitzer Prize—winning Lincoln biographer David Donald in Lincoln Reconsidered.  Several dozen members of the Maryland legislature were thrown into military prison along with the mayor of Baltimore and Congressman Henry May of Maryland so that they could not meet to discuss secession.

The most outspoken member of the Democratic Party opposition, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham, was deported after 67 armed federal soldiers broke into his Dayton, Ohio home and arrested him.

He had been vehemently protesting the suspension of habeas corpus and other constitutional infringements on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Lincoln apparently could not tolerate such talk.  The Ohio Democratic Party made Vallandigham its gubernatorial nominee even though he had fled to Canada.

The border states were systematically disarmed, and two “confiscation acts” were written into law in which any U.S. citizen could have all of his private property confiscated by the government for such “crimes” as “falsely exalting the motives of the traitors”; “overstating the success of our adversaries”; and “inflaming party spirit among ourselves.”

Informers who turned in their neighbors could keep 50 percent of their neighbors’ property; the other half when to the U.S. Treasury.

Lincoln was the political “son” of Alexander Hamilton, who first championed mercantilism–the economic and political system that prevailed in Europe in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries under which special privileges were granted by kings and parliaments to merchant elite in return for their political and economic support.

It is the system that Adam Smith railed against in his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations.  Many of the pilgrims who came to America fled this corrupt system.  King George’s attempt to impose this system on the American colonists, with all its state-sponsored monopolies and high taxes, led to the American Revolution.

There was always a group of ambitious politicians in America who wanted to bring this corrupt system across the Atlantic because, as corrupt and impoverishing as it was, it was a convenient tool for the accumulation of political power.

First, there was Hamilton and the Federalists, then Henry Clay and the Whigs, and then Lincoln and the Republicans.  They all championed high protectionist tariffs that would plunder consumers for the benefit of manufacturers, corporate welfare for railroad and road-building corporations, and a central bank that could print money that was not redeemable in gold or silver that could finance all these adventures.  They had almost no success at all until the entire agenda was imposed on the nation at gunpoint during Lincoln’s war.

The Federalist/Whig/Republican policy of mercantilism was finally put into place during the first eighteen months of the Lincoln administration.  The average tariff rate was tripled, and would remain that high or higher for decades after the war.  The building of the government-subsidized transcontinental railroad (in California) was commenced even though a desperate war was being waged.

The National Currency Acts and the Legal Tender Act finally created a central bank that could issue currency (greenbacks) that was not immediately redeemable in gold or silver.

An income tax was adopted for the first time ever, as was military conscription, pervasive excise taxation, and the internal revenue bureaucracy was created.  It was the triumph of American mercantilism and the beginning of the end of laissez faire capitalism in America.”^[3]

From 1789 until 1865 the citizens of all states, North and South, made periodic use of the principles of nullification, interposition, and even the threat of secession, to protect themselves from federal judicial tyranny (and federal tyranny in general).

They invoked the Jeffersonian judicial philosophy to oppose protectionist tariffs, military conscription, the War of 1812, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Bank of the United States, trade embargos, and other unconstitutional usurpations (See James J. Kilpatrick, The Sovereign States: Notes of a Citizen of Virginia). 

Lincoln’s war ended citizen opposition to federal judicial tyranny.  As Forrest McDonald wrote in States’ Rights and the Union (p. 224), one consequence of Lincoln’s war was that:

[T]he [Supreme] court was the sole and final arbiter of constitutional controversies.  No longer could a Jefferson arise to insist that the other branches of the federal government had coequal authority to determine constitutionality.  No more could a Calhoun arise to defend a doctrine of interposition or nullification.

Jefferson, Tucker, Taylor and Calhoun would not be at all surprised to learn that the consequence of this has been rampant federal judicial tyranny.

Indeed, generations of leftists have celebrated the fact that Lincoln did more than anyone to destroy constitutional limitations on federal power.  In Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln the “progressive” historian James Randall wrote approvingly of the fact that Lincoln’s trashing of the Constitution in the North during the war created precedents for “a living constitution” that, with creative interpretations by the federal judiciary, could become “a vehicle of life.” He criticized “excessive reliance” on the ideas of “a by-gone generation.”^[14]

I ask you, patriot, does any of this sound disturbingly familiar today?

Abraham Lincoln paved the way for constitutional usurpers and Big Brother builders such as Woodrow Wilson and FDR.  Some experts, such as Ivan Eland, author of Recarving Rushmore, include LBJ, the Bushes, JFK and (oh, my!) Reagan as the worst Presidents (ranked on peace, prosperity, and liberty).

Here’s who made the Top 10 List, based on Eland’s rating system: (You might be surprised!)

1.   John Tyler

2.   Grover Cleveland

3.   Martin van Buren

4.   Rutherford B. Hayes

5.   Chester A Arthur

6.   Warren G Harding

7.   George Washington (expanded central power but did refuse a third term)

8.   Jimmy Carter

9.   Dwight D Eisenhower

10. Calvin Coolidge

Not everyone will agree with Eland’s rankings, but no one can deny historical facts and the distressing consequences we’re living under today.

Lincoln was wrong.  We remember what he said and did, and we still await a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”…seven score and eight years later.

“The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man.  There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.”

~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

ENDNOTES

[1.] Thomas DiLorenzo Lincoln Myths

[2.] Dilorenzo The Mythical Lincoln

[3.] Dilorenzo Lincoln’s Second American Revolution

[4.] Ibid.

[5.] Karen De Coster Beheading the Great Messiah

[6.] Wall Street Journal The Torching of Atlanta

[7.] Southern Historical Society The Treatment of Prisoners During the War Between the States

[8.] John K.  McNeill The Other Side of the Coin

[9.] Ruth Lincoln Kaye The History of St.  Paul’s Episcopal Church, Alexandria, Virginia.  Springfield, Va.: Goetz Print.  Co., 1984)

[10.] Robert Werlich, “Beast” Buller: The Incredible Career of Union Major General Benjamin F.  Butler (Washington, D.C.: The Quaker Press, 1962)

[11.] Carl Wicklander Abraham’s Lincoln’s Birthday

[12.] Thomas Dilorenzo America’s Disgraceful History of Military Trials

[13.] Dilorenzo Was Lincoln a Tyrant?

[14.] Dilorenzo, Lincolnian Judicial Tyranny