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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 slave-owner
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).
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.
February 12, 2002
Copyright 2001 LewRockwell.com
  Thomas
J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor
of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. His book,
The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an
Unnecessary War, will be published in February.
History of Banking Fraud:
The Coming Battle
By M. W. WALBERT
The Coming Battle
documents from Congressional records, newspaper reports and writings by
the founding fathers and others a chronology of events long forgotten that
shaped our fledgling nation from 1776 to 1899. Read about the manipulation
of our money and its supply, the intentional creation of recessions,
depressions and panics, manipulation of the stock markets, and the
demonetization of silver.
Secrets of the Federal Reserve
by Eustace Mullins
Eustace Mullins' carefully
researched and documented treatise picks up from Walbert's expose' of
control of the money supply and the economy and
brings it to the mid 1980's.
The
World Order
How control of the world's money has inexorably led to an ever tighter
grip on control of the world's people.
Uranium Wars by Leuren Moret
How control of the world's people has inexorably led to wider use of
depopulation methods which include spreading radioactivity in food,
water, air, and the human genome.
Taking Back Your Power
by Allen Aslan Heart
WHAT CAN YOU DO? Stop playing THEIR game. Take back
your power. Stop paying taxes that are not legal or lawful. Stop paying
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open your mind and look for the gaps in their fences that keep the sheeple
in their pasture. Are you chattel or a real person? You are the one who
makes that choice.
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© 2007, Allen Aslan Heart / White Eagle Soaring of the Little Shell Pembina Band,
a
Treaty
Tribe of the Ojibwe Nation
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