“Lincoln
is theology, not historiology. He is a faith, he is a church, he is a religion,
and he has his own priests and acolytes, most of whom . . . are passionately
opposed to anybody telling the truth about him . . . with rare exceptions, you
can’t believe what any major Lincoln scholar tells you about Abraham Lincoln
and race.”–Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced into Glory,
p. 114
The author
of the above quotation, Lerone Bennett, Jr., was the executive editor of Ebony
magazine for several decades, beginning in 1958. He is a distinguished
African-American author of numerous books, including a biography of Martin
Luther King, Jr. He spent twenty years researching and writing his book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream,
from which he drew the above conclusion about the so-called Lincoln scholars
and how they have lied about Lincoln for generations. For obvious reasons, Mr.
Bennett is incensed over how so many lies have been told about Lincoln and
race.
Few
Americans have ever been taught the truth about Lincoln and race, but it is all
right there in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (CW),
and in his actions and behavior throughout his life. For example, he said the
following:
“Free them [i.e. the slaves] and make them politically and
socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this . . . . We cannot
then make them equals” (CW, vol. II, p. 256.
“What I would most desire would be the separation of the white
and black races” (CW, vol. II, p. 521).
“I have no
purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black
races . . . . I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I
belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the
contrary” (CW, vol. III, p, 16). (Has there ever been a clearer definition of
“white supremacist”?).
“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any
way the social and political equality of the white and black races . . . . I am
not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of
qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people” (CW, vol.
III, pp. 145-146).
“I will to the very last stand by the law of this state
[Illinois], which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes” (CW, vol.
III, p. 146).
“Senator Douglas remarked . . . that . . . this government was
made for the white people and not for the negroes. Why, in point of mere fact,
I think so too” (CW, vol. II, p. 281)
Lincoln was also a lifelong advocate of “colonization,” or the
deportation of black people from America. He was a “manager” of the Illinois
Colonization Society, which procured tax funding to deport the small number of
free blacks residing in the state. He also supported the Illinois constitution,
which in 1848 was amended to prohibit the immigration of black people into the
state. He made numerous speeches about “colonization.” “I have said that the
separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation . . . .
such separation must be effected by colonization” (CW, vol. II, p. 409). And,
“Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and . . . favorable to . . .
our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime” (CW, vol. II, p.
409). Note how Lincoln referred to black people as “the African,” as though
they were alien creatures. “The place I am thinking about having for a colony,”
he said, “is in Central America. It is nearer to us than Liberia” (CW, vol. V,
pp. 373-374).
Bennett also documents how Lincoln so habitually used the N word
that his cabinet members – and many others – were shocked by his crudeness,
even during a time of pervasive white supremacy, North and South. He was also a
very big fan of “black face” minstrel shows, writes Bennett.
For
generations, the so-called Lincoln scholars claimed without any documentation
that Lincoln suddenly gave up on his “dream” of deporting all the black people
sometime in the middle of the war, even though he allocated millions of dollars
for a “colonization” program in Liberia during his administration. But the
book Colonization After Emancipation by Phillip
Magness and Sebastian Page, drawing on documents from the British and American
national archives, proved that Lincoln was hard at work until his dying day
plotting with Secretary of State William Seward the deportation of all the
freed slaves. The documents produced in this book show Lincoln’s negotiations
with European governments to purchase land in Central America and elsewhere for
“colonization.” They were even counting how many ships it would take to
complete the task.
Lincoln’s
Slavery-Forever Speech: The First Inaugural
Lincoln’s first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1861,
is probably the most powerful defense of slavery ever made by an American
politician. In the speech Lincoln denies having any intention to interfere with
Southern slavery; supports the federal Fugitive Slave Clause of the
Constitution, which compelled citizens of non-slave states to capture runaway
slaves; and also supported a constitutional amendment known as the Corwin
Amendment that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering
in Southern slavery, thereby enshrining it explicitly in the text of the U.S.
Constitution.
Lincoln stated at the outset of his first inaugural address that
“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution
of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to
do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Furthermore, “Those who nominated
and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar
declarations and had never recanted them; and more than this, they placed in
the [Republican Party] platform for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves
and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read: Resolved, that
the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right
of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to
its own judgment exclusively, is essential to the balance of power on which the
perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend . . .” By “domestic
institutions” Lincoln meant slavery.
Lincoln
also strongly supported the Fugitive Slave Clause and the 1850 Fugitive Slave
Act in his first inaugural address by reminding his audience that the Clause is
a part of the Constitution that he, and all members of Congress, swore to
defend. In fact, the Fugitive Slave Act was strongly enforced all during the
Lincoln administration, as documented by the scholarly book, The Slave Catchers, by historian Stanley Campbell
(University of North Carolina Press, 2011). “The Fugitive Slave Law remained in
force and was executed by federal marshals” all during the Lincoln regime,
writes Campbell. For example, he writes that “the docket for the [Superior]
Court [of the District of Columbia] listed the claims of twenty-eight different
slave owners for 101 runaway slaves. In the two months following the court’s
decision [that the law was applicable to the District], 26 fugitive slaves were
returned to their owners . . .” This was in Washington, D.C., Lincoln’s own
residence.
Near the
end of his first inaugural address (seven paragraphs from the end) Lincoln
makes his most powerful defense of slavery by saying: “I understand a proposed
amendment to the Constitution . . . has passed Congress, to the effect that the
Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the
States, including that of persons held to service [i.e., slaves]. To avoid
misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of
particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be
implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its
being made express and irrevocable” (emphasis added).
The Corwin
Amendment, named for Rep. Thomas Corwin of Ohio, said:“No amendment shall be
made to the Constitution which shall authorize or give to Congress the power to
abolish or interfere, within any state, the domestic institutions thereof,
including that of persons held to labor [i.e., slaves] or service by the laws
of said State.”
After all the Southern members of Congress had left, the
exclusively-Northern U.S. Congress voted in favor of the Corwin Amendment by a
vote of 133-65 in the House of Representatives on February 28, 1861, and by a
vote of 24-12 in the U.S. Senate on March 2, two days before Lincoln’s
inauguration.
Lincoln
lied in his first inaugural address when he said that he had not seen the
Corwin Amendment. Not only did he support the amendment in his speech; it was
his idea, as documented by Doris Kearns-Goodwin in her worshipful book on
Lincoln entitled Team of Rivals. Based on primary
sources, Goodwin writes on page 296 that after he was elected and before he was
inaugurated Lincoln “instructed Seward to introduce these proposals in the
Senate Committee of Thirteen without indicating they issued from Springfield.”
“These proposals” were 1) the Corwin Amendment; and 2) a federal law to nullify
personal liberty laws created by several states to allow them to nullify the
Fugitive Slave Act.
In 1860-61 Lincoln and the Republican Party fiercely defended
Southern slavery while only opposing the extension of slavery into the new
territories. They gave three reasons for this:
(1) “Many
northern whites . . . wanted to keep slaves out of the [new territories] in
order to keep blacks out. The North was a pervasively racist society . . . .
Bigots, they sought to bar African-American slaves from the West,” wrote
University of Virginia historian Michael Holt in his book, The Fate of Their Country (p.
27).
(2) Northerners did not want to have to compete for jobs with
black people, free or slave. Lincoln himself said that “we” want to preserve
the territories for “free white labor”.
(3) If slaves were brought into the territories it could inflate
the congressional representation of the Democratic Party once a territory
became a state because of the three-fifths clause of the Constitution that
counted five slaves as three persons for purposes of determining how many
congressional representatives each state would have. The Republican Party
feared that this might further block their economic policy agenda of high
protectionist tariffs to protect Northern manufacturers from competition;
corporate welfare for road, canal, and railroad-building corporations; a national
bank; and a giving away, rather than selling, of federal land (mostly to
mining, timber, and railroad corporations). Professor Holt quotes Ohio
Congressman Joshua Giddings explaining: “To give the south the preponderance of
political power would be itself to surrender our tariff, our internal
improvements [a.k.a. corporate welfare], our distribution of proceeds of public
lands . . .” (p. 28).
Lincoln
called the Emancipation Proclamation a “war measure,” which meant that if the
war ended the next day, it would become null and void. It only applied to
“rebel territory” and specifically exempted by name areas of the South that were under Union
Army control at the time, such as most of the parishes of Louisiana; and entire
states like West Virginia, the last slave state to enter the union, having been
created during the war by the Republican Party. That is why historian James
Randall wrote that it “freed no one.” The apparent purpose was to incite slave
rebellions, which it failed to do. Slavery was finally ended in 1866 by the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, with virtually no assistance from
Lincoln, as described by Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer David Donald
in his book, Lincoln. On page 545 of his magnum opus David
Donald writes of how Lincoln refused to lift a finger to help the genuine
abolitionists accumulate votes in Congress for the Thirteenth Amendment.
Stories that he did help, such as the false tale told in Steven Spielberg’s
movie about Lincoln, are based on pure “gossip,” not documented history, wrote
Donald.
Lincoln
Promises War Over Tax Collection
In contrast to his compromising stance on slavery, Lincoln was
totally and completely uncompromising on the issue of tax collection in his
first inaugural address, literally threatening war over it. For decades,
Northerners had been attempting to plunder Southerners (and others) with high
protectionist tariffs. There was almost a war of secession in the late 1820s
over the “Tariff of Abominations” of 1828 that increased the average tariff
rate (essentially a sales tax in imports) to 45%. The agricultural South would
have been forced to pay higher prices for clothing, farm tools, shoes, and
myriad other manufactured products that they purchased mostly from Northern
businesses. South Carolina nullified the tariff, refusing to collect it, and a
compromise was eventually reached to reduce the tariff rate over a ten-year
period.
By 1857 the average tariff rate had declined to about 15%, and
tariff revenues accounted for at least 90% of all federal tax revenue. This was
the high water mark of free trade in the nineteenth century. Then, with the
Republican Party in control of Congress and the White House, the average tariff
rate was increased, by 1863, back up to 47%, starting with the Morrill Tariff,
which was signed into law on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln’s
inauguration by Pennsylvania steel industry protectionist President James
Buchanan. (It had first passed in the House of Representatives during the
1859-60 session).
Understanding that the Southern states that had seceded and had
no intention of continuing to send tariff revenues to Washington, D.C., Lincoln
threatened war over it. “[T]here needs to be no bloodshed or violence,” he said
in his first inaugural address, “and there shall be none unless it is forced
upon the national authority.”
And what
could “force” the “national authority” to commit acts of “violence” and
“bloodshed”? Lincoln explained in the next sentence: “The power confided in me
will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government
and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for
these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among
the people anywhere.” “Pay up or die; the American union is no longer
voluntary” was his principal message. In Lincoln’s mind, the union was more
like what would become the Soviet union than the original, voluntary union of
the founding fathers. He kept his promise by invading the Southern states with
an initial 75,000 troops after duping South Carolinians into firing upon Fort
Sumter (where no one was harmed, let alone killed).
The
Stated Purpose of the War
The U.S. Senate issued a War Aims Resolution that said: “[T]his
war is not waged . . . in any spirit of oppression, or for any purpose of
conquest or subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the
rights or established institutions of those [Southern] states, but to defend .
. . the Constitution, and to preserve the Union . . .” By “established
institutions” of the Southern states they meant slavery.
Like the U.S. Senate, Lincoln also clearly stated that the
purpose of the war was to “save the union” and not to interfere with Southern
slavery. In a famous August 22, 1862 letter to New York Tribune editor Horace
Greeley, he wrote that:
“My paramount objective 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; and if I could save it by freeing some
and leaving others alone I would also do that.” Of course, Lincoln’s war
destroyed the voluntary union of the founding fathers and replaced it with an
involuntary union held together by threat of invasion, bloodshed, conquest, and
subjugation.
The Very
Definition of Treason
Treason is defined by Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S.
Constitution as follows: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only
in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid
and Comfort.” The most important word here is “them.” As in all the founding
documents, “United States” is always in the plural, signifying that the “free
and independent states,” as they are called in the Declaration of Independence,
are united in forming a compact or confederacy with other states. Levying war
against “them” means levying war against individual states, not something
called “the United States government.” Therefore, Lincoln’s invasion and
levying of war upon the Southern states is the very definition of treason in
the Constitution.
Lincoln
took it upon himself to arbitrarily redefine treason, not by amending the
Constitution, but by using brute military force. His new definition was any
criticism of himself, his administration, and his policies. He illegally suspended the writ of Habeas
Corpus (illegal according to this own attorney general, Robert Bates) and had
the military arrest and imprison without due process tens of thousands of Northern-state
citizens, including newspaper editors, the Maryland legislature, the mayor of
Baltimore, the grandson of Francis Scott Key who was a Baltimore newspaper
editor, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, his chief critic in the
U.S. Congress, and essentially anyone overheard criticizing the government.
(See Freedom Under Lincoln by Dean Sprague and Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln by James
Randall).
More than 300 Northern newspapers were shut down for criticizing
the Lincoln regime as documented by James Randall, the preeminent Lincoln
scholar of the twentieth century.
Lincoln’s
Real Agenda: A Mercantilist Empire
Lincoln began his political career in 1832 as a Whig. Northern
Whigs like Lincoln were the party of the corporate plutocracy who wanted to use
the coercive powers of government to line the pockets of their big business
benefactors (and of themselves). They proclaimed to stand for what their
political predecessor, Alexander Hamilton, called the “American System.” This
was really an Americanized version of the rotten, corrupt system of British
“mercantilism” that the colonists had rebelled against. Its planks included
protectionist tariffs to benefit Northern manufacturers and their banking and
insurance industry business associates; a government-run national bank to
provide cheap credit to politically-connected businesses; and “internal
improvement subsidies,” which we today would call “corporate welfare,” for
canal-, road-, and railroad-building corporations. So when Lincoln first ran
for political office in Illinois in 1832 he announced: “I am humble Abraham
Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the
legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am
in favor of a national bank . . . in favor of the internal improvements system
and a high protective tariff.” He would devote his entire political career for
the next twenty-nine years on that agenda.
The major opposition to Lincoln’s agenda of a mercantilist
empire modeled after the British empire had always been from the South, as
Presidents Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and Tyler, among others, vetoed
or obstructed Whig and later, Republican, legislation. There were Southern
supporters of this agenda, and Northern, Jeffersonian opponents of it, but it
is nevertheless true that the overwhelming opposition to this Northern,
Hamiltonian scheme came from the Jeffersonian South.
Henry Clay
was the leader of the Whigs until his death in 1852, and Lincoln once claimed
that he got all of his political ideas from Clay, who he eulogized as “the beau
ideal of a statesman.” In reality, the Hamilton/Clay/Lincoln “American System”
was best described by Edgar Lee Masters, who was Clarence Darrow’s law partner
and a renowned playwright (author of The Spoon River Anthology).
In his book, Lincoln the Man (p. 27),
Masters wrote that:“Henry clay was the champion of that political system which
doles favors to the strong in order to win and to keep their adherence to the
government. His system offered shelter to devious schemes and corrupt
enterprises . . . He was the beloved son of Alexander Hamilton with his corrupt
funding schemes, his superstitions concerning the advantage of a public debt,
and a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone. His
example and his doctrines led to the creation of a party that had not platform
to announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else.”
This was the agenda that Abraham Lincoln devoted his entire
political life to. The “American System” was finally fully enacted with
Lincoln’s Pacific Railroad Bill, which led to historic corruption during the
Grant administration with its gargantuan subsidies to railroad corporations and
others; fifty years of high, protectionist tariffs that continued to plunder
Agricultural America, especially the South and the Mid-West, for the benefit of
the industrial North; the nationalization of the money supply with the National
Currency Acts and Legal Tender Acts; and the beginnings of a welfare state with
veterans’ pensions. Most importantly, the system of federalism that was
established by the founding fathers was all but destroyed with a massive shift
in political power to Washington, D.C. and away from the people, due to the
abolition (at gunpoint) of the rights of nullification and secession.
Lincoln’
Biggest Failure
Slavery was ended peacefully everywhere else in the world during
the nineteenth century. This includes Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut,
and New York, where slaves were once used to build slave ships that sailed out
of New York, Providence, Hartford, Providence, and Boston harbors. There were
still slaves in New York City as late as 1853.
Nobel
prize-winning economist Robert Fogel and co-author Stanley Engerman, in their
book, Time on the Cross, describe how the British, Spanish,
and French empires, as well as the Swedes, Danes, and Dutch, ended slavery
peacefully during the nineteenth century. Whenever slaves did participate in
wars in Central America and elsewhere, it was because they were promised
freedom by one side in the war; the purpose of the wars, however, was never to
free the slaves.
The British simply used tax dollars to purchase the freedom of
the slaves and then legally ended the practice. The cost of the “Civil War” to
Northern taxpayers alone would have been sufficient to achieve the same thing
in the U.S. Instead, the slaves were used as political pawns in a war that
ended with the death of as many as 850,000 Americans according to the latest
research (the number was 620,000 for the past 100 years or so), with more than
double that amount maimed for life, physically and psychologically. (Lincoln
did make a speech in favor of “compensated emancipation” in the border states
but insisted that it be accompanied by deportation of any emancipated slaves.
He never used his “legendary” political skills, however, to achieve any such
outcome, as a real statesman would have done – minus the deportation).
The Glory
of the Coming of the Lord?
By the mid
nineteenth century the world had evolved such that international law and the
laws of war condemned the waging of war on civilians. It was widely recognized
that civilians would always become casualties in any war, but to intentionally target
them was a war crime.
The Lincoln regime reversed that progress and paved the way for
all the gross wartime atrocities of the twentieth century by waging war on
Southern civilians for four long years. Rape, pillage, plunder, the bombing and
burning of entire cities populated only by civilians was the Lincolnian way of
waging war – not on foreign invaders but on his own fellow American citizens.
(Lincoln did not consider secession to be legal; therefore, he thought of all
citizens of the Southern states to be American citizens, not citizens of the
Confederate government).
General Sherman said in a letter to his wife that his purpose
was “extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the
trouble, but the people” (Letter from Sherman to Mrs. Sherman, July 31, 1862).
Two years later, he would order his artillery officers to use the homes of
Atlanta occupied by women and children as target practice for four days, while
much of the rest of the city was a conflagration. The remaining residents were
then kicked out of their homes – in November with the onset of winter. Ninety
percent of Atlanta was demolished after the Confederate army had left the city.
General
Philip Sheridan similarly terrorized the civilians of the Shenandoah Valley in
Virginia. All of this led historian Lee Kennett, in his biography of Sherman,
to honestly state that “had the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put
them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal,
they would have found themselves 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” (Lee Kennett, Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians
During Sherman’s Campaign, p. 286).
About All
Those Statues
Professor
Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was perhaps the most famous academic libertarian
in the world during the last half of the twentieth century. A renowned Austrian
School economist, he also wrote widely on historical topics, especially war and
foreign policy. In a 1994 essay entitled “Just War” (online at https://mises.org/library/just-war), Rothbard
argued that the only two American wars that would qualify as just wars (defined
as wars to ward off a threat of coercive domination) were the American
Revolution and the South’s side in the American “Civil War.” Without getting
into his detailed explanation of this, his conclusion is especially relevant
and worth quoting at length:
“[I]n this War Between the States, the South may have fought for
its sacred honor, but the Northern war was the very opposite of honorable. We
remember the care with which the civilized nations had developed classical
international law. Above all, civilians must not be targeted; wars must be
limited. But the North insisted on creating a conscript army, a nation in arms,
and broke the 19th-century rules of war by specifically plundering and
slaughtering civilians, by destroying civilian life and institutions so as to
reduce the South to submission. Sherman’s famous march through Georgia was one
of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past
century-and-a-half. Because by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and
Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous
20th century. . . . As Lord Acton, the great libertarian historian, put it, the
historian, in the last analysis, must be a moral judge. The muse of the
historian, he wrote, is not Clio but Rhadamanthus, the legendary avenger of
innocent blood. In that spirit, we must always remember, we must never forget,
we must put in the dock and hang higher than Haman, those who, in modern times,
opened the Pandora’s Box of genocide and the extermination of civilians:
Sherman, Grant, and Lincoln.
Perhaps, some day, their statues will be toppled and melted
down; their insignias and battle flag will be desecrated, and their war songs
tossed into the fire.
Perhaps,
some day. But in the meantime, and for the past 150 years, the mountain of lies
that has concocted the Lincoln Myth has been invoked over and over again to
“justify” war after war, all disguised as some great moral crusade, but in
reality merely a tool to enrich the already wealthy-beyond-their-wildest-dreams
military/industrial complex and its political promoter class. As Robert Penn
Warren wrote in his 1960 book, The Legacy of the Civil War,
the Lincoln Myth, painstakingly fabricated by the Republican Party, long ago
created a “psychological heritage” that contends that “the Northerner, with his
Treasury of Virtue” caused by his victory in the “Civil War,” feels as though
he has “an indulgence, a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and
future.” This “indulgence,” wrote Warren, “is the justification for our
crusades of 1917-1918 and 1941-1945 and our diplomacy of righteousness, with
the slogan of unconditional surrender and universal rehabilitation for others” (emphasis added). Robert Penn Warren
believed that most Americans were content with all of these lies about their
own history, the work of what he called “the manipulations of propaganda
specialists,” referring to those who describe themselves as “Lincoln scholars.”
Thomas J.
DiLorenzo [send him
mail] is professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland and
the author of The Real Lincoln; How Capitalism Saved America; Lincoln Unmasked; Hamilton’s Curse; Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government;
and most recently, The Problem With Socialism.
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