The following is the foreword
that I have written for the outstanding new piece of Lincoln scholarship, Lincoln as He Really Was, by Charles T. Pace.
Despite
the fact that there are well over 10,000 books in print about Abraham Lincoln
it is almost impossible for the average American – or anyone else – to know the
truth about the real Lincoln. Having given hundreds of public
presentations, appeared on dozens of radio talk shows (including the Rush
Limbaugh Radio Show), and participated in numerous debates on the subject of
Lincoln, I have learned that the average American knows nothing at all about
the man except for the few slogans and platitudes that we are all taught in
elementary school (and then repeated endlessly in the popular culture).
As an elementary school
student in the Pennsylvania public schools I was taught that Lincoln was so
honest that he once walked six miles to return a penny to a merchant who had
mistakenly undercharged him. Decades later, when I debated Harry Jaffa
who, like the man he called “Father Abraham,” was a student of rhetoric (but
not of American history), Jaffa assured the Oakland, California audience of
several hundred that Lincoln’s political speeches were in fact “the words of
God.” (This presumably did not include his dirty jokes, for which was
famous).
Abraham Lincoln is the only
American president that has literally been deified like a Roman emperor (Like
Julius Caesar, his image is the first to be placed on his country’s
coinage). Lincoln’s deification eventually spread to the presidency, and
then to the entire federal government. The Lincoln myth is thus the
ideological cornerstone of the global American empire, and has been for
generations. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in The Legacy of the Civil War, the deification of
Lincoln (and of the government in general) has been used to argue that the
“Civil War” left the U.S. government with “a treasury of virtue,” a “plenary
indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future.” Consequently,
American foreign policy intervention anywhere in the world is said to be always
virtuous, by definition, because it is, well, American.
For more than 150 years this
“treasury” of false virtue has been invoked
to “justify” the slaughter of the Plains Indians from 1865-1898; the mass
murder of some 200,000 Filipinos at the turn of the century; the imperialistic
Spanish-American War; entry into Europe’s war in 1918; and myriad other
interventions, from Korea to Vietnam to Somalia, Lebanon, Bosnia, Grenada,
Panama, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and on and
on. It is all a part of “our diplomacy of righteousness, with the slogan
of unconditional surrender and universal spiritual rehabilitation for others” (emphasis added), wrote Robert Penn
Warren. Professor Mel Bradford called the Lincolnian rhetoric that is the
ideological basis for all this interventionism “the rhetoric of continuing
revolution.”
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This revolutionary rhetoric
is alive and well today. When Newt Gingrich authored a Wall Street Journal article in which he advocated
the military invasion of Iran, Syria, and North Korea during the George W. Bush
administration, he naturally titled the article “Lincoln and Bush,” implying
that such belligerence would be “Lincolnesque” and therefore should not be
questioned. When the Marxist historian Eric Foner of Columbia University
opposed the breakup of the Soviet Union in an October 1991 article in The Nation magazine he titled the article
“Lincoln’s Lesson.” Unlike Gorbachev, he said, Lincoln would never have
let the Soviet satellite states secede in peace.
The Communist Party USA used
to hold “Lincoln-Lenin Day” rallies and had a giant portrait of Lincoln in its
New York City offices. Even the former dictator of Pakistan, Pervez
Musharref, invoked Lincoln’s unconstitutional suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus to “justify” martial law in his country. The deification of Lincoln has
become a useful rhetorical tool for tyrants, militarists, and enemies of
freedom everywhere.
Americans have been
progressively dumbed down about Lincoln thanks to the avalanche of myths,
superstitions, and propaganda produced by generations of “Lincoln scholars.” It
wasn’t always that way, however. During his lifetime Lincoln was actually
the most hated and detested of all American presidents, as documented by
historian Larry Tagg in The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: The Story of America’s Most Reviled
President. For example, on page 435 of his book Larry Tagg
cites an 1864 Harpers Weekly article that
compiled a list of terms that the Northern press
used to describe Lincoln including “Filthy Story-Teller, Ignoramus Abe, Despot,
Old Scoundrel . . . Perjurer, Liar, Robber, Thief, Swindler, Braggart, Tyrant,
Buffoon, Fiend, Usurper, Butcher, Monster . . .”
This
all changed after the assassination as the Republican Party reveled in what
Larry Tagg calls a “propaganda windfall.” They would rewrite history with
the help of the New England clergy in order to impose on Americans their
version of what is essentially a New England theocracy composed of a government
of nannies, pests, busybodies, tyrants, and money-grubbing plutocrats (known as
“Yankees” by some).
New England pastors who had
excoriated Lincoln for four years all of a sudden “rewrote their Easter sermons
to include a new, exalted view of Lincoln as an American Moses, a leader out of
slavery, a national savior who was not allowed to cross over into the Promised
Land” himself. Senator James Grimes of Iowa boasted that the Republican Party’s deification of
Lincoln “has made it impossible to speak the truth about Abraham Lincoln
hereafter.”
Senator Grimes was right.
In his 1943 book, The Deification of Lincoln, historian
Ira D. Cardiff wrote that by then Americans were not even “interested . . . in
the real Lincoln. They desire a supernatural Lincoln, a Lincoln with none
of the faults or frailties of the common man . . . a savior, leading us to
democracy and liberty – though most said readers are not interested in
democracy or liberty.” Moreover, said Cardiff, “a biography of Lincoln
which told the truth about him would probably have great difficulty in finding
a publisher.”
Well, no longer. Lincoln as He Really Was by Charles T. Pace is a
refreshingly truthful antidote to the standard Lincoln mythology. It is
refreshing because it is so fact-based and well documented and devoted to
historical truth. Lincoln as He Really Was is
not your typical boring, voluminous biography filled with thousands of
disconnected (and often irrelevant) facts dug up by a dozen graduate research
assistants and published by a card-carrying member of the Ivy League Lincoln
cult. It is the first book since Edgar Lee Masters’ 1931 classic, Lincoln the Man, to attempt to
reveal the truth about what kind of man Abraham
Lincoln really was.
Based on voluminous research
of Lincoln’s actions, first and foremost, and not just his rhetoric, Pace
describes how Lincoln was an expert manipulator of people; extremely lazy when
it came to physical labor (contrary to the “rail splitter” legend!); was not at
all well read; and what he did read was almost exclusively books about speech-making
and rhetoric, with titles such as Lessons in Elocution.
The book confirms in spades what economist Murray N. Rothbard once said about
Lincoln in an (online) essay entitled “Just War”: Lincoln was a “master
politician,” said Rothbard, defined as one who is a masterful “liar, conniver,
and manipulator.” He makes any “master politician” or our time look amateurish
by comparison.
Lincoln never joined a
church, and both his law partner William Herndon and his wife Mary Todd said he
was not a Christian. His White House assistant, Colonel Ward Lamon,
called him “an infidel.” His close associate Judge David Davis, whom he
appointed to the Supreme Court, wrote that Lincoln “had no faith, in the
Christian sense of the term.” But his mother read him Bible stories as a child, and later in life he
studied the Bible for political purposes – to use religious rhetoric to
sway the masses to favor his political positions. These positions were
almost exclusively the Whig economic program of protectionism, corporate
welfare, and a government-run national bank to dispense subsidies to
politically-connected corporations, especially his former employers, the
railroad corporations. He boasted of always being a “Henry Clay Man,”
Clay being the leader of the party of the corrupt, corporate welfare-seeking
plutocracy – the Northern Whigs and then the Republicans.
Pace
shows what a political animal Lincoln really was, a “zealous party man” who
honed his skills, such as they were, of personally attacking his political
opponents with often over-the-top ad hominem assaults, similar to how the
Marxists of his day, and our day, argue(d).
None
of Lincoln’s family members voted for him, nor did 20 of the 23 ministers in
his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. He did not even carry his own
county in the 1860 election. These are the people who knew him best.
Lincoln was a master story
teller, many of which were notoriously vulgar and crude. He never passed
up an opportunity to make a speech, writes Pace, as he spent years honing the
skills of the master politician. He could sound like an abolitionist in
front of a Massachusetts audience, and the exact opposite in Southern Illinois.
His speeches were always vague and his positions hard to pin down, the
hallmark of a successful politician. He viewed politics as “life itself”
and was intensely partisan, routinely denouncing his political opponent as
“villains.” He was a “born politician,” writes Pace. He was, in
other words, the very kind of man that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
Patrick Henry, and James Madison warned their fellow citizens about with their
admonitions about how government needed to be “bound by the chains of the
Constitution” (Jefferson). “[I]t is of great importance,” Madison wrote
in Federalist 51, “to guard society against the
oppression of its rulers.”
Lincoln invited no family
members to his wedding; chose not to attend his own father’s funeral; and is
said to have never had a real friend. He had a “preacher’s voice” with a
practiced “metaphysical tone” and was not afraid to tell outrageous lies for political
purposes. For example, he insisted that the South wanted to begin
enslaving poor whites and immigrants and bring slavery back to New England,
where it had ended for purely economic reasons. He denied that he wanted
war, or to destroy the union, or to destroy the South, and then proceeded to do
every one of those things.
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Lincoln as He Really Was ends
with a masterful exposition of how Lincoln used all the skills of the master
politician, accumulated over three decades, to incite South Carolinians into
firing on Fort Sumter in order to use the incident (where no one was harmed or
killed) to “justify” waging war on the South. His war cost the lives of
as many as 750,000 Americans according to the latest research in order to “save
the union,” his professed war goal, and that of the U.S. Congress as
well. Of course, in reality his war destroyed the voluntary union of states created by the founders
and replaced it with a more Soviet-style, compulsory “union” held together by
violence, death, mass killing, and coercion.
You, dear reader, may believe
that there is something fishy about The Official History of Abraham
Lincoln. Or perhaps you are incensed that you have been lied to all your
life by the politically-controlled/politically-correct education
establishment. If so, Lincoln as He Really Was is
a must-read as a first step in your rehabilitation as an educated American
citizen – or as the citizen of any other country. It will be especially
helpful in allowing your children and grandchildren to have an opportunity to
learn the truth about this important aspect of American history.
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.