The Terrible Truth About Abraham Lincoln and the Confederate War

President Lincoln has been all but deified in America, with a god-like giant statue at a Parthenon-like memorial in Washington. Generations of school children have been indoctrinated with the story that “Honest Abe” Lincoln is a national hero who saved the Union and fought a noble war to end slavery, and that the “evil” Southern states seceded from the Union to protect slavery. This is the Yankee myth of history, written and promulgated by Northerners, and it is a complete falsity. It was produced and entrenched in the culture in large part to gloss over the terrible war crimes committed by Union soldiers in the War Between the States, as well as Lincoln’s violations of the law, his shredding of the Constitution, and other reprehensible acts. It has been very effective in keeping the average American ignorant of the real causes of the war, and the real nature, character and record of Lincoln. Let us look at some unpleasant facts.

In his first inaugural address, Lincoln stated clearly that (1) he had no legal authority to interfere with slavery where it existed, (2) that he had no inclination or intention to do so even if he had the legal authority, (3) that he would enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, returning runaway slaves escaping to the North to their masters in the South, and (4) that he fully supported the Thirteenth Amendment then being debated in Congress which would protect slavery in perpetuity and was irrevocable. He later famously stated, “Do not paint me with the Abolitionist brush.”

Although there was some opposition to slavery in the country, the government was willing to concede everything the South wanted regarding slavery to keep it in the Union. Given all these facts, the idea that the South seceded to protect slavery is as absurd as the idea that Lincoln fought the war to end slavery. Lincoln himself said in a famous letter after the war began that his sole purpose was to save the Union, and not to either save or end slavery; that if he could save the Union without freeing a single slave, he would. Nothing could be clearer.

For decades before the war, the South, through harsh tariffs, had been supplying about 85% of the country’s revenue, nearly all of which was being spent in the North to boost its economy, build manufacturing, infrastructure, railroads, canals, etc. With the passage of the 47% Morrill Tariff the final nail was in the coffin. The South did not secede to protect slavery, although certainly they wished to protect it; they seceded over a dispute about unfair taxation, an oppressive Federal government, and the right to separate from that oppression and be governed “by consent”, exactly the same issues over which the Founding Fathers fought the Revolutionary War. When a member of Lincoln’s cabinet suggested he let the South go in peace, Lincoln famously replied, “Let the South go? Where, then, would we get our revenue!” He then launched a brutal, empirical war to keep the free and sovereign states, by force of arms, in the Union they had created and voluntarily joined, and then voluntarily left. This began his reign of terror.

Lincoln was the greatest tyrant and despot in American history. In the first four months of his presidency, he created a complete military dictatorship, destroyed the Constitution, ended forever the constitutional republic which the Founding Fathers instituted, committed horrendous crimes against civilian citizens, and formed the tyrannical, overbearing and oppressive Federal government which the American people suffer under to this day. In his first four months, he

Four months after Fort Sumter, when Lincoln finally called Congress back into session, no one dared oppose anything he wanted or speak out against him for fear of imprisonment, so completely had he entrenched his unilateral power and silenced his other many critics. The Union army, under Generals Grant, Sherman, Sheridan and President Lincoln, committed active genocide against Southern civilians---this is difficult for some to believe, but it is explicit in their writings and dispatches at the time and indisputable in their actions. Tens of thousands of Southern men, women and children---civilians---white and black, slave and free alike---were shot, hanged, raped, imprisoned without trial, their homes, lands and possessions stolen, pillaged and burned, in one of the most horrific and brutal genocides ever inflicted upon a people anywhere; but the Yankee myth of history is silent in these well-documented matters. For an excellent expose of these war crimes and their terrible extent, see War Crimes Against Southern Civilians by Walter Brian Cisco (Pelican Publishing Co. 2007, ISBN 9871589804661).

Only after the Union had suffered two years of crushing defeats in battle did Lincoln resolve to “emancipate” the slaves, and only as a war measure, a military tactic, not for moral or humanitarian purposes. He admitted this, remarking, “We must change tactics or lose the game.” He was hoping, as his original draft of the document shows, that a slave uprising would occur, making it harder for Southerners to continue the war. His only interest in freeing the slaves was in forcing the South to remain in the Union. His Emancipation Proclamation was denounced by Northerners, Southerners and Europeans alike for its absurdity and hypocrisy; for, it only “freed” the slaves in the seceded states---where he could not reach them---and kept slavery intact in the North and the border states---where he could have freed them at once.

The Gettysburg Address, the most famous speech in American history, is an absurd piece of war rhetoric and a poetry of lies. We were not “engaged in a great Civil War, to see whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, can long endure.” The South was engaged in a War of Independence from a tyrannical North, and after having legally seceded, wished only “to be let alone.” The North was engaged in a war of empire, to keep the South involuntarily under its yoke. Government “of the people, by the people and for the people” would not have “perished from the earth” had the North lost the war; on the contrary, it perished in the United States when the North won the war; for, freely representative government, by consent of the governed, is exactly what the South was fighting for and exactly what Lincoln’s military victory destroyed.

The checks and balances of powers, the separation of powers, the constitutional constraints so carefully and deliberately put into place by the Founding Fathers, had all been destroyed in Lincoln’s first months. The Republic which the Founders gave us had been completely destroyed and a new nation-state was set up; one in which the free and sovereign States would afterward be only vassals and tributaries, slaves to an all-powerful, oppressive Federal government. This new nation-state is completely different in both nature and consequence to the original American Republic. One only has to look around today to see the end results and legacy of Lincoln’s war, his destruction of freedom, and his institution of despotic, centralized governmental power and tyranny.

In retrospect, it is a tragedy that John Wilkes Booth did not act four years earlier. Slavery would have ended naturally, as it has everywhere else (except in African and Arab states); the American Republic, liberty, and 700,000 lives would have been saved, and untold thousands of those young men would have lived to contribute their ingenuity, inventions, creativity and talents to the political, economic, literary, scientific and social legacy of our people. And the greatest despotic tyrant in American history would never have gained the foothold of power or been able to establish the oppressive and omnipotent Federal government we all suffer under today.

The US Treasury and Congressional Borrowing in 1859

In preparation for the President’s state of the union report, Howell Cobb (of Georgia), the Secretary of the Treasury (Buchanan Administration), reported to Congress that based on projected spending, there would be dramatic increases in the debt of the government.

In his state of the Union report of December 5, 1859, President Buchanan’s Secretary of the United States Treasury issued his report stating that for fiscal year 1859, the total revenue of the US Treasury was $88,090,787. This was misleading, because $28,185,000 was ‘income’ from government borrowing. The actual total revenue from tariffs, and sale of public lands was $53,486,000. Tariff revenue contributed 92% of the total revenue of the country.

But the Congress spent $69,071,000, which was 29% more than it took in.

“I regret, as much as any member, the unavoidable weight and duration of the burdens to be imposed; having never been a proselyte to the doctrine, that public debts are public benefits. I consider them, on the contrary, as evils which ought to be removed as fast as honor and justice will permit.” —James Madison

The value of total US exports for the year was $278,392,000. The value of the exports grown or produced in the South was 74% of the total.

In order to understand the contribution of Southern agriculture to the trade, and thus tariff and taxation structure of the entire country, the following chart shows the percentage of the total value of exports contributed by the South for the year of 1859:

U. S. Department of Commerce
International Transactions and Foreign Commerce
Agricultural Production of the South
Yearly Detail 1859

Value of : Cotton $161,434,000
Tobacco 21,074,000
Rice 2,207,000

Naval stores 3,694,000
Sugar 196,000
Molasses 75,699
Hemp 9,227
Other 8,108,000
___________
Total $196,797,926

Value of Southern manufactured 4,989,000
Cotton exports
Value of cotton component of Northern 3,669,000
Manufactured cotton exports (60%) ___________
$205,455,926
Percentage of Southern Production to
the total US exports for 1859 of
$278,392,000. 74%

“Further information: see Bleeding Kansas and Missouri in the American Civil War

The Missouri-Kansas border area was fertile ground for the outbreak of guerrilla warfare when the Civil War erupted in 1861. Historian Albert Castel wrote:

For over six years, ever since Kansas was opened up as a territory by Stephen A. Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854, its prairies had been the stage for an almost incessant series of political conventions, raids, massacres, pitched battles, and atrocities, all part of a fierce conflict between the Free State and proslavery forces that had come to Kansas to settle and to battle.[1]

In February 1861 Missouri voters elected delegates to a statewide convention, which rejected secession by a vote of 89-1. Unionists, led by regular US army commander Nathaniel Lyon and Frank Blair of the politically powerful Blair family, and increasingly pro-secessionist forces, led by governor Claiborne Jackson and future Confederate general Sterling Price, contested for the political and military control of the state. By June, there was open warfare between Union forces and troops supporting the Confederacy. Guerrilla warfare immediately erupted throughout the state and intensified in August after the Union defeat at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek.[2]

By August 1862, with the Union victory at the Battle of Pea Ridge, the state was free of significant regular Confederate troops but the violence in Missouri continued. One historical work describes the situation in the state after Wilson’s Creek:

Unlike other border areas in Maryland and Kentucky, local conflicts, bushwacking, sniping, and guerilla fighting marked this period of Missouri history. “When regular troops were absent, the improvised war often assumed a deadly guerrilla nature as local citizens took up arms spontaneously against their neighbors. This was a war of stealth and raid without a front, without formal organization, and with almost no division between the civilian and the warrior.”[3]

The most notorious of these guerrilla forces was led by William Clarke Quantrill.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantrill%27s_Raiders

The Tariff Issue in 1860

There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” -—James Madison

By 1828, the North had become more and more industrialized, leaving its agricultural roots taking the role of a great producer of products and goods. The South maintained its agrarian roots, growing much of the nation’s food as well as exporting a tremendous amount of agricultural products to Europe. As the North grew in factories and production, more people moved to the North. Meanwhile, the voting base in the South did not grow. When the North picked up increasingly more votes in Congress due to the population growth, it was in a position to assert its will. Unfortunately, it started to wield its power unjustly.

The greatest manifestation of this was the Tariff of 1828.

Many European goods were still much less expensive than the same goods from the North. In 1828, Congress, against the will of the Southern minority, imposed a tax on many European goods so that those goods would now be more expensive and U.S. citizens would then have to purchase the more expensive goods from the North. This meant Europe sold much less of their products to the U.S. and had much less money to purchase agricultural products from the South. Worse yet, Southerners also had to pay more for the goods they needed to farm and to live, so their cost of agricultural production went up.

This artificially drove up the cost of Southern agricultural products. Because Europe was the number one market for Southern agricultural goods, the South suddenly lost its market for its products. Therefore, the new tariffs made the North artificially wealthy and financially damaged the South . The citizens of the agricultural South were injured by this unequal treatment, despite prohibitions against this condition by the Constitution. They later expressed this treatment in secession decrees

South Carolinian John C. Calhoun’s reaction to the Tariff of Abominations was immediate. He became an Anti-Federalist and wrote the South Carolina Exposition and Protest. In this protest, Calhoun stated that if the Tariff of 1828 was not repealed, SC would secede.

More importantly he introduced his Doctrine of Nullification, the basis of which came from the states’ rights arguments of famous Anti-Federalists James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Calhoun argued that the several states were not bound to stay under the Federal government if their rights were trampled under the U.S. Constitution. In other words, a state always had the right to nullify any act of Congress that violated the U.S. Constitution, and if Congress did not thereafter repeal said act, then the state had the right to secede.

Rather than abolish the unjust tariffs, Congress proceeded to slightly mitigate the tariffs with new tariffs in 1832. At that point, the South Carolina Legislature acted upon Calhoun’s protest and passed the Ordinance of Nullification, stating that the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were null and void within the state of SC.

Unbelievably, Congress also passed the Force Bill, which authorized the president to organize troops against SC if she did not enforce the tariffs. The War of Northern Aggression was only averted at that point by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, who offered a new compromise that would lessen the tariffs on SC.

The inherent problem remained that Congress had no problem continuing to pass legislation that benefited the Northern states at the expense of the Southern states simply because they had the votes and the power to do so. This became visibly manifest in Congress’adoption of the Morrill Tariff legislation in 1860-61.

From the time Lincoln had entered politics, he championed the political agenda of the “American system.” First advocated by his mentor, Henry Clay, it had become a three-part program of protective tariffs, internal improvements, and centralized banking. This program tied economic development to strong centralized national authority.

Lincoln believed that import tariffs were necessary, even at the expense of consumers. He believed that American industries needed to be shielded from foreign competition and cheaper imported goods. Lincoln and the Republicans were absolutely determined to push mercantilist legislation, and this was documented by their platform in 1860.

Regardless of the Republican party’s infrastructure and protectionist rationalization, the fact was that tariffs were about to go up again.

Many in the North could not perceive that there was anything threatening about tariff legislation.
Economically there was.

“The people of the U.S. owe their Independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom, in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings.” —James Madison

An export economy's entire livelihood depends upon being able to trade. Unless one is in the business of intentionally sending regions of a country into recession, heavy protectionism is indeed an apocalyptic event to those economies.

The South provided increasingly greater percentages of exports while the north's share declined (this was in part due to the fact that protectionism between 1816 and 1846 severely impaired technological modernization in the northern economy by encouraging a lazy domestic monopoly).

By 1860 the south literally supported the entire nation in the world economy. It provided in excess of 70% of the country's exports with most of the remainder coming from Midwestern and Western agriculture. Despite the success of the Southern farmer, the tariff system was defeating the work of the entire region to the benefit of Northern and Mid-Western states that were receiving the benefit of the protectionism and inflated prices.

This smoldering inequality eventually led to the state of SC acting on December 20, 1860, to secede from the Union. Shortly thereafter, ten more Southern states seceded and created a new country, the Confederate States of America. This would not have happened if Congress did not abuse its power by treating its states and citizens unequally.

Because of all of this, John C. Calhoun is widely recognized as the Father of Secession. He established that the Southern states should not be subjected to continued unequal treatment under the U.S. Constitution. When unequal treatment continued unabated, on December 20, 1860, SC became the first state to secede from an oppressive Union.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact.

Funny you should mention that, given the federal inaction on immigration, and their downright refusal to allow states to enforce the law.

From Scalia's dissent regarding AZ's SB 1070:

Today’s opinion, approving virtually all of the Ninth Circuit’s injunction against enforcement of the four challenged provisions of Arizona’s law, deprives States of what most would con- sider the defining characteristic of sovereignty: the power to exclude from the sovereign’s territory people who have no right to be there. Neither the Constitution itself nor even any law passed by Congress supports this result.
[…]
Two other provisions of the Constitution are an acknowledgment of the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders. Article I provides that “[n]o State shall, without the Consent of the Congress, lay any Imposts or Duties on Imports or Exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it’s inspection Laws.” Art. I, §10, cl. 2 (emphasis added). This assumed what everyone assumed: that the States could exclude from their territory dangerous or unwholesome goods. A later portion of the same section provides that “[n]o State shall, without the Consent of Congress, . . . engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.” Art. I, §10, cl. 3 (emphasis added). This limits the States’ sovereignty (in a way not relevant here) but leave sintact their inherent power to protect their territory.

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