The Despot Named Lincoln

The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (Forum, 2002; xiii + 333 pgs.)

Why is The Real Lincoln so much superior to Harry Jaffa’s A New Birth of Freedom? Jaffa offers a purely textual study: he considers, as if he were dealing with Aristotle or Dante, every nuance he can discover or manufacture in Lincoln’s speeches. Professor DiLorenzo follows an entirely different course. He compares Lincoln’s words with what he actually did, and the result is a historical rather than a mythological figure.

Our author confronts those who portray Lincoln as the Great Emancipator with a simple but devastating question: If Lincoln was so much opposed to slavery, why did he not endeavor to abolish it peacefully through a scheme of compensated emancipation? "Lincoln did pay lip service to various compensated emancipation plans, and he even proposed a compensated emancipation bill (combined with colonization) in 1862. But the man whom historians would later describe as one of the master politicians of all time failed to use his legendary political skills and rhetorical gifts to accomplish what every other country in the world where slavery had once existed had done; end it peacefully, without resort to warfare" (p. 52).

How might Jaffa and his fellow Lincoln idolaters reply? Perhaps they will allege that Lincoln judged compensated emancipation politically impossible to realize and for that reason did not pursue it. To this, DiLorenzo has a ready response: "Slavery was already in sharp decline in the border states and the upper South generally, mostly for economic reasons . . . there is evidence that there was growing political support within the border states for gradual, peaceful emancipation that would have ended slavery there" (p. 51).

But what if Lincoln took a different view? Here I think one must answer that he did not even investigate the question. Would one not expect a sincere opponent of slavery to devote considerable attention to the feasibility of peacefully ending it? Further, "Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln’s Collected Works, commented that Lincoln barely mentioned slavery before 1854, and when he did, ‘his words lacked effectiveness’" (pp. 54–55).

As DiLorenzo ably argues, Lincoln’s real concerns lay otherwise. Throughout his political life, he enlisted under the banner of Henry Clay’s "American System." Proponents of this plan favored a strong central government in order to promote economic development. In classic mercantilist fashion, Clay and his supporters wanted the government to direct the economy through spending on "internal improvements," high protective tariffs, and a nationalized banking system.

Our author does not confine himself to a mere description of Lincoln’s economic goals. He is an economist of distinction and readily locates the fallacies in these interventionist programs. As one would expect from someone trained in both public choice and Austrian economics, he at once seeks the self-interested motivations behind policies that profess to secure the national good. "[P]rotectionism . . . was a means by which a government could dispense favors to well-connected (and well-financed) special interest groups, which in turn provided financial and other support for the politicians dispensing the favors. It benefits both those industries that are protected from competition and the politicians, but it harms everyone else. . . . The same can be said for another element of mercantilism—tax-funded subsidies to politically well-connected businesses and industries. These subsidies generally benefit only those businesses that are lucky enough to get them, at the expense of the taxpayers generally" (pp. 56–57).

Those inclined to defend Clay and his disciple Lincoln on the grounds that government must provide us with "public goods" such as roads would be well advised to read DiLorenzo’s discussion of the internal improvements voted by the Whig-dominated Illinois legislature. The Illinois program proved a complete financial disaster, and other states that invested in internal improvements fared no better. "What all this suggests is that the Hamilton/Clay/Lincoln agenda of government subsidies for road building and railroad corporations was wildly unpopular throughout the nation and had been an abysmal failure in every instance" (p. 83).

The financial exactions of tariffs and internal improvements fell with especial force on the South. The states in this region depended heavily on trade, and as a result paid most of the tariffs. "Since they were so dependent on trade, by 1860 the Southern states were paying in excess of 80 percent of all tariffs, while they believed that most of the revenue from the tariffs was being spent in the North. In short, they believed they were being fleeced and plundered" (p. 126).

Small wonder that the South was not prepared to put up with Lincoln’s plans for even higher tariffs, and debate over secession stressed these financial exactions. Like Charles Adams, in his excellent When in the Course of Human Events, DiLorenzo traces the onset of war to Southern resistance to the nationalist economic program, and Lincoln’s determination to enforce it. "To a very large extent, the secession of the Southern states in late 1860 and early 1861 was a culmination of the decades-long feud, beginning with the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, over the proper economic role of the central government. Lincoln and the consolidationists wanted to construct a massive mercantilist state, whereas it was primarily Southern statesmen who always stood in their way. These statesmen apparently believed that secession was their trump card" (pp. 128–29).

DiLorenzo is amply prepared for the objection that even if the Southern states justly opposed Lincoln’s economic plans, they had no legal right to secede. In this view, Lincoln had a constitutional duty to preserve the union by any means necessary. Quite to the contrary, DiLorenzo shows that dominant legal opinion granted states the right to depart. Nor was this exclusively a Southern view of the matter. During the War of 1812, many in New England favored abandoning the union; and our author, relying on the research of Howard Cecil Perkins, points out that the majority of newspaper editorials in the North from late 1860 to mid-1861 recognized the right of secession.

Once the war began, Lincoln conducted himself as a thoroughgoing dictator, and DiLorenzo gives a full account of the president’s suppression of civil liberties. Here we are on familiar ground, but our author shows great dialectical skill in prosecuting his case. I found particularly impressive his identification of a line of defense essayed by some of Lincoln’s advocates. Sometimes, writers on Lincoln and civil liberties describe in great detail Lincoln’s suppression of liberty, but conclude with praise for his "moderation." DiLorenzo with great force notes the discrepancy between evidence and conclusion.

Among the guilty is the foremost of all historians who have written on the topic, James G. Randall. "In chapter after chapter of his 595-page book Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, he [Randall] dutifully describes not mere problems but the destruction of constitutional liberty. He concludes almost every chapter with a string of excuses. . . . The establishment of a dictatorship was not the overthrowing of the Constitution but merely ‘out of keeping with the normal tenor of American law.’ Nor were thousands of arbitrary arrests an example of tyranny but only ‘unfortunate,’ and made, after all, with ‘the best of motives’ " (p. 160).

Incredibly, the same pattern recurs among Lincoln’s partisans when they describe the gross violations of international law committed, with Lincoln’s entire approval, by Generals Sherman, Sheridan, Butler, and many others. After his bombardment of Atlanta, "Sherman’s army went on its usual binge of looting and burning. . . . It has been estimated that more than 90 percent of the city was demolished" (p. 186). As if this were not enough, Sherman expelled the remaining civilian residents from the city. Nevertheless, Mark Grimsley, a leading military historian, "downplays the suffering of the citizens of Atlanta by saying that ‘only’ a few thousand of them were evicted from their homes" (p. 187). In the face of Sherman’s march to the sea and Sheridan’s burning of the Shenandoah Valley, Mark Neely writes that "Sherman and his ‘fellow generals waged war the same way most Victorian gentlemen did, and other Victorian gentlemen in the world knew it.’ Total war, according to Neely, was just not Sherman’s cup of tea" (p. 198).

To attack Sherman and his cohorts is fortunately not very controversial, even in these times of abject Lincoln worship; but to state the obvious clearly is no small virtue. Professor DiLorenzo undertakes a much more difficult task, though, in his treatment of Reconstruction. Here he undermines completely the arguments of the dominant approach to this period among contemporary American historians.

Early in the twentieth century, W. A. Dunning and his students at Columbia University portrayed the Reconstruction period as, in the words of Claude Bowers, a "tragic era," dominated by corruption. The Republican Party, easily controlling new black voters, established puppet governments in the conquered Southern states. The party "used the power gained from this to plunder the taxpayers of the South for more than a decade after the war ended" (p. 202).

One might think such blatant corruption hard to defend, but a group of historians began the task in the 1930s. Our author rightly notes that many of these historians were Marxists, but this is a restrained understatement. In fact, several of this movement’s leading lights, such as James Allen and W. E. B. DuBois, found Lenin greatly to their liking; and the Communist Party actively propagated the new line. By smearing the older view as racist and pro-Southern, the new partisans triumphed.

DiLorenzo will have none of this nonsense, and he patiently dissects their sophisms. A chief method of the group is the misleading comparison. "These Marxist and ‘liberal’ revisionists argue that Reconstruction wasn’t all that bad compared to, say, what happened when the Japanese invaded Nanking in the 1930s. . . . After all, Kenneth Stampp has argued, there were not even any mass executions of former Confederates after the war" (p. 203).

The unstated premise of Stampp’s argument is that Southerners were enemy aliens who deserved whatever their Northern masters dished out to them; if so, anything less than total terror counts as merciful. Had Stampp, no doubt preoccupied with World War II, not presupposed this, he would have seen that a bad policy does not become good because worse things are possible.

In like fashion, Eric Foner, the reigning pontiff of the new school, has some good words for the Radicals’ corruption. Was not the situation even worse in the North? DiLorenzo’s reply exactly strikes its target: "The fact that corruption was even worse in the North proves the Dunning School’s point; since massive corporate welfare was relatively new to the South, it hadn’t quite equaled the North in terms of political corruption. The expansion of government, which Reconstruction facilitated, caused such corruption" (pp. 231–32).

This outstanding book has left me at wit’s end. As everyone knows, I like to charge authors with having committed logical fallacies; but Professor DiLorenzo offers me almost nothing. At only one point do I think I have caught him out. In reply to those who criticize Dunning for racism, since he doubted the wisdom of at once extending the vote to uneducated blacks, DiLorenzo notes that these same critics "virtually deify" Lincoln (p. 204). But Lincoln was a white supremacist of the first order. To be consistent, must not those historians who dismiss Dunning’s interpretations as racist "be just as skeptical of what has been written about Lincoln over the past 100 years and even reevaluate much of their own scholarship?" (p. 204).

So drastic a conclusion does not follow. Consistency requires these historians only to discount Lincoln’s racist remarks; they may admire Lincoln for other reasons, without sinning against logic.

A few minor points: it should have been noted that some states opposed the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. (p. 111); not all Whigs favored the American System: John Tyler was a Whig as well as Henry Clay (p. 235); and the author of the article discussed on p. 231 was Stanley Coben, not "Cohen." My frustration at being able to find so little wrong with the book will not prevent me from congratulating Professor DiLorenzo for a magnificent contribution to history, vital reading for anyone concerned with the defense of liberty.

'But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.'

Nowhere does this phrase from the Declaration of Independence say what kind of a government they had to set up. But lets move on ... you're just pissed because Lincoln waged an unjust and illegal war on the seceding Southern States and you can't disprove what I have posted before. Historians have researched the information ... and it is there! You and Walt ought to form your own little history company and call it "Dummies about Lincoln". Get the book I mentioned to you earlier, read it well, and then get back to me. By the way, its an out of print book but you can still obtain it, it was published in 1976 during the bicentennial.

"That has never been proven. It is just part of the neo-reb rant."

Man you're really getting weak now. Ever heard of Ex parte Merryman? That was the rebuke for taking away habeas corpus. 'Lincoln had taken the position that he had the right to suspend the writ without Congressional approval, and that he had the say on the final Constitutional question, not the court, and his power to make such a determination was a higher power than the Supreme Court. Lincoln thus put himself above the Congress, above the Supreme Court, and above the Constitution. He was an absolute ruler, like the tyrants of ancient Greece and the Caesars of Rome.'

The order to arrest Taney was given to US Marshal Lamon personally by Lincoln. The account of the plan to arrest the Chief Justice and the order for his arrest is confirmed by two trustworthy independent source of information - Lamon himself, in his personal papers in the Huntington Library's rare book and manuscript collection, and Professor Francis Lieber, author of the famous Lieber Code, which Lincoln endorsed. Lieber noted that Lincoln gave Marshal Lamon the arrest warrant for Taney along with permission to make the arrest. Both Lieber and Lamon were life long ardent unionists.

Nowhere does this phrase from the Declaration of Independence say what kind of a government they had to set up. But lets move on ...

Nah let's stay there for a moment. Try reading the confederate constitution some time, it's pretty obvious Davis didn't. It is similar to the real one in that it requires the same three branches of government; legislative, executive, and judicial. Davis totally ignored the third branch. Laws and courts would just have gotten in his way as he nationalized industries, siezed private property, and pretty well pissed all over the states rights that the confederacy was supposed to have been founded on. Those are the facts, the dirty little southron secret that y'all are too terrified to debate on. Jefferson Davis was a criminal, a tyrant, the closest thing to a dictator this continent has seen. He had zero respect for the rule of law, no patience for legal niceties. Jail 'em and forget 'em. Government wants something, government takes if 'for the war effort'. And above all, slavery at all costs.

And unilateral secession as practiced by the confederacy was illegal. The Supreme Court ruled that in 1869.

Once again the pot is calling the kettle black!

"And unilateral secession as practiced by the confederacy was illegal. The Supreme Court ruled that in 1869."

Which merely proves that when the North won the war, the dream of American Liberty as envisioned by the Founders went down the toilet. Thanks to Lincoln we now have this behemoth in Washington that is overtly intrusive of our daily lives and liberties. No longer can States really determine their own destiny without cowtowing to Washington. The Founders never envisioned a government who provides welfare to so many. Who sets up educational curriculum standards for the children, or who has this labyrinth of byzantine type Tax Codes. No ... the Founders set it up with individual liberty being paramount, and States Rights being there to keep the Federal Government in check! Yes, you call Jeff Davis the tyrant, but in reality the tyrant who doomed us to everlasting enslavement to big government and taxes was LINCOLN! Honest Abe wasn't honest!

And while we're on the subject, the Southern States should've been able to determine for themselves whether or not slavery would've continued as an institution ... that was a part of their right of self-determination! It wasn't up to the Federal Government to determine that. Go back and re-read your Constitution and Federalist papers. You'll be amazed at what the Founders intended.

Lincoln did the next most effective thing to disbanding the Supreme Court ... he completely ignored them. By the time Congress came back into session in 1861 Lincoln had things running the way he wanted them to be running ... and which Congressman in his right mind would stand against Lincoln when he could be jailed and brought before a Military Tribunal on some trumped up charge? Lincoln was not averse to doing that to those who disagreed with him. The word traitor was thrown around at every opportune moment by his administration. If you read the Constitution ... Article 1 Section 9 stated that only Congress with the approval of the Supreme Court could suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus. Nowhere in Article 2 which are the Duties of the Executive does it state that the President can decide on matters of law. When Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus, he did so without any authorization from Congress and was castigated by the Chief Justice Roger Taney. Thereupon Lincoln issued a writ of arrest to US Marshal Lamon to apprehend Taney. Lamon never served it, but it was issued! Lincoln shut down all newpapers that didn't agree with his war, and spoke out against it! He violated the Constitution in declaring war against the South (something only Congress has the power to do per the Constitution). But seeing as how your response is always that has never been proven, you are willing to accept whatever Washington DC puts out as gospel.

There has been nothing but a continuous chain of abuses and infringements on the Constitution since Lincoln and his administration. So on that note of calling Jeff Davis the tyrant, you must prove that Lincoln wasn't one. But as we all know ... you can't. By the way, we will always disagree on this subject.

Southron paranoia in full bloom again, I see. Lincoln did not ignore the Supreme Court. Issues affecting the Union conduct appeared before the court throughout the war, witness the Prize Cases that Walt talks about so much. People sentenced in the North by the military tribunals still had the chance to appeal their case all the way to the Supreme Court, witness Ex Parte Milligan. But down south the people that Davis tossed in the hoosegow stayed there and rotted because there was no legal system, there was no appeal, there was no protection against abuse by the Davis regime.

...which Congressman in his right mind would stand against Lincoln when he could be jailed and brought before a Military Tribunal on some trumped up charge?

That is nonsense and you know it, but you need something to justify your support of Davis and his actions. No doubt you are about to trot out Clemment Vallandigham to support your case. Never mind the fact that Vallandigham was a former congressman and deserved trial and punishment. Never mind the fact that Davis himself tossed John Minor Botts, a former congressman from Virginia, into jail for the duration for speaking out against the confederate government. That was OK because the south was nation-building, is that it?

Article 1 Section 9 stated that only Congress with the approval of the Supreme Court could suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus.

I question somethime whether you have ever even read the Constitution some times. That section does not say that only congress can suspend habeas corpus and it doesn't say that they need Supreme Court approval.

Thereupon Lincoln issued a writ of arrest to US Marshal Lamon to apprehend Taney. Lamon never served it, but it was issued!

No he didn't.

Lincoln shut down all newpapers that didn't agree with his war, and spoke out against it!

This is much more descriptive of southern actions than Northern. Lincoln was bedeviled by newspapers throughout the war, from Greely on down. None of those were shut down.

He violated the Constitution in declaring war against the South (something only Congress has the power to do per the Constitution).

Again, pure BS. You declare war against other nations, not rebellious parts of your own. No declaration of war was required.

So on that note of calling Jeff Davis the tyrant, you must prove that Lincoln wasn't one.

I need do nothing of the sort. You and your ilk have been calling Lincoln 'tyrant' since I started posting here, yet none of you offer any evidence that Davis wasn't one. On the contrary, I point out Davis's crimes and I'm criticized for trying to change the subject. Like I said, Jefferson Davis is the south's dirty little secret because every time you turn over a rock another one if his abuses slithers out. Y'all want to keep those rocks right where they are.

Man you got as many smarts as a box of rocks. Lamon's own personal papers stated the fact of who issued the warrant.

"I question somethime whether you have ever even read the Constitution sometimes. That section does not say that only congress can suspend habeas corpus and it doesn't say that they need Supreme Court approval."

For your perusal old son ... Article I pertains to the legislative branch of Government. Section 9 specifically states 'The Priveledge of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.' It never says "shall require it". And it was a matter of legislation to be decided by Congress! Now onto your assertion that the Supreme Court doesn't need to approve it. Habeas Corpus is a matter of law and in Article III, Section 2 it states 'The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution,the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority ...etcetra, etcetra' So as we see, the Supreme Court needed to decide whether or not it was lawful and Constitutional to suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus. The legislative makes law, the Supreme Court decides its Constitutionality. By suspending the Writ of Habeas Corpus, Lincoln was making law ... uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh NOT AUTHORIZED UNDER OUR CONSTITUTION!!!!

As for the rest of your dissertation of bovine scatology ... uuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhh YEEEEEEEEAAAH ... SURE ... whatever. Its your story, tell it like you want. Doesn't mean I'll ever buy into it though.

Man you got as many smarts as a box of rocks. Lamon's own personal papers stated the fact of who issued the warrant.

But his claim is not backed up by a single shred of evidence. Yet you believe it without question. Let me ask you this. Here is a link to a website that quotes from a book claiming that Robert Lee whipped his slaves and had brine poured in the wounds. By your standards this must be true. The author claimed to have seen it. Why would be lie? So what do you think of Lee now?

Article I pertains to the legislative branch of Government.

Very good. I'll let you in on a secret. Article II pertains to the Executive branch and nowhere does it say that the president cannot suspend habeas corpus. Habeas Corpus is a matter of law and in Article III, Section 2 it states....

And if the matter comes before the Supreme Court then it would rule on it. But the Supreme Court does not rule on every piece of legislation passed or every act of the president. It only rules on those that come before it and Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus was never taken up by the full court. So we don't know for certain if his actions were Constitutional or not.

While we're on the subject of Constitutions, Article III pertains to the Judicial branch and mandates a Supreme Court. Amazingly enough there is also an article 3 in the confederate constitution but somehow no supreme court ever appeared. So when when the confederacy suspended habeas corpus there was no court to rule on it. So by your own definition I guess Davis was acting illegally.

"Jefferson Davis was a criminal, a tyrant, the closest thing to a dictator this continent has seen. "

You know Non-Seq, every time I think that I have seen the height of the absurdities of which you are capable you exhibit a greater one."...the closest thing to a dictator this continent has seen.

Do you not understand that our continent comprises more than the territorial United States? But let's assume that you don't. Have you never heard of Abraham Lincoln ,Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson? If you are indeed so ignorant of your country's history, perhaps you would have a chance of recovery from sueing the school boards that administered the schools that you attended. Just a thought; it might make a little more room on the internet for serious people if you could be so diverted.

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