Why? Because of DiLorenzo's crap? Do you accept everything that people say at face value or don't you investigate on your own?
But if Lincoln was exceptionally popular for a century after his death, a major reason for it was a belief in American union, and the idea that we could achieve liberty and political, civil and legal equality within our national union. If we are losing that faith it's bad news for America. But the fact that so many Americans shared that belief for so long is reassuring.
Lincoln was a politician and was very good at it. But that fact doesn't make him another Clinton. George Bush is a politician. Ronald Reagan was a highly skilled politician, and something more -- so was Lincoln.
Di Lorenzo's quotation from Lysander Spooner is a clue to where he's coming from. It's no surprise that Spooner, the author of "A LETTER to Grover Cleveland on his False Inaugural Address, the Usurpations and Crimes of Lawmakers and Judges, and the Consequent Poverty, Ignorance, and Servitude of the People" hated Lincoln. Lysander Spooner was an anarchist, who denied the legitmacy of the Constitution for anyone but those who signed it. No country which followed Spooner's views could long survive. Maybe that's the point, for like Spooner, Lew Rockwell and DiLorenzo have anarchist sympathies.
The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. [This essay was written in 1869.] And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. AND THE CONSTITUTION, SO FAR AS IT WAS THEIR CONTRACT, DIED WITH THEM. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they COULD bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument does not purport to be an agreement between any body but "the people" THEN existing; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right, power, or disposition, on their part, to bind anybody but themselves.
Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
Read deeper into the real history and you'll see that the "wealth of information" from kooks on both the far right like DiLorenzo, or from the far left like Lerone Bennett, Jr. is nothing but intentional distortion of the historical record to promote contemporary political agendas.
For instance, DiLorenzo portrays the Confederacy as upholding the ideals of the Declaration by attempting to distort Lincoln's actions or racial views as a violation of the Declaration principles. Yet there is in the record, even in the speeches that DiLorenzo only quotes highly selective snips from, Lincoln condemning slavery as a violation of Natural Law on which the Declaration rests. As a politician in the 1850s, Lincoln could no more declare his support for equal rights for blacks than could a Georgia politician, or for that matter a national politician, could in 1950. But Lincoln did publicly oppose slavery, and put his entire being into opposing the further expansion of slavery just as many southern politicians opposed the Klan murderers in out times. It was Lincoln's opposition to expansion, which was shared by the framers of the Constitution through the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, that caused the South to despise him. Expansion of slavery was vital to both the economic and class structure of the south.
Politicians of any age are on a relatively short leash in terms of maintaining public support. In the 1850s, people who supported equal rights for blacks included courageous politicians like Thad Stephens and Charles Sumner who were considered to be wide-eyed radicals. They had no broad public support in the North, and their abolitionist views would have made them quite literally criminals in the south where state laws made it illegal to promote abolition. You could be legally hung for supporting abolition if some mob didn't get you first.
Getting back to the Declaration, the facts are that Confederate leaders categorically rejected the Declaration principles as fatally flawed. Read Alexander Stephens "Cornerstone Speech" where he flatly says that Jefferson and the founders had it all wrong, that all men should not be equal under the law, and that the Confederate States of America were founded on the principle that slavery was the natural order.
What DiLorenzo and the other Lost Cause Myth propagandists rely on is the wide spread ignorance of the true cause of the war (the expansion of slavery) and the political realities of the day.
The neo-rebs wail because Lincoln --was-- such an effective politician.
He completely stymied the traitors in Maryland in 1861.
He kept the wavering border states in the Union by gauging with --great-- skill what and when they would accept certaain measures. In 1862 Generals Hunter and Butler issued emancipation documents of verying force. Lincoln had them revoked.
He knew that sentiment in the north was such that it was too soon to go for emancipation. But when he played the compensated emancipation and colonization cards, border state leaders and black leaders were cold to that. The very next day after he met with border state representatives, July 12, 1862, he decided on emancipation as a war measure. And he took that step --when-- he took it --because-- his political sense told him that the north would accept it, this within days after the bloodbath at Antietam.
This is why Frederick Douglass said that Lincoln was "swift, radical, zealous and determined."
Lincoln also used his great --political-- skills to access when and if voting rights for blacks be acceptable to the great mass of whites -- at least in the north. The attempt to legitimize blacks as Americans can be seen in these letters he wrote :
Private
General Hunter
Executive Mansion
Washington D.C. April 1, 1863
My dear Sir:
I am glad to see the accounts of your colored force at Jacksonville, Florida. I see the enemy are driving at them fiercely, as is to be expected. It is mportant to the enemy that such a force shall not take shape, and grow, and thrive, in the south; and in precisely the same proportion, it is important to us that it shall. Hence the utmost caution and viglilance is necessary on our part. The enemy will make extra efforts to destroy them; and we should do the same to perserve and increase them.
Yours truly
A. Lincoln
_________________________________________________________
Hon. Andrew Johnson
Executive Mansion,
My dear Sir:
Washington, March 26. 1863.
I am told you have at least thought of raising a negro military force. In my opinion the country now needs no specific thing so much as some man of your ability, and position, to go to this work. When I speak of your position, I mean that of an eminent citizen of a slave-state, and himself a slave- holder. The colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union. The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once. And who doubts that we can present that sight, if we but take hold in earnest? If you have been thinking of it please do not dismiss the thought. Yours truly
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hon Soc of War
Executive Mansion
Washington
July 21, 1863
My Dear Sir:
I desire that a renewed and vigorous effort be made to raise colored forces along the shores of the Missippi [sic]. Please consult the General-in-chief; and if it is perceived that any acceleration of the matter can be effected, let it be done. I think the evidence is nearly conclusive that Gen. Thomas is one of the best, if not the very best, instruments for this service.
Yours truly
Lincoln also proposed --privately-- to the new governor of Louisiana that the new state constiution include voting rights for blacks. A year later, in April, 1865 he came out --publicly-- for the suffrage for black soldiers, because his great --political-- skill told him that the time was right.
It was a direct result of this speech, and this position, that Booth shot him.
President Lincoln, besides ordering the army (note that this is only a few months after the EP) to use black soldiers more vigorously, made many public speeches to prepare the people for the idea of black suffage.
"But to be plain, you are dissatisfied with me about the negro. Quite likely there is a difference of opinion between you and myself upon that subject. I certainly wish that all men could be free, while I suppose that you do not. ....peace does not appear as distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to worth the keeping in all future time. It will have then been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And then, there will be some black men, who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet they have helped mankind on to this great consumation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, have strove to hinder it. Still let us not be over-sanguine of a speedy final triumph. Let us be quite sober. Let us dilligently apply the means, never doubting that a just God, in his own good time, will give us the rightful result."
8/23/63
"When you give the Negro these rights," he [Lincoln] said, "when you put a gun in his hands, it prophesies something more: it foretells that he is to have the full enjoyment of his liberty and his manhood...By the close of the war, Lincoln was reccomending commissioning black officers in the regiments, and one actually rose to become a major before it was over. At the end of 1863, more than a hundred thousand had enlisted in the United States Colored Troops, and in his message to Congress the president reported, "So far as tested, it is difficult to say they are not as good soldiers as any." When some suggested in August 1864 that the Union ought to offer to help return runaway slaves to their masters as a condition for the South's laying down its arms, Lincoln refused even to consider the question.
"Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them?" he retorted. "Drive back to the support of the rebellion the physical force which the colored people now give, and promise us, and neither the present, or any incoming administration can save the Union." To others he said it even more emphatically. "This is not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force which may be measured and estimated. Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it."
--"Lincoln's Men" pp 163-64 by William C. Davis
Lincoln's sense of fairness made him seek to extend the blessings of citizenship to everyone who served under the flag.
His great political skill made him realize that blacks --were--not-- leaving -- he played that card and no one was biting, black or white. That being the case, he knew he had to prepare for the future, and that future involved full rights for blacks.
Walt
Lincoln did make some political mistakes.
He didn't fathom at all that loyalty to the Union could be so tenuous in the slave states. Like most, he thought it would be a quick war--that a stout lesson would teach the rebels the folly of secession. It took him a long time to get over that notion, which is one reason he opposed measures like Hunter's and Butler's emancipation documents.
On the other hand, as my previous note suggested, he did have great political skills. He also had great strategic skills, which you don't hear so often.
I recently read "The Coming Fury" by Bruce Catton. Catton notes that right after the first battle of Bull Run that Lincoln made some notes on one piece of paper. Those notes ultimately formed the basis of Union victory. It did take him a while to find the right human materials to bring them to fruition.
Lincoln was careful to accept blame for much of the failure of policy. His famous letter saying that events had controlled him and not the other way round is from April, '64. He wrote in a letter late in life that blame for the war was on him as much as anyone, and in his second inagural:
"If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
So Lincoln not only was a canny, if not perfect, politican, in the best sense of that word, he was also a good strategist, and he was willing to take responsibility for his actions, the first mark of a great leader.
Walt