Posted on 11/16/2012 7:27:33 AM PST by BobNative
New Movie Propagates Lincoln Historical Myths
If you are planning to see the new, Steven Spielberg directed, Lincoln movie you might want to invest in an accurate history book instead. While it is successfully dramatic, the movie rehashes several 150 year old myths about the Lincoln presidency and America’s most horrible war. First, to the movie’s credit, the script avoids a key, blatant lie that is currently being taught throughout American public schools today. The script focuses correctly on explaining how slaves were freed by the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, not the Emancipation Proclamation. Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation did not apply to any northern states. It only applied to southern territory that was not under control of the Union. Therefore, it was ignored by the Confederacy too. The original proclamation of September 22, 1862, even stated that all southern states could keep their slaves if they returned to the Union by January 1, 1863.
LINCOLN AND SLAVERY: Although properly focused, the movie misleads its audience into believing that Abraham Lincoln was consumed with the thought of freeing slaves. In reality, Lincoln was a white segregationist from Illinois, whose state Constitution had banned permanent black residents since 1848. Lincoln stated repeatedly in his 1861 inaugural address, his 1862 Horace Greely letter and other times during and before the war that his only intent was to “preserve the union” not free slaves. As a lawyer, Lincoln actually represented Robert Matson, a slave owner who wanted his part-time seasonal slaves returned to him. In 1847, Mr. Lincoln took his case all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court where he lost. Throughout his presidency, Lincoln made repeated attempts to colonize all African Americans beginning in 1862 with his Commissioner of Emigration, James Mitchell, the former leader of the American Colonization Society. In April of 1865, well after Congress passed the 13th Amendment and just before his death, Mr. Lincoln was still discussing his colonization plans with Union Army General, Benjamin Butler.
LINCOLN AND THE WAR: The movie aptly shows graphic scenes depicting some of the many horrendous battles in the appalling war against Southern independence where 620,000 Americans died, almost as many Americans killed as in all other wars combined. But the script serves to conceal Lincoln’s role in instigating the war. Lincoln refused to meet with Confederate commissioners who came to Washington to negotiate a peaceful separation in February of 1861. He did not seek a constitutionally required declaration of war from Congress before initiating the war or petition the U.S. Supreme Court for a ruling as to the legality of secession according to the rights of the states under the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. He ignored the vast majority opinion of his own cabinet and decided to invade Virginia on July 21, 1861 over objections of his military commanders, Generals Winfield Scott and Irwin McDowell. At that time, the Union had never suffered a single casualty from the Confederate military, which had committed no hostilities against the Union for over three months prior to the invasion. The script tends to ignore these well established, largely suppressed facts and imply that Mr. Lincoln had no choice but war.
CAUSES OF LINCOLN’S WAR: The script also tends to deceive the audience into believing that slavery was the major cause of the war. It avoids the issues of Constitutional rights that Jefferson Davis so frequently wrote about and the excessive tariffs that caused South Carolina to initially threaten to secede 30 years earlier. Given that just over 15% of southerners owned slaves, it should be obvious that 85% of southerners were not fighting for the right of the minority 15% to own slaves. Although northern soldiers fought to preserve the union as Lincoln demanded, southern concerns about Constitutional rights and excessive taxation were proven to be justified. After southerners elected state representatives, who voted democratically to secede and unanimously elected Jefferson Davis as their President, they were then forced to fight to protect their homes, families and property from continual invasions. Today, almost all of us are victims of the uncontrollable federal government and taxing excesses that were spawned by President Lincoln’s war.
LINCOLN AND THE PEOPLE: The script further misleads the audience into believing that Lincoln was a beloved populist although with 39.8% of the vote, he was the most unpopular president ever elected. In one scene, Sally Fields, who plays Mary Todd Lincoln, remarks that: “No one has ever been loved so much by the people…” She obviously was not referring to southerners since they were victimized by death and destruction from dozens of invasions. She also could not have been referring to the 30,000 or so northerners who were imprisoned without trial for opposing the invasion of the south. Among them, 30 Maryland legislators were imprisoned to keep the state from voting to secede and thus preventing the war by encircling Washington D.C. with Confederate states. Hundreds of newspaper editors, publishers and citizens were also imprisoned for publicly opposing the invasion. Imprisoned notables include Frances Key Howard, grandson of star spangled banner author, Francis Scott Key and George Armistead Appleton, grandson of Major George Armistead, who commanded Fort McHenry during the key victory in the war of 1812.
LINCOLN AND HUMANITY: The movie theme seems to purposely exaggerate Abraham Lincoln’s concern for slaves to falsely portray him as a great humanitarian. In another dramatic scene, Daniel Day Lewis, who plays Lincoln, asks: “Shall we stop this bleeding?” This line is acutely ironic since it was Lincoln who initiated the bleeding for millions of Americans. Mr. Lincoln personally directed key activities of the Union Army that repeatedly attacked civilian populations. The army burned hundreds of homes in South Carolina, destroyed dozens of farms and killed thousands of head of cattle in the Shenandoah Valley, burned dozens of cities and towns across Georgia, pillaged civilian homes in Fredricksburg, Virginia, and fired cannon shells into the towns of Vicksburg, Mississippi and Petersburg, Virginia for months. These unprecedented atrocities against American citizens are documented in “War Crimes Against Southern Civilians” by Walter Brian Cisco.
CONCLUSION: The movie leaves a burning question as to why Steven Spielberg chose to continue the historical glorification of Abraham Lincoln while covering up the horrible truths about his administration and concealing the source of the greatest atrocities ever committed against American citizens. The real facts must have been uncovered given the historical research that was performed. Did Mr. Spielberg’s lust for money and a “feel good” plot far outweigh his desire to present the full truth? We may never know the answer to such questions. In the meantime, if you are simply looking for dramatic entertainment that will make you comfortable by filling your Kool-Aid cup with propaganda, this movie might be for you. If, on the other hand, you expect any historical documentary to inform you accurately about past events, then your admission fee would be better spent on obtaining an accurate historical education of the Lincoln administration by reading a book such as Professor Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln.
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I saw that one too. It is probably better than this movie.
Actually, the author did a heckuva lot of historical work to tie in the real history with the vampire story.
Right.
Why would ANY conservative give money to liberal Hollywood? It’s nuts. Let’s show more pride than paying the kapo to beat us.
Reagan was OK. I don’t like that he gave us amnesty for millions of illegals and the machine gun ban of 1986. His pressidential library is in California, not Illinos. Perhaps he considered himself a Californian?
Yes, yes, state's rights, industrial tarriffs, property rights, the 10th amendment, etc etc; but every single argument resolved down to slavery and the economics built upon it.
I'm with you on this - anyone who thinks it wasn't 'slavery' needs to read the Lincoln/Douglas debates... It was only the war that ended the evil of slavery and it was Lincoln that made certain that slavery was ended.
Thank God for Abraham Lincoln.
McClellan was a coward and traitor pure and simple. Furthermore, he ran against Lincoln as...a Democrat!
I'm with you on this - anyone who thinks it wasn't 'slavery' needs to read the Lincoln/Douglas debates... You're right - Thank God for Abraham Lincoln.
Another producer, writer faux historian making a buck off of reconstructed history, the Lincoln Fairy Tale™. Sic semper tyrannis.
And I think you're blowing smoke. All the nuancing in the world will not cause me to ignore the obvious.
You cannot separate the tariff issue from the slavery issue, they are connected
Thank you
Why did a South in which only a relative minority owned slaves go to war to keep slavery as an expression of its supposed state sovereignty? For the South, freeing the slaves was recognized to be the end of one set of familiar problems and the beginning of other problems with no clear solutions -- problems that would affect every white Southerner, not just the slave holders.
First, once the slaves were freed, how would they house, clothe, and feed themselves, and how would the South's rural plantation economy function without their labor? How would slaveholders be compensated?
Second, if empowered with the vote and civil liberties equal to whites, impoverished and ignorant freed slaves could be expected to make their influence felt, resulting in corruption, the election of unsuitable officials, and high spending and taxes. There would be much detriment to whites in general and to the property owning class in particular.
Third, the presence of a large, poor, uneducated, restive and resentful mass of freed Black slaves would give rise to an enduring race problem. Notably, the Northern states were unwilling to accept freed slaves into their own states. That was too much trouble, and trouble of a kind that the South was better equipped to deal with and deserving the burdens of as punishment of a sort of rough justice.
As it was, after the failure of Reconstruction and much turmoil and hardship, the eventual resolution for the Southern agrarian economy was a combination of sharecropping , Black farmers on small free holdings, and a large pool of menial Black servants and laborers useful to Southern whites.
Copying laws from the North, virtually all the South adopted a rigid system of Jim Crow laws and a social code that marginalized Blacks for generations. Literacy and property requirements, poll taxes, and other manipulations that severely restricted the right to vote and ended the brief era of relative Black political power in the South.
Might events have taken a better course if Lincoln had lived? Maybe, maybe not. The profound discontinuity of the Civil War changed the country and changed Lincoln, moving both toward advocating greater equality between the races, while remaining uncomfortable with the many problems of applying the principle in practice.
Thus the Civil War led Lincoln far beyond his previous views as to race, and the failure of his African colonization efforts made clear that country would have to find a new path forward that accepted the permanence of a a massive population of former Black slaves.
Yet the contours of history are not as malleable as they may seem, and it is quite possible -- even likely -- that Reconstruction under Lincoln would have failed like it did under Johnson and Grant.
ditto.
What was the bunch of Yankees telling the residents of SC to do?
They were connected in the fact that the North attempted to use the slavery issue to coerce the South into paying the tariffs/taxes and the South used the slavery issue to ‘fire the Southern heart’ when it was thought that the South could not be brought into unanimity about the tariffs. Lincoln’s first Inaugural Address showed his hand. If the South paid the tariffs/taxes they could keep their slaves. According to Lincoln’s own words the horrid institution of slavery was acceptable but not paying ‘taxes’ meant war.
No, Washington was the greatest. He was "first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen"
Absolutely. Sexual slavery, economic slavery, cultural slavery, ideological slavery, etc... It all came with the false flag of freedom.
Maybe he's just tired of this ignorant neoconfederate s___t excreted month after month, year after year.
Just about everybody is at this point.
Fortunately, there are always new people coming in who still have the energy and the interest to dissect this garbage.
Whoever wrote the article has a simplistic view of politics and 19th century American history. Just about everybody who entered major party electoral politics when Lincoln did would have to live with slavery in ways that no one today has to. No one who was elected to major offices could have been a passionate and uncompromising self-professed abolitionist.
It's surprising that Illinois's (not very vigorously enforced) constitutional provision is used to attack Lincoln. Should we then assume that every politician, soldier, or citizen from a slave state was likewise tainted by the policy of his state?
Lincoln's letter to Greeley refers to preserving the union as his "paramount object" not his only intent. It was an expression of his government's policy, not of his private feelings. Obviously, Lincoln's refusal to compromise on the expansion of slavery to the territories indicates that he did have a firm position that he wouldn't compromise on, and the speculation at the time was that slavery couldn't survive without expansion.
Nor was it clear that Lincoln ever intended to "colonize all African Americans." The idea was voluntary colonization. Lincoln's expressed intention in 1865 to extend the right to vote to Black veterans indicates that there was no plan or intention to deport or expel all African-Americans.
Tariffs weren't the cause of secession or of the war. The North wasn't notably less free than the South during the war years. Hostile editors and agitators weren't treated better in the South than in the North. Lincoln didn't start the war, and he certainly didn't "personally directed key activities of the Union Army."
George Armistead's nephew Lewis took up arms against the United States. If his grandson was of the same opinion, was it scandalous or surprising if he was imprisoned? Would he have fared any better if he'd been a self-professed and active unionist in rebel territory?
Lost causers annoy me to no end.
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