[davidjquackenbush]

DiLorenzo says: Lincoln used the war to "remove the constraints that Southern senators and congressmen, standing in the Jeffersonian tradition, placed in the way of centralized federal power, high tariffs, and subsidies to Northern industries." Indeed, Lincoln's 28-year political career prior to becoming president was devoted almost exclusively to this end.

I can't believe DiLorenzo isn't ashamed to keep repeating this fantasy. There is NO evidence that Lincoln thought about economic policy AT ALL from his return to political life in 1854 until his election as president. We have repeatedly shown that the two pathetic attempts he makes at such evidence (his misreading of the Dred Scott speech and his completely false claim about the Lincoln Douglas debates) show instead only that Lincoln thought and spoke only about the danger posed by slavery expansionism to the Union. These are not details -- they are the crucial pieces of evidence (not!) to support the central claim that Lincoln was motivated to seek and use power in support of a corrupt economic agenda. All the DiLorenzo supporters who trust his reading of the secondary sources he (fitfully and inaccurately) cites might have the decency to respond to his claims about these famous Lincoln speeches. I have laid out the case the DiLorenzo is either lying or incompetent to read historical texts.

DiLorenzo has utterly failed to make the case that Lincoln was motivated by an economic agenda. His use of particular texts to give the appearance that he has done so is either dishonest or incompetent. And all of you who keep happily parroting this thesis, with never a single bit of Lincoln's words from the relevant decade to support it, because there is none, are not helping the cause of reasonable discussion.

Some people might think a complete lack of evidence supporting a thesis, and a clear pattern of distortion of the record in place of such evidence, would count against the thesis, but not the epic poets of the tale of the perfidious ape - it just gives them more room to imagine things.

[rdf]

I can't believe DiLorenzo isn't ashamed to keep repeating this fantasy. There is NO evidence that Lincoln thought about economic policy AT ALL from his return to political life in 1854 until his election as president. We have repeatedly shown that the two pathetic attempts he makes at such evidence (his misreading of the Dred Scott speech and his completely false claim about the Lincoln Douglas debates) show instead only that Lincoln thought and spoke only about the danger posed by slavery expansionism to the Union. These are not details -- they are the crucial pieces of evidence (not!) to support the central claim that Lincoln was motivated to seek and use power in support of a corrupt economic agenda. All the DiLorenzo supporters who trust his reading of the secondary sources he (fitfully and inaccurately) cites might have the decency to respond to his claims about these famous Lincoln speeches. I have laid out the case the DiLorenzo is either lying or incompetent to read historical texts.

You could not be clearer, and DiLorenzo's apologists could not be more evasive.

Goodnight!

Richard F.

[VinnyTex]

DiLorenzo has utterly failed to make the case that Lincoln was motivated by an economic agenda

You're out to lunch. Lincoln was a Whig.

The Whigs' direct political antecedents were the National Republicans, the administration party during John Quincy ADAMS ' presidency (1825-1829). They advocated a nationalistic economic policy (the "American System"), but were stymied by the rising power of the Jacksonians, who were thereafter called Democrats. Jackson's inauguration in 1829 began the period of National Republican opposition and prepared the ground for the coalition of political forces which formed the Whig Party. Henry Clay of Kentucky, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts became the party's leading figures. Webster was more of a nationalist than Clay, as he demonstrated in his famed Reply to Hayne of South Carolina (Jan. 26-27, 1830). But both men urged a program of tariff protection, federally sponsored communication projects (internal improvements), continuation of the national bank, and a conservative public land sales policy--the "American System," much of which could be traced back to Alexander Hamilton's Federalist economic policy of 1791. This was a program with especially strong appeal to merchants and manufacturers whose business operations went beyond state lines. Clay made the president's veto of a bill to recharter the second Bank of the United States the key issue of the election of 1832, but Jackson easily won reelection.

The absence of true nationalism before the Civil War, meant that the party with a national economic policy had to depend on nonsense and war heroes for its two national victories. With no Southerners in Congress during the Civil War, and with a former Illinois Whig, Abraham Lincoln, in the White House, the Republican Party finally passed much of the economic legislation on tariff and banking which the Whigs had long advocated.

Frank Otto Gatell
University of Maryland

For Further ReadingBarkan, Elliott Robert, Portrait of a Party: The Origins and Development of the Whig Persuasion in New York State (Garland 1988)
Brown, Thomas, Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the American Whig Party (Columbia Univ. Press 1985)
Carroll, E. Malcolm, Origins of the Whig Party (1925; reprint, Da Capo 1970)
Cole, Arthur C., The Whig Party in the South (1913; reprint, P. Smith 1959)
Ershkowitz, Herbert, The Origin of the Whig and Democratic Parties (Univ. Press of Am. 1983)
Howe, Daniel W., The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1980; reprint, Univ. of Chicago Press 1984)
Poage, George R., Henry Clay and the Whig Party (1936; reprint, P. Smith 1965)

It's rather absurd for a nobody like you to be trashing an esteemed scholar like Professor DiLorenzo who is an editor of Ideas on Liberty, a research fellow at the Independence Institute, and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. And you are????

The Independent Policy Forum

THE REAL ABRAHAM LINCOLN:
A Debate

6:30-8:30 p.m.
Tuesday, May 7, 2002

At The Independent Institute Conference Center
Reception 6:30 p.m.
Program 7:00 p.m.

Harry V. Jaffa Professor of Government Claremont McKenna University Author, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War		Thomas J. DiLorenzo Professor of Economics Loyola College of Maryland Author, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War

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