Was Lincoln a Tyrant?

LewRockwell.com ^ | April 29, 2002 | Thomas DiLorenzo

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Was Lincoln a Tyrant? by Thomas J. DiLorenzo In a recent WorldNetDaily article, “Examining ‘Evidence’ of Lincoln’s Tyranny (April 23),” David Quackenbush accuses me of misreading several statements by the prominent historians Roy Basler and Mark Neely in my book, The Real Lincoln:  A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War.   With regard to Basler, I quote him in Abraham Lincoln:  His Speeches and Writings, as suggesting that on the issue of slavery, post 1854, Lincoln’s  “words lacked effectiveness.”  Quackenbush says he was not referring to Lincoln’s comments on slavery here, but other things.   I read him differently. What Basler said was that, yes, Lincoln used eloquent language with regard to human equality and “respecting the Negro as a human being,” but he offered no concrete proposals other than the odious colonization idea of his political idol, Henry Clay.  As Basler wrote, “The truth is that Lincoln had no solution to the problem of slavery [as of 1857] except the colonization idea which he inherited from Henry Clay.”  In the next sentence he mentions Lincoln’s eloquent natural rights language, then in the next sentence after that, he makes the “lacking in effectiveness” comment.  What I believe Basler is saying here is that because Lincoln’s actions did not match his impressive rhetoric, his words did indeed lack effectiveness.  As Robert Johannsen, author of Lincoln, the South, and Slavery put it, Lincoln’s position on slavery was identical to Clay’s:  “opposition to slavery in principle, toleration of it in practice, and a vigorous hostility toward the abolition movement” (emphasis added).   Regardless of what Basler said, I take the position that Lincoln’s sincerity can certainly be questioned in this regard.  His words did lack effectiveness on the issue of slavery because he contradicted himself so often.  Indeed, one of his most famous defenders, Harry Jaffa, has long maintained that Honest Abe was a prolific liar when he was making numerous racist and white supremacist remarks.   He was lying, says Jaffa, just to get himself elected.   In The Lincoln Enigma Gabor Boritt even goes so far in defending Lincoln’s deportation/colonization proposals to say, “This is how honest people lie.”  Well, not exactly.  Truly honest people do not lie.  The problem with this argument, Joe Sobran has pointed out, is that Lincoln made these kinds of ugly comments even when he was not running for political office.  He did this, I believe, because he believed in these things. Basler was certainly aware of Lincoln’s voluminous statements in opposition to racial equality.  He denounced “equality between the white and black races” in his August 21, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas; stated in his 1852 eulogy to Henry Clay that as monstrous as slavery was, eliminating it would supposedly produce “a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself;” and in his February 27, 1860 Cooper Union speech advocated deporting black people so that “their places be . . . filled up by free white laborers.”  In fact, Lincoln clung to the colonization/deportation idea for the rest of his life.  There are many other similar statements.   Thus, it is not at all a stretch to conclude that Basler’s comment that Lincoln’s words “lacked effectiveness” could be interpreted as that he was insincere.  It also seems to me that Johannsen is right when he further states that “Nearly all of [Lincoln’s] public statements on the slavery question prior to his election as president were delivered with political intent and for political effect.”  As David Donald wrote of Lincoln in Lincoln Reconsidered, “politics was his life.”  In my book I do not rely on Basler alone, but any means, to make my point that Lincoln’s devotion to racial equality was dubious, at best. Quackenbush apparently believes it is a sign of sincerity for Lincoln to have denounced slavery in one sentence, and then in the next sentence to denounce the abolition of slavery as being even more harmful to human liberty.  (I apparently misread the statement Lincoln once made about “Siamese twins” by relying on a secondary source that got it wrong and will change it if there is a third printing). Quackenbush takes much out of context and relies exclusively on Lincoln’s own arguments in order to paint as bleak a picture of my book as possible.  For example, in my book I quote Mark Neely as saying that Lincoln exhibited a “gruff and belittling impatience” over constitutional arguments that had stood in the way of his cherished mercantilist economic agenda (protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare, and a federal monopolization of the money supply) for decades.  Quackenbush takes me to task for allegedly implying that Neely wrote that Lincoln opposed the Constitution and not just constitutional arguments. But I argue at great length in the book that Lincoln did resent the Constitution as well as the constitutional arguments that were made by myriad American statesmen, beginning with Jefferson.  In fact, this quotation of Neely comes at the end of the chapter entitled “Was Lincoln a Dictator,” in which I recount the trashing of the Constitution by Lincoln as discussed in such books as James Randall’s Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, Dean Sprague’s Freedom Under Lincoln, and Neely’s Fate of Liberty.   Lincoln’s behavior, more than his political speeches, demonstrated that he had little regard for the Constitution when it stood in the way of his political ambitions. One difference between how I present this material and how these others authors present it is that I do not spend most of my time making excuses and bending over backwards to concoct “rationales” for Lincoln’s behavior.  I just present the material.  The back cover of Neely’s book, for example, states that thanks to the book, “Lincoln emerges . . . with his legendary statesmanship intact.”  Neely won a Pulitzer Prize for supposedly pulling Lincoln’s fanny out of the fire with regard to his demolition of civil liberties in the North during the war. Quackenbush dismisses the historical, constitutional arguments opposed to Lincoln’s mercantilist economic agenda, as Lincoln himself sometimes did,  as “partisan zealotry.”  Earlier in the book I quote James Madison, the father of the Constitution, as vetoing an “internal improvements” bill sponsored by Henry Clay on the grounds that “it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised in the bill is among the enumerated powers” of the Constitution.  Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and John Tyler made similar statements.  These were more than partisan arguments by political hacks and zealots.  The father of the Constitution himself, Madison, believed the corporate welfare subsidies that  Lincoln would later champion were unconstitutional.  Add to this Lincoln’s extraordinary disregard for the Constitution during his entire administration, and it seems absurd for Quackenbush or anyone else to portray him as a champion of the Constitution who was pestered by “political zealots.”  Among Lincoln’s unconstitutional acts were launching an invasion without the consent of Congress, blockading Southern ports before formally declaring war, unilaterally suspending the writ of habeas corpus and arresting and imprisoning thousands of Northern citizens without a warrant, censoring telegraph communications, confiscating private property, including firearms, and effectively gutting the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.  Even quite worshipful Lincoln biographers and historians called him a “dictator.”  In his book, Constitutional Dictatorship, Clinton Rossiter devoted an entire chapter to Lincoln and calls him a “great dictator” and a “true democrat,” two phrases that are not normally associated with each other.  “Lincoln’s amazing disregard for the . . . Constitution was considered by nobody as legal,” said Rossiter.  Yet Quackenbush throws a fit because I dare to question Lincoln’s devotion to constitutional liberty. Quackenbush continues to take my statements out of context when commenting on the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and he refuses to admit that Lincoln did in fact lament the demise of the Bank of the United Stated during the debates.  His earlier claim that there was not a single word said during the Lincoln-Douglas debates about economic policy is simply untrue.  But the larger context is that even though most of the discussion during the debates centered on such issues as the extension of slavery into the new territories, they were really a manifestation of the old debate between the advocates of centralized government (Hamilton, Clay, Webster, Lincoln) and of decentralized government and states’ rights (Jefferson, Jackson, Tyler, Calhoun, Douglas).  At the time of the debates Lincoln had spent about a quarter of a century laboring in the trenches of the Whig and Republican Parties, primarily on behalf of the so-called “American System” of protectionist tariffs, tax subsidies to corporations, and centralized banking.  When the Whig Party collapsed Lincoln assured Illinois voters that there was no essential difference between he two parties.  This is what he and the Whigs and Republicans wanted a centralized government for.  As Basler said, at the time he had no concrete solution to the slavery issue other than to propose sending black people back to Africa, Haiti, or Central America.  He did, however, have a long record of advocating the programs of the “American System” and implementing a financially disastrous $10 million “internal improvements” boondoggle in Illinois in the late 1830s when he was an influential member of  the state legislature.  Lincoln spent his 25-year off-and-on political career prior to 1857 championing the Whig project of centralized government that would engage in a kind of economic central planning.  When the extension of slavery became the overriding issue of the day he continued to hold the centralizer’s position.  And as soon as he took office, he and the Republican party enacted what James McPherson called a “blizzard of legislation” that finally achieved the “American System,” complete with federal railroad subsidies, a tripling of the average tariff rate that would remain that high or higher long after the war ended, and centralized banking with the National Currency and Legal Tender Acts.  It is in this sense that the Lincoln-Douglas debates really did have important economic ramifications.  Quackenbush complains that I do not quote Lincoln enough.  He falsely states that there’s only one Lincoln quote in the entire book, which is simply bizarre.  On page 85 alone I quote Lincoln the secessionist, speaking on January 12, 1848 (“The War with Mexico:  Speech in the United States House of Representatives”):  “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.  This is a most valuable, a most sacred right --a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.  Nor is the right confined to cases I which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it.  Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.”  That’s four sentences, by my count, and there are plenty of other Lincoln quotes in my book, contrary to Quackenbush’s kooky assertion. But he has a point:  I chose to focus in my book more on Lincoln’s actions than his words.  After all, even Bill Clinton would look like a brilliant statesman if he were judged exclusively by his pleasant-sounding speeches, many of which were written by the likes of James Carville and Paul Begala.  Yet, this is how many Lincoln scholars seem to do their work, even writing entire books around single short speeches while ignoring much of Lincoln’s actual behavior and policies. I also stand by my argument that Lincoln was essentially the anti-Jefferson in many ways, including his repudiation of the principle in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.  I don’t see how this can even be debatable.  The Whigs were always the anti-Jeffersonians who battled with the political heirs of Jefferson, such as Andrew Jackson and John Tyler.  Lincoln was solidly in this tradition, even though he often quoted Jefferson for political effect.  He also quoted Scripture a lot even though, as Joe Sobran has pointed out, he never could bring himself to become a believer. In this regard I believe the Gettysburg Address was mostly sophistry.  As H.L. Mencken once wrote, “it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense.”   It was the Union soldiers in the battle, he wrote, who “actually fought against self determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.”  Regardless of what one believes was the main cause of the war, it is indeed true that the Confederates no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C. and Lincoln waged a war to deny them that right. It’s interesting that even though the title of Quackenbush’s article had to do with “Evidence of Lincoln’s Tyranny,” in fourteen pages he does not say a single word about the voluminous evidence that I do present, based on widely-published and easily-accessible materials, of Lincoln’s tyrannical behavior in trashing the Constitution and waging war on civilians in violation of international law and codes of morality.  Instead, he focuses on accusations of misplaced quotation marks, footnotes out of order, or misinterpretations of a few quotations.  April 27, 2002 Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com Thomas DiLorenzo Archives LRC needs your support. Please donate.

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Here is Q's summary.

Do with it what you like.

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To summarize:

The author of the Civil War volume of "The Oxford History of the United States" is struck precisely by the total absence of evidence that DiLorenzo says is "virtually" everywhere in the Lincoln Douglas debates.

The editor of the "Collected Works" of Lincoln uses the phrase "his words lacked effectiveness" to describe a portion of a single speech about slavery, but only when that speech ventures beyond its central, crucial topics regarding slavery. In 1998, Dr. DiLorenzo clipped this sentence to make it mean precisely the opposite. Four years later, he reports instead that the editor judges Lincoln's words on slavery for almost a decade to have "lacked effectiveness" and seemed "not at all sincere."

A Pulitzer Prize winning historian writes a careful and balanced account of Lincoln's impatient youthful frustration at Democratic resistance to the constitutionality of a national bank. Dr. DiLorenzo tells us that the historian spoke of Lincoln's seething resentment at the Constitution itself.

Lincoln quotes with withering disapproval the words of a Virginia clergyman who repudiates and mocks the Declaration doctrine of human equality. Dr. DiLorenzo presents snippets of the clergyman's words as Lincoln's own – a gross falsehood – in order to "prove" that Lincoln's love of the Declaration was insincere.

Suppressed evidence, misquotation, misconstruction of context, incompetent citations, inaccurate implication – it's all here. I have chosen these four examples from a much longer and ever-growing list. But these examples are utterly characteristic of the entire book. Dr. DiLorenzo wonders why the scholarly world has not responded with argument to his revelation of evidence that Lincoln was a tyrant. It may be because his "evidence" is such a cooked up mess.

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Declaration Foundation

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Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom!

Richard F.

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One more, quickly, before it's swallowed up in cyberspace.

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"We have seen a great deal made of DiLorenzo's new book on Lincoln, and I thought the community might be interested in an alternate view of the book, which I recently purchased.

DiLorenzo includes a "Selected Bibliography" at the end of the text, and the book is endnoted. So far I cannot see that he has not consulted any primary sources beyond Basler's edition of Lincoln's collected works and other published collections of a similar nature. He appears to be only selectively familiar with the extant literature on the Civil War period.

My original plan was to go through the entire book, identify passages that are poorly supported (or not supported at all) by the historical record, quote them, and then offer my comments. I decided to stop after the first two chapters to avoid overkill.

Without further ado, let's dive into the Introduction.

Page 2: "The [Civil War] created the highly centralized state that Americans labor under today." Those of us familiar with the New Deal and the Great Society might take issue with this unsupported assertion. Those of us familiar with the dynamics of the Populist Era might also disagree.

Page 3: "Lincoln thought of himself as the heir to the Hamiltonian political tradition" This is another unsupported assertion (no footnote is given), and I conducted a brief experiment to see if Lincoln's own words would back it up. I went to the Lincoln Papers online site and did a simple search on the word "Hamilton." If DiLorenzo's assertion were valid, it seems clear to me that I ought to get a lot of hits; I got a grand total of 26 hits, the first three of which were not to Alexander Hamilton! In fact, looking through the citations, only five of them referred to Alexander Hamilton; the rest were to locations named Hamilton or to Union officers named Hamilton. It seems to me that this is a sparse degree of citation for someone who thought of himself as Hamilton's "heir."

Page 4: "It is very likely that most Americans, if they had been given the opportunity, would have gladly supported compensated emancipation as a means of ending slavery " With this unsupported assertion, DiLorenzo reveals his utter ignorance of the dynamics of the sectional controversy. He gives no evidence to support the claim that the Southern slaveholders would have agreed to such a policy. While the lack of a footnote can perhaps be excused on the grounds that this is only the introduction (Chapter 3 is devoted to this entire issue of compensated emancipation), there is no excuse for his monumental ignorance of the massive historical record of impassioned defense of slavery by the slaveowners.

Page 5: "This doctrine [secession] was even taught to the cadets at West Point, including almost all of the top military commanders on both sides of the conflict" This, of course, is the William Rawle story, which has been soundly discredited in many places. Rawle's book on the Constitution was used for only a single year at West Point, perhaps two, before being supplanted by another. Unless we count Samuel Heintzleman as one of the "top military commanders," then DiLorenzo's statement is simply false.

Page 6: "Chapter 7 details how Lincoln abandoned the generally accepted rules of war, which had just been codified by the Geneva Convention of 1863." I can find no reference to a Geneva Convention of 1863. The Avalon Project website at Yale mentions an 1864 Geneva Convention, but this was confined in scope to the treatment of the wounded. The next Geneva Convention is dated 1928, and concerns only the use of gas warfare; the first Hague Convention does not occur until 1907. If there is something I have missed because of my reliance on a website as a source, I would be glad to hear of it. Looking in to the body of the book, I looked at Chapter 7, and discovered more of DiLorenzo's fascinating logic. He correctly mentions Henry Halleck as the author of a book on international law, but characterizes this book as having "informed virtually all the top commanders in the Union army (and the Confederate army as well)." It appears to have escaped DiLorenzo's radar screen that Halleck's book was not published until 1861, and so could not have informed any of the "top commanders" in either army. One wonders if DiLorenzo has even seen a copy of Halleck's book.

Page 7: "Chapter 9 describes Lincoln's economic legacy: the realization of Henry Clay's American System. Many (primarily) Southern statesmen had opposed this system for decades" This gets to the heart of DiLorenzo's thesis. His beef is less with Lincoln than with Clay and Clay's ideas. And DiLorenzo conveniently ignores the many prominent Southern Whigs who favored Clay's ideas and the many Northern Democrats who did not. It looks to me as though someone should send Mr. DiLorenzo a Christmas present of Michael Holt's works.

Page 8: "Lincoln's war created the 'military-industrial complex' some ninety years before President Eisenhower coined the phrase." This may win a prize as the most outlandish exaggeration in the chapter.

Chapter 2 is concerned with "Lincoln's Opposition to Racial Equality," but a more accurate title would be "Northern Racism." No one denies that racism (which is a modern term, by the way) existed in the North at the time of Lincoln's election, but DiLorenzo proceeds as though this fact were the second book of Revelation.

Page 15: "In twenty-three years of litigation [Lincoln] never defended a runaway slave, but he did defend a slaveowner." The reference to defending a slaveowner is to the notorious Matson case, in which Lincoln represented (as an assistant) a Kentuckian who owned land in Illinois which he worked with the help of some slaves he brought over from Kentucky for part of the year. There is no denying that this case causes some embarassment to those who hold Lincoln in high esteem, but the fact is that Lincoln did defend a black woman, Nance, who was accused of being a slave. While DiLorenzo's assertion, "he never defended a runaway slave," may be, strictly speaking, true, to omit the Nance case in this discussion is shoddy scholarship, especially since it was the precedent of the Nance case which the court used in deciding the Matson case.

Page 17: "Some ten years later, December 1, 1862, in a message to Congress, Lincoln reiterated his earlier assertions: 'I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization.'" DiLorenzo makes a big issue of Lincoln's support for colonization, but he overlooks the fact that it disappears from Lincoln's agenda after this 1862 message to Congress. Most authors accept that this represents a change of heart on Lincoln's part. DiLorenzo simply ignores it. (He also ignores Frederick Douglass's comments on Lincoln's lack of racial prejudice.)

Page 24: "The more or less 'official' interpretation of the cause of the War between the States, as described in *The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents*, by historian William A. Degregorio, asserts that the slavery issue 'pitted abolitionists in the North who viewed it as a moral evil to be eradicated everywhere as soon as practiable against southern extremists who fostered the spread of slavery into the territories.'" I, for one, have never heard of William A. Degregorio nor *The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents*, and I would think that many better sources would exist for an "official" interpretation. This is nothing more than a strawman, and a weak one at that. No serious scholar takes this view of the Civil War, and while I do grant that many ordinary citizens might, that is an indictment of history education, not of Lincoln's record.

Page 25: "No abolitionist was ever elected to any major political office in any Northern state." Thaddeus Stevens, Salmon Chase, and Charles Sumner would be suprised to read this. Page 26: "[Lincoln] was thus the North's candidate in the election..." Stephen A. Douglas would have been surprised to read this.

DiLorenzo ends this chapter on page 32 by saying, "The foregoing discussion calls into question the standard account that Northerners elected Lincoln in a fit of moral outrage spawned by their deep-seated concern for the welfare of black slaves in the deep South." The problem is that this assertion is based on a false premise. I don't think there is a "standard account that Northerners elected Lincoln in a fit of moral outrage..."

I have read about half the book now, and the weaknesses exposed here are endemic in the entire text. DiLorenzo lacks any contextual knowledge of the period. He has an obvious passion for Libertarian economic ideas --- this is what drives the book, frankly --- but his basic knowledge of the sectional crisis is so thin that he is unable to avoid building a house of cards."

JFE

James F. Epperson

http://members.aol.com/jfepperson/causes.html

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Face it, Dr. d. is a shallow, bigoted, incompetent, unlearned little puppy.

'Nuff said.

Richard F.

[GOPcapitalist]

It is hard to prove a negative.

Hence the difficulty in doing so of DiLorenzo's opponents.

Q., and I, had done a search at the Basler site to see whether indeed Lincoln had said practically nothing on economics during this period, and I can tell you it is, in fact true.

Can you though? I took the time to do my own search as well and found a reasonably large ammount of material, probably among it that which you found. It seems to indicate that Lincoln took up the issue during that time (1) in confidence with individuals, (2) to known friendly audiences, and (3) by falling behind the 1860 GOP platform. When he did so in the first two cases, he made it no secret that he was a tariff man, considered the issue important, and anticipated its implementation in the near future - hence the assertion I previously quoted to you made a few weeks before his inauguration, itself delivered in a tariff-friendly northern locality.

The second issue that arises is the inevitability that, despite their thoroughness as a great resources, the complete works of Lincoln are by no means complete. They do not record every speech and utterance he ever made, every letter he ever wrote - only those that were saved, have survived, and have been documented. Lincoln himself realized this, writing in one letter responding to a request that he provide copies of his tariff speeches throughout his career that "To comply...is simply impossible, because none of those speeches were published." Nevertheless, he conceded, they were there. The tariff issue had been the primary focus of his political career in what Lincoln called the "old days." He conceded that his tariff background "could be proven by hundreds---perhaps thousands---of living witnesses; still it is not in print, except by inference." So in other words, yes. Proving a negative is quite the burden for you. That is why it is unwise to undertake such an attempt. Rather, you should seek content in what may be asserted. And regardless of whether it suits your argument or not, there exists enough writing by Lincoln in his late career to suggest that (1) his tariff position had not changed, (2) he anticipated taking the issue up in the near future, and (3) he was willing to concede that issue's importance at least in confidence and to friendly audiences.

There were the two speeches you have posted, both of which were in fact more about slavery or secession than economics,

You are incorrect. I presume one you are referring to is the February 15, 1861 speech, which I have cited. The word slavery does not appear anywhere in that speech. The secession crisis itself is barely even touched upon, and only long enough to Lincoln to pledge in a few sentences at the begining that it will not be a dire problem before moving on to the tariff issue. It occupies barely 2 paragraphs before Lincoln states of it "I have spoken longer on this subject than I had intended in the outset---and I shall say no more at present" and turns his attention entirely to the tariff. From that point on, the tariff issue was the subject of the entire speech.

and about 6-10 very diffident letters. That's it.

The letters I saw were consistent. They all conceded that Lincoln either (a) was an old Whig tariff man whose position had not changed, or (b) Lincoln stood behind the pro-tariff plank of the Republican platform. They differed in the ammount of detail he went into, perhaps depending upon his political confidence in the recipient, but all expressed anticipation that the tariff would succeed in the future.

This is no dispute; it's a fact. The debates, as McPherson says, contain nothing about economics, especially about "Whig Economics."

McPherson's actual assertion that not a word was said about them by Lincoln. Having read much of this thread, it appears that Ravinson has quoted at least a couple of references to the bank issue. That doesn't dominate the debate, but it certainly isn't "not a word" either. DiLorenzo first acknowledged that things were said on economics by Lincoln and then, in a later editorial, overstated to say they had been the prominent theme of the debates. I will concede that, also noting McPherson, and those who used him as their argument, to have overstated with the truth lying in between.

Read them. And Dr. D. did not only say this in his article, it's on page 68 of his book. And it's false.

Page 68 of his book does not go near as far as the article. It simply asserts Lincoln to have been pro-bank and to have criticized Jackson in the debates. I'll need to do more reading of them in their entirity, but from what I have read of this thread it appears there was at very least a little of that going on.

Balser is a weighty authority. Dr. D. misrepresents him as saying Lincoln was insincere about slavery and uncaring about human equality.

Not entirely true. If I remember correctly, the citation was said in reference to the absence of anti-slavery from the majority of Lincoln's political career. I believe 1854 is the date normally given before it pops significantly onto the radar. While DiLorenzo's interpretation seemingly overstates beyond the particular speech about which the quote was made, it accurately characterizes the unenthused absence of Lincoln's anti-slavery activism throughout the majority of his career. That much was famously pointed out by Richard Hofstadter long before Basler's writing. And though he has his deficiencies, I do not think it can be disputed that Hofstadter is a reputable authority on the matter. Further, so long as you are willing to press this pettyness, I think it is perfectly fair that I point out the absolutism you employ to condemn DiLorenzo's reading of Basler magically vanished in a recent incident when you were defending an ally who had made an assertion about DiLorenzo's book that I would argue is in greater error itself. Consistency matters, you know.

Neeley is another important authority, and DiLorenzo garbles his words to say that Lincoln seethed against the Constitution. That, too, is false, and very material to Dr. D.'s argument.

Without getting into even greater pettyness, see above. Further, I believe it is a safe assertion that, hypothetically assuming that DiLorenzo's readings of both were absolutely wrong, the absence of both from his text would have little if any change on the book itself or its arguments. Neither is asserted as anything upon which the book rests to begin with.

Discussed above.

and responded above.

Good. But it's not the only one. And it's inexcusable.

I don't believe there's ever been such a thing as a 300 page book that has been 100% free of anything erronious. Not even the oft-quoted James McPherson. I haven't even read his book, yet in the quotes alone, I've seen a significant number of flat out historical errors. That is why second, third, fourth editions and so forth normally contain corrections of both typos and factual errors alike. Errors are inescapable and, though their inescapability is not an excuse for abundance, it does not render the entirity of a work invalid. As I have stated, from what I have seen the errors alleged of DiLorenzo are limited in their impact on his arguments, frequently petty in scope, and often not near as clear cut as his critics would make it sound. And again on the matter of inexcusability, I ask a perfectly fair question: does the same apply in your consideration of the error regarding Lincoln quotes made by your ally?

I wasted some days last month trying to sort it out, since I felt right away that it didn't sound like Lincoln. Dr. D. says he thought it did sound like Lincoln.

With all due respect, I can reasonably see how he did. Lincoln was a very polished and I dare say slick master of language. It is not infrequent that one finds both unusual consistencies and glaring inconsistencies between his various writings and speeches.

He has no ear for Lincoln because he does not understand him in the least.

That is a matter of your own assertion. I have no doubt that some would say, and that the argument could be made, that you yourself lack an ear for understanding Lincoln on the ground that your vision of him has been clouded by biases toward his defense.

And he despises his Imaginary Lincoln.

I am not sure as to which imaginary Lincoln you refer. Care to clarify? Thanks in advance.

Dr. D. also has the DoI meaning by equality, the "equality of the people of the several states." [pg 86] Either that means NC is equal to NY, etc., or it means that Jefferson had in mind only the people [citizens?] of the 13 colonies, soon to be states. So much for "ALL MEN are created equal."

That's a lot of speculation on your part for such a brief assertion by DiLorenzo. I could easily see any number of things to have been meant by this, though DiLorenzo's tendencies would probably lead him to certain ones over the others. Therefore explanation of this is a matter of his own undertaking, and I have no doubt he would probably do so if you so requested in a polite and professional manner. Until then, I ask that you at least extend to him basic courtesy in the benefit of the doubt so that clarification of that statement may be accurately made before you have taken it upon yourself to rewrite and redefine it for him and without his consent.

He has Lincoln, in the Illinois Legislature, urging some racist legislation, in 1857.

Do you have the reference on that? Are you sure it wasn't 1837? Or maybe 54? If it does indeed exist, it sounds to me like it may be a typo. That makes your complaint with it, as I have said, more pettyness and no substance.

Let me make a suggestion. Free yourself from this sophist, and make your own case, as you have dne before. There is no need for your cause to be poisoned by a fraud or a fool.

Allow me to make a clarification and suggestion in return. As you may know, I only recently entered the debate specifically on DiLorenzo, though the subject matter has been one of interest to me for some time. Specifically, I purchased his book out of curiosity over the "firestorm" and read it on the airplane a week ago to make my own assessment, only some of which I have revealed. Looking back on the debate, I believe that the critics of his book are being obsessively petty in their attacks, largely avoiding "the meat" all together.

That beign said, keep in mind that I have not myself asserted my own judgment of "the meat" itself in any significant detail to date. I do have my thoughts of assessment for his individual arguments, but I am saving them for the discussion to emerge over those arguments. The time for posting them has not, in my judgment, arrived as a quality assessment of DiLorenzo beyond the pettyness being wallowed in to date has not emerged from his critics. Pessimism suggests to me that perhaps at this rate they never will.

And now my suggestion to you - provide, in all seriousness, your own assessment of DiLorenzo's arguments, themes, and motifs. Petty gripes about isolated interpretations, factual disputes, and typos doesn't cut it. I'm looking for substance so that I may participate in a discussion of it by contributing my own assessment. I would both suggest and request of you that you undertake such a task. If you have read the book, this should not be hard.

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Here is the whole of the Pittsburg speech.

Speech at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania [1] Previous Section | Next Section February 15, 1861 Mayor Wilson and Citizens of Pennsylvania : I most cordially thank his Honor Mayor Wilson, and the citizens of Pittsburg generally for this flattering reception. It is [2] the more grateful, because I know that, while it is not given to me alone, but to the cause which I represent, yet it is given under circumstances which clearly prove to me that there is good will and sincere feeling at the bottom of it. And here, fellow citizens, I may remark that in every short address I have made to the people, and in every crowd through which I have passed of late, some allusion has been made to the present distracted condition of the country. It is naturally expected that I should say something upon this subject, but to touch upon it all would involve an elaborate discussion of a great many questions and circumstances, would require more time than I can at present command, and would perhaps unnecessarily commit me upon matters which have not yet fully developed themselves. [Immense cheering, and cries of ``good!'' ``that's right!''] The condition of the country, fellow-citizens, is an extraordinary one, and fills the mind of every patriot with anxiety and solicitude. My intention is to give this subject all the consideration which I possibly can before I speak fully and definitely in regard to it---so that, when I do speak, I may be as nearly right as possible. And when I do speak, fellow-citizens, I hope to say nothing in opposition to the spirit of the Consititution, contrary to the integrity of the Union, or which will in any way prove inimical to the liberties of the people or to the peace of the whole country. And, furthermore, -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 211 when the time arrives for me to speak on this great subject, I hope to say nothing which will disappoint the reasonable expectations of any man, or disappoint the people generally throughout the country, especially if their expectations have been based upon anything which I may have heretofore said. Notwithstanding the troubles across the river, [the speaker pointing southwardly, and smiling] there is really no crisis, springing from anything in the government itself. In plain words, there is really no crisis except an artificial one ! What is there now to warrant the condition of affairs presented by our friends ``over the river?'' Take even their own view of the questions involved, and there is nothing to justify the course which they are pursuing. I repeat it, then---there is no crisis , excepting such a one as may be gotten up at any time by designing politicians. [3] My advice, then, under such circumstances, is to keep cool. If the great American people will only keep their temper, on both sides of the line, the troubles will come to an end, and the question which now distracts the country will be settled just as surely as all other difficulties of like character which have originated in this government have been adjusted. Let the people on both sides keep their self-possession, and just as other clouds have cleared away in due time, so will this, and this great nation shall continue to prosper as heretofore. But, fellow citizens, I have spoken longer on this subject than I had intended in the outset---and I shall say no more at present. Fellow citizens, as this is the first opportunity [4] which I have had to address a Pennsylvania assemblage, it seems a fitting time to indulge in a few remarks upon the important question of a tariff---a subject of great magnitude, and one which is attended with many difficulties, owing to the great variety of interests which it involves. So long as direct taxation for the support of government is not resorted to, a tariff is necessary. The tariff is to the government what a meal is to the family; but, while this is admitted, it still becomes necessary to modify and change its operations according to new interests and new circumstances. So far there is little difference of opinion among politicians, but the question as to how far imposts may be adjusted for the protection of home industry, gives rise to various views and objections. I must confess that I do not understand this subject in all its multiform bearings, but I promise you that I will give it my closest attention, and endeavor to comprehend it more fully. And here I may remark that the Chicago -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 212 platform contains a plank upon this subject, which I think should be regarded as law for the incoming administration. In fact, this question, as well as all other subjects embodied in that platform, should not be varied from what we gave the people to understand would be our policy when we obtained their votes. Permit me, fellow citizens, to read the tariff plank of the Chicago platform, or rather, to have it read in your hearing by one who has younger eyes than I have. Mr. Lincoln's private Secretary then read section twelfth of the Chicago platform, as follows: That, while providing revenue for the support of the General Government by duties upon imposts, sound policy requires such an adjustment of the imposts as to encourage the development of the industrial interest of the whole country, and we commend that policy of national exchanges which secures to the working men liberal wages, to agriculture remunerating prices, to mechanics and manufacturers an adequate reward for their skill, labor and enterprise, and to the nation commercial prosperity and independence. Mr. Lincoln continued---Now, fellow-citizens, I must confess that there are shades of difference in construing even this plank of the platform. But I am not now intending to discuss these differences, but merely to give you some general ideas upon this subject. I have long thought that if there be any article of necessity which can be produced at home with as little or nearly the same labor as abroad, it would be better to protect that article. Labor is the true standard of value. If a bar of iron, got out of the mines of England, and a bar of iron taken from the mines of Pennsylvania, be produced at the same cost, it follows that if the English bar be shipped from Manchester to Pittsburg, and the American bar from Pittsburg to Manchester, the cost of carriage is appreciably lost. [Laughter.] If we had no iron here, then we should encourage its shipment from foreign countries; but not when we can make it as cheaply in our own country. This brings us back to our first proposition, that if any article can be produced at home with nearly the same cost as abroad, the carriage is lost labor. The treasury of the nation is in such a low condition at present that this subject now demands the attention of Congress, and will demand the immediate consideration of the new Administration. The tariff bill now before Congress may or may not pass at the present session. I confess I do not understand the precise provisions of this bill, and I do not know whether it can be passed by the present Congress or not. It may or may not become the law of the land---but if it does, that will be an end of the matter until a modification -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Page 213 can be effected, should it be deemed necessary. If it does not pass (and the latest advices I have are to the effect that it is still pending) the next Congress will have to give it their earliest attention. According to my political education, I am inclined to believe that the people in the various sections of the country should have their own views carried out through their representatives in Congress, and if the consideration of the Tariff bill should be postponed until the next session of the National Legislature, no subject should engage your representatives more closely than that of a tariff. And if I have any recommendation to make, it will be that every man who is called upon to serve the people in a representative capacity, should study this whole subject thoroughly, as I intend to do myself, looking to all the varied interests of our common country, so that when the time for action arrives adequate protection can be extended to the coal and iron of Pennsylvania, the corn of Illinois, and the ``reapers of Chicago.'' Permit me to express the hope that this important subject may receive such consideration at the hands of your representatives, that the interests of no part of the country may be overlooked, but that all sections may share in common the benefits of a just and equitable tariff. [Applause.] But I am trespassing upon your patience---[cries of ``no!'' ``no!'' ``Go on---we'll listen!''] and must bring my remarks to a close. Thanking you most cordially for the kind reception which you have extended me, I bid you all adieu. [Enthusiastic applause.]

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And here is the New Haven Speech.

These are the only two speeches with any significant mention of the tariff.

Speech at New Haven, Connecticut

March 6, 1860

MR. PRESIDENT AND FELLOW-CITIZENS OF NEW HAVEN: If the Republican party of this nation shall ever have the national house entrusted to its keeping, it will be the duty of that party to attend to all the affairs of national house-keeping. Whatever matters of importance may come up, whatever difficulties may arise in the way of its administration of the government, that party will then have to attend to. It will then be compelled to attend to other questions, besides this question which now assumes an overwhelming importance---the question of Slavery. It is true that in the organization of the Republican party this question of Slavery was more important than any other; indeed, so much more important has it become that no other national question can even get a hearing just at present.

The old question of tariff---a matter that will remain one of the chief affairs of national housekeeping to all time---the question of the management of financial affairs; the question of the disposition of the public domain---how shall it be managed for the purpose of getting it well settled, and of making there the homes of a free and happy people---these will remain open and require attention for a great while yet, and these questions will have to be attended to by whatever party has the control of the government. Yet, just now, they cannot even obtain a hearing, and I do not purpose to detain you upon these topics, or what sort of hearing they should have when opportunity shall come.

For, whether we will or not, the question of Slavery is the question, the all absorbing topic of the day. It is true that all of us---and by that I mean, not the Republican party alone, but the whole American people, here and elsewhere---all of us wish this question settled---wish it out of the way. It stands in the way, and prevents the adjustment, and the giving of necessary attention to other questions of national house-keeping. The people of the whole nation agree that this question ought to be settled, and yet it is not settled. And the reason is that they are not yet agreed how it shall be settled. All wish it done, but some wish one way and some another, and some a third, or fourth, or fifth; different bodies are pulling in different directions, and none of them having a decided majority, are able to accomplish the common object.

In the beginning of the year 1854 a new policy was inaugurated with the avowed object and confident promise that it would entirely and forever put an end to the Slavery agitation. It was again and again declared that under this policy, when once successfully established, the country would be forever rid of this whole question. Yet under the operation of that policy this agitation has not only not ceased, but it has been constantly augmented. And this too, although, from the day of its introduction, its friends, who promised that it would wholly end all agitation, constantly insisted, down to the time that the Lecompton bill was introduced, that it was working admirably, and that its inevitable tendency was to remove the question forever from the politics of the country. Can you call to mind any Democratic speech, made after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, down to the time of the Lecompton bill, in which it was not predicted that the Slavery agitation was just at an end; that ``the abolition excitement was played out,'' ``the Kansas question was dead,'' ``they have made the most they can out of this question and it is now forever settled.'' But since the Lecompton bill no Democrat, within my experience, has ever pretended that he could see the end. That cry has been dropped. They themselves do not pretend, now, that the agitation of this subject has come to an end yet. [Applause.]

The truth is, that this question is one of national importance, and we cannot help dealing with it: we must do something about it, whether we will or not. We cannot avoid it; the subject is one we cannot avoid considering; we can no more avoid it than a man can live without eating. It is upon us; it attaches to the body politic as much and as closely as the natural wants attach to our natural bodies. Now I think it important that this matter should be taken up in earnest, and really settled. And one way to bring about a true settlement of the question is to understand its true magnitude.

There have been many efforts to settle it. Again and again it has been fondly hoped that it was settled, but every time it breaks out afresh, and more violently than ever. It was settled, our fathers hoped, by the Missouri Compromise, but it did not stay settled. Then the compromises of 1850 were declared to be a full and final settlement of the question. The two great parties, each in National Convention, adopted resolutions declaring that the settlement made by the Compromise of 1850 was a finality---that it would last forever. Yet how long before it was unsettled again! It broke out again in 1854, and blazed higher and raged more furiously than ever before, and the agitation has not rested since.

These repeated settlements must have some fault about them. There must be some inadequacy in their very nature to the purpose for which they were designed. We can only speculate as to where that fault---that inadequacy, is, but we may perhaps profit by past experience.

I think that one of the causes of these repeated failures is that our best and greatest men have greatly underestimated the size of this question. They have constantly brought forward small cures for great sores---plasters too small to cover the wound. That is one reason that all settlements have proved so temporary---so evanescent. [Applause.]

Look at the magnitude of this subject! One sixth of our population, in round numbers---not quite one sixth, and yet more than a seventh,---about one sixth of the whole population of the United States are slaves! The owners of these slaves consider them property. The effect upon the minds of the owners is that of property, and nothing else---it induces them to insist upon all that will favorably affect its value as property, to demand laws and institutions and a public policy that shall increase and secure its value, and make it durable, lasting and universal. The effect on the minds of the owners is to persuade them that there is no wrong in it. The slaveholder does not like to be considered a mean fellow, for holding that species of property, and hence he has to struggle within himself and sets about arguing himself into the belief that Slavery is right. The property influences his mind. The dissenting minister, who argued some theological point with one of the established church, was always met by the reply, ``I can't see it so.'' He opened the Bible, and pointed him to a passage, but the orthodox minister replied, ``I can't see it so.'' Then he showed him a single word---``Can you see that?'' ``Yes, I see it,'' was the reply. The dissenter laid a guinea over the word and asked, ``Do you see it now?'' [Great laughter.] So here. Whether the owners of this species of property do really see it as it is, it is not for me to say, but if they do, they see it as it is through 2,000,000,000 of dollars, and that is a pretty thick coating. [Laughter.] Certain it is, that they do not see it as we see it. Certain it is, that this two thousand million of dollars, invested in this species of property, all so concentrated that the mind can grasp it at once---this immense pecuniary interest, has its influence upon their minds.

But here in Connecticut and at the North Slavery does not exist, and we see it through no such medium. To us it appears natural to think that slaves are human beings; men , not property; that some of the things, at least, stated about men in the Declaration of Independence apply to them as well as to us. [Applause.] I say, we think, most of us, that this Charter of Freedom applies to the slave as well as to ourselves, that the class of arguments put forward to batter down that idea, are also calculated to break down the very idea of a free government, even for white men, and to undermine the very foundations of free society. [Continued applause.] We think Slavery a great moral wrong, and while we do not claim the right to touch it where it exists, we wish to treat it as a wrong in the Territories, where our votes will reach it. We think that a respect for ourselves, a regard for future generations and for the God that made us, require that we put down this wrong where our votes will properly reach it. We think that species of labor an injury to free white men---in short, we think Slavery a great moral, social and political evil, tolerable only because, and so far as its actual existence makes it necessary to tolerate it, and that beyond that, it ought to be treated as a wrong.

Now these two ideas, the property idea that Slavery is right, and the idea that it is wrong, come into collision, and do actually produce that irrepressible conflict which Mr. Seward has been so roundly abused for mentioning. The two ideas conflict, and must conflict.

Again, in its political aspect, does anything in any way endanger the perpetuity of this Union but that single thing, Slavery? Many of our adversaries are anxious to claim that they are specially devoted to the Union, and take pains to charge upon us hostility to the Union. Now we claim that we are the only true Union men, and we put to them this one proposition: What ever endangered this Union, save and except Slavery? Did any other thing ever cause a moment's fear? All men must agree that this thing alone has ever endangered the perpetuity of the Union. But if it was threatened by any other influence, would not all men say that the best thing that could be done, if we could not or ought not to destroy it, would be at least to keep it from growing any larger? Can any man believe that the way to save the Union is to extend and increase the only thing that threatens the Union, and to suffer it to grow bigger and bigger? [Great applause.]

Whenever this question shall be settled, it must be settled on some philosophical basis. No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained. And hence, there are but two policies in regard to Slavery that can be at all maintained. The first, based on the property view that Slavery is right, conforms to that idea throughout, and demands that we shall do everything for it that we ought to do if it were right. We must sweep away all opposition, for opposition to the right is wrong; we must agree that Slavery is right, and we must adopt the idea that property has persuaded the owner to believe---that Slavery is morally right and socially elevating. This gives a philosophical basis for a permanent policy of encouragement.

The other policy is one that squares with the idea that Slavery is wrong, and it consists in doing everything that we ought to do if it is wrong. Now, I don't wish to be misunderstood, nor to leave a gap down to be misrepresented, even. I don't mean that we ought to attack it where it exists. To me it seems that if we were to form a government anew, in view of the actual presence of Slavery we should find it necessary to frame just such a government as our fathers did; giving to the slaveholder the entire control where the system was established, while we possessed the power to restrain it from going outside those limits. [Applause.] From the necessities of the case we should be compelled to form just such a government as our blessed fathers gave us; and, surely, if they have so made it, that adds another reason why we should let Slavery alone where it exists.

If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. [Laughter.] I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them. [Applause.] Much more, if I found it in bed with my neighbor's children, and I had bound myself by a solemn compact not to meddle with his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that particular mode of getting rid of the gentleman alone. [Great laughter.] But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide! [Prolonged applause and cheers.]

That is just the case! The new Territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them or not. It does not seem as if there could be much hesitation what our policy should be! [Applause.]

Now I have spoken of a policy based on the idea that Slavery is wrong, and a policy based upon the idea that it is right. But an effort has been made for a policy that shall treat it as neither right or wrong. It is based upon utter indifference. Its leading advocate has said ``I don't care whether it be voted up or down.'' [Laughter.] ``It is merely a matter of dollars and cents.'' ``The Almighty has drawn a line across this continent, on one side of which all soil must forever be cultivated by slave labor, and on the other by free;'' ``when the struggle is between the white man and the negro, I am for the white man; when it is between the negro and the crocodile, I am for the negro.'' Its central idea is indifference. It holds that it makes no more difference to us whether the Territories become free or slave States, than whether my neighbor stocks his farm with horned cattle or puts it into tobacco. All recognize this policy, the plausible sugar-coated name of which is ``popular sovereignty .'' [Laughter.]

This policy chiefly stands in the way of a permanent settlement of the question. I believe there is no danger of its becoming the permanent policy of the country, for it is based on a public indifference. There is nobody that ``don't care.'' ALL THE PEOPLE DO CARE! one way or the other. [Great applause.] I do not charge that its author, when he says he ``don't care,'' states his individual opinion; he only expresses his policy for the government. I understand that he has never said, as an individual, whether he thought Slavery right or wrong---and he is the only man in the nation that has not! Now such a policy may have a temporary run; it may spring up as necessary to the political prospects of some gentleman; but it is utterly baseless; the people are not indifferent; and it can therefore have no durability or permanence.

But suppose it could! Then it could be maintained only by a public opinion that shall say ``we don't care.'' There must be a change in public opinion, the public mind must be so far debauched as to square with this policy of caring not at all. The people must come to consider this as ``merely a question of dollars and cents,'' and to believe that in some places the Almighty has made Slavery necessarily eternal. This policy can be brought to prevail if the people can be brought round to say honestly ``we don't care;'' if not, it can never be maintained. It is for you to say whether that can be done. [Applause.]

You are ready to say it cannot, but be not too fast! Remember what a long stride has been taken since the repeal of the Missouri Compromise! Do you know of any Democrat, of either branch of the party---do you know one who declares that he believes that the Declaration of Independence has any application to the negro? Judge Taney declares that it has not, and Judge Douglas even vilifies me personally and scolds me roundly for saying that the Declaration applies to all men, and that negroes are men. [Cheers.] Is there a Democrat here who does not deny that the Declaration applies to a negro? Do any of you know of one? Well, I have tried before perhaps fifty audiences, some larger and some smaller than this, to find one such Democrat, and never yet have I found one who said I did not place him right in that. I must assume that Democrats hold that, and now, not one of these Democrats can show that he said that five years ago ! [Applause.] I venture to defy the whole party to produce one man that ever uttered the belief that the Declaration did not apply to negroes, before the repeal of the Missouri Compromise! Four or five years ago we all thought negroes were men, and that when ``all men '' were named, negroes were included. But the whole Democratic party has deliberately taken negroes from the class of men and put them in the class of brutes . [Applause.] Turn it as you will, it is simply the truth! Don't be too hasty then in saying that the people cannot be brought to this new doctrine, but note that long stride. One more as long completes the journey, from where negroes are estimated as men to where they are estimated as mere brutes---as rightful property!

That saying, ``in the struggle between the white man and the negro,'' &c., which I know came from the same source as this policy---that saying marks another step. There is a falsehood wrapped up in that statement. ``In the struggle between the white man and the negro'' assumes that there is a struggle, in which either the white man must enslave the negro or the negro must enslave the white. There is no such struggle! It is merely an ingenious falsehood, to degrade and brutalize the negro. Let each let the other alone, and there is no struggle about it. If it was like two wrecked seamen on a narrow plank, when each must push the other off or drown himself, I would push the negro off or a white man either, but it is not; the plank is large enough for both. [Applause.] This good earth is plenty broad enough for white man and negro both, and there is no need of either pushing the other off. [Continued applause.]

So that saying, ``in the struggle between the negro and the crocodile,'' &c., is made up from the idea that down where the crocodile inhabits a white man can't labor; it must be nothing else but crocodile inhabits a white man can't labor; it must be nothing else but crocodile or negro; if the negro does not the crocodile must possess the earth; [laughter;] in that case he declares for the negro. The meaning of the whole is just this: As a white man is to a negro, so is a negro to a crocodile; and as the negro may rightfully treat the crocodile, so may the white man rightfully treat the negro. This very dear phrase coined by its author, and so dear that he deliberately repeats it in many speeches, has a tendency to still further brutalize the negro, and to bring public opinion to the point of utter indifference whether men so brutalized are enslaved or not. When that time shall come, if ever, I think that policy to which I refer may prevail. But I hope the good freemen of this country will never allow it to come, and until then the policy can never be maintained.

Now consider the effect of this policy. We in the States are not to care whether Freedom or Slavery gets the better, but the people in the Territories may care. They are to decide, and they may think what they please; it is a matter of dollars and cents! But are not the people of the Territories detailed from the States? If this feeling of indifference---this absence of moral sense about the question---prevails in the States, will it not be carried into the Territories? Will not every man say, ``I don't care, it is nothing to me?'' If any one comes that wants Slavery, must they not say, ``I don't care whether Freedom or Slavery be voted up or voted down?'' It results at last in naturalizing [nationalizing?] [2] the institution of Slavery. Even if fairly carried out, that policy is just as certain to naturalize [nationalize] Slavery as the doctrine of Jeff Davis himself. These are only two roads to the same goal, and ``popular sovereignty'' is just as sure and almost as short as the other. [Applause.]

What we want, and all we want, is to have with us the men who think slavery wrong. But those who say they hate slavery, and are opposed to it, but yet act with the Democratic party---where are they? Let us apply a few tests. You say that you think slavery is wrong, but you denounce all attempts to restrain it. Is there anything else that you think wrong, that you are not willing to deal with as a wrong? Why are you so careful, so tender of this one wrong and no other? [Laughter.] You will not let us do a single thing as if it was wrong; where is no place where you will allow it to be even called wrong! We must not call it wrong in the Free States, because it is not there, and we must not call it wrong in the Slave States because it is there; we must not call it wrong in politics because that is bringing morality into politics, and we must not call it wrong in the pulpit because that is bringing politics into religion; we must not bring it into the Tract Society or the other societies, because those are such unsuitable places, and there is no single place, according to you, where this wrong thing can properly be called wrong! [Continued laughter and applause.]

Perhaps you will plead that if the people of Slave States should themselves set on foot an effort for emancipation, you would wish them success, and bid them God-speed. Let us test that! In 1858, the emancipation party of Missouri, with Frank Blair at their head, tried to get up a movement for that purpose, and having started a party contested the State. Blair was beaten, apparently if not truly, and when the news came to Connecticut, you, who knew that Frank Blair was taking hold of this thing by the right end, and doing the only thing that you say can properly be done to remove this wrong---did you bow your heads in sorrow because of that defeat? Do you, any of you, know one single Democrat that showed sorrow over that result? Not one! On the contrary every man threw up his hat, and hallooed at the top of his lungs, ``hooray for Democracy!'' [Great laughter and applause.]

Now, gentlemen, the Republicans desire to place this great question of slavery on the very basis on which our fathers placed it , and no other . [Applause.] It is easy to demonstrate that ``our Fathers, who framed this government under which we live,'' looked on Slavery as wrong, and so framed it and everything about it as to square with the idea that it was wrong, so far as the necessities arising from its existence permitted. In forming the Constitution they found the slave trade existing; capital invested in it; fields depending upon it for labor, and the whole system resting upon the importation of slave-labor. They therefore did not prohibit the slave trade at once, but they gave the power to prohibit it after twenty years. Why was this? What other foreign trade did they treat in that way? Would they have done this if they had not thought slavery wrong?

Another thing was done by some of the same men who framed the Constitution, and afterwards adopted as their own act by the first Congress held under that Constitution, of which many of the framers were members; they prohibited the spread of Slavery into Territories. Thus the same men, the framers of the Constitution, cut off the supply and prohibited the spread of Slavery, and both acts show conclusively that they considered that the thing was wrong.

If additional proof is wanting it can be found in the phraseology of the Constitution. When men are framing a supreme law and chart of government, to secure blessings and prosperity to untold generations yet to come, they use language as short and direct and plain as can be found, to express their meaning. In all matters but this of Slavery the framers of the Constitution used the very clearest, shortest, and most direct language. But the Constitution alludes to Slavery three times without mentioning it once! The language used becomes ambiguous, roundabout, and mystical. They speak of the ``immigration of persons,'' and mean the importation of slaves, but do not say so. In establishing a basis of representation they say ``all other persons,'' when they mean to say slaves---why did they not use the shortest phrase? In providing for the return of fugitives they say ``persons held to service or labor.'' If they had said slaves it would have been plainer, and less liable to misconstruction. Why didn't they do it. We cannot doubt that it was done on purpose. Only one reason is possible, and that is supplied us by one of the framers of the Constitution---and it is not possible for man to conceive of any other---they expected and desired that the system would come to an end, and meant that when it did, the Constitution should not show that there ever had been a slave in this good free country of ours! [Great applause.]

I will dwell on that no longer. I see the signs of the approaching triumph of the Republicans in the bearing of their political adversaries. A great deal of their war with us now-a-days is mere bushwhacking. [Laughter.] At the battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon's cavalry had charged again and again upon the unbroken squares of British infantry, at last they were giving up the attempt, and going off in disorder, when some of the officers in mere vexation and complete despair fired their pistols at those solid squares. The Democrats are in that sort of extreme desperation; it is nothing else. [Laughter.] I will take up a few of these arguments .

There is ``THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT.'' [Applause.] How they rail at Seward for that saying! They repeat it constantly; and although the proof has been thrust under their noses again and again, that almost every good man since the formation of our government has uttered that same sentiment, from Gen. Washington, who ``trusted that we should yet have a confederacy of Free States,'' with Jefferson, Jay, Monroe, down to the latest days, yet they refuse to notice that at all, and persist in railing at Seward for saying it. Even Roger A. Pryor, editor of the Richmond Enquirer, uttered the same sentiment in almost the same language, and yet so little offence did it give the Democrats that he was sent for to Washington to edit the States---the Douglas organ there, while Douglas goes into hydrophobia and spasms of rage because Seward dared to repeat it. [Great applause.] This is what I call bushwhacking, a sort of argument that they must know any child can see through.

Another is JOHN BROWN! [Great laughter.] You stir up insurrections, you invade the South! John Brown! Harper's Ferry! Why, John Brown was not a Republican! You have never implicated a single Republican in that Harper's Ferry enterprise. We tell you that if any member of the Republican party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable not to designate man and prove the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable to assert it, and especially to persist in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need not be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true is simply malicious slander. Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper's Ferry affair; but still insist that our doctrines and declarations necessarily lead to such results. We do not believe it. We know we hold to no doctrines, and make no declarations, which were not held to and made by our fathers who framed the Government under which we live, and we cannot see how declarations that were patriotic when they made them are villainous when we make them. You never dealt fairly by us in relation to that affair---and I will say frankly that I know of nothing in your character that should lead us to suppose that you would. You had just been soundly thrashed in elections in several States, and others were soon to come. You rejoiced at the occasion, and only were troubled that there were not three times as many killed in the affair. You were in evident glee---there was no sorrow for the killed nor for the peace of Virginia disturbed---you were rejoicing that by charging Republicans with this thing you might get an advantage of us in New York, and the other States. You pulled that string as tightly as you could, but your very generous and worthy expectations were not quite fulfilled. [Laughter.] Each Republican knew that the charge was a slander as to himself at least, and was not inclined by it to cast his vote in your favor. It was mere bushwhacking, because you had nothing else to do. You are still on that track, and I say, go on! If you think you can slander a woman into loving you or a man into voting for you, try it till you are satisfied! [Tremendous applause.]

Another specimen of this bushwhacking, that ``shoe strike.'' [Laughter.] Now be it understood that I do not pretend to know all about the matter. I am merely going to speculate a little about some of its phases. And at the outset, I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers CAN strike when they want to [Cheers,] where they are not obliged to work under all circumstances, and are not tied down and obliged to labor whether you pay them or not! [Cheers.] I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere. [Tremendous applause.] One of the reasons why I am opposed to Slavery is just here. What is the true condition of the laborer? I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. [Applause.] When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat---just what might happen to any poor man's son! [Applause.] I want every man to have the chance---and I believe a black man is entitled to it---in which he can better his condition ---when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system. Up here in New England, you have a soil that scarcely sprouts black-eyed beans, and yet where will you find wealthy men so wealthy, and poverty so rarely in extremity? There is not another such place on earth! [Cheers.] I desire that if you get too thick here, and find it hard to better your condition on this soil, you may have a chance to strike and go somewhere else, where you may not be degraded, nor have your family corrupted by forced rivalry with negro slaves. I want you to have a clean bed, and no snakes in it! [Cheers.] Then you can better your condition, and so it may go on and on in one ceaseless round so long as man exists on the face of the earth! [Prolonged applause.]

Now, to come back to this shoe strike,---if, as the Senator from Illinois asserts, this is caused by withdrawal of Southern votes, consider briefly how you will meet the difficulty. You have done nothing, and have protested that you have done nothing, to injure the South. And yet, to get back the shoe trade, you must leave off doing something that you are now doing. What is it? You must stop thinking slavery wrong! Let your institutions be wholly changed; let your State Constitutions be subverted, glorify slavery, and so you will get back the shoe trade---for what? You have brought owned labor with it to compete with your own labor, to under work you, and to degrade you! Are you ready to get back the trade on those terms?

But the statement is not correct. You have not lost that trade; orders were never better than now! Senator Mason, a Democrat, comes into the Senate in homespun, a proof that the dissolution of the Union has actually begun! but orders are the same. Your factories have not struck work, neither those where they make anything for coats, nor for pants, nor for shirts, nor for ladies' dresses. Mr. Mason has not reached the manufacturers who ought to have made him a coat and pants! To make his proof good for anything he should have come into the Senate barefoot! (Great laughter.)

Another bushwhacking contrivance; simply that, nothing else! I find a good many people who are very much concerned about the loss of Southern trade. Now either these people are sincere or they are not. (Laughter.) I will speculate a little about that. If they are sincere, and are moved by any real danger of the loss of Southern trade, they will simply get their names on the white list, and then, instead of persuading Republicans to do likewise, they will be glad to keep you away! Don't you see they thus shut off competition? They would not be whispering around to Republicans to come in and share the profits with them. But if they are not sincere, and are merely trying to fool Republicans out of their votes, they will grow very anxious about your pecuniary prospects; they are afraid you are going to get broken up and ruined; they did not care about Democratic votes---Oh no, no, no! You must judge which class those belong to whom you meet; I leave it to you to determine from the facts.

Let us notice some more of the stale charges against Republicans. You say we are sectional. We deny it. That makes an issue; and the burden of proof is upon you. You produce your proof; and what is it? Why, that our party has no existence in your section---gets no votes in your section. The fact is substantially true; but does it prove the issue? If it does, then in case we should, without change of principle, begin to get votes in your section, we should thereby cease to be sectional. You cannot escape this conclusion; and yet, are you willing to abide by it? If you are, you will probably soon find that we have ceased to be sectional, for we shall get votes in your section this very year. [Applause.] The fact that we get no votes in your section is a fact of your making, and not of ours. And if there be fault in that fact, that fault is primarily yours, and remains so until you show that we repel you by some wrong principle or practice. If we do repel you by any wrong principle or practice, the fault is ours; but this brings you to where you ought to have started---to a discussion of the right or wrong of our principle. If our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section for the benefit of ours, or for any other object, then our principle, and we with it, are sectional, and are justly opposed and denounced as such. Meet us, then, on the question of whether our principle, put in practice, would wrong your section; and so meet it as if it were possible that something may be said on our side. Do you accept the challenge? No? Then you really believe that the principle which our fathers who framed the Government under which we live thought so clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse it again and again, upon their official oaths, is, in fact, so clearly wrong as to demand your condemnation without a moment's consideration.

Some of you delight to flaunt in our faces the warning against sectional parties given by Washington in his Farewell address. Less than eight years before Washington gave that warning, he had, as President of the United States, approved and signed an act of Congress, enforcing the prohibition of Slavery in the northwestern Territory, which act embodied the policy of Government upon that subject, up to and at the very moment he penned that warning; and about one year after he penned it he wrote LaFayette that he considered that prohibition a wise measure, expressing in the same connection his hope that we should some time have a confederacy of Free States.

Bearing this in mind, and seeing that sectionalism has since arisen upon this same subject, is that warning a weapon in your hands against us, or in our hands against you? Could Washington himself speak, would he cast the blame of that sectionalism upon us, who sustain his policy, or upon you who repudiate it? We respect that warning of Washington, and we commend it to you, together with his example pointing to the right application of it. [Applause.]

But you say you are conservative---eminently conservative---while we are revolutionary, destructive, or something of the sort. What is conservatism? Is it not adherenece to the old and tried, against the new and untried? We stick to, contend for, the identical old policy on the point in controversy which was adopted by our fathers who framed the Government under which we live; while you with one accord reject, and scout, and spit upon that old policy, and insist upon substituting something new. True, you disagree among yourselves as to what that substitute shall be. You have considerable variety of new propositions and plans, but you are unanimous in rejecting and denouncing the old policy of the fathers. Some of you are for reviving the foreign slave-trade; some for a Congressional Slave-Code for the Territories; some for Congress forbidding the Territories to prohibit Slavery within their limits; some for maintaining Slavery in the Territories through the Judiciary; some for the ``gur-reat pur-rin-ciple'' that ``if one man would enslave another, no third man should object,'' fantastically called ``Popular Sovereignty;'' [great laughter,] but never a man among you in favor of Federal prohibition of Slavery in Federal Territories, according to the practice of our fathers who framed the Government under which we live. Not one of all your various plans can show a precedent or an advocate in the century within which our Government originated. And yet you draw yourselves up and say ``We are eminently conservative!'' [Great laughter.]

It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them?

Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: we must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. [Applause.] This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them, from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches, we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only; cease to call slavery wrong , and join them in calling it right . And this must be done thoroughly---done in acts as well as in words . Silence will not be tolerated---we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all delcarations that Slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State Constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected of all taint of opposition to Slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us. So long as we call Slavery wrong, whenever a slave runs away they will overlook the obvious fact that he ran because he was oppressed, and declare he was stolen off. Whenever a master cuts his slaves with the lash, and they cry out under it, he will overlook the obvious fact that the negroes cry out because they are hurt, and insist that they were put up to it by some rascally abolitionist . [Great laughter.]

I am quite aware that they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us, ``Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about Slavery.'' But we do let them alone---have never disturbed them---so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.

I am also aware they have not, as yet, in terms, demanded the overthrow of our Free State Constitutions. Yet those Constitutions declare the wrong of Slavery, with more solemn emphasis than do all other sayings against it; and when all these other sayings shall have been silenced, the overthrow of these Constitutions will be demanded, and nothing be left to resist the demand. It is nothing to the contrary, that they do not demand the whole of this just now. Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding as they do, that Slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.

Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that Slavery is wrong. If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality---its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension---its enlargement. All they ask, we could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

Wrong as we think Slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States?

If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored---contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man---such as a policy of ``don't care'' on a question about which all true men do care---such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance---such as invocations of Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington did.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it.

********

I'll follow with an excerpt from my book that covers much of the controversy.

Hope this is responsive.

Richard F.

[x]

Epperson's comments are excellent, as is his site on the beginnings of the war.

He's right that Lincoln didn't see himself as a Hamiltonian. People say that because they take themselves for Jeffersonians and see American history as a struggle between Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian principles.

Lincoln didn't see things that way. Like so many Americans of the early 19th century, he wanted to stand with Washington and "the Founders" not in an exclusive Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian camp. Washington and the Founders, like the Bible, were presumed to speak with a single, authoritative voice, though as with the Bible, people might argue over what that voice said.

We forget about the Era of Good Feelings, which confounds political genealogies. Virtually everyone was a Republican under Monroe, even those who had earlier been Federalists. Having vanquished the Federalists, the triumphant Jeffersonians thought the threat from the "monocrats" had been routed. Ideas which had been suspect to Republicans earlier -- a national bank, protective tariffs, internal improvements -- were embraced by them under Madison and Monroe. Radicals like John Taylor and John Randolph opposed such measures, and this opposition surfaced again in the Jacksonians. But Madison, Monroe, and to a degree even Jefferson supported and accepted measures that the simplifiers condemn as Hamiltonian.

Clay came out of this atmosphere of National Republicanism and republican nationalism. And Lincoln followed Clay. I had more to say about this on the deleted thread, but basically, early nineteenth century politics, passionately partisan at times, were not always so polarized or ideological as some would have it. The lines of descent weren't so simple as subsequent generations would have like them to be. The unified nation of 1820 was unified behind policies that would have been more controversial in the more divisive atmosphere earlier or later. Politics weren't a continual struggle of the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian principles. Things were more fluid than that. Lincoln's Whiggery was quite inside the mainstream of the American political tradition and very much in a line of descent from the Founders.

[GOPcapitalist]

Page 2: "The [Civil War] created the highly centralized state that Americans labor under today." Those of us familiar with the New Deal and the Great Society might take issue with this unsupported assertion. Those of us familiar with the dynamics of the Populist Era might also disagree.

When viewed upon the scale of history, not really. It is an inescapable truth of history that the presidency and federal government's power was strengthened in the war as that was the war's very nature - a fight between the actions of several states and those still in the union, consolidated under the name of the federal government. As for the assertion that DiLorenzo's statement is unsupported, this writer certainly had to have been aware that he was on only the second page of the book. Was not that which followed DiLorenzo's argument for the assertion?

Page 3: "Lincoln thought of himself as the heir to the Hamiltonian political tradition" This is another unsupported assertion

Not so for the same reasons explained above.

and I conducted a brief experiment to see if Lincoln's own words would back it up. I went to the Lincoln Papers online site and did a simple search on the word "Hamilton." If DiLorenzo's assertion were valid, it seems clear to me that I ought to get a lot of hits; I got a grand total of 26 hits, the first three of which were not to Alexander Hamilton! In fact, looking through the citations, only five of them referred to Alexander Hamilton; the rest were to locations named Hamilton or to Union officers named Hamilton. It seems to me that this is a sparse degree of citation for someone who thought of himself as Hamilton's "heir."

The experiment attempted by this author is both silly and inconclusive. Aside from assuming that Lincoln's collected works include everything Lincoln ever said, wrote, or did (Lincoln himself admitted that the overwhelming majority of his political career's speeches, specifically the early ones, were never on any sort of written record). It does not. One can however follow the Hamiltonian tradition to Lincoln, and DiLorenzo attempts to do so throughout his book. Recall that the Hamiltonian tradition was embodied in the Federalist Party, which dissolved into the era of Monroe before reemerging in a new political party. The Hamiltonian tradition was carried by this new party, the Whigs. Lincoln was indisputably a Whig with very strong Whig political beliefs. He was an active Whig political organizer involved heavily in its party machinery, campaigned as a surrogate for Whig presidential candidates, and held office as a Whig. Even after the Whigs dissolved and Republicans emerged nominating him for president, Lincoln referenced his Whig values. So politically speaking, Lincoln was every bit of the Hamiltonian tradition, a leader of the political heir to the Hamiltonian federalist party, and a leader of that heir's heir, the Republican Party.

Page 4: "It is very likely that most Americans, if they had been given the opportunity, would have gladly supported compensated emancipation as a means of ending slavery " With this unsupported assertion

Same as above. This author seems to be fighting a war with the book's introduction due to the fact that DiLorenzo makes his arguments not in the introduction, but in the rest of the book where they are properly suited.

Page 5: "This doctrine [secession] was even taught to the cadets at West Point, including almost all of the top military commanders on both sides of the conflict" This, of course, is the William Rawle story, which has been soundly discredited in many places. Rawle's book on the Constitution was used for only a single year at West Point, perhaps two, before being supplanted by another. Unless we count Samuel Heintzleman as one of the "top military commanders," then DiLorenzo's statement is simply false.

I concede I am not familiar enough with the supposed discrediting of this theory to discuss it, though I do know that it is indisputable at least some acknowledgment of secession as constitutional through various sources was taught at some point to cadets at the military academy. The degree and influence I suppose is a matter of debate, but that is for another time.

Page 6: "Chapter 7 details how Lincoln abandoned the generally accepted rules of war, which had just been codified by the Geneva Convention of 1863." I can find no reference to a Geneva Convention of 1863. The Avalon Project website at Yale mentions an 1864 Geneva Convention, but this was confined in scope to the treatment of the wounded.

The author is incorrect. What was collectively known as the Geneva convention began in 1863 and expanded its scope through 1864. There is a discussion of some of these dates here. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/EUgeneva.htm

It appears to have escaped DiLorenzo's radar screen that Halleck's book was not published until 1861, and so could not have informed any of the "top commanders" in either army.

How so? The bulk of the war was fought after 1861, so that date does not in any reasonable way preclude the familiarity of commanders with the book. Further, that author's questioning of whether or not DiLorenzo knew the publication date to have been 1861 is fraudulent, as DiLorenzo gave exactly that date in his September 2001 column - http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo8.html

Page 7: "Chapter 9 describes Lincoln's economic legacy: the realization of Henry Clay's American System. Many (primarily) Southern statesmen had opposed this system for decades" This gets to the heart of DiLorenzo's thesis. His beef is less with Lincoln than with Clay and Clay's ideas.

To the contrary. "I was an old Henry Clay tariff whig. In old times I made more speeches on that subject, than on any other. I have not since changed my views." - Abraham Lincoln, October 11, 1859

Page 8: "Lincoln's war created the 'military-industrial complex' some ninety years before President Eisenhower coined the phrase." This may win a prize as the most outlandish exaggeration in the chapter.

How so and in whose opinion? A decent argument could be made that it traces back to the war. It also seems that this author has violated his own chief complaint, as he does not substantiate his characterization of that quote as outlandish.

Chapter 2 is concerned with "Lincoln's Opposition to Racial Equality," but a more accurate title would be "Northern Racism." No one denies that racism (which is a modern term, by the way) existed in the North at the time of Lincoln's election, but DiLorenzo proceeds as though this fact were the second book of Revelation.

Actually, popular american mythology denies this fact and that mythology has a significant following. If you doubt me, just ask any modern liberal democrat and some republicans. That's certainly more than just "no one."

Page 15: "In twenty-three years of litigation [Lincoln] never defended a runaway slave, but he did defend a slaveowner." The reference to defending a slaveowner is to the notorious Matson case, in which Lincoln represented (as an assistant) a Kentuckian who owned land in Illinois which he worked with the help of some slaves he brought over from Kentucky for part of the year. There is no denying that this case causes some embarassment to those who hold Lincoln in high esteem, but the fact is that Lincoln did defend a black woman, Nance, who was accused of being a slave. While DiLorenzo's assertion, "he never defended a runaway slave," may be, strictly speaking, true, to omit the Nance case in this discussion is shoddy scholarship, especially since it was the precedent of the Nance case which the court used in deciding the Matson case.

First, this author does not dispute the existence of the Matson case. Second, he concedes that Nance was not a runaway slave. In short, he has proven nothing inaccurate about DiLorenzo and only complains that DiLorenzo did not include a loosely related detail that does not contradict any of his assertions.

Page 17: "Some ten years later, December 1, 1862, in a message to Congress, Lincoln reiterated his earlier assertions: 'I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization.'" DiLorenzo makes a big issue of Lincoln's support for colonization, but he overlooks the fact that it disappears from Lincoln's agenda after this 1862 message to Congress. Most authors accept that this represents a change of heart on Lincoln's part. DiLorenzo simply ignores it.

Not really. It is indisputable that Lincoln favored colonization for the vast majority of his political career. That is DiLorenzo's point. If he had a change of heart, then all for the better. Lincoln had many changes of heart. But DiLorenzo's book was never about Lincoln's changes of heart. It was about Lincoln's politics.

(He also ignores Frederick Douglass's comments on Lincoln's lack of racial prejudice.)

Since when was DiLorenzo or any author obligated to include every statement of praise about Lincoln given by a prominent contemporary? His ommission cannot therefore be faulted.

Page 24: "The more or less 'official' interpretation of the cause of the War between the States, as described in *The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents*, by historian William A. Degregorio, asserts that the slavery issue 'pitted abolitionists in the North who viewed it as a moral evil to be eradicated everywhere as soon as practiable against southern extremists who fostered the spread of slavery into the territories.'" I, for one, have never heard of William A. Degregorio nor *The Complete Book of U.S. Presidents*, and I would think that many better sources would exist for an "official" interpretation.

The fact that this particular author has never heard of one of DiLorenzo's sources is not to be faulted to DiLorenzo, yet that is exactly what this author tries to do.

This is nothing more than a strawman, and a weak one at that. No serious scholar takes this view of the Civil War, and while I do grant that many ordinary citizens might, that is an indictment of history education, not of Lincoln's record.

I believe the author is mistaken in his characterization, as it seems that DiLorenzo's work itself seeks to combat the popular myth of Lincoln as the average citizen "knows" it.

Page 25: "No abolitionist was ever elected to any major political office in any Northern state." Thaddeus Stevens, Salmon Chase, and Charles Sumner would be suprised to read this.

Charles Sumner was not elected to his political office - senators were appointed at the time by the state legislatures. Chase was selected by the Ohio legislature as senator in 1860 as well. Stevens was a single congressman. Even then, it is improper to categorize any of these three as abolitionists. They were radical republicans. Abolitionists were pamphleteers like Garrison and Spooner. They aligned from time to time with radical republicans, but were not the same thing.

Page 26: "[Lincoln] was thus the North's candidate in the election..." Stephen A. Douglas would have been surprised to read this.

Politically, Lincoln was chosen by the northern states. Douglas was another northerner, but lost to Lincoln across the north. That is why Stephen Douglas was not elected president.

In short and in summary, every one of this author's complaints listed above with DiLorenzo is weak. Many are completely erronious, others are intentionally misleading, and all are generally frivolous and petty.

[GOPcapitalist]

And in it is no mention of slavery.

[GOPcapitalist]

Suppressed evidence, misquotation, misconstruction of context, incompetent citations, inaccurate implication ? it's all here. I have chosen these four examples from a much longer and ever-growing list. But these examples are utterly characteristic of the entire book.

If that is the case, why then don't DiLorenzo's critics ever move beyond these same four "examples" in their purported refutations of his book? It seems to me that they and they alone have been dwelled upon to degree of laughably absurd pettyness, with practically nothing else being offered by any of them.

[GOPcapitalist]

You misconstrue everything, both from me and Q. and from Lincoln.

Care to address how so?

Over 200 pages of this misbegotten book give Lincoln essentially no voice.

...all the while neglecting to mention that the remaining pages of this 300 page book are frequented by multiple quotes from Lincoln, some of them several sentences long and many of them more than one per page.

The parts that do quote him misquote him egregiously.

...as evidenced by one conclusive assertion of yours that has long since been corrected.

The author is a revisionist

...as asserted on the whim of his critics, not one of which has been able to give consideration to his book beyond an isolated and oft-repeated string of 4-5 petty complaints, typos, and errors that have already been corrected.

and if he wants a hearing at all, he should take note of the contrary position. He does not.

A reading of his book and his response columns to his critics seems to suggest otherwise.

Those who support him are like him.

Just out of curiosity, how do you even know that I support him when I cannot convince you to post your discussion of the arguments he poses in his book itself?

I see I wasted my time in giving you reasons.

Did you? Or are you simply frustrated after the fact that your reasons were rebutted on the table of debate?

That grieves me.

Your purported grief in this matter is not a matter of my concern.

...

"Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizens believe in it? Not in the present generation, he replied; there is no way of accomplishing this; but their sons may be made to believe in the tale, and their sons' sons, and posterity after them. I see the difficulty, I replied; yet the fostering of such a belief will make them care more for the city and for one another." - Plato

[rdf]

Here is my considered opinion.

********

FROM THE REPEAL OF THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE TO THE PRESIDENCY: Declaration Statesmanship in Action

...In 1846 I was once elected to the lower House of Congress. Was not a candidate for re-election. From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, practiced law more assiduously than ever before. Always a whig in politics, and generally on the whig electoral tickets, making active canvasses. I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.

-Abraham Lincoln, from a letter to Jesse W. Fell, with a biographical sketch, December 20, 1859

Now we need to do a bit more history. In particular, we have to know what the Missouri Compromise was, and why its repeal “aroused” Lincoln so. The tale of the growing division over slavery, in particular over the policy of the federal government with respect to slavery, is one of the most frequently written about episodes in American History, and you may have studied it elsewhere in your schooling. We must leave out much of historical interest in what follows. We will concentrate on the arguments between Lincoln and Senator Stephen Douglas, his great opponent from Illinois.

Again, original texts are best, and the most illuminating and enjoyable way to acquaint yourself with the key facts is to read from the men of the times themselves. We would recommend the speech of Lincoln given at Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854, especially the first half of it. Lincoln’s summary of the basic facts is hard to beat, though there is one error: Virginia did not, contrary to what Lincoln said there, make prohibition of slavery in what was to be the Northwest Territory a condition of its ceding the land to the Federal government. Congress did outlaw slavery in the Territory, in 1787, as we have mentioned before.

THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE: Facts, Causes and Principles

The Missouri Compromise is the name commonly used for a number of legislative and political acts taken in 1820, chief among which were the admission of two states to the Union, Missouri and Maine, and the prohibition of slavery in the portion of the Louisiana purchase north of the line of latitude 36' 30'’, approximately the southern boundary of the state of Missouri. The debate on the question of Missouri’s admission as a slave state had been bitter and sectional. In the House, where they had a numerical advantage of 105-81, the representatives of the North voted almost unanimously for a phased-in prohibition of slavery. The Senate, however, consistently blocked this prohibition. John Quincy Adams, Madison, and Jefferson were all aghast at the stark sectionalism of the vote, and Jefferson’s remark, quoted above, that it was “like a fire-bell in the night,” has become famous. Adams, who was then Secretary of State, wrote in his diary that, “If the Union must be dissolved, slavery is precisely the question upon which it ought to break.”

The struggle over Missouri did not appear to all the men of the day as altogether about the morality or justice of slavery. The new Western lands, and the natural increase of the slave population, augmented by legal importation before 1808, and by slave smuggling after then, had kept the South a region of agriculture, and with the invention of the cotton gin, an agriculture that included a significant portion of profitable, large scale slave labor operations. The ‘advanced’ farmers of the day, and certainly the wealthiest of them, saw in slaves the chief source of their labor force. They also constituted a commercial faction opposed to the tariffs that the infant Northern manufacturing interest sought to protect itself against European, and especially English, competition. A Missouri with slavery would presumably also be a state whose representatives would support Southern, agrarian, and anti-tariff policies in future Congresses.

When the Missouri question arose, the Senate had exactly the same number of free states and slave states, eleven. Maine’s desire for admission as a separate state ( it had hitherto been a portion of Massachusetts) gave both parties a way out of the standoff. The opponents of slavery obtained the prohibition north of the 36' 30'’ line, an extension of the policy of the founders in the Northwest Ordinance, which had contained a similar provision. Missouri was admitted in 1821, though it had to accept a second compromise, demanded by Henry Clay, to recognize the constitutional rights of Negro citizens of the United States.

Almost all of the remaining territory owned by the United States at that time (the sole exception was the portion of the Louisiana Purchase that was to become the state of Arkansas; Florida was not acquired until 1821) was thus under a federal ban against slavery. This put into the national law an obstacle to further growth of slavery, much as the Ordinance of 1787 had, and it reaffirmed the moral principle behind that ordinance. It is also reaffirmed the right of Congress to legislate about slavery and everything else in United States’ territories. The three chief goods of the compromise, as they appeared to Lincoln, were these: the fact of territory free of slavery north of the Line, the right of Congress so to act, and the moral disapprobation of slavery effected through its having so acted.

THE COMPROMISE HOLDS: 1821-1854

We now compress our story even further. In this period of Western expansion, the states formed out of the old Northwest Territory or above 36' 30'’ came in as free states, Michigan in 1837 through Minnesota in 1858. Arkansas, below the line, entered with slavery in 1836, and Florida in 1845. Texas, after a period of independence, came in with slavery in 1845. The boundary disputes between Texas, now an American state, and Mexico, culminating in the Mexican-American War, gave rise to new disputes over the prohibition of slavery in any territory to be acquired from Mexico. As in the Missouri controversy, Congress was split by section and between the two houses. Lincoln, who was in the House of Representatives, consistently voted with the majority for the prohibition, which was called the Wilmot Proviso, after its author, a Democrat from Pennsylvania. The Senate, in which the South had a larger share of the members, consistently rejected the Wilmot Proviso. The Missouri Compromise had not granted those favoring extension of slavery the right to have it in federal territory south of the 36' 30'’ line; it had only banned slavery north of it. Hence, Lincoln and the “Proviso men” resisted a motion by Senator Douglas to extend the line to the Pacific Ocean. It would have cut California, which was filling up with gold miners and other immigrants, and already seeking admission to the union in 1849, into two regions. They feared that one would produce a state with slavery and the other, one without it, and they wanted the whole of California free. California, like Texas, had been an independent republic. Its request for admission to the union was blocked in the Senate because the inhabitants wished to come in with a prohibition of slavery.

The California question headed a list of slavery related matters that were resolved in the Compromise of 1850. As with the Missouri Compromise, each side gave something. The North yielded on a fugitive slave law and certain payments to Texas. The South accepted California as a free state and let restrictions be placed on the slave market in the District of Columbia. Utah and New Mexico were allowed to choose to enter the Union, at some later date, as slave or free, but no concession was made limiting the federal power to govern them while they were territories. Most of the leading politicians declared themselves tolerably well satisfied with these arrangements, and both major parties, at that time the Whigs and the Democrats, endorsed it in their national conventions.

Throughout this thirty-year period, among the people, the deeper questions simmered and sometimes flared. Direct denunciations of the equality taught by the Declaration began to be heard, and abolitionists like the doomed Lovejoy made equally fierce attacks on the Constitution. Small but frightening slave rebellions, few in number, but big with terror, prompted Southern states to introduce road patrols and to prohibit the teaching of reading and writing to Negro slaves, lest they should catch a contagion of rebellion from Northern abolitionists. The great Protestant denominations, Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, began to divide on sectional lines. Sentiment in the lower south, the “Cotton Kingdom” was clearly shifting from toleration of slavery as a perplexing and troublesome evil to defense of it as a positive good.

These underlying differences were not settled by the Compromise. In some respects they may have been worsened. Bitterness over the obligation to obey the hated fugitive slave law fueled defiance and sometimes non-compliance in the New England. Indeed, as prominent a man as Ralph Waldo Emerson advised his fellow citizens to break it “on the earliest possible occasion.” Confiding to his diary, he was yet more strident: “This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God!”

It was the fugitive slave law that set Harriet Beecher Stowe to writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the most incendiary novels of all time. It was a Northern and an international sensation, translated into twenty languages and selling over a million copies in the first couple of years after its publication. The crudely overstated depiction of the cruel slave master and the suffering slaves infuriated Southerners who knew how extreme it was from their own experience. Forgotten, perhaps, or overlooked, was how much of it was true. The passionate reaction of slavery apologists culminated in the defiant writings of Fitzhugh, whose polemics included statements like, “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and in some sense, the freest people in the world,” and, “...the whole literature of free society is but a voice proclaiming its absolute and total failure. [Fitzhugh has in mind here the scandals of child labor, and the discarded and poor elderly, discussed and lamented in the liberal and Northern press.] Hence the works of the socialists contain the true defence of slavery.” (from Cannibals All, 1857)

It is hard to know what the leaders who had worked out the Compromise would have thought of these deep fault lines. They were among the great names of American history: Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, and Seward. The first three were all dead within two years of the agreement, and the last two found themselves on opposite sides of the Civil War a dozen years later. Douglas would soon repudiate the 36' 30'’ line, a key element of the Compromise, taking an action that he knew, as he himself put it, would “raise a hell of a storm.” But this was in 1854. In 1850, the nation’s leaders had avoided open schism, and the lovers of the Union continued to live in hope.

Congressman Lincoln, whose popularity had declined in his house district because he had raised objections to the war of conquest in Mexico, did not run for re-election to the House. He returned to Illinois, and gave himself to the study of law.

POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY AND STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS

I regard the great principle of popular sovereignty, as having been vindicated and made triumphant in this land, as a permanent rule of public policy in the organization of Territories and the admission of new States...

I deny their [Congress’] right to force a good thing upon a people who are unwilling to receive it. The great principle is the right of every community to judge and decide of itself, whether a thing is right or wrong, whether it would be good or evil for them to adopt it; and the right of free action, the right of free thought, the right of free judgement upon the question is dearer to every true American than any other under a free government.

-Stephen A. Douglas, Speech, Chicago Illinois, July, 9, 1858

The North has only to will it [the saving of the Union] to accomplish it; to do justice by conceding to the South an equal right in the acquired territory, and to do her duty by causing the stipulations relative to the fugitive slaves to be faithfully fulfilled; to cease the agitation of the slavery question...

John C. Calhoun, Speech to the Senate, March 4, 1850

Lincoln wrote in his sketch for a campaign biography that, “the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again.” Draft language of that repeal was announced in a Washington newspaper in mid-January of 1854 as follows: “[an amendment will be added to the Nebraska bill stipulating that] the Constitution, and all laws of the United States which are not locally inapplicable, shall have the same force and effect within the said Territory of Nebraska as elsewhere within the United States, except the eighth section of the act preparatory to the Admission of Missouri into the Union, approved March 6, 1820, which was superseded by the principles of the legislation of 1850, commonly called the compromise measures, and is hereby declared inoperative.”

Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois was the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories; Douglas consented to the amendment, and the bill passed. This meant that the federal ban on slavery in the Territory, which was divided into a southern portion, the Kansas Territory, and a northern, the Nebraska Territory, was void.

What did Douglas intend? There can be no doubt that he wanted the Union to survive and prosper. Moreover, he was not, like Calhoun, of the “slavery as a positive good” school. Indeed, Douglas had supported the admission of California as a free state, and the organization of the Oregon Territory, in which Congress adopted an amendment authored by Douglas recognizing the existing ban on slavery, enacted by the settlers themselves. Douglas was an intelligent and bold politician, ambitious for the Presidency. He would be the candidate of the Northern Democrats in 1860, running against Lincoln. He saw the threat of disunion, and he had heard the resentment in his Southern Democratic colleagues like Calhoun. Calhoun had all but demanded that no one even talk about slavery as a political question. That is what he meant in saying that the North could bring an end to the threat of disunion by ceasing to “agitate” the issue of slavery. Douglas sought a bold answer to the Union’s troubles. It would require practical politics and principle. He called his answer “Popular Sovereignty.”

As a policy, popular sovereignty meant that Congress would no longer prohibit slavery in any United States’ territories. The question would be handed over to the people of the territories as they organized themselves. It would be addressed again in their conventions when they grew ripe for statehood. Since the fugitive slave law was now in effect, and since the overseas slave trade had been illegal for nearly 50 years, this meant that there should be no reason for any discussion or “agitation” on the issue to arise in Congress again. He further promised not to “care” about what the people of any territory seeking admission had decided on the issue in preparing for admission as a state, so long as they had done it fairly. This last point was meant to satisfy the demands of Calhoun’s heirs in the South. The national argument, as a political argument, was to cease, because the issue, as some say now about abortion, “didn’t belong in politics.” But on the question of the spread of slavery, Douglas’s solution had some appeal to the North, since many thought it unlikely that the northern climate would be hospitable to the plantation agriculture, chiefly cotton and rice, that had been home to slavery in the South. If this hunch about the economics of the spread of slavery was true, then the Union would become progressively more and more dominated by free states, without anyone having to raise the question of the morality of slavery, and thereby offending the slave interest in the South.

To make all this work, Douglas had to persuade his fellow Americans that popular sovereignty was the cornerstone of the republic. He had some reason to think that it was, and that he could make a majority think so. For one thing, the principle squared with the American fondness for local control. Douglas would point out in his 1858 debates with Lincoln that liquor laws, and agricultural laws, and a host of other ordinances differed from Maine to Louisiana, and that we liked it that way. Jefferson himself had been a strong proponent of states’ rights and of local self-government. At the same time, within these local communities, the will of the people had been held sovereign. Jefferson had called the rule of the will of the majority a “sacred principle” in his First Inaugural Address.

But there were problems with Douglas’s formulation. He might say, “I don’t care,” about slavery, but people did care. In Kansas, they would care enough to send armed bodies of settlers to inflate the votes of their side in the territorial disputes on the way to statehood. These men cared enough to shed blood over the question. It was not perfectly evident that slavery could only prove profitable growing cash crops in warm climates; we noticed above that in Richmond a successful factory enterprise employed slave labor exclusively. In our century, tyrants like the Communist Chinese have made effective, if inhumane, use of slaves, as has the old Soviet Union, in very cold climates. Moreover, it was not clear when Douglas was setting forth popular sovereignty in the 1850’s whether the slaveholding settlers who would share in deciding the question would bring their slaves with them, and, if they did, whether they would have the benefit of laws to protect their property. Most important of all, popular sovereignty was not a complete statement of the American Creed. Jefferson’s exact words, from his First Inaugural, in which he called the popular will “sacred,” deserve quotation in full:

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

-Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural, March 4, 1801

Douglas’s policy and that of the founders were alike in key points, but different in others. Both thought that the preservation of the Union was paramount. Both agreed in refusing to interfere with slavery where it existed. Both looked to a change to be produced by time and patience. But the founders had used the power of Congress to block the expansion of slavery and to strengthen the conviction that it was wrong. Douglas looked to popular sovereignty to produce the first effect while he took affirmative action to see that the second, the conviction that it was wrong, would not be expressed in the public arena. This meant that he differed from the founders in principle, and not only in policy. Douglas had made self-rule, and not self-evident truths, the deepest principle of free government. Lincoln thought the policy harmful; he was convinced that the principle, as Douglas’s statesmanship would have it, was false. That is what “aroused” him in 1854.

LINCOLN AROUSED: The Declaration Statesmanship of the Peoria Speech

The doctrine of self-government is right--absolutely and eternally right—but it has no just application as here attempted. Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such application depends on whether a negro is not or is a man. If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to just that extent a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government--that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that “all men are created equal;” and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.

Judge Douglas frequently, with bitter irony and sarcasm, paraphrases our argument by saying: “the white people of Nebraska are good enough to govern themselves, but they are not good enough to govern a few miserable negros!!”

Well I doubt not that the people of Nebraska are, and will continue to be as good as the average of people elsewhere. I do not say the contrary. What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. I say that this is the leading principle--the sheet anchor of American republicanism.

-Abraham Lincoln, Speech, Peoria Illinois, October 16, 1854

Lincoln’s Peoria speech merits our attention for several powerful reasons. It was an immediate success in its day. It is carefully researched. And it gives the heart of his disagreement with Douglas on facts, policy, and principles. Lincoln gave essentially the same speech at least four times, writing out the second, the one given in Peoria, for publication in the Illinois State Journal. Lincoln had asked Douglas to have the Peoria event be a debate; Douglas told a friend that he didn’t want to debate Lincoln, saying “[he is]...the most difficult and dangerous opponent that I have ever met.” Instead of holding a debate, they spoke one after another to the same crowd, Douglas going first. Lincoln’s shrewd political sense manifested itself in the timing; he told the tired crowd to go have dinner and come back before hearing him. Douglas had worn them out with a three hour address on a warm afternoon! To make sure they returned, he also offered Douglas an hour’s rebuttal to “skin me.”

The opening sentence gives the subject of the speech in plain, homespun simplicity: “The repeal of the Missouri compromise, and the propriety of its restoration, constitute the subject of what I am about to say.” The first quarter or so is a thorough review of the policy of Congress regarding slavery from the time of the Articles of Confederation down to the present day. We have summarized that history above. It establishes conclusively that Congresses from before the Constitution up to the 1850's held that they had the power to restrict slavery in national territories, and had often used that power.

STATESMANSHIP: Fidelity to Principles

The heart of the speech is Lincoln’s treatment of the contradiction between popular sovereignty as applied to slavery, and natural right as enshrined in the Declaration. If anyone, black, white, yellow, or brown, is a man, and if I arrogate to myself and only to men of my race the right to choose whether he and his kind shall be slaves or not, I cannot have grounded that decision in the universal proposition that “all men are created equal,” and hence “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” Since I am no longer measured, that is, held to a moral measure, in my choice, how shall I make it?

Douglas’s position, popular sovereignty, comes to saying that the “sacred right of self-government” allows a moral right in one man’s enslaving another. Lincoln says that the deeper understanding of Douglas would lead men “into an open war with the very principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

Indeed, not only would the popular sovereignty basis of the Nebraska Bill lead men to disparage the Declaration, it had already done so, and not only the chieftains of the slave power, like Calhoun. The eloquence of the following passage from the Peoria speech demands that it be quoted at length:

...Little by little, but steadily as man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the OLD for the NEW faith. Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a “sacred right of self-government.” These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other.

When Pettit [Senator from Indiana], in connection with his support of the Nebraska bill, called the Declaration of Independence “a self-evident lie,” he only did what consistency and candor require all other Nebraska men to do. Of the forty odd Nebraska Senators who sat present and heard him, no one rebuked him. Nor am I apprized that any Nebraska newspaper, or any Nebraska orator, in the whole nation, has ever yet rebuked him. If this had been said among [Francis] Marion’s men, Southerners though they were, what would have become of the man who said it? If this had been said to the men who captured [Major] Andre, the man who said it, would probably have been hung sooner than Andre was. If it had been said in old Independence Hall, seventy-eight years ago, the very door-keeper would have throttled the man, and thrust him into the street.

STATESMANSHIP: Our Place in History

Americans had, and have, a special duty because we have natural right spelled out in our founding “scripture.” Our British brethren, against whom we had written the Declaration, had already, in 1832, abolished slavery because they felt themselves measured by the standard of human equality and Christian morality. So had the newly liberated South American Republics. Brazil, a self-styled “Empire,” kept slavery until 1888. The next year it became a republic.

It may have been fairly easy for the British to end slavery, given that there was none of it in the home island, and Spanish Latin America did not have as extensive or as regional a slave establishment as did the United States. Still, they had cleansed themselves of the evil, and we had not. Our reputation, our prestige, was at issue. Lincoln was not alone in feeling ashamed at our loss of moral leadership, and he said so in the speech: “I hate it [Douglas’s declared ‘indifference’ to slavery] because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity...”

The thought that America has a special duty to mankind to vindicate republican government was, of course, not original with Lincoln. We have already seen that it was prominent in Federalist 1. If the young republic failed, it would be, according to Publius, “the general misfortune of mankind.” Washington told his fellow citizens, in his First Inaugural Address, “...the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people.” In the 20th century, Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, among others, have spoken along the same lines regarding the scandal of race discrimination. Here is Eisenhower, addressing a national television audience in response to the defiance of Arkansas state authority to the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock: “At a time when we face grave situations abroad because of the hatred that Communism bears towards a system of government based on human rights, it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to [our] prestige and influence...” Or Kennedy in 1963: “...[racial discrimination] hampers our world leadership by contradicting at home the message we preach abroad.” It is interesting that both of these recent presidents cited the Declaration in their inaugural addresses. In making the charge that Lincoln did, that popular sovereignty and ‘don’t care,’ “deprives our ...example of its just influence...” he showed the breadth of vision and the goodwill, as well as the attitude of a wise servant, that characterizes high statesmanship.

STATESMANSHIP: Opinion, the Matter of the Statesman, and Words, his Instrument

As we read the Peoria speech today, one element jars our sensibilities: Lincoln does not take a stand for full political and social equality of the races. Some of the abolitionists of his day, especially the Quakers and other religious abolitionists, did. The 1854 laws of Maine set up in almost all respects what we would recognize today as equal civil rights, including jury duty and voting rights. But Maine was almost alone. Illinois’ laws did not allow blacks to vote or serve on juries, and Illinois was typical of the free states.

In Peoria, Lincoln said this: “Let it not be said that I am contending for the establishment of political and social equality between the whites and blacks. I have already said the contrary.” Was this statesmanlike too, or was it either weak or unwise, or even unjust?

We think Lincoln’s position in the Peoria speech can be vindicated, and that it can be reconciled with his support for expanded civil rights towards the end of the Civil War, if two things are kept in mind. First, as Lincoln himself said in 1859, “In this country, public opinion is everything.” Second, that the knowledge of the statesman is prudence, or practical wisdom, which consists in knowing how to move towards moral goals by practicable steps, not in “the immoderate pursuit of moral perfection” which, in political life, “will more often lead to misery and terror than to justice and happiness,” as Thomas G. West puts it in his book on the founding.

To take the first point first, is it not self-evident that in a republic, where the citizens are governed by their consent, their opinion will be the court of last resort, the final arbiter of all disputes? That does not mean that those opinions will never change, or that it will not be the duty of a good man and especially of a statesman to mold them for the better. But a public man will ignore them at his peril. Lincoln turns this weapon back on Douglas in the Peoria speech, when he tells him that he will never be able to suppress the voice of the people crying out that slavery is unjust: “...the great mass of mankind...consider slavery a great moral wrong; and their feeling against it, is not evanescent, but eternal. It lies at the very foundation of their sense of justice; and it cannot be trifled with—It is a great and durable element of popular action, and I think, no statesman can safely disregard it.” Sir Francis Bacon wrote long ago that, “Nature, to be mastered, must be obeyed.” The saying is equally true of the nature of the physical body and of the body politic. Public opinion, the soul of the political body, was ailing in the days after the Nebraska Bill, and Douglas was prescribing as medicine what Lincoln thought poison. That the patient should also take up a regimen of vigorous exercise after his recovery was not and should not have been the first thing on the doctor’s list.

Lincoln never said that political equality between the races was wrong; the most complete expression of his early views on the matter came in the 1858 debates with Douglas, and he clothed them entirely in the language of feeling: “...[I said years ago1 that] my own feelings would not admit a social and political equality between the black and white races, and that even if my own feelings would admit of it, I still knew that the public sentiment of the country would not, and that such a thing was an utter impossibility, or substantially that.” And again, in the same debate, “I agree with Judge Douglas that he [the Negro] is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color— perhaps not in intellectual and moral endowments; but in the right to eat the bread without the leave of any body else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man.”

It must be remembered that the young Lincoln had said in 1838 that our passions, our feelings, were to be the enemy of our freedom in the future, and that reason, “cold sober reason,” would be the friend of the principles of the Declaration. Only one feeling, an almost religious reverence for the founding ideals, would buttress that reason. It should also be pointed out that Lincoln said that he knew only that the feelings of his fellow citizens would not admit of equality. He was certain that there was an inequality of “color.” He did not say that he was certain of the infinitely more important inequality of “intellectual and moral endowments.” These he said, might be unequal... “perhaps.”

Many causes, including prominently the religious conviction that all men are brothers, conspired to change public opinion in the United States towards the end of the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation, by altering the legal status of slaves and by encouraging them to flee their masters and seek refuge in the Union armies, had some effect . But the greatest source of the change was probably the testimony given in blood by the black soldiers who had served the Union. The number enlisted was reported by the President to Congress in January of 1864 to be over 100,000, and Lincoln and many others thought that without their services, the war could not have been won. To a complaining Northern politician, James C. Conkling, who objected to fighting to “free negroes,” Lincoln penned these memorable words: “...[when peace comes] it will then have 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 consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.”

When a man will not fight to preserve his people and his principles, we call him a slave; when a slave does fight, we see in him a man. In antiquity, slaves who risked their lives to save their masters were often manumitted. They had proved their manhood. Lincoln wrote Conkling in the same letter, “If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive--even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” It cannot, alas, be said that the promise was perfectly kept. It would take a century more after the abolition of slavery for a new exercise of Declaration statesmanship to establish political equality without regard to race in this country. But the start was made in the time of Lincoln’s stewardship.

Let us be blunt; if Lincoln had taken the full position of equal social and political rights, he would not have been electable to any statewide office in Illinois, neither in 1854, when he was drafted for U.S. Senate and nearly won, nor in 1858, when he and Douglas had their memorable debates. He would not have become president in 1860, nor would any member of his party who took such a stand. He accomplished the good that he could, always insisting on the fundamental principle that in the fullness of time would yield such results. To achieve this good, he had to rekindle a reverence for the Declaration. Let us look briefly at how he did that in the Peoria speech.

Word, words, words. “Mere words” men say, and yet it is by the power of words that we take common counsel and learn to govern ourselves. We are free because we are made in the image of the all-wise God, and we have a bit of His light in our minds, and by that bit we strive to live according to His laws, the “laws of nature, and of nature’s God.” Of Divine things, St. Paul writes, “But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear of him without a preacher?”

Lincoln preached in Peoria. He preached the political religion he had declared must be preached years ago in Springfield. Douglas and the doctrine of popular sovereignty were “giving up the OLD faith... ” Human equality and popular sovereignty were “as opposite as God and mammon...” Three times he calls the proposition that all men are created equal, the “ancient faith.” Of the Nebraska Bill he says, “It hath no relish of salvation in it.” He calls the Founders, “our revolutionary fathers,” and “the fathers of the republic,” stirring memories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He compares slavery to the fateful disobedience of Adam. He says: “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us re-purify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.”

Lincoln was like a great preacher in more than his scriptural language and his vision that America was founded on the Declaration as a kind of covenant or original creed, the “ancient faith.” He endeavored to emulate the charity of great preaching, too, as when he admitted that “the Southern people” were “just what we would be in their situation,” and when he said that “I surely will not blame them...” He stressed that Thomas Jefferson, the ‘father Abraham’ of the American covenant was “a Virginian by birth...a slaveholder...” He opened his speech by announcing that he did not “propose to question the patriotism, or to assail the motives of any man, or class of men...He. added that he wished “to be no less than national in all the positions” he would take. When he had suggested that “...a gradual emancipation might be adopted...” He immediately added, “but for their tardiness in this I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the south.” Thus, to political faith, he added political charity.

The climax of the speech actually occurs about three-fourths in; after that point Lincoln anticipates some of the points he expects Douglas to make in his final hour’s response. The paragraph begins with “Our republican robe is soiled...” It ends with these words of salvation and hope, which we quote in full:

Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south--let all Americans--let all lovers of liberty everywhere--join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make and keep it, forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.

In the Lyceum speech, Lincoln had concluded by urging the statesmen of his day to take the materials supplied by reason and mold them into intelligence, morality, and reverence for the law. “Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, ‘the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.’” At Peoria, he took his own advice, and became such a statesman.

DRED SCOTT: The Supreme Court Betrays the Declaration

...Congress is neither “to legislate slavery into any Territory or State nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.”

A difference of opinion has arisen in regard to the point of time when the people of a Territory shall decide this question for themselves.

This is, happily, a matter of but little practical importance. Besides, it is a judicial question, which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States, before whom it is now pending, and will, it is understood, be speedily and finally settled. To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be...

The whole Territorial question being thus settled upon the principle of popular sovereignty--a principle as ancient as free government itself--everything of a practical nature has been decided...Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance.

-President James Buchanan, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1857

I know that Mr. Calhoun and all the politicians of his school denied the truth of the Declaration....But I say...that three years ago there had never lived a man who had ventured to assail it in the sneaking way of pretending to believe it, and then asserting it did not include the negro. I believe the first man who ever said it was Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our friend Stephen a. Douglas. And now it has become the catchword of the entire [Democratic] party.

-Abraham Lincoln, Seventh Debate with Douglas, Alton, Illinois, October 15, 1858

Dred Scott was a black slave, born in Virginia. His owner, an army officer, had taken him into the free state of Illinois and the then territory of Minnesota, also free soil under the Missouri Compromise of 1820. When Scott’s owner died, having willed Scott, his wife, whom he had married in the North, and their children to his wife, Scott sued for his freedom in the state court of Missouri, where the family had been taken and the owner had died. The case reached the United States Supreme Court, which decided against Scott on March 6, 1858, just two days after President Buchanan’s inauguration.

Chief Justice Taney’s opinion was long and convoluted in its reasoning. The key elements for anti-slavery men were these: it declared that Congress had never had the power to prohibit slavery in the territories, and hence that the Ordinance of 1787 and the Missouri Compromise were never valid, and that blacks were not and could not be citizens of the United States. These were intended by the high court’s majority to be legally binding precedents. Buchanan, who had been in private correspondence with at least two members of the Court prior to their handing down the decision, desired this outcome. It meant that no legal power could prevent the introduction of slaves into federally controlled territory, not only before a territorial government had been set up, but also under the territorial government itself. Neither Congress nor its delegated substitute, the territorial legislature, could do anything whatever to block slavery.

Supreme Court decisions do more than settle the case before them (here, they reduced Scott and his family to the status of slaves again) and establish precedents for future cases. They also include the spirit and reasoning by which future decisions may be made on more or less closely connected matters. These additional elements of the justices’ opinions are called, “obiter dicta.” In Taney’s written opinion, the obiter dicta included the claim that the founders did not intend to include blacks in the Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence. Assuming that the humanity of the black man was not a constitutional principle, Taney went on to reason that the operative parts of the Constitution would be those governing him as a species of property. Accordingly, he wrote, “And no word can be found in the Constitution which gives Congress a greater power over slave property, or which entitles property of that kind to less protection than property of any other description. The only power conferred is the power coupled with the duty of guarding and protecting the owner in his rights. The Dred Scott decision provoked a storm of controversy in the North. The nationally known editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, wrote that the decision was about as respectable as an opinion reached by “a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.” It also caused both Lincoln and Douglas serious political problems, though for opposite reasons, as we shall see. Let’s start with Douglas.

Buchanan had said that the territorial question was being settled on the basis of Douglas’ principle of popular sovereignty. In 1854, popular sovereignty as taught by Douglas meant that the people of a territory would be free to keep slavery out by making a law . Congress had chosen not to make such a law by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in the Nebraska Bill, but the people of Kansas still could, before they applied to become a state. Now the Court had decided that not only Congress, but also the people of the territory, had no such power. How could Douglas now say that popular sovereignty meant anything? And if, as Lincoln was to hammer home in the great debates of 1858, slavery was hard to abolish once even a sizeable minority of the inhabitants held slaves, did Dred Scott mean anything other than the total victory of Calhoun and the more extreme pro-slavery men in the South? After the Court’s decision, the only part of the governmental structure in the country that could ban slavery was the state government. Lincoln was to show reason to doubt that sole remaining bulwark’s chances to stand. Lincoln’s statesmanship faced a problem of its own. After all, the highest court in the land had declared that the central reason for the existence of his party, the use of the national power to block the expansion of slavery in the territories, was unconstitutional. And Lincoln himself had said in the Lyceum speech that American statesmanship required an almost religious “reverence for the constitution and laws.” Was Dred Scott not, as a precedent, “the constitution and laws?” Had he not said, just a year ago, that “We [Republicans] will submit to its [the Court’s] decisions; and if you [Democrats] do also, there will be an end of the matter?”

Rarely has there been a Supreme Court decision as partisan in its effects as Dred Scott...perhaps never. To save his doctrine of popular sovereignty, Douglas would have to advocate local resistance to passage of local laws to protect legally held property, i.e., slaves. If the territorial legislature or its subordinate agencies simply refused to enact or enforce the laws needed to help the owner hold his slaves, they would run off when they pleased. It would be as if, in a state where popular resistance to drinking were strong, the local ordinances exempted saloons from protection by the police, while the Temperance society activists smashed windows and bottles. Douglas’ espousal of this policy, to which he was forced by the probing questions of Lincoln in the second of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, was to lose him every Southern state in the Presidential election of 1860. On the other hand, Lincoln had said while campaigning for Fremont, the Republican candidate in the 1856 election, that there was only one question, the answer to which defined his party: “Shall the government of the United States prohibit slavery in the [territory of] the United States?” Now his party was to be defined by advocating a position solemnly held to be unconstitutional! What was he to do?

For three months he thought, and held his peace. Then, in June of 1857, after Douglas had joined Taney in holding that the Declaration did not include blacks, who were, according to the Senator, “an inferior race,” and “incapable of self-government,” Lincoln struck. In a forceful speech given in Springfield on June 26, 1857, Lincoln withdrew his unqualified promise of acquiescence in the dictates of the Court. He granted that Scott and his family must stay in slavery, granted too that any future decisions made in accordance with that decision as a precedent would bind him as to action, but he emphatically denied that it had any moral force that would keep him or anyone else from direct, peaceful, and legal political measures aimed at its overthrow. Legal precedents have great force if they are unanimous, impartial, consistent with our legal expectations and traditions, including the policy of our statesmen, and if they are based on what is true. The Dred Scott decision, Lincoln held, met none of these standards. He said, “...we think the...decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it overrule this. We offer no resistance to it.” Quoting President Andrew Jackson, Lincoln implied that the executive and legislative branches could act in ways contrary to the decision of the court, taken as precedent and authority. Jackson had said that ‘The Congress, the executive and the court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer, who takes an oath to support the Constitution, swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others.” Lincoln drops his argument here, but he has raised a difficult and powerful point. Was he saying that when an egregiously wrong decision has been reached by the Court, that the other branches may legislate and act contrary to it as authority and precedent, and must only go along with the Court’s understanding when particular cases are decided? Such a teaching would greatly impair the power of the Court to decide fundamental questions, where public opinion is divided or hostile. It would surely be prudent to resort to it only in matters of great import. But was not slavery such a matter? And without such an understanding of Constitutional Law, how could judicial tyranny be effectively resisted?

The rest of the speech, and the part where it soars, is devoted to showing that it is historically false to say that the black man had no part in the Declaration, and to expounding the Declaration as a standard of human action and a beacon for human hopes. We give two excerpts from the speech, which could, with profit, be read in its entirety:

...In those days [the period of the founding], our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all; but now , to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.

...They [the founders] defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal--equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which could be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere. The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.

I have now briefly expressed by view of the meaning and objects of that part of the Declaration of Independence which declares that “all men are created equal.”

-Abraham Lincoln, Speech, Springfield Illinois, June 26, 1857

Lincoln perhaps went beyond what was in Jefferson’s mind in his account of the meaning of the Declaration. We argued in an earlier chapter that there was great immediate use of the idea of human equality towards effecting our separation from Great Britain. But where Jefferson used equality for separation and revolution, Lincoln saw in it a deeper meaning for perpetuation and justice. Equality in Jefferson’s thought led to “don’t tread on me,” since I am your equal, and I have my rights. And Jefferson was not wrong. But in Lincoln’s thought, this old, perhaps selfish, perhaps passionate sense of my rights, while retained, has added to it, what is right.

Let’s say that again in a slightly different way. In this speech, my rights are not only the basis of resistance and possibly revolution, but the standard to be aspired to, “looked to” approached, approximated, perhaps never perfectly attained. Slavery remains a violation of rights, but now it is also, and more importantly, not right. As Lincoln will say in the next to last debate, when confronted by Douglas’s presentation of the rights of the people to choose slavery, to have slaves, “...he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that any body has a right to do wrong.”

You might almost say that the attack of Taney and Douglas upon the Declaration gave Lincoln a golden opportunity to restore the fortunes both of his party and of the country. It moved Lincoln to take the argument about slavery, which had been mired in discussions of laws and technicalities when conducted by the men of the center in the political parties, and immoderate, uncharitable, and divisive when pressed by abolitionists and Southern “fire-eaters,” and restored it to fundamental principles that hold the Union together and give it purpose. It also taught us something about the fallibility of the Supreme Court, a lesson some would have us relearn in our day.

We leave our consideration of Lincoln’s Declaration statesmanship here, aware that his story and that of the nation’s final struggle with slavery was only to be consummated in the in the fiery trial of civil war. As we have said before, our subject is not American History, but American Principles. We have argued that the exercise of statesmanship we have studied was guided by a deep reflection on the principles of the Declaration, and brought about a new and deeper understanding of and love for those principles. A sign that this greater understanding was achieved is that every Congressional Act admitting a new state starting in 1864 with Nevada and continuing through Hawaii in 1959 has contained a provision specifying that the state government would be faithful to the principles contained in the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps a word of respect for the courage and honor of the men of the South would be in order here. Most of them fought for hearth and home, whatever the reasons of the political men, North and South, who brought on the war, may have been. Estimates vary, but probably no more than one in five owned any slaves. The spirit and valor of the Confederate armies has impressed everyone who has read the record of their lost cause. The capacity and personal dignity of many Southern generals, particularly Robert E. Lee, have been admired by Americans of all regions and parties from the days of their doomed but gallant campaigns to the present. Lee’s agonizing choice to join the Southern cause, which historian Samuel Eliot Morrison wrote, “[showed] the distress of a noble mind,” is best seen in his own words:

Secession is nothing but revolution¼In 1808, ¼and [when] the Hartford Convention assembled, secession was termed treason by Virginia statesmen; what can it be now? Still, a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets, and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me. If the Union is dissolved, the government disrupted, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people. Save in her defense, I will draw my sword no more.

-Col. Robert E. Lee, USA, to his son , January, 1861 (quoted in Samuel Eliot Morrison’s History of the American People, page 613)

*********

I know that's long, but I hope it's relevant.

Regards,

Richard F.

[rdf]

Page 68 of his book does not go near as far as the article. It simply asserts Lincoln to have been pro-bank and to have criticized Jackson in the debates. I'll need to do more reading of them in their entirity, but from what I have read of this thread it appears there was at very least a little of that going on.

Do re-read the paragraph on page 68, or type it in for us.

I think you'll change your mind on this one.

As to "only four errors," I think that's a long dead position.

Cheers,

Richard F.

[GOPcapitalist]

The quote is "He made the same arguments a month later in a response to Douglas. In virtually every one of the Lincoln Douglas debates, Lincoln made it a point to champion the nationalization of money and to demonize Jackson and the Democrats for their opposition to it."

That's a far cry from the article line of your complaint. I'll agree that it is still an overstatement, but DiLorenzo is accurate that Lincoln discussed the bank in those debates, contrary to McPherson's claim that not a word was said of them.

As for the 4-5 complaints, if that is not so, why then do you not move beyond them?

[rdf]

Dear capitalist,

You wrote: "That's a far cry from the article line of your complaint. I'll agree that it is still an overstatement, but DiLorenzo is accurate that Lincoln discussed the bank in those debates, contrary to McPherson's claim that not a word was said of them."

From the article:

In virtually every one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln made it a point to champion this corrupt economic agenda.

Even when commenting on the Dred Scott decision on June 26, 1857, he bitterly denounced Andrew Jackson's refusal, some 30 years earlier, to recharter the Second Bank of the United States. He repeated this complaint a month later in a debate with Douglas.

From the book:

"Even when commenting on the Dred Scott decision on June 26, 1857, Lincoln apparently couldn't resist once again criticizing Andrew Jackson's refusal thirty years earlier to recharter the Bank of the United States, insinuating that Jackson had acted unconstitutionally; he tarred Stephen Douglas with the same criticism.

He made the same arguments a month later in a response to Douglas. In virtually every one of the Lincoln Douglas debates, Lincoln made it a point to champion the nationalization of money and to demonize Jackson and the Democrats for their opposition to it."

Somehow I'm not struck by the difference.

Am I missing something?

Wait ... I SEE IT! HE CHANGED THE ORDER!!!

Cheers,

Richard F.

Mad Dawg,

I had to ping you on this one. It's too perfect.

[rdf]

I wrote: "and about 6-10 very diffident letters. That's it."

And you wrote:

"The letters I saw were consistent."

Perhaps you misread 'diffident'as 'different.'

I meant, "diffident."

Regards,

Richard F.

[GOPcapitalist]

Somehow I'm not struck by the difference. Am I missing something?

Actually Richard, you are. In the book, he specifically cites only the monetary issue of the bank. That appears to be accurate at its core, as Lincoln did cite the bank issue. In the article, he extends it to the entire economic agenda. That is inaccurate, and it is what prompted the calling upon McPherson's quote.

[x]

Recall that the Hamiltonian tradition was embodied in the Federalist Party, which dissolved into the era of Monroe before reemerging in a new political party. The Hamiltonian tradition was carried by this new party, the Whigs.

This is not the best history. It looks like a pack of tricks ideologues play with the past. The Federalist party collapsed, leaving little behind, save in New England. There weren't enough Federalists left to build a new party out of.

The Republicans (or Democratic Republicans) dominated the scene. Both the National Republican and Democrats grew out of the Republican party. The Whigs were the successor to the National Republicans. Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Clay, Jackson and J.Q. Adams were all members of that Republican or Democratic Republican party in the "Era of Good Feeling."

Madison accepted protective tariffs and a national bank, as did Monroe. Both allowed that some forms of internal improvements might be built and paid for by the federal government. If Jefferson had any objections, he kept most of them to himself. The Federalist "monocrats" had been defeated and the old objections didn't apply. There were some radical "old Republicans" like John Taylor and John Randolph who echoed older anti-federalist and radical decentralist themes, but the bulk of Republicans went with Madison and Monroe and accepted what might have been thought "Hamiltonian" policies.

Now maybe at some deep metaphysical level the Whigs were the decendants of Hamilton, but Clay, Lincoln and other Western Whigs probably would not have seen it that way. The link to the Founders, not to Hamiltonians or Jeffersonians, was paramount, but Clay's Republican antecedents could not be ignored. Such continuities as may have existed with Federalism were at the class or regional level, not at that of political parties. New England Whigs might feel ties to their own Federalist past, but the Whigs of Kentucky or Illinois certainly wouldn't define themselves as Hamiltonian or as heirs of the Federalist party. Clay had sound Republican precedents for his policies. Henry Clay had served as a Republican in Congress under Madison and Monroe. Lincoln supported Clay and viewed him as a connection to the founders -- to the founders as a whole, not to some Hamiltonian tradition.

Does it matter? Viewing history as a clash between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians is polarizing. Everything and everyone can be lined up on one side or the other. Flyover history ignores the details and nuances, like the support of Jefferson's successors for "Hamiltonian" policies.

What the actual political history leading up to Lincoln reveals is that things were more fluid and mixed. People changed their views and compromised. Passions ran high at times but it wasn't an all or nothing struggle between statism and libertarianism.

Ideal types like the Hamilton and Jefferson of 1791 were at the extremes. Most of those in political life were in between the two. Neither extreme Hamiltonianism and extreme Jeffersonianism satisfied most Americans. Rather than cling to theories, people tested theory against reality and discarded theories if they didn't fit or work.

I suppose on some metahistorical level the war can be seen as a conflict between Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism, but that's only because the war and the conflicts that preceded it brought the extremes out in Americans.

In any event, it's probably healthy if those who regard Lincoln as the great deviation consider that perhaps their views may be the deviant ones.

[GOPcapitalist]

Perhaps you misread 'diffident'as 'different.' I meant, "diffident."

My mistake. I read it as "different." But for the record, they didn't all seem reserved either. The ones that were written in confidence, Lincoln readily conceded his pro-tariff views and his anticipation of the issue's reemergence. On the other hand, in a couple he stepped behind the GOP platform plank. It seems he was playing it safe from a matter of political strategy.

[Torie]

As usual good post. It would be quite odd if individuals and groups didn't reorient themselves as the paramount issues perceived as facing the nation changed. That is an ongoing process that continues to this day. New Jersey was safely GOP in 1968, and throught the Reagan era, and now safely Dem. Not far away, West Virginia is not now safely in the Dem column.

[rdf]

Here is McPherson:

"Desiring to confront Douglas directly, Lincoln proposed a series of debates. ... The stakes were higher than a senatorial election, higher even than the looming presidential contest of 1860, for the theme of the debates was nothing less than the future of slavery and the Union. Tariffs, banks, internal improvements, corruption, and other staples of American politics received not a word in these debates – the sole topic was slavery."

We cited him because he is right about the passage in bold type.

The Bank only comes up as an instance of Douglas' inconsistency regarding Dred Scott. You can't even tell from what Lincoln says what his position on the Bank would be. And he doesn't attack Jackson, he uses him as an authority to support dissent from Court decisions. Read any of the Debates, or the Dred Scott speech.

My new friend 'ravinson' is wrong on this one, and McPherson is right. The debates were solely about slavery, especially slavery in the Territories.

Cheers,

Richard F.