Lincoln Unmasked

by Thomas DiLorenzo

  The nineteenth and final chapter begins with a survey of some recent books by prominent authors who have seriously challenged the Official View of American History that is presented by the Lincoln cult. Among these authors are New York Times editorial writer Steven R. Weisman, University of Virginia historian Michael F. Holt, liberal writer Michael Lind, historian John Steele Gordon, and former U.S. Navy Secretary and novelist James Webb.

  Are the gatekeepers losing their influence at last? We can only hope so.

  PART I

  What You’re Not Supposed to Know

  About Lincoln and His War

  2

  The Lincoln Myths—Exposed

  In Lincoln, the South, and Slavery, historian Robert W. Johannsen wrote that anyone who embarked on a study of Abraham Lincoln “must first come to terms with the Lincoln myth. The effort to penetrate the crust of legend that surrounds Lincoln … is both a formidable and intimidating task.”1

  Indeed it is. One reason for this difficulty is that, as in all wars, the victors write the history. The War between the States is no exception; the victorious federal government has seen to it that generations of “court historians” have rewritten the history of the war, especially with regard to the leading figures in that American tragedy, such as Abraham Lincoln. This occurred partly because the government became more and more influential over education in the postwar era, and government always uses public education to aggrandize itself. But the truth is available for anyone who perseveres enough to look for it. Indeed, the true facts are often found in many of the books and articles written by the court historians themselves, although they are usually buried amidst an avalanche of excuses, rationales, and “spin.” Let’s take a look at some of the more prominent myths.

  Myth #1: “Lincoln invaded the South to free the slaves.” This is another way of saying that slavery was the sole cause of the war, which has recently become the mantra of the Lincoln gatekeepers. The problem for them, however, is that Lincoln never said this and most certainly did not believe it. Nor did anyone else in his government—or in the Northern states. It is unlikely that anyone who voted for Lincoln in 1860 did so because he thought the new president would order an army to march south to free the slaves in a war that might cost hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars.

  On March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln’s inauguration as president, the U.S. Senate passed a proposed constitutional amendment that read: “No Amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of the State.” The U.S. House of Representatives passed the amendment on February 28, 1861. “Domestic institutions” meant slavery.

  Two days later, in his first inaugural address, Lincoln promised several times that he had no intention to interfere with Southern slavery, and that even if he did, it would be unconstitutional to do so. He also pledged his support for this amendment, announcing to the world that “holding such a provision [the legality of slavery] to be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable” (emphasis added).

  Lincoln wanted the Constitution to make slavery “irrevocable.”

  Thus, on the day of his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln did not defend or support the natural, God-given rights of Southern slaves to life, liberty, and property. Quite the opposite: He supported the “rights” of Southern slave owners to deprive the slaves of those rights. Lincoln was perfectly willing to see Southern slavery persist long past his own lifetime, for all he knew, as long as the Southern states remained in the Union and continued to pay federal taxes.

  Lincoln clearly stated the real cause and purpose of the war on numerous occasions, including in his famous August 22, 1862, letter to newspaper editor Horace Greeley. There he wrote, “My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery.”2 His objective was to destroy the secession movement by force of arms, period.

  The U.S. Congress concurred, announcing to the world on July 22, 1861, that the purpose of the war was not “interference with the rights or established institutions of those states”—that is, slavery—“but to preserve the Union with the rights of the several states unimpaired.” Thus, according to both President Lincoln and the Congress, the conflict over states’ rights was the sole cause of the war. The Confederate states believed the Union was voluntary, that governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that they consequently had a right to secede. Lincoln disagreed, and was willing to wage total war to “prove” himself right. Most gatekeepers today will say that states’ rights were, at best, a “figleaf.” Or they will peddle the false notion that it was made up as an excuse after the war by disgruntled former Confederates. Either way, they are distorting true history and contradicting Lincoln himself.

  Myth #2: “Lincoln saved the Union.” In reality, Lincoln did more than any other individual to destroy the voluntary union of the founding fathers. All of the founding documents—the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty with Great Britain, the Constitution—refer to the states as “free and independent.” That is, the founders construed them as being free and independent of any other state, including the federal government which they—the states—had created as their agent.

  The states delegated certain narrowly defined and enumerated powers to the federal government but preserved sovereignty for themselves. The federal Constitution was created by a voluntary association of states and three of them—New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia—explicitly reserved the right to withdraw from the constitutional compact should the federal government ever abuse their liberties. Since all states have equal rights under the Constitution, and no state is given more rights than any other, the fact that this contingency was accepted by all the other states implies that this right of secession was naturally assumed to be enjoyed by all the states. The citizens of the states did not create “a new nation” with the Constitution; they created a compact or a confederacy of states.

  This was an uncontroversial view in 1860. Newspapers throughout the North echoed the opinion of the Bangor Daily Union, which editorialized on November 13, 1860, that the Union “depends for its continuance on the free consent and will of the sovereign people of each state, and when consent and will is withdrawn on either part, their Union is gone.”3

  The voluntary union of the founding fathers was destroyed in 1865.

  Thus, Lincoln “saved” the federal union in the same sense that a man who has been abusing his wife “saves” his marital union by violently forcing his wife back into the home and threatening to shoot her if she leaves again. The union may well be saved, but it is not the same kind of union that existed on their wedding day. That union no longer exists. The American union of the founding fathers ceased to exist in April of 1865.

  Myth #3: “Lincoln was a champion of the Constitution.” George Orwell himself would blush at this assertion. The only way one could conceivably make this argument is to base the argument exclusively on a few nice things that Lincoln said about the Constitution while generally ignoring his actions. For example, he launched an invasion without the consent of Congress; illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political opponents; shut down some three hundred opposition newspapers; censored all telegraph communication; imprisoned a large percentage of the duly elected legislature of Maryland as well as the mayor of Baltimore; illegally orchestrated the secession of West Virginia; deported the most outspoken member of the Democratic opposition, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio; systematically disarmed the border states in violation of the Second Amendment; and effectively declared himself dictator. The gatekeepers try to excuse all of this, but their words ring hollow to anyone familiar with the historical facts.

  Myth #4: “L
incoln was devoted to equality.” Lincoln’s words and, more important, his actions, thoroughly contradict this claim. “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races,” he stated in his August 21, 1858, debate with Stephen Douglas. Incredibly, various Lincoln scholars take a statement like this and somehow conclude that Lincoln “really” meant, “I do have purpose to introduce political and racial equality.…” Mostly, statements like this are simply ignored and kept from the innocent eyes of American schoolchildren.

  Lincoln’s usurpations of power were unconstitutional.

  Lincoln opposed the immigration of black people into Illinois; supported the Illinois Black Codes, which deprived the small number of free blacks who resided in the state of any semblance of citizenship; and was a leader of the Illinois Colonization Society, which persuaded the state legislature to allocate funds to “colonize,” or deport, free blacks. As syndicated columnist Joseph Sobran has remarked, Lincoln’s position was that blacks could be “equal” all right, but not in the United States. He favored “colonizing” them in Africa, Haiti, Central and South America—anywhere but in the United States. This position was supported by the vast majority of Northerners, and Lincoln, as an astute and even brilliant politician, supported it as well.

  Myth #5: “Lincoln was a great statesman.” Imagine that California seceded from the union and an American president responded with the carpet bombing of Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco that destroyed 90 percent of those cities. Such was the case with General Sherman’s bombardment of Atlanta; a naval blockade; a blocking off of virtually all trade; the eviction of thousands of residents from their homes (as occurred in Atlanta in 1864); the destruction of most industries and farms; massive looting of private property by a marauding army; and the killing of one out of four males of military age while maiming for life more than double that number.

  As a man of his time, Lincoln held views that can only be described as the views of a white supremacist.

  Would such an American president be considered a “great statesman” or a war criminal? The answer is obvious. A statesman would have recognized the state’s right to secede, as enshrined in the Tenth Amendment, among other places, and then worked diligently to persuade the seceded state that a reunion was in its best interest. Agreat statesman, or even a modest one, would not have impulsively plunged the entire nation into a bloody war.

  Lincoln’s warmongering belligerence and his invasion of all the Southern states in response to Fort Sumter (where no one was harmed or killed) caused the upper South—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—to secede after originally voting to remain in the Union. He refused to meet with Confederate commissioners to discuss peace and even declined a meeting with Napoleon III of France, who offered to broker a peace agreement. No genuine statesman would have behaved in such a way.

  A “great statesman” would not have manipulated his own people into the bloodiest war in world history.

  After Fort Sumter, Lincoln thanked naval commander Gustavus Fox for assisting him in manipulating the South Carolinians into firing at Fort Sumter. A great statesman does not manipulate his own people into starting one of the bloodiest wars in human history.

  Myth #6: “Lincoln was a great humanitarian.” Great humanitarians do not micromanage the waging of total war, or wage war on civilians, as Lincoln did for the duration of his administration. This included the burning of entire towns populated only by civilians, massive looting and plundering, and even the execution of civilians. A great humanitarian would not express his personal thanks and “the thanks of a nation” to those who committed such atrocities and war crimes, as Lincoln did to General Philip Sheridan. Nor would he have literally laughed at the fate of Southern civilians who had lost everything, as General Sherman said that he did in his [Sherman’s] memoirs.

  Great humanitarians do not become obsessed with allocating tax dollars to the development of more powerful and more devastating weapons of mass destruction to be aimed at their own citizens, as Lincoln did.

  Humanitarians do not wage war on innocent civilians.

  Historian Lee Kennett was right when he wrote, in Marching Through Georgia, that had the Confederates somehow won, they would have been justified in “stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command” as war criminals, especially for waging war on civilians.4 This is the kind of conclusion that one often comes to from studying the actual history of the War between the States, as opposed to the fanciful reinterpretations of it provided to us by the gatekeepers and other assorted court historians.

  3

  Fake Lincoln Quotes

  Why is it so difficult to see through, as Robert Johannsen put it, “the crust of legend that surrounds Lincoln”? One reason is that literature is filled with fake Lincoln quotes. These fake statements are used to further advance the deification of the sixteenth president, or to promote a particular political agenda. For example, such a quotation appeared in a 2003 New York Times review of a book entitled Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the Rich, by Kevin Phillips. Reviewer Paul Kennedy, a Harvard University historian, repeated a bogus quotation that Phillips used in his book: “The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace, and it conspires against it in times of adversity. It’s more despotic than monarchy. It’s more insolent than autocracy. It’s more selfish than bureaucracy.… Corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow.”

  Phillips apparently thought he had found the perfect quotation that attached the “moral authority” of Lincoln to his general theme of “the money power” corrupting society. But as historian Mathew Pinkser wrote on the website History News Network, the quotation “is nowhere in Lincoln’s collected works,” and the editor of Lincoln’s Collected Works called it “a bold, unblushing forgery.”

  Anyone who knows about the real Lincoln would suspect the quotation to be a forgery. The truth is, Lincoln was a corporate trial lawyer whose clients included every major railroad corporation in the Midwest. At the 1860 Republican National Convention, corporations seeking protectionist trade policies delivered to Lincoln the steel-industry-dominant state of Pennsylvania. He was closely associated with the nation’s largest corporations, who were among his staunchest political supporters. It is hardly likely that he would have been on record as expressing such socialistic, antibusiness views as those held by Kevin Phillips, Ralph Nader, and Michael Moore.

  And there are dozens, if not hundreds, of quotes like this one that have been used for generations to enhance the “holy” image of the Fake Lincoln. Some of these fraudulent statements are catalogued in an Oxford University Press book entitled They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions, by Professors Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George.

  Many of your favorite Lincoln quotes are simply fakes.

  For decades, scholars and journalists have been quoting Lincoln as saying, “All that loves labor serves the nation. All that harms labor is treason to America. No line can be drawn between these two. If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates labor, he is a liar. If any man tells you he trusts America, yet fears labor, he is a fool. There is no America without labor, and to fleece one is to rob the other.”

  Labor unions have naturally repeated this quotation endlessly. Unfortunately for them, write Professors Boller and George, “there is no record of [Lincoln’s] ever having uttered these words.”1

  The antiprohibitionist movement has long touted another supposed Lincoln quote: “Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance … for it … attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.” “There is no record of this statement being made by Lincoln,” write Boller and George.2 The statement was apparently fabricated by a Georgia antiprohibition leader.

  “If I ever get a chance to hit that thing, I’ll hit it hard,” Lincoln supposedly said about slave
ry. This, too, is often repeated. In the March 2003 issue of The American Enterprise magazine, which was devoted to essays about Lincoln and the War between the States, historian Jay Winik, author of April 1865: The Month That Saved America, repeated it. Unfortunately for Winik, Lincoln “never made the above statement,” as Boller and George document.3

  Lincoln never became a Christian, never joined a church, and rarely stepped foot in one, despite his skilled use of religious rhetoric in political speeches. When he ran for president, almost every one of the ministers in Springfield, Illinois, opposed him. Yet he supposedly said, “I have never known a worthwhile man who became too big for his boots or his Bible.” Another fake, as Boller and George prove.4

  The same can be said of the story that, after viewing the graves at Gettysburg, Lincoln became a Christian. He supposedly said, “I then and there consecrated myself to Christ. Yes, I do love Jesus!” Another fake. He never said it. This particular delusion was most likely the result of the successful crusade by the New England clergy after the war to deify Lincoln. They compared him to Jesus and Moses, claiming that just as Jesus died for the world’s sins, Lincoln died for the nation’s sins. That’s why he is sometimes given the blasphemous label of “redeemer president.”5 And just as Moses led his people to the Promised Land but never reached there himself, the same was true of Lincoln. The problem facing the late-nineteenth-century New England clergy, however, was that their “sainted” Lincoln was either an agnostic or an atheist. Thus, he had to be born again—firguratively speaking—as a Christian. As one well-informed clergyman said in mockery, Lincoln became a Christian “six months after his death.”6