Even though Lincoln was one of the highest-paid trial lawyers in the nation before becoming president and was married to the daughter of a wealthy slave-owning Kentucky family, he is still portrayed as a poor, backwoods “railsplitter” and “a man of the people.” Generations of American schoolchildren have been taught that he said, “God must have loved the common people, he made so many of them.” There is absolutely no evidence “that Lincoln ever said anything of the kind,” conclude Professors Boller and George.7 They discovered that the origin of this particular fake quotation is a book entitled Our Presidents by James Morgan, published in 1928.
The old story about Lincoln becoming a Christian in Gettysburg is untrue.
“If this nation is to be destroyed,” Lincoln is credited with saying, “it will be destroyed from within; if it is not destroyed from within, it will live for all time to come.” Another proven fake. Boller and George discovered that this fake quote was a distortion of Lincoln’s words by former U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy in a 1953 speech.8
Lincoln was clearly opposed to racial equality of any kind. He stated his opposition to racial equality in many of his public speeches and, more important, demonstrated it through his actions. Americans have been misled about his racial beliefs by generations of court historians and gatekeepers. If you’ve ever read the following quotation attributed to Lincoln you should know that it, too, is a fake: “The restoration of the Rebel States to the Union must rest upon the principle of civil and political equality of both races.” He never said it. Nor did he ever say, “Know there is a God and that He hates injustice and slavery,” another fake quotation that schoolchildren have been exposed to, say Professors Boller and George.9
There are long, words-of-wisdom quotes attributed to Lincoln that make him seem exceptionally wise and sage. These include the admonitions that “You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift; strengthen the weak by weakening the strong; help strong men by tearing down big men; help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer; further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred; help the poor by destroying the rich; establish sound security on borrowed money; keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn; build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative; and help men permanently by doing for them what they could do for themselves.”
These are indeed words of wisdom; every bit of this advice is as sound as a gold dollar. But none of them came from Lincoln. They have all been exposed “as forgeries.”10
Abraham Lincoln never even said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can not fool all the people all the time.” (Besides, his actions and his political rhetoric prove that he did in fact believe it was possible to “fool all the people.”) This statement “cannot be found in any of Lincoln’s printed addresses,” say Boller and George, yet Lincoln scholars still utilize it because it sounds “Lincolnesque.”11
Americans are not only unaware of some of the most important facts about Lincoln, as discussed in the last chapter and throughout this book, but much of what they think they know about him is false. They have been very thoroughly miseducated.
4
The Myth of the Morally Superior “Yankee”
I was born and raised in Pennsylvania but do not consider myself to be a Yankee. The word Yankee refers not so much to native-born residents of the northern United States, but to an attitude, or mind-set. Dutch immigrants from New York first gave the name to English settlers in Connecticut. In the early to mid-nineteenth century the word gained popularity as a description of a brand of New Englander and, later, midwesterner. The word Yankee was attached to those New Englanders who were seen as arrogant, unfriendly, condescending, intolerant, extremely self-righteous, and believing that they were God’s chosen people. (Conservative historian Clyde Wilson has remarked that Hillary Clinton, born in Illinois and educated in Massachusetts and Connecticut, is a “museum-quality specimen” of a Yankee.)1
Yankees never shied away from using the coercive powers of government to compel others to be remade in their image. Consequently, it is probably not just a coincidence that compulsory government schooling began in New England, as did prohibition. The latest manifestation of the Northern Yankee is “neoconservativism,” an ideology that believes the U.S. government should use its military might to remake the entire world in its image, all in the name of “democracy and freedom.”
The idea of Yankee moral superiority was carefully crafted from the time of the Pilgrims. By 1861, New England Yankees and their midwestern brethren had concocted the myth of a morally superior free, white, and virtuous New England that had a right to remake other sections of the United States in its own image, creating nothing less than heaven on Earth through the New Englandization of America. A corollary of this notion was the assumption that the slave-owning South was inherently morally inferior.
But the notion of a morally superior New England Yankee society is a myth, as explained in great detail by Brown University professor Joanne Pope Melish in her book Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780–1860, published in 1998 by Cornell University Press. Professor Melish documents how New England opinion makers rewrote their own history (not unlike how the Soviets rewrote theirs) to say that slavery in their part of the country was very brief and relatively benevolent.
Not all Northerners were (or are) “Yankees.”
The truth is that slavery existed in New England for more than two hundred years (beginning in 1638) and was as degrading and dehumanizing as slavery elsewhere. In mid-eighteenth-century Rhode Island, slaves accounted for one-third of the population of many communities. Newport, Rhode Island, and Boston, Massachusetts, were the two biggest centers of the transatlantic slave trade. Slave labor was used to build the New England slave ships that transported most of the slaves from Africa.
Virtually all of the New England aristocracy’s household and farm labor was done by slaves, Professor Melish writes. “These servants performed the dirty, heavy, dangerous, menial jobs around the household, or they acted in inferior roles as valets and maids to masters and mistresses of the upper class.”2
Professor Melish also documents the pervasive sexual abuse of female slaves by their New England masters. The renowned New England cleric Cotton Mather advised his fellow Yankees that Christianizing their slaves would transform them into even better slaves. “Your servants will be the Better Servants,” the New England religious icon said, “for being made Christian servants.”3 Christianize them, and they will be “afraid of speaking or doing any thing that may justly displeasure you.”
Slavery existed in New England for more than two hundred years and was as degrading and dehumanizing as slavery anywhere.
Slavery became uneconomical in New England with the growth of a manufacturing industry that required a more educated and skilled workforce. And beginning in the late eighteenth century, gradual emancipation laws were introduced. In general, these laws stated that the children of existing slaves would be freed upon reaching a certain age, usually twenty-one to twenty-five. In theory, a one-year-old slave in the year 1784 who had a child at age twenty-five would remain a slave for life, but her child would be freed somewhere around 1834.
Slaves were included in the New England population census during the nineteenth century, and the data reveal that as late as 1848, Rhode Island was passing new laws outlawing slavery. New Hampshire passed a new law outlawing slavery even later—in 1857. Thus, there were still slaves in New Hampshire on the eve of the War between the States. There were slaves in the state of New York until at least 1850, and New Jersey did not end slavery until 1865.4
Professor Melish writes of New England slave owners who violated the gradual emancipation laws by keeping their slaves in ignorance of the laws requiring it, or never telling them exactly when they were born so they could be enslaved as long as possible. Many New Englanders did not free their slaves when they reached the age
of liberation, but sold them instead to Southern plantation owners. Slavery may have ended, but not all Northern slave owners freed their slaves.
When New England ever so gradually ended slavery for economic reasons, many New England slave owners sold their slaves to Southern plantation owners.
In Democracy in America Tocqueville noted that, ironically, the “problem of race” seemed to be worse in the non-slave-owning states than in slave-owning states. He was aware of the general attitude in New England that all blacks were “aliens” and should be deported or “colonized” back to Africa. Ralph Waldo Emerson proved Tocqueville’s point by predicting that as an “inferior” race, blacks would “follow the Dodo into extinction.”5
Even after gradual emancipation laws were passed New England governments passed legislation that assured “free” blacks would never be granted any semblance of real citizenship. “A complicated system of seizures, fines, whippings, and other punishments for a legion of illegal activities” on the part of free blacks was imposed.6 Free blacks were denied titles to property, which pauperized them. Vagrancy laws were passed so that New England communities could deport as many free blacks as possible. The free blacks were routinely accused of “disturbing the peace” and subsequently deported out of their communities.
The “morally superior” New England Yankees announced repeatedly that they did not believe black people were capable of citizenship and tried to force them out of their communities. The American Colonization Society, which raised funds to deport blacks to Liberia and other foreign lands, was very active in New England. By 1861 some twelve thousand free blacks from New England had been deported to Liberia, where most of them perished. To New Englanders “abolitionism” did not necessarily mean freedom, it meant “abolishing” the presence of black people from their midst. They were God’s chosen people, and no “inferior beings” were acceptable to them. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “the abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery, but because he wishes to abolish the black man.”7 That would supposedly “restore New England to an idealized original state as an orderly, homogenous, white society. A free New England would be a white New England.”8 In other words, they apparently hoped to create a superior master race.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Melish documents that free blacks in New England were horribly abused in inhumane ways. New Englanders were bombarded with graphic literary representations of blacks as preposterous, stupid, or evil beings. There was even a New England version of the Ku Klux Klan terrorist gang long before any such thing appeared in the Southern states. Melish writes of roving gangs that conducted “terroristic raids on urban black communities and the institutions that served them.”9
Free blacks in New England were urged to leave the country, attacked, rioted against, excluded from juries, and even from cemeteries. Black graves were dug up so that white cemeteries would not be “tainted.” “The corpses of people of color seem to have become a target of grave robbers,” writes Melish.10 Black children were excluded from most public schools, even if their parents were taxpayers.
In an early example of the Shermanesque warfare that would later be used on Southern civilians, entire black communities in New England were assaulted and burned to the ground. “By the early 1820s whites had begun to apply a strategy for their [blacks’] physical removal—assaulting their communities, burning down their homes, and attacking their advocates.”11 There was “a crescendo of mob violence against people of color” in the 1830s, and almost a hundred violent incidents recorded between 1820 and 1840. Morally superior, indeed.
This violence was motivated by the fundamental New England belief that black people were “anomalous and troublesome strangers.” Its objective was that “Negroes would slowly diminish in number until finally they would disappear altogether.” By 1853 Frederick Douglass surveyed the situation in New England and asked, “What stone has been left unturned to degrade us? What hand refused to inflame the popular prejudice against us? What whit has not laughed at us in our wretchedness?”12
New Englanders did everything they could to eradicate free blacks from their midst, including burning down entire communities.
Just as Abraham Lincoln never accepted responsibility for the war, essentially blaming it all on God in his second inaugural address, New Englanders never accepted any blame for the sorry plight of the free blacks who lived among them. The reason black people in New England lived a degraded existence, they said, was because of Southern slavery! The idea was repeated enough that it took hold in New England and exists to this day. Melish cites contemporary left-wing “social scientists” (from New England) who claim that northern racism today is not the fault of the northerners themselves; rather, such attitudes are imported from the southern states.
Right-wing economist Thomas Sowell made this same argument in a 2005 book entitled Black Rednecks and White Liberals, in which he blames the current problems of northern black communities on seventeenth-century Southern culture. He believes the ancient habits and folkways of the South are still so influential that they control the behavior of entire regions of the north today. (Conservatives like Sowell used to champion individual responsibility and excoriate “liberals” who searched for “root causes” of deviant behavior. No longer, at least in Sowell’s case.) The perpetual demonization of the South and Southerners is part and parcel of the Lincoln myth. The continued demonization of everything Southern is part of the gatekeepers’ strategy to keep the public from ever becoming curious about alternative interpretations of nineteenth-century history.
By 1860 the myth of the morally superior Yankee had migrated to the Midwest along with thousands of transplanted New Englanders. New England attitudes toward blacks were transferred to states such as Illinois, “Land of Lincoln,” which in 1848 amended its constitution to prohibit the immigration of black people into the state. Throughout the Midwest, just as in New England, blacks were denied genuine citizenship and discriminated against even more viciously. One of eleven managers of the Illinois Colonization Society, Abraham Lincoln supported allocating state tax dollars for deporting free blacks out of his state.
As early as 1784, reports Professor Melish, an American dictionary quoted a British visitor to America observing that New Englanders were disliked by the inhabitants of all other provinces, “by whom they are called Yankeys.…” Little wonder. The North’s victory in the War between the States, writes Melish, marked “the stunning success of the cultural imperialism” that was part and parcel of New England nationalism.
At that point, “New England had become the nation and, in the process, the nation had become New England.”13
This truth has been swept under the rug by generations of gatekeepers, but it is possible to pick up the “rug” and look under it, as Professor Melish demonstrates. Earlier writers have done the same but have been largely ignored. In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, first published in 1955, C. Vann Woodward anticipated many of Professor Melish’s claims. He noted that the farther west one went, the worse things got for blacks. Indiana, Illinois, and Oregon amended their constitutions so that it would be illegal for blacks to immigrate into those states. “Racial discrimination was the rule” in the North, according to Woodward.14
New England’s “cultural imperialism” is based on a bundle of lies.
Free blacks in the North were basically locked out of the legal system: Only 6 percent of the free blacks in the North lived in states that allowed them to vote; they were generally barred from being jurors; in many states they could not legally testify in court against a white man; and there were “disproportionate numbers of Negroes in Northern prisons.…”15 On the eve of the Civil War, Woodward wrote, the North’s position on racial matters was “white supremacy, Negro subordination, and racial segregation.” Moreover, “the political party [Republicans] that took control of the federal government at that time was in accord with this position, and Abraham Lincoln as its foremost spokesman was on record with repeated e
ndorsements” (emphasis added).16
Even the notorious Black Codes that were put into place in the South after the war were not the work of Southerners, but of “the provisional legislatures established by President Johnson in 1865. Some of them were intended to establish systems of peonage or apprenticeship resembling slavery.”17 They were, in other words, the work of the party of Lincoln.
Another author who dared to reveal these truths was historian Leon Litwack, author of the 1961 book North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860. This book is well known by Lincoln scholars, but it is steadfastly kept from the prying eyes of the general public. “The Mason-Dixon line is a convenient but often misleading geographical division,” Litwack wrote.18 The generally accepted view among most Americans about “southern racial inhumanity” versus “northern benevolence and liberality” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries simply “does not accord with the realities.…”19 Moreover, “Abraham Lincoln, in his vigorous support of both white supremacy and denial of equal rights for Negroes, simply gave expression to almost universal American convictions.”20 Most Northerners, Litwack pointed out, favored either voluntary “colonization” or the forced expulsion of all blacks from the United States.
More recently, the New-York Historical Society had an exhibition on the topic of “Slavery in New York” (in late 2005–2006). A book by the same title was published that explains the eye-opening exhibit. As stated in the book’s introduction:
The notorious Black Codes originated in the Northern states and were imposed on the South by the Republican Party’s “Reconstruction” governments.
For nearly three hundred years, slavery was an intimate part of the lives of all New Yorkers, black and white.… For portions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, New York City housed the largest urban slave population in mainland North America, with more slaves than any other city on the continent. During those years, slaves composed more than one quarter of the labor force in the city and perhaps as much as one half of the workers in many of its outlying districts.… Slaves could be found in New York into the fifth decade of the nineteenth century.21
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