Lincoln Unmasked

by Thomas DiLorenzo

  Also in 2005, Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, journalists who write for the Hartford Courant, published Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. Several centuries of Northern slavery “has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret,” they write.22 They point out that it was Massachusetts, not South Carolina, that first legalized slavery. Colonial Boston was “a bustling port for the trade of human flesh.” In Rhode Island, “large landholdings used sizable numbers of slaves to provision the … plantations in the Caribbean with foodstuffs.”23

  Rhode Island was long the leader in the transatlantic slave trade. Although the transatlantic slave trade was made illegal in the United States in 1808, in 1860 and beyond Manhattan shipyards continued to build slave ships that were used to transport slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and elsewhere.24 It was Harvard University researchers who established the discredited field of “race science” in the nineteenth century that was used to justify slavery and the subordination of black people.

  Several decades after the end of the War between the States, Connecticut businessmen operated an “international center for ivory production” in their state, “through the enslavement … of as many as 2 million people—in Africa.”25

  Not surprisingly, “Northerners have pushed much of their early history into the deepest shadows of repression.”26 The New England version of mid-nineteenth-century American history, with its heroic, freedom-loving North and evil South, is “a convenient and whitewashed shorthand, at best.”27 Yet it is the history that has been taught to American schoolchildren for generations, indoctrinating the America public in the myth of the morally superior Yankee.

  5

  Lincoln’s Liberian Connection

  Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett, Jr., harshly criticized Lincoln in his book Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, because of Lincoln’s lifelong advocacy of “colonization.” He recommended deporting black people to some other country—Africa, Haiti, Central America—anywhere outside the United States.1

  One of Lincoln’s first choices was the West African country of Liberia, created in 1816 by the American Colonization Society, which had purchased land for the purpose of “colonizing” black Americans there. One of the founders, and eventual presidents, of the society was Henry Clay, Lincoln’s professed political role model whom he idolized as “the father of Whig principles.” Lincoln followed in his idol’s footsteps, being appointed as one of eleven managers of the Illinois Colonization Society.2

  As president, Lincoln tried repeatedly to get a colonization program going, which he eventually did. In 1862 he invited a group of free black men into the White House to request that they lead by example and leave the country.3 The men were greeted by the federal commissioner of emigration, J. Mitchell. Lincoln informed the men that, at his request, a sum of money had been appropriated by Congress “for the purpose of aiding the colonization in some country of the people, or portion of them, of African descent.” Thus, early in his administration Lincoln commenced a plan to eventually ship all black people out of the country. This is what Lerone Bennett, Jr., called Lincoln’s “white dream.”

  Lincoln was a manager of the Illinois Colonization Society, which sought to deport all of the state’s free black people.

  “You and we are different races,” Lincoln astutely observed. “We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races.… This physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both” and “affords a reason at least why we should be separated.… It is better for us both, therefore, to be separate.”4

  The president then made his sales pitch for Liberia: “The colony of Liberia has been in existence a long time. In a certain sense it is a success. The old president of Liberia, Roberts, has just been with me—the first time I ever saw him. He says they have within the bounds of that colony between 300,000 and 400,000 people.… They are not all American [black] colonists, or their descendants. Something less than 12,000 have been sent hither from this country. Many of the original settlers have died, yet like people elsewhere, their offspring outnumber those deceased.”5

  This was not an offer one would jump at. Lincoln was telling the men that if they went to Liberia, most of them would probably die within a few years. But, if they procreated in the meantime, several decades hence their descendants would likely outnumber them. Little wonder Frederick Douglas had nothing but scorn for Lincoln’s colonization schemes, and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced him as not having “a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins.”6 The leader of the delegation of free black men, Mr. E. M. Thomas, promised a response to Lincoln’s proposal but there is no record of one being received.

  Lead by example, Lincoln told a contingent of free black men in the White House, and migrate to Liberia.

  This incident was not a onetime flight of fancy for Lincoln. In his July 6, 1852, eulogy to Henry Clay, delivered in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln approvingly quoted Clay’s statement that “there is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children,” which would supposedly be “a signal blessing to that most unfortunate region.” He first proposed deporting American blacks to Liberia in an 1854 speech in Peoria, Illinois. On June 26, 1857, as an aside while commenting on the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln offered another reason why he favored colonization: “There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races.…”7 He voiced such opinions throughout his entire adult life. Such views were consistent with the views of the vast majority of white people in the North.

  During his administration Lincoln allocated funds to found a colony of American blacks in Haiti, but the crooked businessman Bernard Koch, who was chosen to be the “governor” of the colony, embezzled most of the federally appropriated funds. In 1864 Lincoln finally concluded that the Haitian colonization experiment had failed and instructed the War Department to offer to return the Haitian colonists to the United States.

  Lincoln even toyed with the idea of turning American blacks into Panamanian coal miners. Funds were allocated to purchase land for colonization in Panama once large coal deposits were discovered there. The administration’s plans to subsidize a transcontinental railroad would require a great deal of coal to fuel the trains, and it would take a lot of backbreaking labor to mine sufficient quantities of the mineral. In the same White House meeting with the free black men where the topic of Liberia was discussed Lincoln told the men that if Liberia was not to their liking, “Room in South America for colonization, can be obtained cheaply, and in abundance.”

  Panama was a malaria trap when the Panama Canal was dug in the early twentieth century; “colonization” there in the 1860s would have meant the certain demise of the settlers. The delegation of free black men politely turned down Lincoln’s offer but, according to historian Webb Garrison, the president continued to plot and plan some kind of colonization program till the end of his presidency.

  6

  An Abolitionist Who Despised Lincoln

  The myth of Northern “national unity” is one of the biggest myths surrounding Lincoln and the history of the War between the States. The truth: There was a great deal of dissent and political opposition in the North. The Lincoln administration used a variety of tactics to squash dissent: shutting down three hundred opposition newspapers, suspending habeas corpus, imprisoning tens of thousands of political dissenters, deporting outspoken Democratic congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, censoring telegraphs, intimidating judges, conscripting soldiers, recruiting thousands of foreign immigrants to fight in the war, and rigging Northern elections, to name but a few. Lincoln’s reliance on these underhanded devices proves there was indeed a great deal of opposition to his administration in the North, which was anything but “unified” in the war effort. Despite all these dictatorial efforts, he still only won 55 percent of the popular vote in the North in 1864.

  A
dramatic critique of the Lincoln administration came from famed Massachusetts abolitionist, philosopher, and legal scholar Lysander Spooner (1808–1887). Spooner and his family had been abolitionists for decades prior to the war. In 1845 he authored the book The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, which made him an instant hero to the abolition movement. The book made a seemingly ironclad case that slavery was unconstitutional, advocated jury nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act (which Lincoln strongly supported), and called for abolitionists to aid and finance slave insurrections in the South. Spooner went so far as to hatch a plot to kidnap Virginia governor Henry Wise and hold him hostage in exchange for John Brown.

  Today, libertarians consider Spooner to be one of their heroes and icons. In the introduction to The Lysander Spooner Reader, historian and philsopher George H. Smith describes Spooner as “one of the greatest libertarian theorists of the nineteenth (or any other) century.”1 Spooner’s “contempt for government was rivaled only by his contempt for fellow libertarians who compromised their principles.”2 Spooner was not a mere theorist of liberty; he founded a private mail delivery service that underpriced the U.S. Postal Service, which he believed was an unconscionable government monopoly that exploited the public.

  Lysander Spooner was a hero of the New England abolitionist movement who despised Lincoln and his entire administration.

  Lysander Spooner was a fiery and influential opponent of the Republican Party regime in general, and of Abraham Lincoln in particular. Spooner’s Collected Papers include a January 22, 1860, letter to William Seward of New York, who would become Lincoln’s secretary of state and the administrator of a secret police force that rounded up and imprisoned thousands of political dissenters.3 Like many other Republicans, Seward had spent the previous decade making self-aggrandizing speeches for supposedly being a great defender of human liberty.

  Based on Seward’s actions, as opposed to his political rhetoric, Spooner believed that Seward was a fake and a hypocrite. His letter to Seward leads off with a most incendiary sentence, speaking of “evidence of your unfaithfulness to freedom” and a pledge, by Spooner, to “embarrass the plans of the Chases, and Sumners, and Wilsons, and Hales, and the other Jesuitical leaders of the Republican Party, who profess that they can aid liberty, without injuring slavery.”4 (Note: “Jesuitical” means “crafty and equivocating.”)5

  A good example of why Spooner believed the entire Republican Party cabal was comprised of hypocrites and scoundrels is because they used antislavery language while at the same time working to cement Southern slavery into place permanently through a constitutional amendment. The so-called Lincoln scholars know that not only did Lincoln voice support for the proposed 1861 amendment to the Constitution that would have forbidden the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery in his first inaugural address, but that the amendment was his idea. Doris Kearns Goodwin, for one, discusses the whole sordid affair in her Lincoln biography, Team of Rivals.6

  As soon as he was elected, but before his inauguration, Lincoln “instructed Seward to introduce [the amendment] in the Senate Committee of Thirteen without indicating they issued from Springfield.”7 Lincoln instructed Seward to begin the procedure to enact a constitutional amendment that would say, “the Constitution should never be altered so as to authorize Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in the states.”8 In addition, Lincoln instructed Seward to get through Congress a law that would make the various “personal liberty laws” that existed in some Northern states illegal. (Such state laws nullified the federal Fugitive Slave Act, which required Northerners to apprehend runaway slaves.)

  Goodwin writes that when Seward announced these actions to a Boston audience he was met with “thunderous applause.” Lincoln then personally congratulated him for a job well done.

  So despite all their talk of “liberty,” and all their “antislavery” rhetoric, these kinds of actions proved to Spooner that these men were diabolical liars, connivers, and political manipulators of the worst kind. He excoriated them for believing that they could “ride into power on the two horses of Liberty and Slavery.” In his letter to Seward he called the future secretary of state, and the rest of the prominent Republicans, “double-faced demagogues.”

  The famous Massachusetts abolitionist condemned the Lincoln regime as full of “fakes and hypocrites.”

  The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, published some fifteen years earlier, had never been refuted in print or in public. Spooner reminded Seward of this, going so far as to point out that Senator Brown of Mississippi had publicly admitted Spooner’s arguments to be irrefutable, whereas he (Seward), a supposed champion of “liberty,” had not. “Thus an open advocate of slavery from Mississippi virtually makes more concessions to the anti-slavery character of the constitution, than a professed advocate of liberty from New York.…”

  Spooner closed his letter to Seward—one in a series exchanged between the two—by saying that he intended to make their full correspondence public, contrary to Seward’s wishes that it be kept secret and private. This action would have supported Spooner’s intention to “serve any purpose towards defeating yourself and the Republicans,” upon which time “I shall be gratified.”9

  Two years—and many thousands of war-related deaths—later, Spooner focused his ire on another Republican Party luminary, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who was known to have admitted in public that Spooner’s argument on the unconstitutionality of slavery was irrefutable. “Why, then, in Heaven’s name, do you not take that position?” he boomed in a letter to the Massachusetts senator. As with Lincoln, Seward, and others, Sumner only “opposed” slavery in the abstract, not in reality. Consequently, wrote Spooner, “while for a dozen years, you have been making the most bombastic pretensions of zeal for freedom, you have really been, all that time, a deliberately perjured traitor to the constitution, to liberty, and to truth.” He then accused Sumner of “treason” to the Constitution.10

  Spooner strongly believed that, had the case been publicly made by some of the nation’s leading politicians that slavery was unconstitutional, then world opinion would have pressured honorable Southern leaders like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee (who denounced slavery as a “moral and political evil” and emancipated the slaves his wife inherited) to work toward doing what the British, Spanish, Dutch, French, Danes, and others had done during the nineteenth century: end slavery peacefully. In his own words, from the letter to Sumner:

  Spooner never believed the North fought for “liberty and justice” but for “control of [Southern] markets.”

  Had all those men at the North, who believed these ideas [i.e., the unconstitutionality of slavery] to be true, promulgated them as was their plain and obvious duty to do, it is reasonable to suppose that we should long since have had freedom, without shedding one drop of blood … the South could, consistently with honor, and probably would, long before this time, and without a conflict, have surrendered their slavery to the demand of the constitution … and to the moral sentiment of the world … you, and others like you have done more, according to your abilities, to prevent the peaceful abolition of slavery, than any other men in the nation.11

  Spooner was not finished. He continued on, criticizing that “in your pretended zeal for liberty, you have been urging the nation to the most frightful destruction of human life,” and “through a series of years, betrayed the very citadel of liberty, which you were under oath to defend.” There has been “no other treason at all comparable with this.”12

  Now that is what is meant by “speaking truth to power.” As George H. Smith wrote in the introduction to The Lysander Spooner Reader, “Spooner stood nearly alone among radical abolitionists in his defense of the right of the South to secede from the Union.”13 To Spooner, the right of secession was “a right that was embodied in the American Revolution,” which was, first and foremost, a war of separation or secession from the British Empire.

  In his 1870 essay “No Treason,” S
pooner revealed that he never changed his opinion of Seward, Sumner, Lincoln, and the entire Republican Party regime. He wrote that the war “erupted for a purely pecuniary consideration,” and not for any moral reason. He labeled the economic lifeblood of the Republican Party, Northern bankers, manufacturers, and railroad corporations, “lenders of blood money” who had “for a long series of years previous to the war, been the willing accomplices of the slaveholders in perverting the government from the purpose of ”liberty and justice.…”14 It was such interests, after all, that benefited so handsomely from the transatlantic slave trade and the cheap cotton that it produced.

  To Spooner the Northern financiers of the war who had lent millions to the Lincoln government did not do so for “any love of liberty or justice,” but for “the control of [Southern] markets” through tariff “extortion.” Mocking the argument of the “lenders of blood money” as they addressed the South he wrote: “If you [the South] will not pay us our price [a high tariff] … we will secure the same price (and keep control of your markets) by helping your slaves against you, and using them as our tools for maintaining dominion over you; for the control of your markets.…”15

  In return for financing a large part of Lincoln’s war machine, Spooner noted, “these holders of the debt are to be paid still further—and perhaps doubly, triply, or quadruply paid—by such tariffs on imports as will enable our home manufactures to realize enormous prices for their commodities; also by such monopolies in banking as will enable them to keep control of, and thus enslave and plunder, the industry and trade of the great body of Northern people themselves.”16 The war had led to “the industrial and commercial slavery” of all Americans, North and South. Spooner was obviously referring to the fact that, during the war, the average tariff rate on imported goods was raised to nearly 50 percent (from a prewar low of 15 percent), and remained in that range for the next five decades.