Lincoln Unmasked

by Thomas DiLorenzo

  To make his case against states’ rights in Mein Kampf Hitler quite logically turned to Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address for intellectual ammunition. “The individual states of the American Union,” the future führer wrote, “could not have possessed any state sovereignty of their own. For it was not these states that formed the Union, on the contrary it was the Union which formed a great part of the so-called states.”18

  This is Hitler’s rendition of the false theory of the American founding that Lincoln himself espoused in his first inaugural address. In Lincoln’s own words:

  The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured … by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And, finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was “to form a more perfect Union.”19

  This statement was as ahistorical as it was logically absurd. It is impossible for the union of two things to be older than either of its parts. That would be akin to saying a marriage can be older than either spouse. In addition, the Union was formed by the states! It doesn’t matter whether one starts with Lincoln’s arbitrarily chosen year of 1774, or the year the Constitution was ratified (1789). The states created the federal Union by retaining their sovereignty and merely delegating certain powers to a central government for their own mutual benefit. That is, at least, what they hoped.

  Hitler recognized that his dream of omnipotent governmental power under his control could be thwarted by “the struggle between federalism and centralization,”20 the former of which he blamed on “the Jews.” He promised that “The National Socialists [Nazis] … would totally eliminate states’ rights altogether: Since for us the state as such is only a form, but the essential is its content, the nation, the people, it is clear that everything else must be subordinated to its sovereign interests. In particular we cannot grant to any individual state within the nation and the state representing it state sovereignty and sovereignty in point of political power.”21 The “mischief of individual federated states … must cease and will some day cease,” the aspiring dictator promised. And, “the lesson for the future” is that “the importance of the individual states will in the future no longer lie in the fields of state power and policy.”22

  Adolf Hitler invoked Lincoln’s first inaugural address to make his case against state sovereignty in Germany.

  To Adolf Hitler the essence of Nazism was an omnipotent central government that would rule in the name of “the whole people” or “the whole Arian race” once all aspects of state sovereignty were abolished.

  National Socialism as a matter of principle, must lay claim to the right to force its principles on the whole German nation without consideration of previous federated state boundaries, and to educate in its ideas and conceptions. Just as the churches do not feel bound and limited by political boundaries, no more does the National Socialist idea feel limited by the individual state territories of our fatherland. The National Socialist doctrine is not the servant of individual federated states, but shall some day become the master of the German nation. It must determine and reorder the life of a people, and must, therefore, imperiously claim the right to pass over [state] boundaries drawn by a development we have rejected.23

  In his 1962 book Patriotic Gore, the literary critic Edmund Wilson noted that Lincoln also had much in common with two other uncompromising enemies of federalism and divided sovereignty during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lenin and Bismarck.

  [I]f we would grasp the significance of the Civil War in relation to the history of our time, we should consider Abraham Lincoln in connection with the other leaders who have been engaged in similar tasks. The chief of these leaders have been Bismarck and Lenin. They with Lincoln have presided over the unifications of the three great new modern powers.… Each established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples. Lincoln kept the Union together by subordinating the South to the North; Bismarck imposed on the German states the cohesive hegemony of Prussia; Lenin … began the work of binding Russia … in a tight bureaucratic net.24

  Each of these men, wrote Wilson, was an “uncompromising dictator” while in office who was succeeded by newly formed government bureaucracies that became so powerful that “all the bad potentialities of the policies [they] had initiated were realized after [their] removal, in the most undesirable ways.”25

  The lesson here is that constitutional liberty is an empty slogan unless the people remain sovereign, and the only practical way for them to do so is through political communities at the state and local levels, as long as a central government exists. They must also enjoy the rights of nullification and secession, the latter of which has been most important to achieving the amazing rise of freedom in the former Soviet empire in recent years. Fortunately for the Russian people, when the Soviet empire began to crumble and fifteen states (or “republics”) decided to secede, Mikhail Gorbachev let them go in peace.

  Unlike the communist dictator, Abraham Lincoln refused to negotiate—or even discuss—a separation after the seven states of the lower South seceded. Instead, he launched an invasion and reintroduced total war to the world, resulting in the death of more than six hundred thousand Americans, all to secure a Northern territorial and political monopoly, cleverly disguised by the fanciful and misleading rhetoric of “saving the Union.”

  9

  Lincoln’s Big Lie

  Another key element of Lincoln’s argument against state sovereignty was an argument that he borrowed from Daniel Webster: that the Constitution was created by “the whole people” and not the citizens of the free and independent states. If this were true, said Lincoln, then only “the whole people” could decide to dissolve the Union, not individual states. He asserted that state sovereignty never existed; and that the states were never free and independent of the central government, or, in other words, “the whole people.” He enunciated this view in his first inaugural address, and elsewhere. But as James J. Kilpatrick remarked in his book The Sovereign States, “The delusion that sovereignty is vested in the whole people of the United States is one of the strangest misconceptions of our public life.”1

  Modern-day proponents of nationalism and executive power still make this argument, however, by pointing to the preamble of the Constitution, which reads, “We the people of the United States … do ordain and establish this Constitution.…” However, James Madison’s Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention, the only written record of the constitutional convention’s proceedings, dispels this myth. The preamble of the first draft of the U.S. Constitution read:

  We the people of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New-York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, do ordain, declare, and establish the following Constitution for the Government of Ourselves and our Posterity.

  Once the founders realized that all the states might not ratify the document—at least not after a considerable amount of time had passed—the preamble was changed so that the individual states were not named. A state could hardly be named in the document before the document was actually ratified by that state. Clearly, the founders never intended one big national act of ratification by “the whole people.” This is a pure fabrication, invented out of thin air by Daniel Webster, and repeated by Lincoln decades later to rationalize waging war on the South and the destruction of the federal system of government created by the founders.

  James Madison himself was meticulous in explaining exactly how the ratification of the Constitution was to take place, for it would determine where sovereignty resided. In his Notes he clearly wrote that the Constitution would be ratified by “the people composing those political societies [of the states], in their highest sovereign capacity.” It was not state governments th
at possessed this power, moreover, but the citizens of the states. The people delegated certain powers to their elected representatives, but retained ultimate sovereignty to themselves, as members of separate political communities called states.

  The national government was created by the process whereby state ratifying conventions chose to delegate certain powers, previously delegated to the states, to the central government. For example, under the Articles of Confederation the central government had no taxing powers of its own, but it was able to impose tariffs and excise taxes under the Constitution.

  Lincoln’s assertion in the Gettysburg Address that “a new nation” was created in 1776 (four score and seven years prior to 1863) was wrong on all counts. The founders never created “a nation” but a confederacy of states. And the Declaration of Independence never had the legal authority of either the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution. More important, the very words of the Declaration contradict Lincoln’s theory of the absence of state sovereignty. The Declaration was, first and foremost, a Declaration of Secession from the British Empire. America was founded by a War of Secession. “Secession” means a separation from a community of one part of that community, according to Black’s Law Dictionary. This is surely what the Revolution of 1776 was all about. The founders could hardly have thought that secession was an illegitimate act when it was what defined them politically. They were all secessionists, to the man. It was the “loyalists,” such as Benedict Arnold, who were the antisecessionists and traitors.

  The founding fathers understood that the states were sovereign. Lincoln “proved” them wrong at gunpoint.

  The concluding paragraph of the Declaration of Independence announced to the world that the colonists were seceding from the British Empire as citizens of free and independent states, not as “the whole people.” As the Declaration states: “These colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, they have full power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other Acts and things which Independent States may of right do.” Clearly, the founders viewed the individual states as, essentially, separate countries, each of which was to even have the right to wage war. Indeed, by the time war broke out in 1861, it was quite common for such figures as Robert E. Lee to refer to their home states as “my country.”

  When the Revolution ended, the king of England did not sign a peace treaty with something called “The United States of America,” in the singular. Article I of the Treaty with Great Britain that ended the American Revolution states:

  His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, vis, New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia to be free, sovereign and independent States; that he treats with them as such and for himself, his heirs and successors, Relinquishes all claims to the Government, proprietary and territorial rights of the Same, and every part thereof.

  When the citizens of the states created a federal constitution in the form of the Articles of Confederation, they made a point of clearly spelling out their independent and sovereign status. As defined in Article I, Section II: “Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.” Sovereignty always rested in the hands of the citizens of the states, never with “the whole people.”

  In Federalist #39, James Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” rejected what would become Lincoln’s Big Lie regarding the founding of the Republic. The Constitution was to be ratified by the people “not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong.” He also stated the new government created by the Constitution got all of its authority from the citizens of the free and independent states, and that each state involved in ratifying the Constitution was “considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act.” Lincoln disagreed; he believed that the states should be bound together at the barrel of a gun or cannon, if necessary.

  “The whole people” had nothing whatsoever to do with the adoption of the Constitution.

  The “whole people,” in other words, had nothing whatsoever to do with the formation of the government. Either Lincoln never read the Federalist Papers, which is likely, or he lied about their contents in his political speeches.

  The primary documents that chronicle this country’s founding are at odds with Lincoln’s anti-state-sovereignty theory. The phrase “United States” is always in the plural in the Constitution and all the other founding documents, signifying not one consolidated government, but a confederacy of states. The president is not elected by “the whole people” but by an electoral college that consists of appointees from each state, chosen by state legislatures. Until 1914, U.S. senators were appointed by state legislatures and not popularly elected. The reason for this, once again, was to assure state sovereignty over the central government. Prior to the Seventeenth Amendment, passed in 1913, a number of state legislatures actually recalled and replaced their U.S. senators for acting against the interests of the citizens of their own states upon arriving in Washington.2

  No new state may be formed, according to the Constitution, “within the Jurisdiction of any other state; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as Congress.” This ensures state control over the creation of new states and was one of many constitutional provisions that Lincoln discarded when he orchestrated the illegal secession of West Virginia from the rest of Virginia. Amending the Constitution still requires ratification by three-fourths of the states, not a popular vote of “the whole people.”

  The founders feared mass democracy or rule by “the whole people.” This is why they attempted to carefully limit the abilities of the central government, with the states delegating only seventeen very specific responsibilities (in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution). It is also why they created the system of checks and balances and the whole edifice of dual sovereignty or federalism. Lincoln denied all of this, invented a new theory of the founding, and waged the bloodiest war in world history up to that point to “prove” himself right.

  As long as this nationalist myth prevails the American people can never regain true sovereignty over their government. It is no surprise that contemporary advocates of more-or-less dictatorial executive branch powers and military aggression (i.e., the “neoconservatives”) invoke the Lincoln legend time and again to “justify” the interventionist policies that they pursue. It worked for Lincoln, and his political descendants have relied on it ever since.

  10

  A “Great Crime”:

  The Arrest Warrant for the Chief Justice

  of the United States

  Imagine that in 2006 America had a chief justice of the United States who firmly believed in enforcing the Constitution and issued an opinion that the war in Iraq was unconstitutional because Congress did not fulfill its constitutional duty in declaring war. Imagine also that the administration and its allies in the media responded with a vicious propaganda campaign that demonized the chief justice as unpatriotic, and possibly even treasonous. Imagine that this media campaign then emboldened the American president who launched the war to issue an arrest warrant for the chief justice, effectively destroying the constitutional separation of powers and establishing a de facto dictatorship.

  This sequence of events actually happened during the early Lincoln administration. Abraham Lincoln issued an arrest warrant for Chief Justice Roger B. Taney after the eighty-four-year-old jurist issued an opinion that only Congress, and not the president, can legally suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Taney’s opinion, issued as part of his duties as a circuit cour
t judge (a duty that Supreme Court justices had in those days), relied on the case of Ex Parte Merryman (May 1861). The essence of his opinion was not that habeas corpus could never be suspended under the Constitution, only that the document requires Congress to do it, not the president. In other words, if it was truly in the “public interest” to suspend due process (a dubious assumption at any time), then the representatives of the people should have no problem doing so. The Lincoln administration could have appealed the chief justice’s ruling, but it chose to simply ignore it and, worse yet, to intimidate the elderly judge by issuing an arrest warrant for him.

  Several sources corroborate the story that Lincoln actually issued an arrest warrant for the chief justice, a breathtaking act of despotism. The warrant was never served for lack of a federal marshal with the nerve to drag the elderly chief justice out of his chambers and throw him into the dungeonlike military prison at Fort McHenry in Baltimore.

  Rather than appealing an unfavorable opinion by the chief justice of the United States, Lincoln issued an arrest warrant for the elderly judge.

  The first source of the story is a history of the U.S. Marshal’s Service written by Frederick S. Calhoun, the chief historian for the Service, entitled The Lawmen: United States Marshals and Their Deputies, 1789–1989. Calhoun recounts the words of Lincoln’s former law partner, Ward Hill Lamon, who also served in the Lincoln administration, and matter-of-factly mentioned the arrest warrant in a book that he wrote after the war. Lamon’s account of Lincoln’s arrest warrant for the chief justice is discussed in a chapter of Calhoun’s book entitled “Arrest of Traitors and Suspension of Habeas Corpus.”