Lincoln Unmasked

by Thomas DiLorenzo

  Upon hearing of Lamon’s verification of the Taney arrest story, the Lincoln cult immediately began claiming that Lamon ”was a drunkard whose word could not be trusted, despite the fact that Lincoln himself obviously trusted him, employing him as a close adviser. Ulysses S. Grant was another notorious drunkard of the era, but somehow the Lincoln cult never doubts anything he said or wrote.

  Unfortunately for the Lincoln cult, there are several more very reliable accounts of the arrest warrant. One of them is an 1887 book by George W. Brown, the wartime mayor of Baltimore, entitled Baltimore and the Nineteenth of April, 1861: A Study of War. In it is the transcript of a conversation Mayor Brown had with Taney in which Judge Taney mentions his knowledge that Lincoln had issued an arrest warrant for him.

  Yet another corroborating source is A Memoir of Benjamin Robbins Curtis, a former U.S. Supreme Court justice. Judge Curtis represented President Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial before the U.S. Senate; wrote the dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case; and resigned from the Supreme Court over a dispute with Judge Taney over that case. Nevertheless, in his memoirs he praises the propriety of Justice Taney in upholding the Constitution by opposing Lincoln’s unilateral suspension of habeas corpus. He refers to the arrest warrant for the chief justice, accusing him of treason, as “a great crime.”

  Judge Benjamin Robbins Curtis, who wrote the dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case, thought Lincoln’s arrest warrant for the chief justice was “a great crime.

  There is also growing evidence that intimidation of federal judges was a common practice of the Lincoln administration. In October 1861 Lincoln ordered the District of Columbia provost marshal to place armed sentries around the home of a Washington, D.C., circuit court judge and place him under house arrest. The reason for the arrest: the judge had carried out his constitutional duty to issue a writ of habeas corpus to a young man being detained by the provost marshal, allowing the man to have due process. The judge’s actions were later vindicated by the U.S. Supreme Court. After the war, the Court ruled that neither the president nor Congress can legally suspend habeas corpus as long as the civil courts are operating, as they certainly were in the Northern states in 1861.

  By placing the judge under house arrest Lincoln prevented him from attending the hearing in the case.1 The latter ruling contained a letter from Judge W. M. Merrick, the judge of the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, explaining how, after issuing the writ of habeas corpus to the young man, he was placed under house arrest. Here’s the final paragraph of the letter:

  After dinner I visited my brother judges in Georgetown, and returning home between half past seven and eight o’clock found an armed sentinel stationed at my door by order of the Provost-Marshal. I learned that this guard had been placed at my door as early as five o’clock. Armed sentries from that time continuously until now have been stationed in front of my house. Thus it appears that a military officer against whom a writ in the appointed form of law has first threatened with and afterwards arrested and imprisoned the attorney who rightfully served the writ upon him. He continued, and still continues, in contempt and disregard of the mandate of the law, and has ignominiously placed an armed guard to insult and intimidate by its presence the Judge who ordered the writ to issue, and still keeps up this armed array at his door, in defiance and contempt of the justice of the land. Under the circumstances I respectfully request the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court to cause this memorandum to be read in open Court, to show the reasons for my absence from my place upon the bench, and that he will cause this paper to be entered at length on the minutes of the Court.

  W. M. Merrick

  Assistant Judge of the Circuit Court

  of the District of Columbia

  The Lincoln cult has an excuse for everything, and in this case the party line is that federal judges were imprisoned by federal marshals, not Lincoln himself. But that’s like saying that Lincoln was not responsible for any of the battlefield deaths during the war because he did not personally pull the trigger of a gun to shoot someone despite the fact that he was the commander in chief. Thus, according to the cultists Lincoln would have had to personally hold federal judges prisoner at gunpoint to be considered involved in the arrest.

  But Lincoln himself was fully aware that this was going on and did nothing to stop it. The reason he did nothing, obviously, was that it was his intended policy.

  The implications of the arrest warrant for Judge Taney are that the separation of powers was essentially destroyed, along with the place of the Supreme Court in the constitutional scheme of American government. It essentially made executive power supreme, over all others, and put the president, the military, and the executive branch of government in control of American society.

  PART II

  Economic Issues You’re

  Supposed to Ignore

  11

  The Origins of the Republican Party

  When the Whig Party imploded in the early 1850s Abraham Lincoln assured the people of Illinois that there were very few differences, if any, between the old Whig and the new Republican Party he had just joined. The Whig Party was always the party of government interventionism, with its “American System” of protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for road-, canal-, and railroad-building corporations, and a federal government bank to help finance all of these dubious schemes.

  This time Lincoln was not lying to the American people. Sure enough, as soon as the newly created Republican Party gained enough power to influence national legislation, it picked up right where the Whig Party had left off. The Republicans forced the U.S. House of Representatives to pass the protectionist Morrill Tariff bill during the 1859–60 session of Congress—before Lincoln’s election and before any Southern state had seceded. This fact is important because it shows that the high tariff policy was the top priority of the Republican Party and not just a mechanism for financing the war. The moment the party gained enough power to pass legislation, the piece of legislation that was at the top of its list of priorities was a high, protectionist tariff that would “protect” mostly Northern manufacturers from international competition. It was a protectionist tariff, not a war-financing tariff.

  The party then defended Southern slavery by explicitly defending the institution in its 1860 party platform, and by overwhelmingly supporting a proposed constitutional amendment that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery.

  One of the first legislative successes of the new Republican Party was to more than double the average tariff rate.

  Even when the Republicans did oppose the extension of slavery into the new territories, it was motivated much more by politics and economics than by humanitarianism. In fact, Lincoln and other party leaders explicitly stated that they wanted to preserve the territories for the white race. Even Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot’s famous proviso (a law first introduced in Congress—but never passed—in 1846 that would have barred slavery from the new territories acquired by the Mexican War) was referred to by Wilmot himself as “the white man’s proviso.” The reason he and other Northern politicians gave for wanting to ban slavery in the territory acquired by the Mexican War was not that they wanted to strike a blow against slavery, but that they did not want any black people—free or slave—living among them. Lincoln himself was very explicit about this. As historian Eugene Berwanger explained in The Frontier Against Slavery: “Republicans made no pretense of being concerned with the fate of the Negro and insisted that theirs was a party of white labor. By introducing a note of white supremacy, they hoped to win the votes of the Negrophobes and the anti-abolitionists who were opposed to the extension of slavery.”1

  To the early Republicans “free soil” meant more than free land giveaways by the federal government; it also meant soil that was free of black people. The Republican Party championed the free giveaway of land to settlers in the territories and also catered to the almost unanimous Northern preference
that the territories remain as free as possible of black people, free or slave. In other words, they wanted the territories to look like New England. (Southern Democrats favored selling the land to settlers in order to raise revenue for the government that would take pressure off of the tariff as the government’s main source of revenue. The South was an agrarian society that exported as much as three-fourths of everything it produced. Since protectionist tariffs tend to diminish the overall amount of international trade, they saw protectionism as virtually all cost and no benefit to them, just the opposite of the viewpoint of the North where manufacturing was more prevalent.)

  A second reason given for opposing the extension of slavery was to continue skewing the balance of political power in Congress in favor of the North. Because of the Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution that existed at the time, every five slaves counted as three persons for purposes of determining the number of congressional representatives within each state. Lincoln himself clearly stated that he was opposed to slavery extension precisely because it would artificially inflate the congressional representation of the Democratic Party. If this came to pass, then the old Whig economic agenda of protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare, and central banking, which had become the Republican agenda, would continue to fail in Congress.

  Some of the most renowned Lincoln biographers fail to understand the meaning and importance of these economic issues, and for good reason: They are historians, not economists. An example is an essay in the October 2004 issue of The Smithsonian magazine by Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln biographer David Donald. The essay, entitled “The Road Not Taken,” was part of a symposium that posed the question of what America would look like today if the presidential elections of 1860, 1912, 1932, and 1980 had turned out differently. Donald focused on the Lincoln administration’s “social legislation” and concluded that, had Lincoln not been elected in 1860, a Democratic majority in Congress

  would have blocked the important economic and social legislation enacted by the Republicans during the Civil War. Thus, there would likely have been no high tariff laws that protected the iron industry, so essential in postwar economic development, no Homestead Act giving 160 acres to settlers willing to occupy and till land out West, no transcontinental railroad legislation, no land-grant colleges, no currency or national banking system, no Department of Agriculture to offer expert guidance on better seeds and improved tillage. Without such legislation, the economic takeoff that made the United States a major industrial power by the end of the century would have been prevented.

  The Lincoln cult is hopelessly confused when it comes to economic policy issues, especially the tariff.

  It is not clear that Southern Democrats would have been able to block this legislation—the population of the North had been rapidly outstripping that of the South, leading to greater congressional representation in the former region. And there were about twice as many U.S. senators from Northern states as there were from the states that seceded. But aside from that point, every single one of these sentences is false. Protectionist tariffs made the iron industry lazy and inefficient, which is always the case when any industry is isolated from competitive pressures. The industry did develop, but it would have developed faster and more efficiently without protectionism. Moreover, the high-priced steel caused by Lincoln-era tariffs (which lasted for over half a century) was a hindrance to all steel-using industries in America and hobbled their development. Everything made in America of steel was more costly to manufacture due to Republican Party protectionism. This rendered American manufacturing much less competitive on international markets during that period. American manufacturing industry developed despite this economic roadblock, not because of it. In addition, America’s trade partners abroad retaliated to some degree with high tariffs of their own on American-made goods imported into their countries. This constituted a second dose of economic harm to American industry thanks to Republican Party protectionism. David Donald got it all backwards.

  The effect of Republican Party protectionism was to make the iron and steel industry inefficient, which caused it to become a perennial whiner and complainer and beggar for more protection from competition. Indeed, one of the first things President George W. Bush did upon taking office in 2001 was to impose 50 percent tariffs on imported steel. How long will this industry claim to be an “infant industry” in need of protection from competition? American consumers were plundered by all of this protectionism, which reduced their standard of living by forcing them to pay more for all goods that were made with steel.

  Late-nineteenth-century protectionist tariffs were especially harmful to American farmers who had to purchase expensive farm tools and machinery made of steel. Also, by restricting international trade, protectionism reduced the wealth of our foreign trading partners, who in turn purchased fewer American goods, especially farm goods, an area where the United States has long had a comparative advantage. Thus, American farmers were hurt twice by Lincolnian protectionism: once by having to purchase higher-priced farm tools and machinery, and again by the reduction in American agricultural exports.

  As for the Homestead Act, historian Ludwell Johnson long ago determined that the majority of the land was not given to individual settlers but to mining, timber, and railroad corporations.2 As is always the case with subsidies to corporations, there was a colossal amount of corruption, especially with regard to the land giveaways associated with the government-subsidized transcontinental railroads.

  Giving the land away for free (or for a pittance) made the Republican Party, which controlled the federal government for decades after the war, very popular, but it also increased pressures to keep tariff rates high in an era where there was no income tax. It was therefore a win/win policy for the Republicans, but lose/lose for the rest of society: It was a way of indirectly “buying” votes and campaign contributions from settlers and corporations who were given free land, while supporting its protectionist trade policy and cementing the political support of Northern industry.

  The government-subsidized transcontinental railroads, which Donald also praises, were arguably the worst example in American history of the corruption and inefficiency that is associated with massive government “public works” projects. They resulted in the Credit Mobilier scandal of the Grant administration. Entrepreneur James J. Hill proved that the subsidies were unnecessary by building a nonsubsidized transcontinental railroad, the Great Northern, which was constructed and operated much more efficiently than the scandal-prone government-subsidized railroads.

  Land grant colleges have also been a mixed blessing, as government money inevitably led to greater government control of higher education, culminating with today’s plague of “political correctness” on college campuses and in much of the rest of society. It has also led to the politicization of scientific research and the creation of academics who are essentially “hired guns” for the various government agencies that fund their research and, at times, pay their salaries.3

  Donald’s assertion that federal government bureaucrats were necessary to educate farmers about what kinds of seeds to plant seems absurd. At best, such government programs are simply a means of getting American taxpayers to pay for things that farmers—who are businessmen after all—should be paying for themselves. There’s no need for a U.S. Department of Automobiles to instruct automobile manufacturers on what kinds of tires and engine parts to use in their cars any more than there is a need for a U.S. Department of Agriculture to instruct farmers on what seeds to plant. The private sector can and does do a much better job of making those decisions.

  In addition to providing unnecessary subsidies to mostly large corporate farms, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has made agricultural markets grotesquely inefficient. It has done this through various programs that pay farmers for not growing food or raising livestock, only to allow farmers to charge higher prices and make more money; price control programs that prop up food prices above free-market levels, causing l
arge surpluses that often go to waste; and hooking millions of farmers on government debt that they will never be able to pay off.4

  Donald’s praise for Lincoln’s National Currency Acts is also misplaced (to be discussed in more detail in Chapter 15). These acts immediately created unprecedented rates of inflation during the war and ushered in a much more unstable banking system than the one that had preceded it, known as the “Independent Treasury System.”

  Liberal historians like David Donald and James McPherson praise Lincoln’s “social legislation” because to them it appears to be a precursor to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and indeed it was. In fact, the phrase “New Deal” was not coined by Roosevelt but by a Raleigh, North Carolina, newspaper in 1865 when describing Lincoln’s social legislation. The newspaper urged North Carolinians to rejoin the Union and enjoy the government handouts that had been created by what economists Mark Thornton and Robert Ekelund call “the flurry of new laws, regulations, and bureaucracies created by President Lincoln and the Republican Party.”5 These included the Homestead Act, Morrill Land-Grant College Act, Department of Agriculture, transcontinental railroad land grants, tax-subsidized mail delivery, subsidized railway mail service, and other programs, all financed by myriad excise taxes, ten tariff increases, and the printing of greenbacks.

  The Republican Party was always, from its inception, the party of big government in America. It was the Democratic Party that was the party of Jefferson and of limited government, at least until the 1912 election, after which the party veered dramatically to the left. That’s why liberal historians like David Donald so often portray the Republican Party’s nineteenth-century origins in such a heroic light.

  The phrase “New Deal” was originally coined to describe the domestic policies of the Lincoln administration.