Lincoln Unmasked

by Thomas DiLorenzo

  In short, Berns calls for nothing less than a complete repudiation of the American ideal, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, that citizens have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the purpose of government is to secure these rights, period. Under this philosophy the citizens are the masters of their government, which only exists to serve them by securing their rights. Under Berns’s philosophy it’s the other way around: the people, particularly young people, are to serve—and even die for—the state to promote the state’s whims and abstract notions, such as the forceful imposition of “democracy” around the world. Under this scenario, the state is the master and the people are its servants. Patriotism really is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

  The Lincoln cult believes the Lincoln legend should be used to convince America’s youth that it’s not so bad after all to become cannon fodder.

  To inspire “patriotism” in the nation’s youth, a “national poet” must mesmerize them and unite them in a cause, says Berns. Ideally, such a poet can convince them to abandon their individualism, their old-fashioned Americanism, and their selfish pursuit of peaceful and prosperous lives. Fortunately, Berns informs us, such a national poet is at hand. That person is Abraham Lincoln, whom he describes as “statesman, poet, and … the martyred Christ of democracy’s passion play.”1 If America’s youth are to be persuaded to become the American equivalent of mad Muslim fanatics hell-bent on a “civil” religious revolution, then they must be indoctrinated in Lincoln’s “greatness,” which consists not so much in his actions but “in the power and beauty of his words.”2

  This is typical behavior of a member of the Lincoln cult: they concentrate almost exclusively on a small sampling of Lincoln’s nicer-sounding political speeches, while often showing little or no interest in his actual behavior or real history. This is a disastrous recipe for understanding any politician. Any politician who has ever served in a national office can be made to appear as a “great statesman” or a “great humanitarian” if he is judged exclusively by his own political rhetoric.

  Another typical characteristic of Lincoln cultists is to ascribe angelic motives to everything Lincoln ever said or did, and pretending to possess unique knowledge of what was “in his heart,” if not his mind. This theme runs throughout the voluminous Lincoln literature, including Making Patriots, in which Berns devotes more than a chapter to fabricating myths about Lincoln that he apparently hopes will become part of the “civil religion” of American militarism and imperialism.

  Many of the statements made by Berns are so absurd that they can only be construed as pure nonsense. For example, he writes that Lincoln responded to Fort Sumter, where no one was even wounded let alone killed, with a full-scale invasion of all the Southern states, including a naval blockade, because “his purpose was peace.”3 Thus, in a statement that defines the word Orwellian, Berns literally says that war is peace. Berns believes Lincoln ordered his army to kill fellow citizens by the hundreds of thousands in the name of peace. Before the war broke out, both Confederate peace commissioners and Napoleon III of France attempted to broker a peace, but Lincoln refused to even meet with them to discuss it. Lincoln rebuffed every opportunity to discuss peace, yet to Berns “his purpose was peace,” not war.

  Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and had his military imprison tens of thousands of Northern political critics and opponents without due process; he censored all telegraph communication; shut down over three hundred opposition newspapers; imprisoned dozens of duly elected officials of the state of Maryland; participated in the rigging of Northern elections; waged war without the consent of Congress; illegally created a new state, West Virginia; and deported the most outspoken member of the Democratic opposition, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio. Generations of historians have admitted that no one considered any of this to have been legal or constitutional. But to Berns, all of this was done “so that the laws be faithfully executed.” This is the same absurd argument that Lincoln himself asserted, and it is no less absurd when coming from a “distinguished fellow” of the American Enterprise Institute 140 years later. Lincoln’s massive disregard for the law and the Constitution, according to Berns, is evidence of his devotion to the law and the Constitution.

  Lincoln cultist Walter Berns believes that Lincoln waged war on Southern civilians for four long years because he loved them and was “a man of peace.”

  Lincoln never became a Christian and was opposed by nearly every minister in Springfield, Illinois, when he first ran for president. Yet to Berns, Lincoln “of course … read the Bible” and used biblical language “to save the American Republic … with his words.”4

  The voluntary union of the founding fathers was not “saved” but destroyed. It was no longer voluntary after the war. Moreover, it wasn’t so much Lincoln’s political rhetoric that achieved this result as it was the work of the largest and best equipped army in the history of the world up to that point. An army that, on Lincoln’s orders as commander in chief, waged war on civilians as well as on military combatants for four long years. Lincoln’s armies bombed Southern cities, killing thousands of civilians. Homes, farms, and businesses were pillaged, plundered, and burned all throughout the South. He compulsively experimented with bigger and bigger weapons of mass destruction to be turned loose on Southern civilians as well as on the Confederate army. But to Berns, “Lincoln never looked upon the Confederates as enemies.”5

  He micromanaged a war that killed his fellow citizens by the hundreds of thousands and maimed more than double that amount because he loved them, claims Walter Berns, and he supposedly “purged his heart and mind from hatred or even anger towards his fellow-countrymen of the South.”6 There’s that technique again that is so typical of Lincoln cultists—claiming to know what was in the heart and mind of a man who died over a century ago. Obviously, one must possess psychic powers in order to become a certified “Lincoln scholar.”

  Lincoln famously said of General Ulysses S. Grant that he admired him and would stick with him as the commander of the Army of the Potomac because “he fights.” In other words, Grant was a general who would never stop killing his fellow citizens, no matter how many of his own men were sacrificed in the process. To Berns, behavior like this is apparently proof that Lincoln “loved” Southerners.

  Berns asserts that a war resulting in the death of some 620,000 Americans, including one out of four Southern men of military age, taught Americans “to love the Union” and “helped make us patriots.” But surely Americans from the Southern states were not taught by the war “to love the Union.” Millions of Southerners hated and despised the newly consolidated government, run for decades after the war by the Republican Party as a one-party monopoly. What Berns means by “loving the Union” is submitting blind obedience to the dictates of the state. He conflates the word country with government, something the founding fathers would never have done.

  The “greatest importance” of the Lincoln legend, says Berns, is that it has been used for generations “in the public schools” where “we” were taught “to love our country.”

  The deification of Lincoln after the war went a long way toward deifying the presidency itself, and the American state. This is what Berns approves of so fervently: a practice that would likely motivate many of the founders to reach for their swords and muskets and fight another revolution.

  The Lincoln legend has helped teach our children blind obedience to the American state, a quintessentially un-American practice.

  Making Patriots by Walter Berns is an example of how the Lincoln legend is full of myths, misinformation, and distortions of history. The purpose of the myths and distortions is to attach the “moral authority” of Lincoln to various political agendas, which, in Berns’s case, is foreign policy imperialism.

  16

  Lincolnite Totalitarians

  In his book Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War, literary critic
Edmund Wilson explained that one of the most important consequences of the war was the establishment of a strong central government. In this regard, he considered Lincoln to be connected politically to Lenin and Bismarck, who, like Lincoln, were the figures primarily responsible for introducing large, centralized, governmental bureaucracy into their own respective countries.1

  Each of these men, wrote Wilson, “became an uncompromising dictator” and was succeeded by newly formed bureaucracies that continued to expand the power of the state and diminish freedom so that “all the bad potentialities of the policies he had initiated were realized, after his removal, in the most undesirable ways.”

  The Lincoln cult has succeeded in sweeping almost all such statements under the rug for generations, so that most Americans—even most Southerners—have never even had a negative thought about Lincoln. But it was not always that way. The Lincoln cult was not always so influential. Until around the mid-1960s it was still possible to find objective scholarship, as opposed to myth, fantasy, and idolatry, in the literature on Lincoln and his war. One example is an August 24, 1965, article in the “conservative” National Review magazine by the publication’s editor, Frank Meyer. Commenting on the book Freedom Under Lincoln by Dean Sprague, Meyer wrote that Lincoln’s “pivotal role in our history was essentially negative to the genius of freedom of our country.” This was so because of, among other things, the “harshness of his repressive policies and his responsibility for methods of waging war approaching the horror of total war.”2

  “Under the spurious slogan of Union,” wrote Meyer, Lincoln “moved at every point … to consolidate central power and render nugatory the autonomy of the states.… It is on his shoulders that the responsibility for the war must be placed.” And, “We all know his gentle words, ‘with malice toward none, with charity toward all,’ … but his actions belie this rhetoric.” Here Meyer was referring to Lincoln’s “repressive dictatorship” in the Northern states during the war, and the “brigand campaigns waged against civilians by Sherman,” among other things.3

  Meyer was well aware that Lincoln did not invade the South to free the slaves but to “consolidate” political power in Washington, D.C., by destroying the secession movement, as Lincoln himself had proclaimed. He also understood that all other countries of the world that ended slavery in the nineteenth century did so peacefully through compensated emancipation.

  Moreover, there were very negative, long-term consequences of Lincoln’s actions, just as Edmund Wilson surmised. In Meyer’s mind, “Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted upon the Constitution, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to carry through his revolution [and] for the coercive welfare state to come into being.… Lincoln, I would maintain, undermined the constitutional safeguards of freedom as he opened the way to centralized government with all its attendant political evils.”4

  One no longer reads any objective articles on this subject in “establishment” conservative publications such as National Review, The Weekly Standard, or the publications of the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, and especially the Claremont Institute. Quite the contrary: On the topic of Lincoln there is only room for idolatry of the sort espoused by Walter Berns and Harry Jaffa.

  After Meyer’s article appeared, the magazine’s publisher, William F. Buckley, Jr., took him to task over it and disputed his own editor’s comments on Lincoln. From that point on, there was very little realistic analysis of the Lincoln legacy in National Review or in most other conservative publications. An intellectual purge, of sorts, had taken place, part of an overall purge of the Old Right writers and their ideas.

  Buckley successfully re-created the conservative movement in the 1950s by using his role as publisher of National Review to flush out many of the old, limited-government constitutionalists from the movement. In their place, Buckley promoted big government conservatives, known today as “neoconservatives.” It turns out, however, that there’s nothing “neo” about them: They’ve always been opposed to limited government, the defining characteristic of genuine old-fashioned conservativism.

  Murray Rothbard expressed this in a January 25, 1952, article in The Commonweal magazine.5 He quoted Buckley, in his (Buckley’s) own words, as favoring “the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-communist foreign policy … we have got to accept Big Government for the duration [of the cold war]—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged … except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores (emphasis added).”6

  We must all support, said Buckley, “large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards [i.e., centrally planned economies], and the attendant centralization of power in Washington.…” The founder of National Review was “a totalitarian socialist,” Rothbard wrote, “and what is more admits it.” What other label would one give an advocate of “totalitarian bureaucracy” as his preferred form of government?

  This is why Buckley personally repudiated Frank Meyer’s views on Lincoln, and why most conservatives have been Lincoln idolaters ever since. Lincoln’s dictatorial methods, and his creation of a consolidated, militaristic state, have long been the model for the American Right. When the cold war ended and there was no longer any need for a “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” the conservative movement, which now calls itself the “neoconservative” movement, declared that its new goal would be perpetual global warfare in the name of spreading democracy around the globe. Naturally, they constantly make use of the Lincoln legend in speeches and articles to attempt to “justify” this quintessentially un-American policy. They are Lincolnite totalitarians.

  William F. Buckley, Jr., believed that America needed a “totalitarian bureaucracy” to fight the cold war, and that the Lincoln administration served as an ideal model.

  The American state’s “totalitarian bureaucracy” has grown increasingly powerful in recent years by employing such tactics as the Patriot Act, strip searches at airports, Internet spying by the government, illegally spying on millions of private phone conversations, prying into citizens’ private financial records, military tribunals, torture of prisoners, and many other ominous developments that are destructive of civil liberties. And the Lincoln idolatry continues, as the name of the “martyred saint” is frequently invoked to justify such policies.

  Right-wing totalitarians are not the only ones who invoke the Lincoln legend when justifying monopolistic or dictatorial government. There are many prominent academic leftists who idolize Lincoln because they, too, favor “totalitarian bureaucracy,” as long as they, and not people like William F. Buckley, Jr., are running it. One of the best examples is Civil War historian Eric Foner of Columbia University, a past president of the American Historical Association and a self-described Marxist.

  For decades, Foner was an apologist for Soviet communism. After the collapse of Soviet communism in 1989, a Moscow display of the Soviet gulag system drew a bitter denunciation by Foner, who complained of “the obsessive need to fill in the blank pages in the history of the Soviet era.”7 This is indeed an odd statement for a historian to make—that it is “obsessive” to want to document the history of one of the governments that dominated global politics during the twentieth century.

  Genuine conservatives were always shocked and alarmed at the totalitarian practices of the Lincoln administration.

  In his 1988 book The Story of American Freedom, Foner lavishly praised the Communist Party U.S.A. as a “cultural front that helped to redraw the boundaries of American freedom.” To Eric Foner communism means “freedom” and opposition to communism means tyranny. No wonder he’s considered to be a top “Lincoln scholar.” Foner was such an apologist for Soviet communism that he opposed the breakup of the Soviet Union and, naturally, invoked the Lincoln legend as the reason for his opposition. In an editorial in the February 11, 1991, issue of The Nation magazine entitled “Linco
ln’s Lesson,” Foner railed against the secession movements in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Georgia and urged Mikhail Gorbachev to deal with them in the same brutal manner that Lincoln dealt with the Southern secessionists.

  The entire free world was ecstatic over the collapse of Soviet communism, and no one was as thrilled as the people of the Soviet empire. But to Foner the secession of the Soviet republics was a “crisis” that would destroy the “laudable goal” of creating a monopolistic, dictatorial government in the name of socialism. Such a government, Foner said, demanded “overreaching loyalty to the Soviet Union,” just as Lincoln demanded overreaching loyalty to himself and his government. No “leader of a powerful nation,” Foner complained, should allow such a thing to happen as “the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.”8

  Marxist historians like Columbia University’s Eric Foner, who opposed the breakup of the Soviet Union, naturally point to the Lincoln regime as “justification” for their position.

  He agreed completely with Edmund Wilson’s characterization of Lincoln’s role in creating a consolidated, monopolistic government, but like all totalitarian socialists, he thinks it was a good thing. Socialism cannot survive if there are competing sovereignties. Thus, all socialists, whether left-wing socialists like Foner or right-wing socialists like Buckley, favor highly centralized, dictatorial government with a “strong executive.”

  Foner concluded his essay by opining that “The Civil War was a central step in the consolidation of national authority in the United States.” Unlike Wilson and Frank Meyer, he viewed this as a positive development. “The Union, Lincoln passionately believed, was a permanent government,” Foner continued, and he hoped that “Gorbachev would surely agree.”

  It turns out, of course, that Gorbachev did not agree (thank God). Unlike Lincoln, the communist dictator of the Soviet Union did not have the stomach for ordering the Russian military to bomb its own cities and kill fellow citizens by the hundreds of thousands (or millions, with today’s military technology) merely for the sake of “saving the [Soviet] Union.”