Lincoln Unmasked

by Thomas DiLorenzo

  Thus, the writings of right-wing neoconservatives as well as left-wing academics routinely invoke the mythical Lincoln legend in order to push their respective political agendas, whether it is foreign policy imperialism, as in the former case, or opining about the “unfortunate” demise of totalitarian socialism in the latter case.

  Politics is a dirty business, which is why there is so often a vicious personal reaction by the likes of Eric Foner and neoconservative Lincoln idolaters to any and all writers who question some of the historical myths they have fabricated or perpetuated. They are also afraid to death of being exposed as proponents of totalitarian bureaucracy while posing as “freedom fighters” (like Foner) or strict constuctionists (like Harry Jaffa and his followers).

  17

  Pledging Allegiance to the

  Omnipotent Lincolnian State

  Most Americans believe that the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag was the work of the eighteenth-century founding fathers. In fact, the Pledge did not come about until 1892. It was authored by Francis Bellamy, a defrocked Baptist minister from Boston who identified himself as a “Christian Socialist” and was removed from the pulpit for preaching politics, specifically for espousing the view that “Jesus was a socialist.”

  Bellamy was the cousin of Edward Bellamy, author of the popular 1888 socialist fantasy Looking Backward. In this novel the main character, Julian West, falls asleep in 1887 and awakens in the year 2000 when “socialist utopia” had been achieved. All industry is state owned, Soviet style, and everyone is conscripted into the military at age twenty-one, is an employee of the state for their entire lives, and retires at age forty-five. All workers earn exactly the same income regardless of merit, performance, or skill. It may be hard to fathom in the twenty-first century, but there used to be many influential novelists and opinion makers who actually believed that this system—which later came to be known as totalitarian communism—would produce “utopia” or heaven on earth.

  Pledge of Allegiance author Francis Bellamy said that one purpose of the Pledge was to help achieve this totalitarian fantasy in America.1 The “true reason for allegiance to the flag,” said Bellamy, was to indoctrinate schoolchildren into the Lincolnian theory of the “perpetual” nature of the consolidated, unitary, and omnipotent state. It was to ingrain in the minds of America’s schoolchildren the falsehood that no such thing as state sovereignty ever existed. As discussed in the previous chapter, totalitarians of all persuasions, including Christian Socialists, have long understood that omnipotent government cannot be achieved if the citizens have divided loyalties. Federalism is poison to socialism and socialists.

  The Pledge of Allegiance was authored in the late nineteenth century by a Socialist who designed it as a propaganda tool with which to brainwash children in the supposed virtues of the monopolistic, consolidated, Lincolnite state.

  Although Lincoln proved his theory to be correct—in his own mind—by force of arms, in the late nineteenth century there were still millions of Americans who cherished the Jeffersonian ideal of limited decentralized government and states’ rights, and were suspicious of centralized governmental power. Ideas cannot be snuffed out as easily as human lives or even governments can be. This was alarming to the Bellamy cousins, for they understood perfectly well that their socialist utopia could never be achieved in America unless the central government became all powerful and the notion of state sovereignty was destroyed completely. In Francis Bellamy’s own words, as recounted by author John W. Baer:

  The true reason for allegiance to the Flag is the “republic for which it stands.” … And what does that vast thing, the Republic mean? It is the concise political word for the Nation—the One Nation which the Civil War was fought to prove. To make that One Nation idea clear, we must specify that it is indivisible, as Webster and Lincoln used to repeat in their great speeches.2

  Bellamy considered the “liberty and justice for all” phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance to be an Americanized expression of the French—not the American—Revolution: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” The basic philosophy of the French Revolution, coming from Rousseau, was that there existed in the mind of an elite the notion or definition of “the general will,” and that the elite was obligated to impose that will on the entire nation, even if it meant killing dissenters. There was to be a “single body” with “a single will,” said Rousseau. Whoever disagrees with the state-sanctioned “general will” will be “forced to be free,” even if it literally kills them.

  In America the Virtuous Catholic University philosophy professor Claes Ryn explains how Rousseau’s (and the Bellamy cousins’) philosophy of government “collides head on with advocates of constitutionalism,” such as the American founding fathers.3 “Rousseau’s wish to free the current majority from all restrictions, to dissolve the people into a homogenous mass, abolish decentralization, and remove representative institutions could not be in sharper contrast to American traditions of constitutionalism, federalism, localism, and representation.”4

  Rousseau was one of the founders of “modern nationalism,” with Lincoln following in his footsteps. For Rousseau, nationalism was connected to virtue. The “general will” was said to be virtuous, by definition, and dissenters, naturally, were the opposite, sinful. It was imperative, said Rousseau, to therefore “begin by making [citizens] love their country” through indoctrination in “patriotism.”5 This is exactly what the Bellamy cousins hoped to achieve with the Pledge of Allegiance to the unitary American state, and it is also what such Lincoln cultists like Walter Berns and Harry Jaffa hope to achieve. They are truly neo-Jacobins.

  Francis Bellamy claimed to have gotten the idea for the Pledge of Allegiance from the “loyalty oaths” that Southerners were forced to take, often at gunpoint, during the War between the States. The Pledge was first published in the September 1892 issue of The Youth’s Companion, which was sort of the Reader’s Digest of its day. At the time, Francis Bellamy had been defrocked as a minister and was the vice president in charge of education for the “Society of Christian Socialists,” a national organization that advocated income taxation, central banking, nationalized education, nationalization of industry, and other features of socialism. In his book Socialism, economist Ludwig von Mises characterized Christian socialism as “merely a variety of socialism” and nothing exceptional. Its advocates held that “agriculture and handicraft, with perhaps small shop keeping, are the only admissible occupations. Trade and speculation are superfluous, injurious, and evil. Factories and large-scale industries are the wicked invention of the ‘Jewish spirit’; they produce only bad goods which are foisted on buyers by the large stores and by other monstrosities of modern trade to the detriment of purchasers.”6

  The “one nation, indivisible” language of the Pledge was extremely important to the Bellamy cousins. If states’ rights, let alone secession, were ever legitimized, then their dream of a socialist utopia in America, enforced by a unitary, dictatorial government, would never be realized. Thus, once compulsory attendance laws were established for public schools, they provided the ideal vehicle for socialist indoctrination under the guise of “patriotism,” which in reality meant blind obedience to the state.

  The public schools were happy to assist in the cause. In 1892 the Bellamy cousins planned a “National Public School Celebration,” the first major propaganda campaign to be launched on behalf of the Pledge of Allegiance. It was a massive, nationwide campaign that involved government schools and politicians throughout the country. Government-run schools, along with the Pledge, were promoted while private, parochial schools were denigrated (they could not be counted on to force their students to recite the Pledge like the government-run schools could).

  Students were taught to recite the Pledge with their arms outstretched, palms up, similar to how Roman citizens were required to hail Caesar. The custom was dropped in the 1940s, however, when it became apparent that this particular way of saying the Pledge was eerily similar to the Nazi
salute or the salute of the Italian fascists.

  So the Pledge of Allegiance is an oath of allegiance to the omnipotent, Lincolnian state. Its purpose was never to inculcate in schoolchildren the ideals of the American founding fathers, but those of two eccentric, Lincoln-worshipping, utopian socialists. The War between the States was truly America’s “French Revolution,” and Lincoln cultists, in the tradition of the Bellamy cousins, have worked long and hard to cement the ideas of that Revolution—especially the supposed imperative of a “unitary state”—in the minds of American schoolchildren for generations.

  18

  The Lincoln Cult

  on Imprisoning War Opponents

  It is well known that Abraham Lincoln imprisoned without due process tens of thousands of Northern political dissenters, including many newspaper editors and owners. After the war the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that his actions were illegal because no one—neither Congress nor the president—has the right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, even in wartime, as long as the civil courts are operating (and they were). But Supreme Court precedents never stand in the way of the Lincoln cult, which believes that the words of one man, Abraham Lincoln, should take precedence over anything else, including the Constitution. A case in point is how certain Lincoln cultists invoked Lincoln’s habit of imprisoning his political opponents in order to make their case for intimidating, if not imprisoning, opponents of the war in Iraq. If the “sainted” Lincoln did it, they say, then it must be legitimate. Thus, in 2005 and 2006 we observed the spectacle of the website that was established by the “conservative” Heritage Foundation, townhall.com, publishing numerous articles calling for sedition trials for citizens who openly opposed the war in Iraq and invoking the Lincoln precedent of imprisoning his war opponents to make their case.1

  This argument was first on display in a December 23, 2003, Insight magazine article by senior editor J. Michael Waller entitled “When Does Politics Become Treason?” “Lincoln’s policy was to have treasonous federal lawmakers arrested and tried before military tribunals, and exiled or hanged if convicted.” He quoted Lincoln himself as saying, “Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs who should be arrested, exiled or hanged.” Lincoln “spoke forcefully of the need to arrest, convict and, if necessary, execute congressmen who by word or deed undermined the war effort,” says Waller. Of course, the ever-paranoid Lincoln defined “saboteur” as virtually anyone who disagreed with his policies; that’s why he had so many thousands of them imprisoned (and sometimes tortured).

  Modern-day neoconservatives have invoked the Lincoln legend to advocate imprisoning congressional opponents of their imperialistic fantasies.

  It is remarkable how Lincoln cultists simply take everything Lincoln said as the Gospel truth, never to be questioned, even if the idea seems absolutely outrageous. To Lincoln, criticizing him or his administration amounted to “warring on the military,” which was a treasonous act punishable by death. Clearly, his purpose was to intimidate all of his political opponents in brutal dictatorial fashion. No other American president dared to assert that there should be no political dissent whatsoever—none—during wartime. James Madison even tolerated the noisy New England Federalists’ secession movement during the War of 1812. But to Waller these bizarre words should “apply to some lawmakers today,” even if said lawmakers insisted that their opposition to the war was “in support of the troops,” who they wanted to bring home.

  “Exhibit A” of the Lincoln cultists’ case for possibly imprisoning congressional war opponents is Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham. Vallandigham was forcefully taken from his Dayton, Ohio, home in the middle of the night by sixty-seven armed federal soldiers, thrown into a military prison without due process, convicted by a kangaroo court military tribunal, and deported.2

  While a newspaper editor in Ohio and, later, as a congressman, Vallandigham ridiculed the Whig and Republican Party political agenda of protectionism, corporate welfare, and inflationism. He was a states’ rights Jeffersonian and a strict constructionist of the Constitution who once said bluntly that he was “inexorably hostile to the Puritan [i.e., New England] domination in religion or morals or literature or politics.” He and thousands of other midwesterners were known as “Peace Democrats” who favored working toward a peaceful resolution of the sectional differences that existed. Throughout the Midwest he became known as the “apostle of peace.” In Lincoln’s mind, advocates for peace and nonviolence could not be tolerated and needed to be deported.

  Vallandigham was appalled and outraged at Lincoln’s illegal suspension of habeas corpus and his mass arrest of political opponents, as any true Jeffersonian would be. The congressman’s alleged “act of treason” was a speech he made on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, and later repeated back home in Akron, Ohio, in which he condemned the Lincoln administration’s “persistent infractions of the Constitution” and its “high-minded usurpations of power,” which were designed as a “deliberate conspiracy to overthrow the present form of Federal-republican government, and to establish a strong centralized government in its stead.”3

  Starting a war without the consent of Congress, Vallandigham said, was the kind of dictatorial act “that would have cost any English sovereign his head at any time within the last two hundred years.” Echoing the Declaration of Independence, he railed against the quartering of soldiers in private homes without the consent of the owners; the subversion and imprisonment of the duly elected Maryland government; censorship of the telegraphs; and the confiscation of firearms throughout the border states in clear violation of the Second Amendment.

  All of these dictatorial acts were done, said Vallandigham, not to “save the union” but to advance the cause of “national banks … and permanent public debt, high tariffs, heavy direct taxation, enormous expenditure, gigantic and stupendous peculation … and strong government … no more State lines … and a consolidated monarchy or vast centralized military despotism.” With the exception of “military despotism,” these were the exact issues prominent Republicans claimed they elected Abraham Lincoln to promote.

  The Lincoln administration argued that Vallandigham’s speeches discouraged Ohio boys from enrolling in the military or, worse yet, encouraged desertion from the military, and were therefore treasonous. Essentially, Lincoln claimed his illegal and unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus was not “treasonous” (to the Constitution) but pointing out his actions in public speeches was.

  The Lincoln administration made a big scene of handing Vallandigham over to Confederate authorities in Tennessee in order to create the false impression that political dissenters like the Ohio congressman were spies and traitors. But after having their country invaded, bombed, burned, and plundered for two years by Lincoln’s armies, the Confederates wanted nothing to do with a congressman who favored uniting the North and the South. So Vallandigham lived in exile in Canada for the remainder of the war. While there, the Ohio Democratic Party made him its gubernatorial nominee; he lost the election, of course, but it was indeed a heroic act of protest on the part of the Ohio Democrats.

  Still, Lincoln was not finished with Vallandigham. The political propaganda arm of the Republican Party, established in 1862, that came to be known as the “Union League,” spread incendiary, hateful, and false propaganda about administration opponents, and Vallandigham was certainly the most outspoken, and most prominent, opponent. Historian Frank Klement, who spent his career researching “Copperheads,” the defamatory name that Lincoln gave to his Northern political opponents, documented a number of the falsehoods that were spread about Vallandigham in order to “justify” his deportation.4

  First, the Union League forged a letter that supposedly implicated Vallandigham in the July 1863 New York City draft riots, even though he resided in Ontario, Canada, at the time. Klement proved that this was a forgery, but the story is nevertheless repeated today by members of the L
incoln cult as part of their rewriting of American history.

  The Union League forged other documents that claimed it was Vallandigham who persuaded Robert E. Lee to head north into Pennsylvania in June of 1863, leading to the Battle of Gettysburg. The notion that General Lee would base his entire war strategy on the advice of a Northern congressman from the same state as Generals Grant and Sherman is preposterous and bizarre, but war sometimes causes normally levelheaded people to suspend their sense of reality. Contemporary historians and writers who continue to spread this false story have no such excuse, however.

  Another bizarre lie spread about Vallandigham by the Union League was that he was somehow involved in Confederate John Hunt Morgan’s abortive raids into Indiana and Ohio. So the Republican Party attempted to portray Vallandigham as a Wizard-of-Oz-type character who magically controlled the decisions of the Confederate army from Canada, while he simultaneously orchestrated violent attacks on his own friends and family in Ohio. Frank Klement proved what a lie it all was.

  Interestingly, in his 2003 Insight article that seemed to be a clear attempt to intimidate congressional war opponents, Waller wrote that “given the recent controversy about the authenticity of quotations attributed to President Abraham Lincoln, Insight went directly to the primary source for the presidential statements about how to deal with congressmen who sabotage the war effort.” And what was this trustworthy, primary source? It was an 1863 publication entitled “The Truth from an Honest Man: The Letter of the President,” published and distributed by the Union League!5