Lincoln Unmasked

by Thomas DiLorenzo

  Whenever the government and its private-sector propagandists attempt to deprive Americans of their civil liberties, they inevitably invoke the Lincoln legend as a supposed “justification.”

  Whenever anyone wants to defend the worst kinds of civil liberties abuses, they typically cite Lincoln’s precedents, which they always insist are “proof” that the abuses are legitimate and moral. In one case, another Lincoln cultist, neoconservative pundit Michelle Malkin, defended the Roosevelt administration’s imprisonment of more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans during World War II. The prisoners were sent to what FDR himself called “concentration camps,” but which Malkin euphemistically refers to as “relocation centers” in her book In Defense of Internment.

  Malkin’s book is a defense of suspending habeas corpus in the name of waging “the war on terror.” In an August 9, 2004, interview about the book on the website Townhall.com, Malkin stated: “Historically, civil rights have often yielded to security in times of crisis. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, which enabled him to detain thousands of rebels and subversives without access to judges.” Therefore, she implies, it’s okay to do it again today This is another patented falsehood—that the tens of thousands of Northern citizens who were imprisoned during the Lincoln administration were “rebels and subversives.” The truth is that virtually anyone who opposed administration policies in any way was threatened with imprisonment without due process. This included elected officials, newspaper editors, and thousands of ordinary citizens of the Northern states. Lincoln himself argued that those who simply remained silent and did not publicly support his administration should also be subject to imprisonment. In his own words: “The man who stands by and says nothing when the peril of his Government is discussed cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered, he is sure to help the enemy; much more if he talks ambiguously—talks for his country with ‘buts’ and ‘ifs’ and ‘ands.’ ”6

  Lincoln believed in imprisoning citizens who merely remained silent and did not publicly support him and his administration.

  Thus, in Lincoln’s mind, anyone who did not publicly support his policies was a traitor, susceptible to being prosecuted as such, presumably with the death penalty in some cases. What could be more tyrannical than punishing silence as a crime? This was a common technique of the totalitarian communist countries in the twentieth century, but most Americans would be shocked to learn that the idea was also embraced by Lincoln.

  Pro-administration newspaper editors were recruited as a sort of spy network for the Lincoln administration. As Dean Sprague wrote in Freedom Under Lincoln, whenever a newspaper editor wanted to cause trouble for a Lincoln critic he would “suggest him as a candidate for Fort Lafayette,” the government’s gulag for political prisoners in New York harbor.7

  As word of Lincoln’s gulag in New York spread throughout the country, writes Sprague, “the prison cast its shadow over the entire North” and “became a kind of American Bastille, its name on everyone’s lips.”8 As such, it was a “weapon” in the hands of the Lincoln administration, used “to establish the fact that the federal government was the greatest power in the nation.”

  Whenever congressmen requested information about constituents of theirs who were suspected of being imprisoned in Fort Lafayette, Lincoln, whom Sprague describes as “a man of steel,” would simply say that it was against the “public interest” to supply such information. This is the kind of “role model” that Lincoln cultists like Malkin routinely cite whenever they advocate yet another watering down of civil liberties in America.

  The only place free speech existed in the North during the war was in the gulags where Lincoln’s political prisoners were held.

  Lincoln intimidated the Supreme Court by ignoring its rulings, placing federal judges under house arrest, illegally suspending habeas corpus, and even issuing an arrest warrant for the chief justice. He also intimidated Congress by deporting the most outspoken member of the loyal opposition. It wasn’t until after the war that the Supreme Court regained the courage and integrity to state the obvious and declare, in Ex Parte Milligan (1866), that: “The constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and peace, and it covers with its shield of protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of men that any of its great provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of Government.”

  In other words, the Supreme Court said that it is precisely in times of national emergencies, such as war, that civil liberties must be defended and protected. If not, then governments will be given an incentive to constantly create crises, or perceptions of crises, as a means of grabbing more and more power. And more governmental power always means less freedom for ordinary citizens.

  19

  Contra the Lincoln Cult

  The Lincoln cult is composed primarily of academics who have chosen careers as, well, cultists. They have their “human capital,” in other words, their professional reputations, wrapped up in published articles and books that deify Abraham Lincoln as a Jesus- or Moses-like figure (“Father Abraham”) who is routinely described as “the greatest of all Americans” and “redeemer” of the nation, just as Christ was the redeemer of the world. To the cultists, Lincoln is the closest thing to human perfection, a role model for all the ages, nothing less than a combination of Jesus and Moses. If one were to watch a Lincoln forum on cable television, one will find much more lavish praise being heaped upon Father Abraham by Lincoln cultists than your typical television preacher will adorn the Lord with in a Sunday morning sermon.

  Such rhetoric is rarely beneficial to anyone interested in learning true history, despite the cultists’ academic credentials. The cultists tend to be cover-up artists, court historians, gatekeepers, and propagandists more than genuine scholars. Interestingly, in recent years a number of genuinely informative and insightful books and articles on Lincoln have been published by “outsiders”—authors who are not card-carrying members of the Lincoln cult, but simply skilled writers and researchers with inquisitive minds and a thirst for historical knowledge. Unburdened by the mandate to either toe the party line or sacrifice their careers, these writers tend to be much more informative and truthful than the Lincoln cultists are.

  One example of this phenomenon is the book The Great Tax Wars: Lincoln to Wilson—The Fierce Battles Over Money and Power That Transformed the Nation, by Steven R. Weisman. Weisman is a journalist who wrote about politics, economics, and international affairs for the New York Times for more than thirty years. When his book was first published in 2002, he was an editorial writer for the Times. The book is a general history of the income tax in America, beginning with Lincoln’s income tax in the 1860s. Several sections of the book stand out with regard to the author’s analysis of the real Lincoln. In particular, while discussing the secession of the Southern states in 1860–61 Weisman writes:

  South Carolina went first. The state’s grievances had been long-standing and not simply focused on slavery. Its major complaint went to the heart of the nation’s finances—tariffs. A generation earlier, South Carolina had provoked a states’ rights crisis over its doctrine that states could “nullify” or override, the national tariff system. The nullification fight in 1832 was actually a tax revolt. It pitted the state’s spokesman, Vice President John C. Calhoun, against President Andrew Jackson. Because tariffs rewarded manufacturers but punished farmers with higher prices on everything they needed—clothing, farm equipment and even essential food products like salts and meats—Calhoun argued that the tariff system was discriminatory and unconstitutional. Calhoun’s antitariff battle was a rebellion against a system seen throughout the South as protecting the producers of the North.1

  It is clear to Weisman that tariff exploitation was just as important to South Carolina and the rest of the South in 1860 as it was during the nullification fight in 1832.
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  The history profession has become so poisoned by political correctness that some of the best research and writing now comes from those who are from outside the profession.

  Lincoln cultists are quick to demonize and assassinate the characters of historical figures like Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun, while Weisman obviously spent a considerable amount of time educating himself about these men and their political positions and priorities instead. It is refreshing to run across a rare student of Lincoln and the Civil War who is such a transparent truth seeker. Weisman is obviously familiar with Jefferson Davis’s first inaugural address, which does not mention the word slavery but announces that “our policy is peace, and the freest trade our necessities will permit.” He does not describe Davis as a devil but as a hero of the Mexican War, former secretary of war, and a former U.S. senator. He also describes him as “a vigorous exponent of the view that the war was, at its core, not a fight to preserve slavery but a struggle to overthrow an exploitative economic system headquartered in the North.”2 Furthermore, “There was a great deal of evidence to support Davis’s view of the South as the nation’s stepchild” for “the South had to import two-thirds of its clothing and manufactured goods from outside the region, and southerners paid artificially high prices because of the high tariffs.… The South even had to import food.”3 In short, Weisman has independently arrived at the same conclusions about the economic sources of the conflict of 1861–1865 as I have. It is no accident that neither of us is a “professional historian” or a card-carrying, establishmentarian “Lincoln scholar.”

  Another “outside” author who shares Weisman’s exceptional historical clarity and hunger for the truth is James Webb, author of the book Born Fighting, A History of the Scots-Irish in America. Webb is a former U.S. Navy secretary, assistant secretary of defense, a filmmaker, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, an Emmy Award–winning journalist, and the author of several popular novels.

  Webb’s focus is on “his people,” the Scots-Irish in America. The Scots-Irish have always been radical individualists: “To them, joining a group and putting themselves at the mercy of someone else’s collective judgment makes about as much sense as letting the government take their guns.”4 In the early years of America they had very little in common with English immigrants who settled in New England—the Puritans and, later, the “Yankees.” Indeed, the American Scots-Irish were mostly the descendants of people who had been tyrannized for centuries by the British. They became “the dominant culture of the South,” comprised a large portion of the Confederate army, and were typically yeoman farmers or small merchants who “had no slaves and actually suffered economic detriment from the practice” of slavery.5

  On the subject of Lincoln and his war, Webb asks the question of why “his people” fought in the way they did. He quotes the historian Wilbur Cash as noting that Confederate soldiers came from a culture that produced “the most intense individualism the world has seen since the Italian renaissance.”6 They never learned to salute as briskly or to become as obedient as their much more compliant Yankee soldier counterparts.

  What all this suggests to Webb is that “It is impossible to believe that such men would have continued to fight against unnatural odds and take casualties beyond the level of virtually any other modern army [70 percent]—simply so that 5 percent of their population who owned slaves could keep them.… Something deeper was motivating them, something that appealed to their self-interest as well.”7

  Webb clarifies one particularly telling fact about the average Confederate soldier: He knew that slave owners in Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky were allowed to keep their slaves when the war began. The Lincoln administration’s policy was that slave owners could keep their slaves as long as they were loyal to the Union. Indeed, when Fort Sumter was fired upon there were more slave states in the Union than out of it. Consequently, writes Webb, “in virtually every major battle of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves were fighting against a proportion of Union Army soldiers who had not been asked to give up theirs.”8 This fact spoke volumes to the Confederate soldier about the true causes of the war, and about the Lincoln regime itself.

  Former U.S. Navy secretary James Webb has written an important book that exposes the illogic of the Lincoln cult.

  Webb writes of how the Confederate soldier knew that the Emancipation Proclamation “exempted all the slaves in the North,” and in all the areas of the South that were under federal army control at the time. The Southerners understood that the union was voluntary and that the Constitution was on their side: “The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reserved to the states all rights not specifically granted to the federal government, and in their view the states had thus retained their right to dissolve the federal relationship.”9

  So why did the Confederate soldier fight, according to Webb? He fought because “he was provoked, intimidated, and ultimately invaded.” His leaders “convinced him that this was a war of independence in the same sense as the Revolutionary War.”10 The “tendency to resist outside aggression was bred deeply into every heart”11 of every Scots-Irish man, writes Webb. That’s why they had to fight. Once again, it takes an outsider to effectively question the “official line” of the Lincoln cult.

  In addition to Webb and Weisman, Professor Michael F. Holt, a distinguished historian at the University of Virginia, has challenged cult wisdom in his book The Fate of Their Country. Unlike Weisman and Webb, Holt is an academic, but he is not a Lincoln cultist. He is probably the American history profession’s top expert on the politics of the antebellum era, having authored the monumental book The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, and The Political Crisis of the 1850s. He’s also the coauthor of a textbook entitled The Civil War and Reconstruction.

  The distinguished University of Virginia historian Michael Holt makes more sense than all of the “Lincoln scholars” combined. Naturally, he is not considered to be one of them.

  In The Fate of Their Country Professor Holt addresses the question, “What brought about the Civil War?” and concludes the answer is “politics” rather than the North’s moral objection to slavery He correctly points out that slavery was constitutionally secure in 1861; that neither Lincoln nor his party formally opposed Southern slavery; that Lincoln supported a constitutional amendment to prohibit the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery; and that the issue of slavery in 1860 evolved around its expansion into the territories, just as noted throughout this book.

  Holt agrees with the thesis of this book, and of The Real Lincoln, that the primary reason for the North’s (and Lincoln’s) opposition to slavery extension was that it would have been a roadblock to the plan of politically and economically dominating the South.

  The only moral argument against slavery, one that was articulated by Lincoln, was that stopping the spread of slavery into the territories would supposedly lead to its eventual demise everywhere. Exactly how and why this would occur was never explained, and the theory makes little sense. Slavery was already profitable without expansion into the territories, and besides, it is almost absurd to believe that slavery would have been economical in most of the territories. As Professor Holt concludes, “Modern economic historians have demonstrated that this assumption was false.”12

  Lincoln and the Republican Party opposed the extension of slavery into the new territories for purely economic and political reasons.

  Far more Northerners opposed the extension of slavery, writes Holt, because they simply did not want to compete for jobs with slave labor. It was economics, not humanitarianism, that motivated them. In addition, “Many northern whites also wanted to keep slaves out of the West in order to keep blacks out. The North was a pervasively racist society where free blacks suffered social, economic, and political discrimination.…”13 “Bigots, they sought to bar African-American slaves from the West.”14

  Yet another reason why the North opposed slavery extension was to
limit the congressional representation of the Democratic Party. Slaves would increase the population of the territories, which, when they became states, would then have a larger number of congressional representatives. Thus, the real reasons for Republican opposition to slavery extension were purely political and economic, writes Holt.

  Why were the Republicans so concerned about blocking the power of the Southern Democrats at any cost—even at the cost of a bloody war? Professor Holt answers this question by quoting the Ohio congressman Joshua R. Giddings: “To give the south the preponderance of political power would be itself a surrender of our tariff, our internal improvements, our distribution of proceeds of public lands.… It is the most abominable proposition with which a free people were ever insulted.”15

  Holt contends that Southern politicians were equally responsible for the war as Northern ones were. As he states on the inside cover of his book, “shortsighted politicians [of all parties] … used the emotionally charged and largely chimerical [i.e., “wildly fanciful and realistic”] issue of slavery’s extension westward to pursue the election of their candidates and settle political scores, all the while inexorably dragging the nation toward disunion.”

  But if the quest for money and political power was the root cause of the war, as Holt contends, one can hardly hold the South as responsible as the North on moral grounds. It was the North that was attempting to use the powers of the state to plunder the South. The South was acting defensively. The North was the political mugger, whereas the South was the victim of the mugging, with the slaves diabolically used as political pawns.

  A fourth writer who dissents from official opinion on the subject of Lincoln is the business historian John Steele Gordon. Like Weisman, Holt, and Webb, he is an established researcher and writer, but not a member of the Lincoln cult.16 Consequently, he is free to speak his mind without fear of professional punishment. In his book Hamilton’s Blessing, about the history of the American public debt, Gordon has this to say about the role of the tariff in precipitating the War between the States: