LDS Freedom Forum

I caught a snatch of news the other day that, even with all that is happening in our time, stunned me. It seems that Hollywood is gearing up its machinery to produce entertainment about “Confederate War Crimes.” This so contradicts the historical record that it can represent nothing but willful ignorance, dishonesty, and malice. For Hollywood, anything they don’t like or find alien must be Nazi and atrocious.

The Confederacy was fighting against an invader. It had no opportunity, even if it had wanted, to commit crimes against an enemy civilian population which it seldom saw. The war was on such a vast scale that you may find a few incidents of anything you want along the Border, but that is to mistake the odd for the usual. The Missourians who raided Lawrence, Kansas, did not harm a single woman, although they were hard on the men. And they had ample grievances about harm, including death, that had been done to their womenfolk by Federals to justify retaliation.

President Davis was quick to condemn excesses the few times they happened, unlike Lincoln, who praised and promoted the perpetrators of atrocities against civilians. General Lee told his men on the way to Pennsylvania that although they had ample justification in what had been done to their homes, they should not imitate the enemy but preserve their honour as representatives of the civilised side of the conflict.

Southerners saw the war as a contest between armed men, conducted by rules that had arisen from the slow development of Christian civilisation. The ruling element of the North saw the war as a crusade to crush a people (fellow Americans) that they had long been taught to hate or disdain and who stood in the way of their power, progress, and profit.

Crimes? The simple truth about the war, which Americans deliberately refuse to see because its recognition would subvert their self-righteous belief that they are heirs of a benevolent war to “preserve the Union” and free the suffering slaves. The plain factual explanation of the war is that Lincoln formed the biggest army ever seen in the Western Hemisphere in order to invade and conquer the Southern States and deprive their people of the self-government which they had enjoyed since the War of Independence. Lincoln and his supporters solemnly declared they were not acting against slavery. Pressed to give a justification beyond the amorphous one of “preserving the Union,” they confessed that the people, labour, and resources of the South were needed for their profit.

Now if you want to talk about “war crimes” that was a big one. Every honoured American statesman and thinker before 1860 had said that the Union could not be preserved by force. That would violate the nature of the Union, destroy the Union, and substitute, in violation of liberty, a despotism.

The crimes committed by federal soldiers against Southern civilians are as abundantly documented as anything in history. From the first day the troops passed over the Potomac and Ohio rivers private property was fair game. And the hatred and destruction increased with the difficulty of conquering the brave and skillful opposition of the invaded people.

Sherman’s systematic war crimes in Georgia and the Carolinas were deliberate and intended, not an unfortunate “collateral damage.” His celebrated military campaign was primarily directed not at armed enemies but at noncombatants. But that is only the biggest example of a policy carried out every day everywhere. Sherman and Grant had already practiced in Mississippi.

Simple facts. Hundreds of Southern women had had pistols put to their heads by officers demanding valuables or had their earrings torn off. Many more, including the sick, aged, and pregnant were made homeless. Fresh graves were dug up on the hope that they might contain hidden valuables. Think about it. Houses were robbed and ransacked and then burned—after furniture, portraits, art works, pianos, keepsakes had been destroyed or stolen. One Yankee officer’s wife furnished her house by theft from a Georgia home, and this is an example not an oddity.

Thousands of times in almost every State, homes were destroyed. Houses, barns, and essential farm equipment burned; food carried away or ruined; livestock carried away or destroyed, often including children’s pets. Churches, schools, colleges, libraries, even a convent did not escape the deliberately set flames. A number of South Carolina towns were literally wiped off the map.

The Feds also took civilian hostages and sometimes executed them. A standard Nazi proceeding. And, against all the laws of war, used prisoners as shields.

Not all Union soldiers participated in the war crimes. Some were shamed by them. But the malefactors included officers and were deliberate. You have to remember that the Union Army was made up of largely people who had been paid to enlist. In fact, Lincoln and his supporters, in something rare in history, spent more money paying people to enlist than they did on food and ammunition.

Remember that no respectable Northerner had to serve in the Yankee army unless he wanted to. So, the federal forces were full of the riffraff of the big cities and impoverished rural regions and brutal German immigrants who had no idea of American institutions and no connection to their victims.

The victims were by no means only the rich as is now being claimed. And black people suffered as well as white from being robbed and from lack of food and shelter. Recent studies have steadily been showing an increase in the count of Southerners, black and white, who died indirectly from the invasion. The “war cimes,” are abundant although they are not “Confederate.”

It is a bad cause that has to be sustained by lies.

In his great new book The Problem with Lincoln, Tom DiLorenzo brought back an old memory. As Tom points out, Walter Berns, who taught political science at Cornell and then worked for the American Enterprise Institute, was one of the main figures urging us to worship Honest Abe. He quarreled with the main Lincoln idolater, Harry Jaffa, but I’m not going to go into what they fought about. Rather, I’d like to focus on an argument in Berns’s book Making Patriots (2006), to which Tom refers.

Berns thinks he can solve a fundamental problem of modern America, and wait till you hear what that problem is. People in America aren’t willing to sacrifice their lives to the state. They are too much devoted to their own selfish interests. To overcome this dire state of affairs, we need to establish a "civil religion" in the guise of patriotism.

Berns acknowledges that America was founded on individual rights, but he thinks there is a difficulty with overemphasis on Lockean rights to life, liberty, and property. No doubt, these have their proper place, and it is not a small one. But "patriotism means love of country and implies a readiness to sacrifice for it, to fight for it, perhaps even to give one's life for it. But, aside from the legendary Spartans, why should anyone be willing to do this?…why should self-interested men believe it in their interest to give their lives for the idea or promise of their country?”

Things were different in the ancient world. In classical Athens, no conflicting loyalties stood between the citizen and his city: "Athenians were enjoined to be lovers of Athens because they were Athens—in a way, by loving their city, they loved themselves—and because, by gaining an empire, Athens provided them with the means by which they gained fame and glory."

By no means does Berns seek to restore the ancient city. Quite the contrary, he recognizes that the "institutions of both Athens and Sparta were ordered with a view to war, and, precisely for this reason, neither Athens nor Sparta could, or can, provide a model for America." Since the rise of Christianity, allegiance no longer can be undivided. The soul of the religious believer does not belong exclusively to the political community, and the great mistake of the French Revolution was its futile attempt to uproot the church and restore the ancient ways. The founders of the American Republic avoided this trap. So far, so good.

But Berns now asks an odd question. If Christianity cannot be eliminated, how can as much as possible of the unity of the ancient city be restored? His answer—and it is not a bad one given his premise—is that religion must be rigidly confined to the private sphere. In that way, the state may proceed toward its great tasks, unhindered by the scruples of believers. Though believers may practice their faith unmolested, they must realize that private conscience must always bow before the law.

Our author makes entirely clear that, on this matter, he is a thoroughgoing Hobbesian:

with the free exercise of one's religion comes the requirement to obey the law regardless of one's religious beliefs….Whether a law is just or unjust is a judgment that belongs to no "private man," however pious or learned, or, as we say today, sincere he may be. This means that we are first of all citizens, and only secondarily Christians, Jews, Muslims, or any other religious persuasion.

Thus, if your religion forbids you to fight, Berns would grant you no right to avoid military service. It may be a prudent policy for the government to make room for conscientious objectors, so long as they number but few. But their status is a privilege, and Berns does not hide his dismay with the Supreme Court for making "the exception the rule for anyone willing to invoke it." No wonder Murray Rothbard said that Berns is an enemy of freedom.

So much for religion—or, rather, so much for religion that extends beyond devotion to the state. What is to replace it as an object of popular devotion? We cannot, of course, rely on so egotistic a notion as natural rights; instead, we need a national poet around whose work the emotions of the people can concentrate.

Fortunately, one is at hand: Abraham Lincoln. "As…Shakespeare was, or is, to the English (and Robert Burns to the Scots, Gabriele D'Annunzio to the Italians, and Homer to the Greeks) so Lincoln is to us; he is our spokesman, our poet." Lincoln gives Berns exactly what he wants. His winged words, especially the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address, remind all Americans "that freedom is more than being left alone, that there is a price to be paid for it." The great bloodletting that took place during Lincoln's crusade was an essential means to bond all Americans together in love.

Berns’s argument rests on a false premise. Why should we think that a free people needs to be bonded together to defend their hearths and home from attack? Wars are rarely justified, but in the case of a genuine invasion, people don’t need a civil religion to defend themselves. Certainly we don’t need a religion that worships Lincoln.

The Problem with Lincoln is the culmination of Tom DiLorenzo’s many years of research on Abraham Lincoln. It is a masterly summing-up and extension of his earlier classics The Real Lincoln (2002) and Lincoln Unmasked (2006). DiLorenzo is both a historian and an economist with an expert knowledge of Austrian economics and also of the public choice school. This background enables him to grasp what most other historians of the Civil War period miss, the centralizing economic plan behind Lincoln’s policies.

DiLorenzo calls attention to a vital fact that demolishes the mythological view that Lincoln's primary motive for opposing secession in 1861 was his distaste for slavery. Precisely the opposite is true. It is well known that, in an effort to promote compromise, a constitutional amendment was proposed in Congress that forever forbade interference with slavery in states where it already existed. Lincoln referred to the proposal, the Corwin Amendment, in his first inaugural, stating that he was not opposed to the amendment, since it merely made explicit the existing constitutional arrangement regarding slavery. Of course, Lincoln was not telling the truth; nothing in the Constitution prior to the Corwin Amendment prohibited amendments to end slavery, so this new proposal did not just make the existing constitutional arrangement explicit. Readers can judge the Corwin Amendment for themselves, in a helpful set of original documents that our author includes in the book. (The Corwin Amendment is on p. 217.)

So much is well established, but DiLorenzo adds a surprising touch. Far from viewing the Corwin Amendment with grudging consent, Lincoln was in fact its behind-the-scenes promoter.

It was Lincoln himself who had instructed his soon-to-be secretary of state William Seward to suggest three resolutions, the import of the first of which was identical with that of the Corwin Amendment, to the ‘Committee of Thirteen’ in the U.S. Senate "without indicating they issued from Springfield"—that is, from Lincoln himself. (p. 28, quoting Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals)

Extension of slavery in the territories was for Lincoln an entirely different matter, and on this issue he refused all compromise. Here we confront a paradox. If Lincoln thought it more important to preserve the Union than to oppose slavery, why was he unwilling to compromise over slavery in the territories? If he thought slavery's extension was too high a price to pay to preserve the Union, why was he willing permanently to entrench slavery wherever it already existed? It is hard to detect a moral difference between slavery in the states and the territories.

DiLorenzo readily resolves the paradox. Lincoln opposed extension of slavery, because this would interfere with the prospects of white workers. Lincoln, following his mentor Henry Clay, favored a nationalist economic program of which high tariffs, a national bank, and governmentally financed "internal improvements" were key elements. This program, he thought, would promote not only the interests of the wealthy industrial and financial powers that he always faithfully served but would benefit white labor as well. Blacks, in his opinion, would be better off outside the United States, and throughout his life Lincoln supported schemes for repatriation of blacks to Africa and elsewhere. If blacks left the country, they could not compete with whites, the primary objects of Lincoln's concern. (Lincoln, by the way, did not see this program as in any way in contradiction to his professed belief that all men are created equal. Blacks, he thought, had human rights but not political rights.)

In order to finance his economic program, high tariffs were essential.

In his first inaugural address, Lincoln threw down the gauntlet of war over tax collection….He reassured the country that "there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority." (p. 30)

DiLorenzo is appropriately scathing about Lincoln’s remarks.

The myth of the sacred Union bound together by "the mystic cords of memory" was invented to provide cover for Lincoln’s coldhearted willingness to wage total war on his own country for tax revenue….There was no talk of "force" of any kind when the subject was slavery—except for forcing runaway slaves back into slavery by enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act; tax collection, on the other hand, called forth threats of total war on the entire population of the South, threats that were carried out a few months later, leading to as many as 750,000 American deaths. (p. 31)

DiLorenzo is fully prepared for the objection that even if the Southern states had ample reason to oppose Lincoln’s economic plans, they had no legal right to secede. In this view, Lincoln had a constitutional duty to preserve the Union by any means necessary. The historian Allan Guelzo claims that Southern secessionists were guilty of treason by their efforts to leave the Union. In what to my mind is the highlight of the book, DiLorenzo turns the tables on those who charge the Southern states with treason. The United States was a compact of sovereign states, and a state that no longer wished to remain part of the Union was free to leave.

This view of the matter was not dreamed up by Southern firebrands in 1860; it had behind it the weighty authority of Thomas Jefferson.

In an August 12, 1803, letter to John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who had inquired about the secession movement that was gaining prominence in New England at that time, Jefferson wrote that if there is to be a "separation" then "God bless them both [that is, both regions of the union that were at odds], & keep them in the union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better." (p. 22, brackets in original)

If one accepts Jefferson’s approach, Lincoln’s nationalist understanding of the United States was, as Murray Rothbard would say, “monstrous.” As DiLorenzo writes,

Lincoln justified the military invasion of his own country and the mass killing of fellow American citizens by the hundreds of thousands with a theory that the people of the "free and independent states," as they are called in the Declaration of Independence, were not sovereign, that the Union—which is to say, the federal government—was the real sovereign; that the federal government was therefore supreme; that the Union was not voluntary; and that no state had a right to secede from it…the theory that the union of the states is older than the states themselves makes about as much sense as the theory that a marital union can be older than either spouse—in which case they would have been married before they were born….No state would ever have ratified the Constitution if this—Lincoln’s theory of the "more perfect Union"—was what the founding generation thought the document said. (pp. 109–11)

With a brilliant stroke, DiLorenzo reverses the verdict that leaving the Union was treason. Lincoln was the real traitor:

Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern states was the very definition of treason in Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which defines treason as "only in levying war upon them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." The "them" and "their" in this definition of treason refer to "the United States," which are always in the plural in the founding documents, denoting that the individual, free, and independent states were uniting by a compact among them, not irrevocably surrendering their sovereignty and their very existence in favor of a sacred, perpetual, inescapable Union. (pp. 77–78)

Once Lincoln invaded the South, he and his henchmen carried on the war with great brutality. Murray Rothbard says that the Union conduct of the war

broke the 19th century rules of war by specifically plundering and slaughtering civilians, by destroying civilian life and institutions so as to reduce the South to submission. Sherman’s infamous March through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half. Because by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century. (quoted on p. 44)

DiLorenzo confronts an important objection to his main argument. Even if Lincoln didn’t start the war to free the slaves but rather to create a powerful central state, wasn’t war still necessary to end slavery? This seems unlikely. In an appearance on Bill Maher’s television program, Ron Paul "responded [to Maher] by pointing out that all other countries in the world that ended slavery in the nineteenth century did so peacefully, without a civil war, specifically citing how the British used tax dollars to buy the freedom of the slaves and then ended slavery legally throughout the British Empire" (p. 71).

DiLorenzo’s forthright analysis of Lincoln stands in marked contrast to a leading member of what our author, following the usage of Lerone Bennett Jr., calls the Logos school, "which treats Lincoln’s words as gospel truth. An example of this would be a statement by Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa when I [DiLorenzo] debated him at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, in 2003. During the question-and-answer session, an audience member—apparently a Jaffa protégé—asked Jaffa if he thought Lincoln’s speeches were the words of God. Jaffa responded that yes, he thought they were." (pp. 139–40)

Readers of The Problem with Lincoln will be forever immune to this idolatrous nonsense.

ajax wrote: ↑July 18th, 2020, 3:09 pm Demolishing the Lincoln Myth, Yet Again
https://mises.org/wire/demolishing-linc ... -yet-again
David Gordon

The Problem with Lincoln is the culmination of Tom DiLorenzo’s many years of research on Abraham Lincoln. It is a masterly summing-up and extension of his earlier classics The Real Lincoln (2002) and Lincoln Unmasked (2006). DiLorenzo is both a historian and an economist with an expert knowledge of Austrian economics and also of the public choice school. This background enables him to grasp what most other historians of the Civil War period miss, the centralizing economic plan behind Lincoln’s policies.

DiLorenzo calls attention to a vital fact that demolishes the mythological view that Lincoln's primary motive for opposing secession in 1861 was his distaste for slavery. Precisely the opposite is true. It is well known that, in an effort to promote compromise, a constitutional amendment was proposed in Congress that forever forbade interference with slavery in states where it already existed. Lincoln referred to the proposal, the Corwin Amendment, in his first inaugural, stating that he was not opposed to the amendment, since it merely made explicit the existing constitutional arrangement regarding slavery. Of course, Lincoln was not telling the truth; nothing in the Constitution prior to the Corwin Amendment prohibited amendments to end slavery, so this new proposal did not just make the existing constitutional arrangement explicit. Readers can judge the Corwin Amendment for themselves, in a helpful set of original documents that our author includes in the book. (The Corwin Amendment is on p. 217.)

So much is well established, but DiLorenzo adds a surprising touch. Far from viewing the Corwin Amendment with grudging consent, Lincoln was in fact its behind-the-scenes promoter.

It was Lincoln himself who had instructed his soon-to-be secretary of state William Seward to suggest three resolutions, the import of the first of which was identical with that of the Corwin Amendment, to the ‘Committee of Thirteen’ in the U.S. Senate "without indicating they issued from Springfield"—that is, from Lincoln himself. (p. 28, quoting Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals)

Extension of slavery in the territories was for Lincoln an entirely different matter, and on this issue he refused all compromise. Here we confront a paradox. If Lincoln thought it more important to preserve the Union than to oppose slavery, why was he unwilling to compromise over slavery in the territories? If he thought slavery's extension was too high a price to pay to preserve the Union, why was he willing permanently to entrench slavery wherever it already existed? It is hard to detect a moral difference between slavery in the states and the territories.

DiLorenzo readily resolves the paradox. Lincoln opposed extension of slavery, because this would interfere with the prospects of white workers. Lincoln, following his mentor Henry Clay, favored a nationalist economic program of which high tariffs, a national bank, and governmentally financed "internal improvements" were key elements. This program, he thought, would promote not only the interests of the wealthy industrial and financial powers that he always faithfully served but would benefit white labor as well. Blacks, in his opinion, would be better off outside the United States, and throughout his life Lincoln supported schemes for repatriation of blacks to Africa and elsewhere. If blacks left the country, they could not compete with whites, the primary objects of Lincoln's concern. (Lincoln, by the way, did not see this program as in any way in contradiction to his professed belief that all men are created equal. Blacks, he thought, had human rights but not political rights.)

In order to finance his economic program, high tariffs were essential.

In his first inaugural address, Lincoln threw down the gauntlet of war over tax collection….He reassured the country that "there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority." (p. 30)

DiLorenzo is appropriately scathing about Lincoln’s remarks.

The myth of the sacred Union bound together by "the mystic cords of memory" was invented to provide cover for Lincoln’s coldhearted willingness to wage total war on his own country for tax revenue….There was no talk of "force" of any kind when the subject was slavery—except for forcing runaway slaves back into slavery by enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act; tax collection, on the other hand, called forth threats of total war on the entire population of the South, threats that were carried out a few months later, leading to as many as 750,000 American deaths. (p. 31)

DiLorenzo is fully prepared for the objection that even if the Southern states had ample reason to oppose Lincoln’s economic plans, they had no legal right to secede. In this view, Lincoln had a constitutional duty to preserve the Union by any means necessary. The historian Allan Guelzo claims that Southern secessionists were guilty of treason by their efforts to leave the Union. In what to my mind is the highlight of the book, DiLorenzo turns the tables on those who charge the Southern states with treason. The United States was a compact of sovereign states, and a state that no longer wished to remain part of the Union was free to leave.

This view of the matter was not dreamed up by Southern firebrands in 1860; it had behind it the weighty authority of Thomas Jefferson.

In an August 12, 1803, letter to John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who had inquired about the secession movement that was gaining prominence in New England at that time, Jefferson wrote that if there is to be a "separation" then "God bless them both [that is, both regions of the union that were at odds], & keep them in the union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better." (p. 22, brackets in original)

If one accepts Jefferson’s approach, Lincoln’s nationalist understanding of the United States was, as Murray Rothbard would say, “monstrous.” As DiLorenzo writes,

Lincoln justified the military invasion of his own country and the mass killing of fellow American citizens by the hundreds of thousands with a theory that the people of the "free and independent states," as they are called in the Declaration of Independence, were not sovereign, that the Union—which is to say, the federal government—was the real sovereign; that the federal government was therefore supreme; that the Union was not voluntary; and that no state had a right to secede from it…the theory that the union of the states is older than the states themselves makes about as much sense as the theory that a marital union can be older than either spouse—in which case they would have been married before they were born….No state would ever have ratified the Constitution if this—Lincoln’s theory of the "more perfect Union"—was what the founding generation thought the document said. (pp. 109–11)

With a brilliant stroke, DiLorenzo reverses the verdict that leaving the Union was treason. Lincoln was the real traitor:

Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern states was the very definition of treason in Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which defines treason as "only in levying war upon them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." The "them" and "their" in this definition of treason refer to "the United States," which are always in the plural in the founding documents, denoting that the individual, free, and independent states were uniting by a compact among them, not irrevocably surrendering their sovereignty and their very existence in favor of a sacred, perpetual, inescapable Union. (pp. 77–78)

Once Lincoln invaded the South, he and his henchmen carried on the war with great brutality. Murray Rothbard says that the Union conduct of the war

broke the 19th century rules of war by specifically plundering and slaughtering civilians, by destroying civilian life and institutions so as to reduce the South to submission. Sherman’s infamous March through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half. Because by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century. (quoted on p. 44)

DiLorenzo confronts an important objection to his main argument. Even if Lincoln didn’t start the war to free the slaves but rather to create a powerful central state, wasn’t war still necessary to end slavery? This seems unlikely. In an appearance on Bill Maher’s television program, Ron Paul "responded [to Maher] by pointing out that all other countries in the world that ended slavery in the nineteenth century did so peacefully, without a civil war, specifically citing how the British used tax dollars to buy the freedom of the slaves and then ended slavery legally throughout the British Empire" (p. 71).

DiLorenzo’s forthright analysis of Lincoln stands in marked contrast to a leading member of what our author, following the usage of Lerone Bennett Jr., calls the Logos school, "which treats Lincoln’s words as gospel truth. An example of this would be a statement by Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa when I [DiLorenzo] debated him at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, in 2003. During the question-and-answer session, an audience member—apparently a Jaffa protégé—asked Jaffa if he thought Lincoln’s speeches were the words of God. Jaffa responded that yes, he thought they were." (pp. 139–40)

Readers of The Problem with Lincoln will be forever immune to this idolatrous nonsense.

diligently seeking wrote: ↑July 19th, 2020, 7:29 am

ajax wrote: ↑July 18th, 2020, 3:09 pm Demolishing the Lincoln Myth, Yet Again
https://mises.org/wire/demolishing-linc ... -yet-again
David Gordon

The Problem with Lincoln is the culmination of Tom DiLorenzo’s many years of research on Abraham Lincoln. It is a masterly summing-up and extension of his earlier classics The Real Lincoln (2002) and Lincoln Unmasked (2006). DiLorenzo is both a historian and an economist with an expert knowledge of Austrian economics and also of the public choice school. This background enables him to grasp what most other historians of the Civil War period miss, the centralizing economic plan behind Lincoln’s policies.

DiLorenzo calls attention to a vital fact that demolishes the mythological view that Lincoln's primary motive for opposing secession in 1861 was his distaste for slavery. Precisely the opposite is true. It is well known that, in an effort to promote compromise, a constitutional amendment was proposed in Congress that forever forbade interference with slavery in states where it already existed. Lincoln referred to the proposal, the Corwin Amendment, in his first inaugural, stating that he was not opposed to the amendment, since it merely made explicit the existing constitutional arrangement regarding slavery. Of course, Lincoln was not telling the truth; nothing in the Constitution prior to the Corwin Amendment prohibited amendments to end slavery, so this new proposal did not just make the existing constitutional arrangement explicit. Readers can judge the Corwin Amendment for themselves, in a helpful set of original documents that our author includes in the book. (The Corwin Amendment is on p. 217.)

So much is well established, but DiLorenzo adds a surprising touch. Far from viewing the Corwin Amendment with grudging consent, Lincoln was in fact its behind-the-scenes promoter.

It was Lincoln himself who had instructed his soon-to-be secretary of state William Seward to suggest three resolutions, the import of the first of which was identical with that of the Corwin Amendment, to the ‘Committee of Thirteen’ in the U.S. Senate "without indicating they issued from Springfield"—that is, from Lincoln himself. (p. 28, quoting Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals)

Extension of slavery in the territories was for Lincoln an entirely different matter, and on this issue he refused all compromise. Here we confront a paradox. If Lincoln thought it more important to preserve the Union than to oppose slavery, why was he unwilling to compromise over slavery in the territories? If he thought slavery's extension was too high a price to pay to preserve the Union, why was he willing permanently to entrench slavery wherever it already existed? It is hard to detect a moral difference between slavery in the states and the territories.

DiLorenzo readily resolves the paradox. Lincoln opposed extension of slavery, because this would interfere with the prospects of white workers. Lincoln, following his mentor Henry Clay, favored a nationalist economic program of which high tariffs, a national bank, and governmentally financed "internal improvements" were key elements. This program, he thought, would promote not only the interests of the wealthy industrial and financial powers that he always faithfully served but would benefit white labor as well. Blacks, in his opinion, would be better off outside the United States, and throughout his life Lincoln supported schemes for repatriation of blacks to Africa and elsewhere. If blacks left the country, they could not compete with whites, the primary objects of Lincoln's concern. (Lincoln, by the way, did not see this program as in any way in contradiction to his professed belief that all men are created equal. Blacks, he thought, had human rights but not political rights.)

In order to finance his economic program, high tariffs were essential.

In his first inaugural address, Lincoln threw down the gauntlet of war over tax collection….He reassured the country that "there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority." (p. 30)

DiLorenzo is appropriately scathing about Lincoln’s remarks.

The myth of the sacred Union bound together by "the mystic cords of memory" was invented to provide cover for Lincoln’s coldhearted willingness to wage total war on his own country for tax revenue….There was no talk of "force" of any kind when the subject was slavery—except for forcing runaway slaves back into slavery by enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act; tax collection, on the other hand, called forth threats of total war on the entire population of the South, threats that were carried out a few months later, leading to as many as 750,000 American deaths. (p. 31)

DiLorenzo is fully prepared for the objection that even if the Southern states had ample reason to oppose Lincoln’s economic plans, they had no legal right to secede. In this view, Lincoln had a constitutional duty to preserve the Union by any means necessary. The historian Allan Guelzo claims that Southern secessionists were guilty of treason by their efforts to leave the Union. In what to my mind is the highlight of the book, DiLorenzo turns the tables on those who charge the Southern states with treason. The United States was a compact of sovereign states, and a state that no longer wished to remain part of the Union was free to leave.

This view of the matter was not dreamed up by Southern firebrands in 1860; it had behind it the weighty authority of Thomas Jefferson.

In an August 12, 1803, letter to John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, who had inquired about the secession movement that was gaining prominence in New England at that time, Jefferson wrote that if there is to be a "separation" then "God bless them both [that is, both regions of the union that were at odds], & keep them in the union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better." (p. 22, brackets in original)

If one accepts Jefferson’s approach, Lincoln’s nationalist understanding of the United States was, as Murray Rothbard would say, “monstrous.” As DiLorenzo writes,

Lincoln justified the military invasion of his own country and the mass killing of fellow American citizens by the hundreds of thousands with a theory that the people of the "free and independent states," as they are called in the Declaration of Independence, were not sovereign, that the Union—which is to say, the federal government—was the real sovereign; that the federal government was therefore supreme; that the Union was not voluntary; and that no state had a right to secede from it…the theory that the union of the states is older than the states themselves makes about as much sense as the theory that a marital union can be older than either spouse—in which case they would have been married before they were born….No state would ever have ratified the Constitution if this—Lincoln’s theory of the "more perfect Union"—was what the founding generation thought the document said. (pp. 109–11)

With a brilliant stroke, DiLorenzo reverses the verdict that leaving the Union was treason. Lincoln was the real traitor:

Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern states was the very definition of treason in Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which defines treason as "only in levying war upon them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort." The "them" and "their" in this definition of treason refer to "the United States," which are always in the plural in the founding documents, denoting that the individual, free, and independent states were uniting by a compact among them, not irrevocably surrendering their sovereignty and their very existence in favor of a sacred, perpetual, inescapable Union. (pp. 77–78)

Once Lincoln invaded the South, he and his henchmen carried on the war with great brutality. Murray Rothbard says that the Union conduct of the war

broke the 19th century rules of war by specifically plundering and slaughtering civilians, by destroying civilian life and institutions so as to reduce the South to submission. Sherman’s infamous March through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half. Because by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century. (quoted on p. 44)

DiLorenzo confronts an important objection to his main argument. Even if Lincoln didn’t start the war to free the slaves but rather to create a powerful central state, wasn’t war still necessary to end slavery? This seems unlikely. In an appearance on Bill Maher’s television program, Ron Paul "responded [to Maher] by pointing out that all other countries in the world that ended slavery in the nineteenth century did so peacefully, without a civil war, specifically citing how the British used tax dollars to buy the freedom of the slaves and then ended slavery legally throughout the British Empire" (p. 71).

DiLorenzo’s forthright analysis of Lincoln stands in marked contrast to a leading member of what our author, following the usage of Lerone Bennett Jr., calls the Logos school, "which treats Lincoln’s words as gospel truth. An example of this would be a statement by Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa when I [DiLorenzo] debated him at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, in 2003. During the question-and-answer session, an audience member—apparently a Jaffa protégé—asked Jaffa if he thought Lincoln’s speeches were the words of God. Jaffa responded that yes, he thought they were." (pp. 139–40)

Readers of The Problem with Lincoln will be forever immune to this idolatrous nonsense.

Lincoln, to appreciate him—you have to be able to appreciate your own struggle with life in connection of always wanting better and hoping for personal reform and redemption through Jesus. If this course of life is more lip service for folks then largely the power and truth of Lincoln will evade such a person. In other words, because at his core he was a benevolent kind and desiring to be a God fearing, and he truly was a God fearing man, Lincoln was able to change and adjust positions when moral truths were taught to him. Frederick Douglas, as I understand it, helped Lincoln appreciate how wrong, (though Lincoln thought he was right) in colonizing the slaves else where was.

Again, if you are a jaded soul and thrive in that atmosphere vs moving forward in an acknowledged fallen condition desiring for daily redemption and sanctification at the feet of Christ than the greatness of life with Jesus and the greatness of Lincoln will evade you... Familiar spirits want us to miss the mark and find fault in a inaccurate ways. They want us to make assessments that align with prevailing tellestial fallen sentiments that thrive by diminishing moral and virtuous truth. Few things squelch the desire to seek mysteries of Godliness than a soul filled with unbelief and jaded finger pointing when a person moving along the path of life stumbles and rises stumbles and rises. The rising is seen as phony and the perceived stumbles are exaggerated and the emphasis of focus—- and the devil and his angels laugh...

yet in such a accustomed to “find fault individual,” in this persons honest moments they personally want those acquainted with their world to believe they are not their mistakes / stumbling.

To know grace is to extend grace. Which spirit have we chosen to “list to obey” in life as it pertains to correctly making assessments etc?

diligently seeking wrote: ↑July 12th, 2020, 1:21 pm

ajax wrote: ↑July 12th, 2020, 10:02 am

diligently seeking wrote: ↑July 12th, 2020, 8:19 am
Turning to Jesus and striving for reconciliation through Jesus, Lincoln got that as much if not more than any living President.

If any one is looking to cleanse their understanding of the disparagement of Lincoln on this thread and Learn of who Lincoln was regarding the true strength of his position being ultimately a disciple of Jesus in his “incomings and outgoings” / responsibilities — please read this book.

https://www.amazon.com/Lincolns-Battle- ... 1480506427

Yeah, disciple of Jesus Lincoln: waging war on fellow Americans and civilians causing mass death and suffering, subverting the Constitution and the original order of the nature of the union.

But he liked to quote scripture sometimes.

Reality vs Rhetoric.

So said they who proclaimed supposed hypocrisy Of Captain Moroni for his reason’s in the swift death of those who would usurp freedoms...

diligently seeking wrote: ↑July 19th, 2020, 7:40 am https://www.amazon.com/Lincolns-Battle- ... 1480506427

Read this book see how much in a lot of ways Lincoln was just like you... take courage and inspiration by how he over came. Signs truly follow those that believe. Greatness of soul / the love of God that “sheds itself abroad in ones heart” is the greatest indication / sign of belief... Lincoln had a great endowment of this gift as well as many other endowments of the Holy Spirit because he overcame his challenges through the redemptive power and glory of Jesus. Of this I witness in his behalf...

The title of Thomas J. DiLorenzo new book, The Problem with Lincoln, is an understatement. Lincoln was far more than a problem. He was the worst disaster ever to befall the United States.

Lincoln destroyed the federal republic established by the founding fathers, and he destroyed the Constitution that protected it. He violated every provision of, and every Amendment to, the Constitution. He then rewrote, in effect, the Constitution and left the 10th Amendment out.

The Lincoln regime was a dictatorship. Lincoln disregarded US law, the US Constitution, every right of the people, the power and authority of judges, and even exiled a US Representative. DiLorenzo writes that “freedom of speech was virtually nonexistent in the Northern states for the duration of the Lincoln administration.” Lincoln ordered the arrest and imprisonment of everyone who disapproved of his invasion of the South or made the slightest criticism of him. There were mass arrests of citizens and news paper editors of northern states. A minimum of 38,000 citizens of northern states were imprisoned without due process.

Lincoln committed treason against the Constitution when he suspended Habeas Corpus. No such power resides in the presidency. Only Congress can suspend Habeas Corpus even in the case of rebellion and invasion.

US Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley wrote that it may be necessary to teach Taney a lesson. Lincoln had an arrest warrent written for Taney’s arrest, but did not serve it, apparently instead relying on Taney’s awareness of the warrant to bring him into line.

Other judges both state and federal who attempted to uphold laws were beat bloody and dragged off to prision or placed under house arrest and prevented from performing their judicial duties. Judge Richard Bennett Carmichael in Maryland attempted to enforce due process. Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward sent armed federal soldiers. They pistol-whipped the judge in his chambers, “beat him bloody and unconscious, and dragged him off to Fort McHenry.” US circuit court judge William Merrick issued a writ of habeas corpus for an underaged youth and was put “under house arrest by force of arms without due process.” Under Lincoln, there was not only no separation of powers, there was no other power.

Lincoln used army troops to break up meetings of the Democratic Party. US Senator Thomas A. Hendricks, for example, was prevented from speaking by Union troops with fixed bayonets who threatened “to make a summary disposal of him.”

In other words, life under Lincoln in the North was like life in the Soviet Union during the darkest days of Stalin’s rule. Life under Lincoln in the South was like Stalin’s destruction of the kulaks.

The white liberal “Lincoln scholars” admit much of this. And they justify it. For example, Cornell University professor Clinton Rossiter wrote a book, curiously titled Constitutional Dictatorship, a contradiction in terms. Rossiter declares Lincoln to be “a great dictator” whose “amazing disregard for the Constitution was considered by nobody as legal.” Rossiter celebrates this fact. Being a “great dictator” is what made Lincoln a “true democrat.” Another “Lincoln scholar,” Dean Sprague, wrote a book detailing hundreds of acts of tyranny by Lincoln, “and then somehow managed to conclude that Lincoln ‘had no taste for tyranny’ and was a ‘great humanitarian.’”

“This,” DiLorenzo writes, “is what makes someone a Lincoln ‘scholar’—dictatorship is democracy, tyranny is freedom, destroying the Constitution is constitutional, imprisoning political dissenters is benevolent, dictatorship in the right hands is good and noble—and on it goes.”

The most important chapter in DiLorenzo’s book is the fourth one. In this chapter the war crimes of Lincoln and his generals and army are the subject. Lincoln has the disgrace of being the first ruler in modern times to unleash indiscriminate war on civilian populations. From Lincoln came all of Washington’s subsequent violations of the rules of war and the Geneva protocols and conventions—the firebombing of Japanese and German civilian cities, the nuking of two Japanese civilian cities, the atrocities in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the murder of 500,000 Iraqi children justified by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in true Lincoln fashion as “worth it,” the massive deaths from Washington’s and Washington-sponsored illegal invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Washington’s bombings of Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, the persecution and torture of journalist Julian Assange, the torture horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. If the South had won the war, Lincoln, the entirety of the Union high command and the bulk of the Union army could have been legally and justly hung as war criminals. Indeed, the war crimes of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and the Union army “paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century.”

Lincoln’s war plan was designed to destroy the South, not just its army. Arson, looting, rape and murder of civilians, destruction of their homes, barns, livestock, and towns by the Union thugs in uniform were the means. In Missouri vast areas of the state became uninhabited. Union General James H. Lane said: “We believe in a war of extermination. I want to see every foot of ground in Jackson, Cass and Bates Counties burned over—everything laid waste.”

“Union cavalry burned 45 buildings in Dayton, Missouri, 42 in Rose hill, and 150 private homes in Johnson County. The entire town of Columbus, Missouri, was burned to the ground.”

General Thomas Ewing cleared 3,000 square miles of Missouri from habitation and forced 20,000 civilians from their homes, leaving them homeless, bare-footed and bare-headed with all of their possessions stolen by Union “soldiers.” Ewing bragged of his feat to a Washington reporter, telling him that his action was approved by President Lincoln.

Lincoln’s friend, General Grenville Dodge, announced his policy of starving the entire population of the state of Tennessee. “These people are proud, arrogant rebels,” and will be made to understant that “all they they possess belongs to the US Government.”

In December 1862 Fredericksburg, Virginia, was sacked, looted and destroyed by Union “soldiers.” Dilorenzo reports that “similar lawless abuse of civilians occurred throughout the South as Lincoln’s generals continued to condone and even encourage it.”

Athens, Alabama was sacked by Union Col. Turchin, a Russian immigrant and Czar Nicholas enforcer. The atrocities suffered by the civilian residents included the organized gang-raping of negroe women by Union “soldiers.” This was too much even for Union generals. Major General Don Carlos Buell court-martialed Turchin and dismissed him from the army, but Lincoln intervened and promoted Turchin to general. The Chicago Tribune praised Turchin’s elevation and wrote that Turchin “has had, from the beginning, the wisest and clearest ideas of any man in the field about the way in which the war should be conducted.” This should tell you all you need to know about the “great moral North,” but, alas, there is much worst to come.

Unable to defeat Lee on the field of battle, the Union war criminals increasingly targeted civilians. Charleston, South Carolina, was bombarded for six months by the Union navy. Unexploded shells were still being discovered in 1963,

Atlanta was completely destroyed by General Sherman, first by bombardment and then by planted explosive charges. Sherman’s chief military engineer, Captain O.M. Poe, dismayed at so many corpses of women and children, advised Sherman that there was no military purpose in the continued bombardment. To the contrary, Sherman said, “the corpses are a beautiful sight.”

DiLorenzo writes: “In city after city, town after town, the same routine was followed: bombardment of civilians, theft of their property, burning of their homes and businesses, killing of livestock, even the bizarre, gratuitous and cruel killing of all family dogs.” Orangeburg, South Carolina, was turned into one heap of ashes. “Even graves in cemetaries were dug up as [Union] soldiers searched for any valuable jewelry on the corpses.” Two-thirds of Columbia, South Carolina, was burned to the ground. A Union colonel boasted: “We have burnt one city, the capital, and most of the villages on our route, as well as most of the barns, outbuildings and dwelling houses, and every house that escaped fire has been pillaged.”

The South lost the war when Stonewall Jackson was killed by Confederate sentries who mistook him for a Union scout. With Jackson out of the picture, Union General Philip Sheridan could destroy the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Grant ordered Sheridan to turn the land into “a barren waste.” And he did. “Sheridan informed Grant that he had set fire to 2,200 barns and 70 flour and wheat mills and had stolen or killed at least 7,000 cattle and sheep in one day. ‘Tomorrow I will continue the destruction.’”

DiLorenzo writes: “It took a special kind of ‘soldier’ to commit such war crimes. Sherman biographer Lee Kennett wrote how in Sherman’s army ‘the New York regiments were filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World.’ . . . These men committed atrocious war crimes under the direction of commanders like Sherman, who wrote to his wife that his ultimate purpose in the war was ‘extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people’ of the South. A few years later Sherman would become even more notorious for his saying that ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’ as the commanding general of the [genocidal] Plains Indians Wars.”

The “Lincoln scholars,” frauds to the last, pretend that Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan and the Union armies fought the war in order to free the slaves. Hundreds of thousands of white Northerners died in order to allegedly free black people that Lincoln said were unfit to live among white people. This is the kind of “history” that Americans get from their “historians.” Not a single historical document supports the false claim that the war was fought over slavery. See: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/0 ... civil-war/

It has never, ever, struck “Lincoln scholars” as notable that within six weeks of the end of the war Sherman and Sheridan were busy at work with the Union army exterminating the Plains Indians who were, like the Confederacy, in the way of the empire and the railroad barons.

Sherman wrote to Grant that “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress of the railroads.” Lincoln’s friend, General Grenville Dodge, proposed enslaving the Indians and making them do the work on the railroad beds. DiLorenzo writes: “The same army that had just pillaged, plundered, and looted its way throughout the South ‘to free the slaves,’ as folklore has it, was to become a giant collection of slave plantation overseers.”

Sherman regarded native Americans the same as he regarded southerners—creatures to be exterminated. The native American, the Union general said, was “a less than human and savage race.” The armies of Sherman and Sheridan conducted more than a thousand raids on Indian villages, mostly in winter months when families would be hunkered down together. Orders were given to kill everyone and everything, including women, children, and animals. A war of extermination of the buffalo was launched in order to deprive the Indians of food and to starve them to death, making them an ineffectual fighting force. The crimes committed by the Union army from 1861 unto well into the 1880s exceed the war crimes of any other period of history.

DiLorenzo concludes: “Their behavior paved the way for the great sins and war crimes of the twentieth century’s wars.”

DiLorenzo describes how the criminal Lincoln was turned into a saint and how Lincoln’s criminal actions became precedents for presidents who followed. President George W. Bush repeated Lincoln’s illegal act of suspending habeas corpus, and Congress and the Supreme Court did not challenge Bush’s usurpation of the power of Congress. Both Bush and Obama dispensed with due process. Because of Lincoln, the United States today bears no resemblance to the country created by the Founding Fathers. The United States, as it once was, was in its grave in 1865.

When the war was over, the real destruction of the South began. It is known as Reconstruction. The humiliation of southern people and the poisoning of racial relations by the Republicans and the Union occupiers, had southerners been less decent people, would have ended in the extermination of blacks and the killing on sight of every northerner and their southern accomplices. But southerners were a moral and civilized people. Consequently, it was the South that was exterminated.