The Problem with Lincoln

To Professor Clyde Wilson,

the very model of a gentleman and a scholar

Chapter 1

Un-Founding Father

Great men are almost always bad men.

—Lord Acton

[U]nder the spurious slogan of Union, he moved at every point… to consolidate central power and render nugatory the autonomy of the states. It is on his shoulders that the responsibility for the war must be placed.… We all know his gentle words, ‘with malice toward none, with charity for all,’ but his actions belie this rhetoric.… this was Lincoln’s pattern of war leadership: in the North, a repressive dictatorship; against the South, the brutal meat-grinder tactics of ‘Unconditional Surrender’ Grant and the brigand campaigns waged against civilians by Sherman.… Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted upon the Constitution, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to carry through his revolution, for the coercive welfare state to come into being.… Lincoln… opened the way to centralized government with all its attendant political evils.

—Frank Meyer¹

As the quotation above, from conservative literary icon Frank Meyer, attests, it was once possible for conservatives to judge all presidents by their actions and not just the prettier words of some of their speeches. That all changed in the 1960s when a segment of the conservative intellectual class joined with the leftist intellectual class to essentially deify Lincoln and censor virtually all criticisms of him, no matter how fact-based they might be. The Left was honest about its motives in this regard. The late Professor Kenneth Stampp, a former president of the Organization of American Historians and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, admitted that a rewriting of the history of Lincoln and the Civil War was being undertaken in the hope that it would bolster the welfare state and the civil rights policies of the government during the Johnson administration. From that point on it would become more and more difficult for Americans to learn the unfiltered, unspun truth about our sixteenth president.

The Left has always championed centralized governmental power in the name of egalitarianism. Since Lincoln is more responsible than anyone else in American history for the centralized governmental bureaucracy that Americans have now lived under for generations, and because he is famous for his egalitarian rhetoric, he is wholeheartedly embraced by the Left as a hero. (The Communist Party USA even used to hold Lincoln–Lenin Day celebrations in New York City.)

The segment of conservatism that has done the most to obfuscate the history of Lincoln and the Civil War is the so-called Straussians (followers of the twentieth-century philosopher Leo Strauss), whose intellectual leader was the late Harry Jaffa, an expert in the use of rhetoric (the field of his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago). Jaffa’s writings on Lincoln are almost devoid of historical facts; instead, they are filled with instructions on how to properly interpret Lincoln’s speeches. As Frank Meyer explained in an important essay in National Review, Jaffa celebrates Lincoln for his novel theory that America was founded not on freedom from governmental oppression and taxation without representation—on the rallying cry of give me liberty or give me death—but on the principle of the equality of individual persons.²

Members of what we might call the Lincoln Cult, whether on the Left or the Right, routinely use ad hominem attacks to censor all criticism of Lincoln by insinuating that the critic is somehow a secret racist and even a defender of slavery. In a review of Judge Robert Bork’s book, The Tempting of America, Jaffa himself compared the late Judge Robert Bork to Confederate president Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun. This was Jaffa’s way of insinuating that since Judge Bork may have been a neo-Confederate, his views of the Constitution should be dismissed and ignored.

Like leftist revisionism, the Straussian rewriting of history has been used to bolster a political agenda: If America is based on the principle that all men are created equal, that means all men everywhere. Therefore, it is morally right for the U.S. government to militarily intervene virtually anywhere in the world to bring equal freedom to the oppressed. Historian and philosopher Professor Mel Bradford has called this the rhetoric of continuing revolution.³

And these interventions require a highly centralized government, perhaps even a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores, as William F. Buckley Jr. once said was necessary to fight the Cold War.

As Frank Meyer points out in his telling criticism of Jaffa and his odd, ahistorical theories about the American founding, freedom from government compulsion, not equality, is the central theme of American constitutionalism. Freedom and equality are opposites, in fact, and any political or social attempt… to enforce equality leads inevitably to the restriction and the eventual destruction of freedom. Meyer was all for equality under the law and in the eyes of God, as he once put it, but he wasn’t for Jaffa’s Lincolnian notion of equality, which he thought was the primrose path to tyranny. Since human beings are all unique in thousands of different ways, the governmental enforcement of equality or even equal opportunity is a recipe for totalitarian government.⁴

The Truth about Lincoln

So many thousands of books deifying Lincoln have been published that it is nearly impossible for the average citizen who is not a university researcher with an advanced degree to learn much of anything that is truthful about Lincoln and his war. But the truth is out there and can be found in myriad scholarly publications and documents. The problem for the average citizen is that these facts are squirreled away in university libraries, the National Archives, and other such places, and they rarely make their way into the public school textbooks from which most Americans learn whatever they know—or think they know—about Abraham Lincoln. This state of affairs is not surprising in light of the nearly complete dominance of government-funded schools at all levels. Government-funded schools are not likely to be keen on criticizing the government’s greatest president.

This book is intended to challenge the designation of Abraham Lincoln as America’s greatest president. Some readers may even decide that he was the worst. It contains many plain and easily documented historical facts—facts that your teachers probably never told you—that could easily lead to that conclusion. To give just one example, no American in 1861 thought Lincoln invaded the South to free the slaves; as we shall see, he declared in his first inaugural address that he had no intention of doing so, and the U.S. Congress’s declaration of its war aims said the same thing.

You probably never learned that the rest of the world—and even the Northern states in the U.S.—ended slavery peacefully in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lincoln’s greatest failure was that he did not pursue a policy of peaceful emancipation, as all the rest of the world had done. Instead, in his first inaugural address he promised to protect slavery forever by endorsing the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, which would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with Southern slavery. The first inaugural address should rightly be known as Lincoln’s slavery now, slavery tomorrow, and slavery forever speech.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the prejudice of race was, ironically, even worse in the North than in the South. Lincoln was certainly a man of the North in this regard. Throughout his life he made numerous speeches endorsing racist, white supremacist policies: excluding negroes from juries and the right to vote, prohibiting interracial marriage, deporting every last African via his cherished policy of colonization, and more—as we will see in greater detail in chapter 2, on the myth of Lincoln as a racial saint.

The real reason Lincoln never admitted that secession was legal or legitimate and launched an invasion of his own country was to replace the voluntary union of the founders with a coerced union held together by violence and threats of violence. Lincoln himself was very clear about this aim, as we will see in chapter 3.

You were probably not taught in school that, by waging total war on Southern civilians and reducing Southern cities to smoldering ruins, Lincoln violated accepted moral codes and the international law of war and opened the door to the horrific atrocities of twentieth-century warfare, as will be demonstrated in chapter 4. To brush this all aside by repeating General Sherman’s quip that oh well, War is hell, is to embrace an attitude that makes more such atrocities more likely in the future.

Why didn’t Lincoln pursue a policy of peaceful emancipation? Because emancipation was never his real aim. As he himself stated repeatedly, his main purpose was always to save the Union. He even went so far as to write to newspaper editor Horace Greeley that if he "could save the Union without freeing any slave, he would do so. And as a matter of fact, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave, since it only applied to rebel territory" where the U.S. government had no power to emancipate anyone. (See chapter 5, which also contains a survey of how all the rest of the world ended slavery without a bloody war.)

One of the biggest falsehoods perpetuated about Lincoln is that he was a champion and defender of the Constitution. Nothing could be further from the truth. (See chapter 6, King Lincoln, which describes how generations of historians have described Lincoln as a dictator—and then praised him for being a good one!)

Follow the money is good advice to anyone researching why politicians did what they did, especially when it comes to making war. Chapter 7 tells the story of Lincoln’s thirty-year association with the Northern banking-newspaper-railroad-manufacturing elite and how they elected him as their president to promote their interests. This same collection of special interest groups had attempted for decades to turn the U.S. government into an instrument of political plunder for their own benefit, but with little to no success. All of that changed with the election of Lincoln, who gave them everything they wanted and more in return for his elevation to the presidency.

Abraham Lincoln was undeniably a master politician, arguably the most masterful of all American presidents. Saying this is not necessarily a compliment, though. Economist Murray Rothbard defined a masterful politician as one who is a masterful liar, conniver, and manipulator. Chapter 8 catalogues many of the lies, myths, and deceptions that Lincoln employed to justify waging war on his own country, a war that caused the death of as many as 750,000 Americans, more than all other American wars combined—all for the fiction of the sacred Union.

Lincoln was probably the most hated and reviled of all American presidents during his own lifetime, as a book entitled The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, by Larry Tagg, exhaustively documents.⁵

But immediately after his death the Republican Party propaganda machine went to work creating the myth of Saint Lincoln—as detailed in chapter 9, which tells the story of how such a hated and reviled politician was deified, and how that deification eventually hallowed the institution of the presidency and then the federal government as a whole. (It is not healthy for any society to deify its politicians.)

The tenth and final chapter of this book addresses what the Lincoln Myth means for Americans today, as well as the role of court intellectuals in perpetuating the myth. Although I prefer War to Prevent Southern Independence as more accurate than Civil War, the latter is used in this book since it is what the entire world is used to. (A civil war is actually a contest between two or more political factions for control of a country’s government. Jefferson Davis did not want to take over the United States any more than George Washington wanted to take over the government in London.)

Americans are so imbued with what one might call a sporting-event mindset that it interferes with their ability to learn about and understand their own history. The study of history is not a contest where one roots for one side over the other. The purpose of the study of history should be to better understand the world, period. Criticizing Abraham Lincoln does not make one a defender of the Confederacy any more than criticizing FDR makes one a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. It is no more legitimate to call a critic of FDR a Nazi sympathizer than it is to call a critic of Abraham Lincoln a Confederate sympathizer. (One of the harshest critics of Lincoln is Lerone Bennett Jr., the distinguished African American writer, longtime managing editor of Ebony magazine, and author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. It is doubtful that he was a Confederate sympathizer.) Anyone who argues otherwise is promoting censorship of ideas and the historical ignorance that it fosters.

Chapter 2

The Racial Saint

Lincoln never acknowledges black inferiority.

—Dinesh D’Souza¹

[T]he level of ignorance on Abraham Lincoln and race in the United States is a scandal…

—Lerone Bennett Jr.²

The claim above by Dinesh D’Souza, an Ivy League–educated author and successful documentary filmmaker, is typical of what generations of Americans have been taught about Abraham Lincoln’s views on race. It is also diametrically opposed to the truth. If someone as intelligent as D’Souza can be so easily misled about his country’s history, so can millions of others.

The professional Lincoln historians know the truth about Lincoln’s views on race, and sometimes even write about them, but such things are almost completely whitewashed from the school textbooks. Hence the ignorance of the American public about the real Lincoln. As just one example, consider the following description of Lincoln by historian James Oakes, winner of multiple Lincoln Prizes for the best book of the year on Lincoln historiography: Lincoln… earned a reputation as a brutal partisan attack dog. He published pseudonymous letters and anonymous editorials satirizing the religious convictions of his opponents or belittling their manhood. Worst of all was Lincoln’s penchant for race-baiting. He implied that Democrats would give blacks the vote and that Illinois would ‘be overrun with free negroes.’ He described Martin Van Buren’s running mate as ‘the husband of a negro wench, and the father of a band of mulatoes.’ He published fake letters endorsing Democrats in ‘negro dialect.’

Upon entering politics, Lincoln quickly gained the reputation for being a race-baiting political hack, says James Oakes. He was not merely a man of his times when it came to his commentary on race: he announced over and over again in public what a proud white supremacist he was, how he opposed making voters or jurors of negroes, his fierce opposition to interracial marriage, his plan to deport or colonize all black people, and more. His actions supported his words all throughout his adult life.³

In other words, he was not just pandering to Northern racist voters with his racist rhetoric, as we shall see below.

Lincoln would never have been elected president by Northern whites as he was if he had not held such views, for as Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.⁴

(The Northern states ended slavery for primarily economic reasons through gradual, compensated emancipation—so gradual, in fact, that there were still slaves in New York City in the early 1850s, although the legal phasing-out of slavery there had begun almost sixty years earlier.⁵

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Words You Probably Never Heard in School

The self-described Lincoln scholars have written entire books about single speeches by Lincoln that include some of his prettier-sounding political slogans and rhetoric. His second inaugural address, with catchphrases such as malice toward none, charity toward all, is a great favorite in this regard.⁶

But Lincoln gave hundreds of other speeches deploying rhetoric that is not so attractive, and these speeches are almost never brought to the attention of American students outside of graduate students doing thesis or dissertation research. A survey of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln presents an entirely different picture of Lincoln the man than is current in American folklore.⁷

Far from maintaining that all men are created equal, Lincoln assured his audiences over and over again that his true beliefs were that black people were inferior to whites. Free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this, he said. We can not make them equals.⁸

According to Lincoln, it was natural for white people to be disgusted by the notion of racial desegregation. There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races, he said.⁹

Lincoln did not distinguish himself from the nearly all white people he was referring to. On the contrary, he was assuring potential voters that he was of the same opinion. What I would most desire, he said in a debate with Stephen Douglas, would be the separation of the white and black races.… I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary.¹⁰

Today the political Left seems intent on smearing anyone who opposes its political agenda as a racist, sexist, or white supremacist. President Trump was the object of these libelous labels thousands of times. Leftists do this, presumably, because it is hard to think of a worse thing to say about a political opponent. But in Lincoln’s day it was apparently a badge of honor to be a white supremacist—or so Abraham Lincoln himself appears to have thought. Why else would he have literally used the word superior to describe the position that the white race should hold compared to other races?

Lincoln adamantly opposed any thought of equality of the black and white races. I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, he said. And I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.¹¹

One has to wonder how Dinesh D’Souza ever came to the conclusion that Lincoln never acknowledges black inferiority. It could not have been from reading the sixteenth president’s own words.

Lincoln maintained a lifelong opposition to interracial marriage. Long before he was elected president, he assured voters in Illinois, I will to the very last stand by the law of this state, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes.¹²

He stated that Judge Douglas is especially horrified at the thought of mixing the blood by the white and black races, and then said agreed for once—a thousand times agreed.… On this point we fully agree with the Judge; and when he shall show that his policy is better adapted to prevent amalgamation than ours we shall drop ours, and adopt his. Furthermore, A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, said Lincoln. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas.¹³

Lincoln was referring to his opposition—and that of the Republican Party—to the extension of slavery into the new territories. As a senatorial and presidential candidate Lincoln never opposed Southern slavery, only the extension of slavery into the territories. I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists, he announced.¹⁴

And, I believe there is no right, and ought to be no inclination in the people of the free states to enter into the slave states and interfere with the question of slavery at all.¹⁵

In a speech in Peoria, Illinois, in 1854, he proclaimed, The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories. We want them for the homes of free white people.¹⁶

Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward, once said, The motive of those who protested against the extension of slavery had always really been concern for the welfare of the white man, and not an unnatural sympathy for the Negro.¹⁷

So sympathy for black people was unnatural according to the man chosen by Lincoln to be the American secretary of state. Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull reiterated the same sentiment when he announced, We, the Republican Party, are the white man’s party. We are for the free white man, and for making white labor acceptable and honorable, which it can never be when Negro slave labor is brought into competition with it.¹⁸

Finally, as historian Eugene Berwanger has noted, all during the 1860 presidential campaign, Republicans made no pretense of being concerned with the fate of the Negro and insisted that theirs was a party of white labor. By introducing a note of white supremacy, they hoped to win the votes of the Negro-phobes and the anti-abolitionists who were opposed to the extension of slavery.¹⁹

This view was cemented in the Republican Party platform of 1860, which opposed the extension of slavery into the territories, but defended Southern slavery. Item 4 of that platform read, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any state or territory, no matter under what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.²⁰

The phrase domestic institutions alluded to the institution of slavery. Just months after this document was published, the Republican Party would commit what it here called the gravest of crimes by launching an invasion of the Southern states.

Lincoln (and the Republican Party) gave two reasons for opposition to the extension of slavery into the territories: First, so that the territories could be preserved for free white labor and the amalgamation of the races prevented; second, to diminish the congressional representation of the Democratic Party. At the time, the Three-Fifths Clause of the U.S. Constitution counted every five slaves as three persons for the purpose of determining how many congressional representatives there would be for each state. Permitting slavery in the territories, Lincoln and the Republican Party feared, would inflate Democratic