The Real Lincoln: a New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda and an Unnecessary War Pdf

FREE THE REAL LINCOLN: A NEW LOOK AT ABRAHAM LINCOLN, HIS AGENDA AND AN UNNECESSARY WAR PDF

By Walter E. Calhoun said, "Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or consolidated His Agenda and an Unnecessary War a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence, and force must ultimately prevail. Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. Thomas J. African slavery existed in many parts of the Western world, but it did not take warfare to end it. Dozens of countries, including the territorial possessions of the British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, ended slavery peacefully during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Countries such as Venezuela and Colombia experienced conflict because slave emancipation was simply a ruse for revolutionaries who were seeking state power and were not motivated by emancipation per se. Abraham Lincoln's direct statements indicated his support for slavery; He defended slave owners' right to own their property, saying that "when they remind us of their constitutional rights [to own slaves], I acknowledge them, not grudgingly but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the claiming of their fugitives" in indicating support for the Fugitive Slave Act of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was little more than a political gimmick, and he admitted so in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase: "The original proclamation has no…legal justification, except as a military measure. The true costs of the War between the States were not thebattlefield-related deaths, out of a national population of 30 million were we to control for population growth, that would be equivalent to roughly 5 million battlefield deaths today. Thomas Jefferson saw as the most important safeguard of the liberties of the people "the support of the state governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti- republican tendencies. If the federal government makes encroachments on the constitutional rights of the people and the states, what are their options? In a word, their right to secede. Most of today's Americans believe, as did Abraham Lincoln, that states do not have a right to secession, but that is false. DiLorenzo marshals numerous proofs that from the very founding of our nation the right of secession was seen as a natural right of the people and a last check on abuse by the central government. For example, at Virginia's ratification convention, the delegates affirmed "that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to injury or oppression. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, "The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing so, and the His Agenda and an Unnecessary War Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right. DiLorenzo lists newspaper after newspaper editorial arguing the right of secession. Most significantly, these were Northern newspapers. In fact, the first secession movement started in the North, long before shots were fired at Fort Sumter. The New England states debated the idea of secession during the Hartford Convention of — Lincoln's intentions, as well as those of many Northern politicians, were summarized by Stephen Douglas during the senatorial debates. Douglas accused Lincoln of wanting to "impose on the nation a uniformity of local laws and institutions and a moral homogeneity dictated by the central government" that would "place at defiance the intentions of the republic's founders. The War between the States settled by force whether states could secede. Once it was established that states cannot secede, the federal government, abetted by a Supreme Court unwilling to hold it to The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln constitutional restraints, was able to run amok over states' rights, so much so that the protections of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments mean little or nothing today. Not only did the war lay the foundation for eventual nullification or weakening of basic constitutional protections against central government abuses, but it also laid to rest the great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. The Real Lincoln contains irrefutable evidence that a more appropriate title for Abraham Lincoln is not the Great Emancipator, but the Great Centralizer. Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University, and The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln nationally syndicated columnist. The Best of Walter The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln. Show Menu. Williams March 22, Tags: Walter E. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page. Privacy Policy. DiLorenzo Is Right About Lincoln - LewRockwell

Please contact mpub-help umich. For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy. Thomas J. Roseville, Calif. Lanham, Md. Two decades ago Don E. Fehrenbacher wrote in these pages of "an anti-Lincoln tradition, attenuated but persistent, that had its sturdy roots in the years of the Civil War. Foremost among those issues are national civil rights policy, race relations, and the nature and scope of national government power, including the relationship between majority rule and minority rights. Two new books dealing with the economic dimension of the Civil War suggest that the ranks of Lincoln detractors have been augmented by libertarian economists. A generation ago this would have seemed an unlikely source of anti-Lincoln opinion. On the face of it, hostility toward Lincoln would appear as counterintuitive for market-minded economists as for emancipation-minded African Americans. By any reasonable standard, the defeat of the Confederacy and abolition of slavery, for which Lincoln was primarily responsible, signified the expansion of liberty in the form of free labor and entrepreneurial capitalism, as well as racially impartial civil rights guarantees. In today's hyper-pluralistic society, however, economic liberty is as politically contentious as civil rights and liberties. More precisely, with respect to the books under review, there is a temptation for writers oblivious to the requirements of historical scholarship to treat Lincoln's speeches and writings as a polemical grab bag from which to select materials, abstracted from their historical context, that can be used to present Lincoln in an unfavorable light. The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln and Charles Adams, writing from the point of view that in academic economics is labeled anarcho-capitalist libertarianismscavenge the documentary record in an attempt to show Lincoln as a revolutionary centralizer who used national sovereignty to establish corporate-mercantilist hegemony at the expense of genuine economic liberty. No one has ever denied that Lincoln was a vigorous supporter The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln free-market capitalism as defined by the policies of the Whig party. DiLorenzo and Adams go far beyond the evidence, however, in equating the nineteenth-century American system of central banking, protective tariff, and internal improvements with late-twentieth-century "corporate welfare" policies. Assuming a narrow conception of economic motivation, their approach is even more reductionist than the quasi-Marxian theory of economic materialism that inspired progressive historians in the early twentieth century. In Charles A. Beard's famous phrase, the Civil War was the Second American Revolution, which saw northern business interests seize national power from the proslavery planter class. Critical of the laissez faire ideology of their day, progressives blamed this economic development on the Radical Republicans, not on Lincoln, who in their reformist outlook was a sympathetic figure. DiLorenzo and Adams, by contrast, write from a hard-edge libertarian perspective that is considered politically conservative because it is critical of the mixed economy of modern corporate capitalism. They attack Lincoln as the "great centralizer" who paved the way for the twentieth-century liberal regulatory welfare state. In this view Lincoln used the sectional conflict over slavery as a pretext for destroying the voluntary, states-rights Union of the founding fathers as well as the decentralized system of private property and agrarian-commercial liberty that was its economic corollary. The problem with His Agenda and an Unnecessary War two books is not their focus on economic change as a key factor in the assessment of Civil War politics. DiLorenzo and Adams regard Lincoln, like Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster before him, as a one-dimensional politician whose "real agenda" was to create a mercantilist economic order of central banking, discriminatory taxation for the protection of northern industry, and corporate-welfare subsidies internal improvements. In this interpretation Lincoln was a mythical "great emancipator," a racist white supremacist who did not really care about the well being of Negro slaves. His abiding ambition was "the consolidation of state power" DiLorenzo, It is not that a case cannot be made analyzing Lincoln's career from a public choice perspective that views the exercise of political power through the lens of economic calculation. It is that the dogmatic, undiscriminating libertarianism of these authors precludes any realistic consideration of the complexity of political life as it manifestly appears in the historical record. Methodologically, this takes the form of substituting mere assertion for documentary evidence. DiLorenzo, for example, describing Lincoln's "real agenda," writes: "In virtually every one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln made it a point to champion the nationalization of money and to demonize Jackson and the Democrats for their opposition to it" This will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the debates, which were primarily concerned with the slavery question and matters related to it. Perhaps the clearest illustration of the kind of reasoning upon which these accounts depend can be seen in the discussion of the secession crisis. Both authors claim that Lincoln provoked the South into war in order to adopt a protective tariff policy favoring northern business interests. Proof of his motivation is found in a statement from Lincoln's first inaugural address, that "The power confided to me, will The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion—no using of force against, or among, the people anywhere. But protectionist tariffs—the keystone of the Republican Party—were nonnegotiable" To be sure, the tariff laws were profoundly significant, and not simply because of the economic significance of tax revenues for the support of government. Secession elevated that conflict into public view as the paramount issue in American politics. Secession forced a showdown, and neither side was willing to compromise. The stand-off can be regarded from a neutral perspective that accords moral equivalence to the rival claims of Union and Confederate nationality. It is a strangely ahistorical kind of libertarianism, however, as illustrated in these books, which judges enforcement of the law of a slave-based society to be morally superior to that of a free-labor society. Perhaps the most economical as well as charitable explanation of the inability of these two libertarian writers to see the forest of freedom for the trees of proslavery secessionism is their lack of understanding—indeed their doctrinaire rejection—of politics. Posing a counter-factual, DiLorenzo asks why Lincoln, if he was the master politician that his hagiographers say he was, "failed to use his legendary political skills and his rhetorical gifts to His Agenda and an Unnecessary War what every other country of the world where slavery once existed had done: end it peacefully, without resort to warfare. Lincoln never seriously offered the nation the opportunity" And why not? Because Lincoln "was not particularly supportive of emancipation" and needed a war to transform America into a centralized imperial nation! Without belaboring the obvious, it is fair to ask what historical value these accounts of Lincoln may have. That His Agenda and an Unnecessary War libertarians can contort the documentary record into an attack on Lincoln for emancipation under false pretenses, tells us more about contemporary academic life than it does about slavery and the Civil War. Much as they might His Agenda and an Unnecessary War to deny it, these supposedly tough-minded libertarians are cut from the same utopian cloth as left-liberal historians who fault Lincoln for being insufficiently egalitarian. To put this in historical terms, the scholarly value of these not very scholarly books lies in their reflection of recent trends in Civil War historiography. Two developments stand out. The first is radicalization of the interrelated issues of slavery, civil rights, and race relations. The second development is a revival of interest in secession as a solution to the problem of government centralization. DiLorenzo and Adams appeal indirectly to the former current in historical writing and directly to the latter. Radicalization of slavery, emancipation, and civil rights refers to the way in which the study of these issues is increasingly subsumed under the rubric of racism. The "discovery" is made that although slaves were emancipated, race relations did not essentially change. In this interpretation, slavery becomes the dependent variable in the historical equation. Racism is the independent variable, the enduring value in American politics and society. From this perspective, the motives of the free soil and antislavery movements are questioned on the ground of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln and denied genuine moral standing. Defense of the Union is divorced from the antebellum controversy over the extension of slavery into the territories. Abstracted from the ideology and aims of the Republican Party, the goal of preserving the Union is viewed simply as a project for aggrandizing national power--a project that includes permanent defense of existing slavery. Meaningful antislavery motives are attributed only to slaves, who in recent accounts are viewed as principally responsible for initiating the process of emancipation. Lincoln and the Union high command, their vision clouded by racial conservatism, stand in need of instruction in the ways of genuinely higher moral purpose by the The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln themselves, whose flight to freedom transformed the war for the Union into an abolitionist crusade. The second scholarly trend reflected in these accounts is renewed interest in secession as a form of political action. In the most general sense the impetus for this intellectual interest has been the collapse of communism and the breakup of the Soviet empire into ethnic national states. In American historiography the study of secession has, of course, never disappeared. The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln it now has appeal not only for unreconstructed Confederate sympathizers, who perhaps have never lost hope in the lost cause, but also for anarcho-capitalist libertarians who view it as a means of resisting what they perceive as the centralized tyranny of the regulatory welfare state. American neosecessionist writers advance two major His Agenda and an Unnecessary War. First, they contend that in the United His Agenda and an Unnecessary War, as elsewhere, slavery was doomed to extinction by the laws of historical progress that made free-market capitalism a superior system of labor and economic production. The second and more novel libertarian assertion is that the American political tradition is based on the right of secession, not the right of revolution as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. His Agenda and an Unnecessary War is the language of the Declaration" 85— DiLorenzo is mistaken. Secession based on state sovereignty is neither the language nor the theory of American nationality in the Declaration of Independence. DiLorenzo's assertions are, however, a reasonable facsimile of the reasoning that supported Southern secession. In a speech in the Senate, on January 10,for example, Jefferson Davis attempted to justify disunion in the name of "an inalienable right" of the people in each community giving them "the power Moreover they err in regarding the Union as a compact between sovereign state-nations that, notwithstanding ratification of the Constitution, were never under a legal obligation to obey the laws of the Union, except insofar as they voluntarily chose to do so. This was never the nature of the relationship between political authority and the rights of individuals in social contract communities, including the federal republic of the United States. Properly understood—and the way southern politicians themselves understood and exercised national authority in the federal system from to —government sovereignty was divided between the states His Agenda and an Unnecessary War the federal Union. The essential principle of the system—the end and reason of its existence—was that neither government could reduce the other to itself or otherwise destroy it. Fundamental to the system was the conjunct sovereignty of the American people, constitutionally established in the states and the The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln of the Union. The Declaration of Independence asserted the natural right of revolution as a principle of American nationality. This was a moral and political right, to be exercised prudentially, that justified resistance to oppressive government. It was not a claim of legal immunity imposing duty and obligation on others not to interfere. Audacious as it was, this was a strategy of desperation driven by the desire to protect a slave-based society against the democratizing force of a liberal republican government. Latter-day secessionists deny this fact, and point to threats of disunion emanating from the New England states in His Agenda and an Unnecessary War period to as proof that a constitutional right of secession existed in the United States. This reading distorts the historical record and misconstrues the nature of federal republican politics. Control of the government of the Union was the paramount objective of federal-system politics. States' rights was a default position, a defensive strategy for resisting national policies that might be objectionable on partisan and ideological grounds. Disputing the contention that the South fought not to defend slavery, but to uphold the constitutional right of secession, a northern writer observed after the Civil War: "In a federal system one weapon of the minority is sure to be the menace of withdrawal or disunion. In his January Senate speech, Jefferson Davis asked: "Are we, in this age of civilization and political progress For a time Davis's prediction appeared prophetic as a kind of moral disarmament settled over a large portion of the northern public. Had the Confederate high command been more patient, it might have placed the Lincoln administration in an untenable political situation. What neosecessionist libertarians fail to consider is the moral difference between the American Revolution for liberty and the Confederate revolution for slavery. Standing on the claim of constitutional immunity to destroy the government, the South resolved the crisis of the Union by firing on Fort Sumter. This action signified the "appeal to heaven" that was universally The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln as His Agenda and an Unnecessary War ultimate means of exercising the right of revolution. It vindicated Lincoln's understanding of the crisis of the Union, expressed in his argument that secession was the essence The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln anarchy and must be treated as unjustified rebellion. Skip to main content Skip to quick search Skip to global navigation. Quick search:.

It hardly seems possible that there is more to say about someone who has been subjected to such minute scrutiny in thousands of books and articles. Yet Thomas J. In doing so, DiLorenzo does not follow the lead of M. Bradford or other Southern agrarians. He writes primarily not as a defender of the Old South and its institutions, culture, and traditions, but as a libertarian enemy of the Leviathan state. DiLorenzo holds Lincoln and his war responsible for the triumph of big government and the birth of the ubiquitous, suffocating modern U. In many ways, The Real Lincoln is a sobering study in power and corruption. For those familiar only with the deified Lincoln of the copper penny, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. DiLorenzo provides evidence that Lincoln, very much a man of his time and not a visionary prophet, never favored social equality for blacks. Throughout his political career and into the His Agenda and an Unnecessary War, Lincoln promoted overseas colonization of freed slaves, for the most part opposed the extension of slavery into the territories so that the land would remain open for white settlers, and promised never to touch slavery in the Southern states. When Lincoln finally did embrace emancipation, he adopted it as a pragmatic war measure, subordinating the freedom of slaves to winning the war and maintaining the Union. The quotations from Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, and Alexis de Tocqueville eloquently answer the arguments of those who would claim that postwar apologists for the Old South in large part fabricated the right of secession in retrospect. DiLorenzo effectively summarizes The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln editorial opinion on the eve of the war, a surprising amount of which was sympathetic to the Southern cause, favorable to secession, and unwilling to have the once-voluntary Union held together by force and violence. Despite its provocative insights and obvious rhetorical skill, however, The Real Lincoln is seriously compromised by careless errors of fact, misuse of sources, and faulty documentation. Unfortunately, these lapses are more than matched by a clumsy mishandling of sources that violates the presumed trust between author and reader. A few pages later p. In chapter 3, DiLorenzo claims that in a letter to Salmon P. His source, however, is the recollections of a conversation not a letter that portrait artist Francis B. Other errors include misplaced quotation marks, missing ellipses, and quotations with incorrect punctuation, capitalization, and wrong or missing words. Note 14 leads down another blind alley to no trace of the quoted material. On pageDiLorenzo cites Federalist No. Sad to His Agenda and an Unnecessary War, this catalog of errors is only His Agenda and an Unnecessary War sampling. As it stands, The Real Lincoln is a travesty of historical method and documentation. Ironically, it is essentially correct in every charge it makes against Lincoln, making it all the more frustrating to the sympathetic reader. Without it, his good work collapses. He is an author of evident courage and ability, but his sloppiness has earned him the abuse and ridicule of his critics. A book such as The Real Lincoln needed to be written, but until it is revised and corrected in a new edition, this is not that book. In the meantime, there is still hope for skeptical cynics. Richard M. GamblePalm Beach Atlantic University.