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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 Thomas J. Dilorenzo | 368 pages | 01 Jun 2004 | Random House USA Inc | 9780761526469 | English | New York, United States The Real Lincoln - Wikipedia 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.
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