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this Lincoln book JEB sent me is great. I should write a really long and involved book report about it.

Was consolidation of power in the Federal government worth it?

When did the aim of our government become equality rather than liberty?

What's the difference between capitalism and mercantilism, and is there any good argument for the marriage of business and government? I've always believed the argument about the efficacy of heavy industry married to national purpose as central to US success in WWII, but this question goes beyond that, I think. This is about the changes we made in our way of governance through the fulcrum of the Civil War that propelled us to superpower status a century later, and if that was truly inevitable or even desirable. Additionally, was the boon of an apparent prevalence in the global bloodshed of the 20th century merely a set-up for us suddenly finding ourselves as THE monolithic state of the 21st century that we seemed to be fighting against throughout our history.

It isn't so much that this book speaks directly from my perspective, but that it gives voice to so many questions I've had in recent years about the way our society exists today versus what the intentions of the founders were and whether the benefits of the evolution we've experienced are worth the deviation from that original intent.

Was it necessary to subvert the relationship of the states to central authority in order to achieve the aims of those who sought greater civil rights and equality? Was the result truly what they intended? Why was Union more important than the sovereignty of the states? That had not been the case up until that moment in our history. Why did it become a cause sufficient to wipe out a portion of the citizenry that in today's numbers would top 30,000,000? This has nothing whatsoever to do with the institution of slavery in the southern states and everything to do with the abdication of power to a central authority for no other aim than the enrichment of a few at the expense of the masses and the corresponding political power that is generated by that equation and the consequent corruption that is as natural as any fact in physical science.


Jesus, thanks, JEB. I'll have a LOT more to say about this as the days go on. I haven't scribbled so much in the margins in literally years.

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rats -- I haven't had a chance to read it yet.

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The idea that one state can coerce another at gunpoint or that the federal government can do so at the behest of one group over another in sectional conflict should be ludicrous on the face of things to anyone at all acquainted with the spirit of the documents codifying the distribution of power in our nation's founding. There are so many quotes I'm reading from men who wrote those documents, and those who sought to usurp the authority that those instruments put into the hands of the people via the vehicle of state governments as sovereign nations joined for common purpose, that I just want to quote them all here - and perhaps I should if I have more time. They are worthy of study by anyone interested in the American experiment and how it has evolved from its original intent.

I used to say that the federal power was the last refuge of the disenfranchised against the oppression of state authority. I have altered that somewhat, I think, to the point that I see it as a usurpation of genuine and accessible political power by the people, in the name of equal access and civil rights, purely for the sake of the unequal distribution of wealth and power created on a large scale with little regard for individual liberty and pandering to the natural inclination to sloth peculiar to our race and integral to our self-destruction.

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Maybe the founders were wrong and Lincoln was right?

I'm not arguing for that, because clearly secession of the Blue States from the United Red States of Pigfucking is the best course of action. Fuck, if anyone had known it'd turn out like this, they'd have made damn sure that states could secede. Secession is all good, unless you're a frigid pig.

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I got this book from JEB as well. I just started reading it last night and haven't gotten very far into. But I'm really looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Thanks again JEB!

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Here's an excerpt of the book that is printed on the amazon site, so I reckon it's fair enough game. Besides, I encourage everyone to buy it and read it, so I'm not tryin to get around them makin a buck.

quote:

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More words have probably been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any other American political figure. According to one source, more than 16,000 books have been written on virtually every aspect of Lincoln's private and public life. But much of what has been written about Lincoln is myth, as Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln biographer David Donald noted in his 1961 book, Lincoln Reconsidered. Donald attempted to set at least part of the record straight; but, if anything, the literature on Lincoln has become even more dubious in the succeeding decades. Anyone who delves into this literature with an open mind and an interest in the truth cannot help but be struck by the fantastic lengths to which an entire industry of "Lincoln scholars" has gone to perpetuate countless myths and questionable interpretations of events. Many of these myths will be examined in this book.

In the eyes of many Americans, Lincoln remains the most important American political figure in history because the War between the States so fundamentally transformed the nature of American government. Before the war, government in America was the highly decentralized, limited government established by the founding fathers. The war created the highly centralized state that Americans labor under today. The purpose of American government was transformed from the defense of individual liberty to the quest for empire. As historian Richard Bensel has observed, any study of the origins of the American state should begin no earlier than 1865.

This aspect of the War between the States has always been downplayed or even ignored because of the emphasis that has been given to the important issue of slavery. Lincoln will forever be known as the Great Emancipator. But to understand the real Lincoln one must realize that during his twenty-eight years in politics before becoming president, he was almost single-mindedly devoted to an economic agenda that Henry Clay labeled "the American System." From the very first day in 1832 when he announced that he was running for the state legislature in Illinois, Lincoln expressed his devotion to the cause of protectionist tariffs, taxpayer subsidies for railroads and other corporations ("internal improvements"), and the nationalization of the money supply to help pay for the subsidies.

Lincoln labored mightily in the political trenches of the Whig and Republican parties for nearly three decades on behalf of this economic agenda, but with only minor success. The Constitution stood in the way of the Whig economic agenda as one American president after another vetoed internal improvement and national bank bills. Beginning with Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, Southern statesmen were always in the forefront of the opposition to this economic agenda. According to Lincoln scholar Mark Neely, Jr., Lincoln seethed in frustration for many years over how the Constitution stood in the way of his political ambitions.

Lincoln thought of himself as the heir to the Hamiltonian political tradition, which sought a much more centralized governmental system, one that would plan economic development with corporate subsidies financed by protectionist tariffs and the printing of money by the central government. This agenda achieved little political success during the first seventy years of the nation's existence, but was fully implemented during the first two years of the Lincoln administration. It was Lincoln's real agenda.

Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln's Collected Works, has written that Lincoln barely ever mentioned the issue of slavery before 1854, and, even then, he did not seem sincere.Chapter 2 explores the doubts that many others have also expressed about Lincoln's supposed commitment to racial equality. The average American--who has not spent much time reading Lincoln's speeches but who has learned about him through the filter of the "Lincoln scholars"--will be surprised or even shocked by some of his words and actions. He stated over and over again that he was opposed to political or social equality of the races; he was not an abolitionist but denigrated them and distanced himself from them; and his primary means of dealing with racial problems was to attempt to colonize all American blacks in Africa, Haiti, Central America--anywhere but in the United States.

Chapter 2 also shows the extent to which Lincoln's views on race were consistent with those of the overwhelming majority of white Northerners, who discriminated against free blacks so severely that several states, including Lincoln's home state of Illinois, amended their constitutions to prohibit the emigration of black people into those states. Such facts raise serious questions about the extent to which racial injustice in the South motivated Lincoln and the Republican Party to wage a long, bloody war.

Chapter 3 poses a key question that almost no one has addressed in much detail: Why didn't Lincoln do what much of the rest of the world did in the nineteenth century and end slavery peacefully through compensated emancipation? Between 1800 and 1860, dozens of countries, including the entire British Empire, ended slavery peacefully; only in the United States was a war involved. It is very likely that most Americans, if they had been given the opportunity, would have gladly supported compensated emancipation as a means of ending slavery, as opposed to the almost unimaginable costs of the war: 620,000 deaths, thousands more maimed for life, and the near total destruction of approximately 40 percent of the nation's economy. Standardizing for today's population of some 280 million (compared to 30 million in 1865), this would be roughly the equivalent of 5 million deaths—about a hundred times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam.

Chapter 4 outlines Lincoln's real agenda: Henry Clay's "American System." For his entire political life Lincoln was devoted to Clay and Clay's economic agenda. The debate over this economic agenda was arguably the most important political debate during the first seventy years of the nation's existence. It involved the nation's most prominent statesmen and pitted the states' rights Jeffersonians against the centralizing Hamiltonians (who became Whigs and, later, Republicans). The violence of war finally ended the debate in 1861.

Chapter 5 discusses the long history of the right of secession in America, beginning with the Declaration of Independence, which is properly viewed as a "Declaration of Secession" from England. The New England Federalists attempted for more than a decade to secede from the Union after Thomas Jefferson was elected president in 1800. Until 1861 most commentators, North and South, took it for granted that states had a right to secede. This doctrine was even taught to the cadets at West Point, including almost all of the top military commanders on both sides of the conflict during the War between the States.

Lincoln's insistence that no such right existed has no basis whatsoever in history or fact. He essentially invented a new theory--that the federal government created the states, which were therefore not sovereign--and waged the bloodiest war in world history up to that point to "prove" himself right.

Chapter 6 deals with the odd nature of the claim by so many Lincoln scholars that Lincoln "saved" the Constitution by suspending constitutional liberty in the North for the entire duration of his administration. He supposedly had to destroy constitutional liberty in order to save it. Quite a few Lincoln scholars have labeled Lincoln a "dictator" for launching a military invasion without the consent of Congress; suspending habeas corpus; imprisoning thousands of Northern citizens without trial for merely opposing his policies; censoring all telegraph communication and imprisoning dozens of opposition newspaper publishers; nationalizing the railroads; using Federal troops to interfere with elections; confiscating firearms; and deporting an opposition member of Congress, Clement L. Vallandigham, after he opposed Lincoln's income tax proposal during a Democratic Party rally in Ohio.

Even though many have labeled these acts as "dictatorial," they usually add that Lincoln was a "good" or "benevolent" dictator. In reality, these precedents did irreparable harm to constitutional liberty in America. Some writers, such as historian Garry Wills and Columbia University law professor George P. Fletcher, have voiced their approval of Lincoln's assault on constitutional liberty because they believe that the Constitution stands in the way of their cherished goal of "egalitarianism." They openly celebrate the fact that Lincoln led the way in subverting constitutional government in America.

In addition to abandoning the Constitution, the Lincoln administration established another ominous precedent by deciding to abandon international law and the accepted moral code of civilized societies and wage war on civilians. General William Tecumseh Sherman announced that to secessionists--all of them, women and children included-- "death is mercy." Chapter 7 details how Lincoln abandoned the generally accepted rules of war, which had just been codified by the Geneva Convention of 1863. Lincoln famously micromanaged the war effort, and the burning of entire Southern towns was an essential feature of his war strategy.

Lincoln's political legacy is explored in chapter 8 in the context of how, during Reconstruction (1865-1877), the Republican Party essentially plundered the South for twelve more years by instituting puppet governments that constantly raised taxes but provided very few public benefits. Much of the money was simply stolen by Republican Party activists and their business supporters. The adult male ex-slaves were immediately given the right to vote in the South (even though blacks could not vote in several Northern states), while most white male Southerners were disenfranchised. Former Union General and newspaper editor Donn Piatt, a close Lincoln confidant, expressed the opinion that using the ex-slaves as political pawns in such a corrupt way poisoned race relations in the South beyond repair at a time when racial reconciliation should have been the primary objective.

Lincoln's policy of crushing dissenters with overwhelming military might was continued after the war with the federal government's eradication of the Plains Indians by many of the same generals who had guided the North's war effort (particularly Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan). The stated purpose of this campaign against the Plains Indians was to make way for the government-subsidized transcontinental railroads. The quest for empire had become the primary goal of government in America.

Chapter 9 describes Lincoln's economic legacy: the realization of Henry Clay's American System. Many (primarily) Southern statesmen had opposed this system for decades because they viewed it as nothing more than the corrupt "mercantilist" system that prevailed in England during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and they wanted no part of it. Indeed, many of the original colonists fled to America to escape from that very system. So powerful was Southern opposition to the American System that the Confederate Constitution outlawed both protectionist tariffs and internal improvement subsidies altogether. Lincoln's war created the "military-industrial complex" some ninety years before President Eisenhower coined the phrase.

The notorious corruption of the Grant administrations was an inevitable consequence of Lincoln's success in imposing the "American System" on the nation during the war. The "Era of Good Stealings," as one historian described it, proved that the concerns of Southern statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Jefferson Davis, were well founded.

Chapter 10 explains how the death of federalism--the decentralized system of government that was established by the founding fathers--was perhaps the biggest cost of Lincoln's war. Although Lincoln is generally credited with having "saved the Union," in reality he destroyed the idea of the Union as a voluntary association of states by forcing the Southern states to remain in the Union at gunpoint. Lincoln can be said to have saved the Union only in a geographical sense.

It was not to end slavery that Lincoln initiated an invasion of the South. He stated over and over again that his main purpose was to "save the Union," which is another way of saying that he wanted to abolish states' rights once and for all. He could have ended slavery just as dozens of other countries in the world did during the first sixty years of the nineteenth century, through compensated emancipation, but he never seriously attempted to do so. A war was not necessary to free the slaves, but it was necessary to destroy the most significant check on the powers of the central government: the right of secession.

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Found an interesting rebuttal piece designed to take some of the air out of DiLorenzo:

quote:

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Examining 'evidence' of Lincoln's tyranny
Posted: April 23, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By David Quackenbush
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com

In a recent WND interview with Geoff Metcalf, Dr. Thomas DiLorenzo suggested that those who have found fault with his recent book, "The Real Lincoln," and its thesis that Lincoln was a tyrant, have avoided the facts and arguments of that book:

"We academics pride ourselves in criticizing each other a lot, but criticizing on the basis of facts and logic and argument. But there has been a lot of name-calling and that sort of thing. That tells me I must be hitting a responsive chord, because if my arguments were weak, they could just shoot them down and not have to call me names."

Accordingly, I have selected the following texts from the book and from Dr. DiLorenzo's public writings in its defense. I believe that these texts accurately reflect the consistent quality of scholarship and argument throughout "The Real Lincoln." (All emphasis added in the texts below.)

First, Dr. DiLorenzo has claimed, in "The Real Lincoln" and in his recent public writing, that Lincoln's "real agenda" throughout his entire political career, was the pursuit of corrupt economic centralization. A colleague and I pointed out that, if this were true, it is remarkable that Lincoln said practically nothing about economics in the crucial years of his rise to national political prominence. In fact, the Lincoln of those years spoke almost exclusively of the evil of slavery and the threat it posed to the Union. In his WND column of Feb. 20, Dr. DiLorenzo responded thus:

"The claim by Ferrier and Quackenbush that Lincoln never talked about his career-long devotion to the Whig/mercantilist agenda of protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for the railroad industry and government monopolization of the money supply from 1854 on belies their claim that they have read all of Lincoln's post-1854 speeches. In virtually every one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln made it a point to champion this corrupt economic agenda."

This claim is also presented in "The Real Lincoln" as a crucial piece of evidence revealing Lincoln's mind in the 1850s. Please note that Dr. DiLorenzo chose this evidence as his direct reply to our claim that Lincoln was entirely silent on his supposed "economic agenda" over the seven years of his rise to the presidency. In his book and in his reply to Dr. Ferrier and me, the best evidence Dr. DiLorenzo could marshal in support of his thesis that Lincoln was motivated chiefly by an economic agenda was the claim, "In virtually every one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln made it a point to champion this corrupt economic agenda."

Somehow, however, DiLorenzo failed to cite any of these acts of championship. It is not difficult to demonstrate why. They do not exist.

Consider the following quotation from Dr. James M. McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom," the Civil War volume of "The Oxford History of the United States." Dr. McPherson introduces his treatment of the Lincoln Douglas debates by noting precisely the absence of any trace of the evidence Dr. DiLorenzo claims is found in them:

"Desiring to confront Douglas directly, Lincoln proposed a series of debates. ... The stakes were higher than a senatorial election, higher even than the looming presidential contest of 1860, for the theme of the debates was nothing less than the future of slavery and the Union. Tariffs, banks, internal improvements, corruption, and other staples of American politics received not a word in these debates – the sole topic was slavery."

Those who find it strange that Dr. DiLorenzo could find evidence of Lincoln's economic fixation in precisely the debates which struck Dr. McPherson so strongly by their lack of any such evidence should read on. It gets stranger.

Turning to a second example from "The Real Lincoln," we find DiLorenzo telling the reader:

"Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln's 'Collected Works,' commented that Lincoln barely mentioned slavery before 1854, and when he did, 'his words lacked effectiveness.'"

In his WorldNetDaily column, DiLorenzo went further, saying Basler "wrote that Lincoln barely ever mentioned the topic prior to 1854 and even then, he did not seem at all sincere. 'His words lacked effectiveness,' writes Basler."

One notes immediately Dr. DiLorenzo's strange confidence that the reader will accept "lacked effectiveness" as equivalent to "not at all sincere." Turning to the Basler text Dr. DiLorenzo cites, we discover that it occurs in a paragraph devoted not, as Dr. DiLorenzo falsely implies, to the general topic of Lincoln's words on slavery after 1854, but to a single speech, the Dred Scott speech of 1857. Basler writes of the Dred Scott speech:

"Although the speech contains some of the most memorable passages in his writings, it lacks the unity of effect which marks his best. The truth is that Lincoln had no solution to the problem of slavery except the colonization idea which he had inherited from Henry Clay, and when he spoke beyond his points of limiting the extension of slavery, of preserving the essential central idea of human equality, and of respecting the Negro as a human being, his words lacked effectiveness." (page 23: "Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings")

According to Dr. DiLorenzo, Basler says Lincoln's words on slavery after 1854 "lacked effectiveness" and "did not seem at all sincere." But the actual quotation clearly implies that – even in this single speech, Basler's only topic – Lincoln's words on slavery were not ineffective on the crucial questions "of the extension of slavery, of preserving the essential central idea of human equality, and of respecting the Negro as a human being." Regarding Lincoln's insincerity, we find not the slightest trace of a comment.

Would Roy Basler, editor of the collected works of Lincoln, think that it is accurate or honest for Dr. DiLorenzo to represent him as saying that Lincoln's words on slavery "after 1854" were ineffective and "did not seem at all sincere"? Yet Dr. DiLorenzo cites four words from Basler's paragraph to suggest, quite falsely, that the editor of Lincoln's "Collected Works" dismissed Lincoln's entire corpus of words on slavery after 1854 as ineffective and insincere.

It gets worse. Dr. DiLorenzo actually quoted this Basler text once before, in an article entitled, "The Great Centralizer: Abraham Lincoln and the War between the States" [July 1998 Independent Review]. In the acknowledgments to "The Real Lincoln," Dr. DiLorenzo says that this article benefited from the "advice of two anonymous peer reviewers" and formed the "backbone" of the current book.

So much for "peer review." Basler is the first authority DiLorenzo cites in his 1998 article, and on its second page we find the following attempt at a sentence, reproduced here verbatim as it appeared in The Independent Review:

"Basler writes that as of 1857 Lincoln 'had no solution to the problem of slavery except the colonization idea which he had inherited from Henry Clay ... when he spoke ... of respecting the Negro as a human being, his words lacked effectiveness'" (23).

Compare the relevant part of this ungrammatical passage to Basler's original and perfectly clear sentence from page 23, reproduced in full above. Dr. DiLorenzo used his handy snips to convert Basler's clear implication that Lincoln's 1857 words were effective on the point "of respecting the Negro as a human being" to the direct statement that Lincoln's 1857 words were not effective on precisely that point.

This was in 1998. In the intervening four years, Dr. DiLorenzo has apparently decided that it is better to be more terse in his quotations, that he may be more expansive in his interpretation. In "The Real Lincoln," as we have seen, he quotes only four words of Basler's text. But in this second go round with the Basler text, it is Lincoln's words on slavery, in general, after 1854 (not just those Lincoln spoke in 1857), that are dismissed as ineffective, with "not at all sincere" added for good measure. All of this, of course, DiLorenzo presents as Basler's professional historical judgment.

DiLorenzo clearly considers the Basler text a crucial piece of evidence. He led off with Basler in 1998, includes it in his book and makes it his first point in his reply to Dr. Ferrier and me. Examining the weird sequence of DiLorenzo's serial abuse of Basler's text, one concludes that it is not Lincoln whose words "lack effectiveness" and do "not seem at all sincere."

For another example of Dr. DiLorenzo's meticulous use of secondary literature, we may turn to the following passages from "The Real Lincoln":

"In 'Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Rights,' Mark E. Neely Jr. observed that as early as the 1840s Lincoln, one of the most ambitious politicians in American history, was seething with resentment over the fact that the Constitution stood in the way of the Whig economic program and his vaunted American System. At that time, writes Neely, 'Lincoln appeared to be marching steadily toward a position of gruff and belittling impatience with constitutional arguments against the beleaguered Whig program.'"

DiLorenzo continues:

"The Federalist/Whig program of protectionist tariffs, nationalized banking and government subsidies for corporations was foiled for 60 years by strict constructionist interpretations of the Constitution. Once he and the old Whigs were finally in power, Lincoln was not about to let the Constitution stand in his way."

As the highlighted portions make clear, Dr. DiLorenzo attributes to Neely the historical judgment that Lincoln was "seething with resentment" over "the fact that the Constitution stood in the way" of his economic program, and "was not about to let the Constitution stand in his way."

But Neely says nothing of the kind. On the very page of Neely's book that DiLorenzo cites we find the following two passages:

"Lincoln was satisfied that the U.S. Supreme Court had declared a national bank constitutional, as had a majority of the country's famous founders."

"Lincoln thought them both constitutional, of course." (the bank and the "subtreasury," the Democratic alternative, DQ)

Neely makes crystal clear that Lincoln's frustration was not with the Constitution, but with what he considered to be obtuse and willful refusal by Democrats to admit (to Lincoln) the manifest constitutionality of the bank. Neely is also, it is true, developing the larger theme that Lincoln as a young politician was more practically than theoretically minded, but he says nothing to suggest that Lincoln would resist or resent what he thought a true interpretation of the Constitution. He even summarizes Lincoln's argument for the constitutionality of the bank on the same page.

Can Dr. DiLorenzo not distinguish between frustration at the Constitution, and frustration at those whom Lincoln sincerely believed persisted willfully to misread the Constitution? Is it not clear that by "impatience with constitutional arguments against the beleaguered Whig program" Neely means the latter, and not the former?

Neely proceeds, still on the page Dr. DiLorenzo cited:

"A set of resolutions drafted by Lincoln and adopted at a Whig meeting in Springfield in 1843 reiterated his position on the proven constitutionality of a national bank, and followed with this abrupt dismissal of Democratic arguments against the distribution of the proceeds from the sale of the national lands: 'Much incomprehensible jargon is often urged against the constitutionality of this measure. We forbear, in this place, attempting to answer it, simply because, in our opinion, those who urge it, are, through party zeal, resolved not to see or acknowledge the truth.'"

Dr. DiLorenzo uses the one sentence he quotes from Neely to give the clear impression that Neely had written that Lincoln resented the restraint imposed on his political agenda by the Constitution. But Neely makes it absolutely clear that Lincoln was frustrated by partisan zealotry taking the form of constitutional argument, a very different matter.

I will preface the fourth, and most striking instance of Dr. DiLorenzo's creative textual interpretations by noting that only in two chapters of the book, "Lincoln's Opposition to Racial Equality" and "Why Not Peaceful Emancipation?," does Dr. DiLorenzo quote so much as a full sentence of Abraham Lincoln's words, with the single exception of a sentence from the first inaugural. This in itself is a fascinating demonstration of DiLorenzo's method of scholarship. The vast majority of a book entitled "The Real Lincoln" contains precisely one quoted sentence from Lincoln. But it is filled with extensive quotations from other historical figures, scholars, etc., and above all with Dr. DiLorenzo's confident narrative explaining to us how all these things reveal the real Lincoln. Lincoln himself, however, is muzzled.

Dr. DiLorenzo presumes throughout to speak for Lincoln, revealing to us Lincoln's tyrannical motives and base purposes, his fallacious reasoning and duplicitous explanations – without quoting from him. Accordingly, much of a reader's insight into the "real Lincoln" depends on Dr. DiLorenzo's fidelity and accuracy in selecting and presenting evidence, and interpreting it. In this light, consider the following passage, my final example of the quality of Dr. DiLorenzo's evidence:

DiLorenzo says:

"Lincoln even mocked the Jeffersonian dictum enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. He admitted that it had become 'a genuine coin in the political currency of our generation.' But added, 'I am sorry to say that I have never seen two men of whom it is true. But I must admit I never saw the Siamese twins, and therefore will not dogmatically say that no man ever saw a proof of this sage aphorism.'"

Dr. DiLorenzo finishes the paragraph by proving that the Gettysburg Address was insincere and manipulative, in view of the now established fact of Lincoln's contempt for the Declaration principle of human equality.

Continuing to find a rich mine of imaginary evidence in the Lincoln Douglas debates, Dr. DiLorenzo inaccurately identifies the first debate as the source of Lincoln's mocking words. They are actually snipped from Lincoln's "Eulogy to Clay," delivered in 1852. But no matter. More important is the question whether we can trust Dr. DiLorenzo to select quotations that reveal to us the real Lincoln.

How shall we answer this question? Perhaps some context will help. Here is a more complete quotation from Lincoln's "Eulogy to Clay:"

"But I would also, if I could, array [Clay's] name, opinions, and influence against the opposite extreme – against a few, but an increasing number of men, who, for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule the white-man's charter of freedom – the declaration that 'all men are created free and equal.' So far as I have learned, the first American, of any note, to do or attempt this, was the late John C. Calhoun; and if I mistake not, it soon after found its way into some of the messages of the governors of South Carolina.

"We, however, look for, and are not much shocked by, political eccentricities and heresies in South Carolina. But, only last year, I saw with astonishment, what purported to be a letter of a very distinguished and influential clergyman of Virginia, copied, with apparent approbation, into a St. Louis newspaper, containing the following, to me, very extraordinary language –

'I am fully aware that there is a text in some Bibles that is not in mine. Professional abolitionists have made more use of it, than of any passage in the Bible. It came, however, as I trace it, from Saint Voltaire, and was baptized by Thomas Jefferson, and since almost universally regarded as canonical authority "All men are born free and equal."

'This is a genuine coin in the political currency of our generation. I am sorry to say that I have never seen two men of whom it is true. But I must admit I never saw the Siamese twins, and therefore will not dogmatically say that no man ever saw a proof of this sage aphorism.'

"This sounds strangely in republican America. The like was not heard in the fresher days of the Republic."

Far from mocking our ancient Declaration creed, as DiLorenzo claims on his behalf, Lincoln laments the corruption of public sentiment that has occurred since Jefferson's time. He calls the Virginia clergyman's words, by clear implication, a "political heresy." But DiLorenzo reports the clergyman's words as Lincoln's own.

How, might we be permitted to ask, was it possible for a scholar of good will and serious attention to have misread this text so completely? I invite the reader to consider the passage, and try to imagine committing the mistake of thinking that Lincoln is mocking the Declaration.

Dr. DiLorenzo's method of giving us the real Lincoln is passing strange. It includes ascribing to Lincoln things Lincoln never said and, in fact, rejected as astonishing political heresy in the very passage our author cites. Truly a man might "prove" much with such methods.

To summarize:

* The author of the Civil War volume of "The Oxford History of the United States" is struck precisely by the total absence of evidence that DiLorenzo says is "virtually" everywhere in the Lincoln Douglas debates.

* The editor of the "Collected Works" of Lincoln uses the phrase "his words lacked effectiveness" to describe a portion of a single speech about slavery, but only when that speech ventures beyond its central, crucial topics regarding slavery. In 1998, Dr. DiLorenzo clipped this sentence to make it mean precisely the opposite. Four years later, he reports instead that the editor judges Lincoln's words on slavery for almost a decade to have "lacked effectiveness" and seemed "not at all sincere."

* A Pulitzer Prize winning historian writes a careful and balanced account of Lincoln's impatient youthful frustration at Democratic resistance to the constitutionality of a national bank. Dr. DiLorenzo tells us that the historian spoke of Lincoln's seething resentment at the Constitution itself.

* Lincoln quotes with withering disapproval the words of a Virginia clergyman who repudiates and mocks the Declaration doctrine of human equality. Dr. DiLorenzo presents snippets of the clergyman's words as Lincoln's own – a gross falsehood – in order to "prove" that Lincoln's love of the Declaration was insincere.

Suppressed evidence, misquotation, misconstruction of context, incompetent citations, inaccurate implication – it's all here. I have chosen these four examples from a much longer and ever-growing list. But these examples are utterly characteristic of the entire book. Dr. DiLorenzo wonders why the scholarly world has not responded with argument to his revelation of evidence that Lincoln was a tyrant. It may be because his "evidence" is such a cooked up mess.

Special Offer:

Judge DiLorenzo for yourself. Get "The Real Lincoln" at WorldNetDaily's online store, ShopNetDaily.

David Quackenbush is a senior academic fellow with the Declaration Foundation.

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Here's another Lincoln booster responding to DiLorenzo's train of thought as it is inflected in revisionist history (I use that term in a value-neutral sense).

quote:

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Lincoln: Tyrant or Champion?

By David Quackenbush

May 30, 2002

Copyright 2002 Catholic Exchange

In a recent column entitled: Lincoln: Tyrant or champion … or both? talk show host and columnist Geoff Metcalf issued his verdict on this supposed great debate. Metcalf acknowledges that he is not a scholar. But he is a prominent citizen who speaks to thousands of his fellow citizens on political and other questions, seeking to form their opinions.

The public judgment on Abraham Lincoln reached by such a man should matter to those who hear it, particularly when he concludes that President Lincoln was a tyrant. I want to comment on two of the points Metcalf made, which are typical of the sort of argument often advanced to support this unhappy conclusion.

First, a brief point. Metcalf says:

"[A] lot of the things Lincoln did were specifically designed to abrogate, eviscerate and destroy the very document to which he swore an oath."

This is an astonishing claim. Many (not some, but many) of the things Lincoln did, we are told (with no evidence), had as their specific purpose (not their unintended effect, not even a foreseen and accepted consequence, but their specific and hence primary purpose – Lincoln’s purpose, this must mean) to “abrogate, eviscerate and destroy” the Constitution, the “very document to which he swore an oath.”

Metcalf’s words casually charge President Lincoln with intentional, duplicitous, evil. We should think about such language. Once we decide to speak this way about Abraham Lincoln, or any other American statesman, we cease searching for an honorable motive for his public actions. We prevent ourselves from wondering what good reasons he might have for doing things, because we “know” that he does them for the sake of evil. In the context of American politics, such a judgment means that we no longer consider such an opponent to be a fellow citizen, but a traitor.

When any of us is tempted to speak this way, we would do well to pause and search our own hearts. Are we really unable to conceive any honorable or decent motive that might have led our “unredeemable” opponent to act as he did? Honestly pursued, this question can lead us to the humbling experience of realizing that our “enemy” actually had reasons and motives that look much like our own. That experience will be even more humbling if we see that we are poised to make ourselves incapable of imagining the honorable motives our opponent might have. By the simple device of not granting that he might have good reasons, we give ourselves hearts of stone; we make ourselves stupid. A statesman did many things we don’t like, many with which we disagree. Are we thoughtlessly to assume that he did them because they were, and therefore he is, evil?

It is a simple duty of the ethical life, the intellectual life, the civic life, to try to do better than this. It may be too much to ask Metcalf, who makes no pretence to scholarship, to walk a mile in Lincoln’s shoes, but surely non-scholars, citizens, all of us, might be expected to try a few halting steps before concluding that Abraham Lincoln’s political journey aimed, with “specific purpose,” to corrupt, abrogate and destroy self-government in America.

But this brings me to the second point Metcalf made, on which I wish to comment at greater length. It is a particular example of the way that anti-Lincoln zeal can lead to a complete failure to consider Lincoln’s actual situation before dismissing him as evil.

Metcalf summarizes the words of his guest, Lincoln defender and Declaration Foundation President, Dr. Richard Ferrier, in these words:

[Ferrier] diminishes his idol as disingenuous, calculating and adroit at parsing “weasel words." In discussing slavery, [Ferrier] confirmed Lincoln said, "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between white and black races, and I have never said anything to the contrary." He . . . said, "Lincoln, who was a lawyer and was careful with his words, did not say 'I do not believe in that equality. I do not think it is a good thing.' He said, 'I have no purpose to introduce it.' Those are the words of a careful lawyerly politician …"

In other words Lincoln was using Clintonian verbiage carefully qualifying the definition of what "is" is. So, when Lincoln said, "I have no purpose," Ferrier says he meant, "I don't at the moment intend to bring about such equality." And [Ferrier adds] if he had said anything else in Illinois in the 1850s, he couldn't have been elected to dogcatcher. So Lincoln (according to Dr. Ferrier) was being duplicitous – in other words, dishonest.

This "gotcha" interpretation of Dr. Ferrier’s remarks on Lincoln's words about race is a supreme example of the freedom that ignorance can give us when we wish to condemn. It has all the moral generosity of the teen-ager who denounces his mother as a liar for offering polite praise to a neighbor with a strange new hair-do. It has precisely the concern for fairness of speech and impartiality of judgment that Dodger fans summon when discussing George Steinbrenner.

The real problem, of course, is not Metcalf’s twisting of Dr .Ferrier’s words – it is that he, like most Lincoln-bashers, is serenely oblivious to nearly every factor that was involved in Lincoln’s words and deeds. Because the dismissal of Lincoln’s entire statesmanship by the anti-Lincoln crowd is routinely based on such cherry-picked quotations, I ask the reader’s patience for the following very general summary of the actual dimensions of the political and moral world in which Lincoln was trying to do good and avoid evil. Those who are not already resolved to dismiss him as the Illinois Iago may profitably compare what follows with the increasingly common dismissal of Lincoln as a “racist,” a “hypocrite,” or both.

It is crucial to understand that Lincoln was wholly devoted to one great project with two apparently conflicting aspects. He believed that a statesman willing to be disciplined in his duty could lead the nation to reconcile these two aspects, and save self-government. The one great project was the preservation of self-government based on the laws of nature and nature's God. The two apparently conflicting aspects were 1) the unalienable rights of all men, created equal, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and 2) the equally valid principle of self-government, that all just powers of government come from the consent of the governed, which means that the statesman must take the opinions of the unwashed citizenry seriously.

So the great, tragic, deep question that an American statesman faced in the 1850’s was – how do you lead a people (remember, consent of the governed is a fundamental principle) that is not immediately ready to consider the ultimate implications of its founding principles? Lincoln’s answer: you devote yourself heart and soul to preventing that people from abandoning its principles irrevocably, from aborting its laborious progress towards the realization of those principles. And you undertake this task based on the generous, charitable presumption that your fellow citizens are not entirely base men, but complex moral beings like yourself. You try, as you invite them to do what is right, not to judge them for their hesitation. You are patient.

That means you speak to the best part of your audience which you have any practical hope of reaching. You do not indulge in abstract moralizing perfectionism. Any parent who has talked to a teen-ager understands that there are moments in life when wisdom means working very hard to say precisely that amount of the truth that your auditor is willing and able to hear. Lincoln did not always (although he frequently did) speak about race the way we would like for our Martin Luther King video series. Sometimes, for good and sufficient reason, he reassured his racist constituents that the Republican Party did not intend to impose on them a near term project of full racial equality. He did so because his political opponents – Stephen Douglas above all – were intent on defeating the anti-slavery political movement in America by stampeding Northern racists into alliance with the Slave Power of the South.

But Lincoln spoke the truth, with a care that superficial reading of brief quotations can obscure. Lincoln did not have any real political ambitions to bring about racial equality in political or social affairs. He judged this to be impossible in any reasonable scenario for the near future.

Nor did he intend to inaugurate World Peace or the New Age. If someone had said, "Abe, do you intend the Republican Party as a vehicle for global peace?" He would have said, "That's crazy." And those who have assumed that Lincoln was evil could have happily quoted this as proof that Abe was against peace in the world..

Lincoln spoke truthfully, and prudently, when he said he had no intention or inclination to undertake the quixotic and impractical project of uniform racial equality in all aspects of life. He certainly had no intention of articulating a dreamy and abstract vision of an interracial society so that Stephen Douglas could use it against him and the Republicans, win national power, and entice the American people to embrace slavery as a just policy.

Lincoln’s exquisite care in speech did not conceal such a project in Clintonian double-speak. Politicians – statesmen – govern a free people with words, and they must choose those words with honest and decent attention, including the care they must take to consider the imperfect moral condition of the citizens they are trying to lead a bit further down the road to justice.

Lincoln, in short, thought he had a DUTY not to cause harm by self-indulgent or patronizing speech . He chose his words carefully, because of the enormous complexity of the moral and political terrain through which he journeyed. The notion that he should talk publicly about a society of true interracial equality and harmony, with racial intermarriage and mixed race offspring, would have struck him as criminally irresponsible for a politician trying to get a racist North to accept, first and most importantly, the most fundamental implication of human equality — that all men have the right to live for their own human good, and not for the use of another. Lincoln's carefully restricted, and wholly truthful, denial of further projects was just that — careful and wholly truthful. Treating it like Clinton's denial of sexual relations is ignorant and deeply unfair.

Lincoln's project was to win assent from the American people to the proposition that, whatever was ultimately to be done to solve the race problem, so-called, slavery at least was wrong, and could not be permitted to expand. This expresses honestly the substance of the Republican Party position. It was Lincoln's policy on the matter in every public utterance in his life.

Everything Lincoln wrote or spoke from 1854 to 1860 is infused with the drama of this moral dilemma, and Lincoln's high resolve to solve it. Yet anti-Lincoln bigots continually assemble whole books on the man without giving the slightest sign that they have even noticed, let alone fairly weighed, the complexity of the true moral challenge Lincoln — and the nation — faced. Instead they offer us Lincoln the tyrant-droid, apparently genetically programmed to do evil that evil might result. In order to maintain this astonishing opacity, they quite evidently avoid reading any extensive portions of Lincoln's actual words, repeatedly recycling the same out-of-context snips to readers equally ignorant of the context and strategic purpose of Lincoln’s statesmanship.

The anti-Lincoln sect dismisses serious Lincoln scholarship as adulatory myth-making. This permits a wonderful one-size-fits-all dismissal of every positive judgment on Lincoln. Anyone who concludes that Lincoln had serious moral purpose, coherence of moral strategy and tactics, or genuine devotion to the principles of decent self-government, is duly diagnosed as an “mythmaker” and his evidence and argument are dismissed without further ado.

This tactic works well with audiences who themselves have no qualm or doubt about their conclusion that Lincoln was the father of all tyrants. Those who are in genuine doubt about Lincoln’s legacy, and wish to compare the quality and extent of arguments on both sides, should read books making the contrary case.

For a scrupulously fair, non-adulatory, and approachable presentation of the case for Lincoln, I suggest reading Dr. William Lee Miller’s fine new book, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography. Compare it with the latest digest of attacks on Lincoln, Tom DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln (about which I have already expressed my opinion here.)

And check the footnotes carefully, particularly when reading DiLorenzo. His book is filled with “evidence” of Lincoln’s evil that cannot sustain the briefest examination. One characteristic example is DiLorenzo’s triumphant citation of a passage in which Lincoln the hypocrite “mocks” the Declaration of Independence – thus demonstrating that his later invocation of its principles in the Gettysburg address cannot have been sincere!

It turns out that the passage is from a speech in which Lincoln is quoting a Virginia clergyman. It is the clergyman who is mocking the Declaration, and Lincoln quotes his words as a shocking political heresy. Lincoln repudiates the clergyman’s view and embraces America’s ancestral piety toward the Declaration. It would not be possible to misrepresent a passage more completely than DiLorenzo has done, and on a matter more central to the thesis of his book. Nor can one imagine a more complete self-parody of the quality of the scholarship on which anti-Lincoln bigotry thrives.

Except that DiLorenzo has since blamed his error on a secondary source from which he copied this reference – with no embarrassment at the fact that he plainly never even attempted to find the original himself. How revealing! Such is the world of Lincoln-hatred: a closed circle of “damning” evidence traded back and forth among true believers with no serious attempt to sustain conversation with intellectual opponents, or the original historical record. It was not in such soil that the roots of self-government grew strong, or in which they can find renewed strength in time of trouble.

Rather we must look to Lincoln himself to be reminded of the possibility, and the dignity, of disagreements conducted without rancor, and with respect for those with whom we differ. It would be an excellent thing if those who consider themselves Lincoln’s enemies would take to heart, in their debate with his memory, Lincoln’s words in the First Inaugural: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

Whether the real Lincoln was tyrant or hero matters, particularly to those interested in the possibility of establishing decent government in a sinful world. No responsible citizen should rest content with his opinion on this question until he has a basic familiarity with the case for and against Lincoln – and with the words of Lincoln himself throughout his career. I believe that those willing to walk even a few steps in Lincoln’s shoes will quickly realize that the civic piety towards this, our greatest president, is well deserved. And, at the risk of provoking the apparently unlimited contempt of the vitriolic “Lincoln as false God” crowd, I will add that meeting the real Abraham Lincoln through the introduction of a genuine historian, such as Dr. Miller, will edify the soul of any decent American.

Lincoln is, rightly, our greatest national hero. Let’s do our homework, and remember why we love him.
Declaration Foundation
809 Virginia Ave, SE • Washington, DC 20003
202-544-9555 • 202-544-8775 (fax) • df@declarationfoundation.com

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The attack on the footnoting is strong. If DiLorenzo really made that error in that way (copying another secondary source that supported his somewhat contentious argument), then that is pretty poor scholarship. If the Quackenbush attack is sound, then it would appear that DiLorenzo's book really isn't a scholarly work at all.

The questions about the unconstitutionality of Lincoln's actions are a different matter (and, it seems to me, not that often denied), of course. But if a book is shitty scholarship, then it become rather less in terms of an informational resource, and more good fun for the people who already believe what is being said in it.

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JEB sent me that same book.

I'm not done with it either (just read it in bits and pieces), but it is at times pretty compelling.

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Also, Smug's question strikes me as the next logical step in the argument, and one that DiLorenzo (so far anyway) hasn't really touched. A lot of his writing is practically dripping with values-based innuendo, which is fine, but to make these sorts of cases, you have to either try an divorce yourself from that (which DiLorenzo in my opinion isn't doing all that well), or embrace it and take it down that road, in the latter case the next step being "Well, was Lincoln ultimately RIGHT?". I buy that slavery could have been ended peacefully if Lincoln had half a mind to go that route, and I also buy that he had a view of how America should work fairly radically different than Jefferson and Adams, and I appreciate that DiLorenzo is (ostensibely) primarily concerned with stripping away some of the mythology surrounding Lincoln, but he seems to be posing a lot of questions that he's unwilling to tackle, though it's pretty clear what his answers would be.

It strikes me that perhaps the Founding Fathers' vision and the way the country worked pre-Lincoln might well have been untenable (and I think DiLorenzo at times inadvertently presents a lot of evidence to support that notion...that under that system, perhaps a civil war and mass secession was not just possible but inevitable, and it had certainly come close to happening pre-Lincoln and I don't have much reason to suspect that it wouldn't have some point boiled over even absent him...and when that happened we could have certainly had a lot less benevolent despot in the oval office than Abe Lincoln). I also don't give Lincoln quite as much Evil Genius cred as DiLorenzo seems to, meaning I don't think Lincoln had any great vision of what he was going to do and then subverted circumstances to advance that, so much as it sounds like he had a different vision of how America should work (as many presidents have before and after), and he just ended up having circumstances hoisted on him that he applied his personal value system to (as our current president is doing I might add).

So I guess my main criticism is that DiLorenzo can't seem to keep his own bias out of the scholarship, but since he can't he should at least embrace, extend, and defend it instead of trying to keep a shaky lid on it. If he's going to constantly toe the line on the values of it (the right and wrong), he should stride across and start asking and answering the real questions instead of hiding behind a facade of objective scholarship to snipe. If that makes sense. It's late.

Great book though, and it brings up a lot of real interesting perspectives.

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