Taste Feature
House Divided: Did Abe
Have The Right Stuff?
Maybe it's a Yankee thing. Much
as I admire the original George W., the conglomeration of his and Lincoln's
births into a single, generic "President's Day" reminds me of one of those
infelicitous Wall Street mergers where they don't know quite what to call
the new beast.
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de gustibus
By William McGurn
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Or maybe it's the revenge of the South. The reputations of Dead White
Males being what they are today, few Americans would likely be shocked by a
school of thought that claims our 16th president was a "monster," "racist,"
"dictator" or "war criminal" who practically invented "ethnic cleansing."
But you can't blame the loony left for this one. For this all comes from a
loose confederacy (pun definitely intended) of Southern Agrarian
conservatives and aggrieved libertarians who see in Lincoln not the
president who saved the Republic but the one who destroyed it.
Clearly Lincoln's crude jokes about blacks and his belief that the two
races could never live together in peace suggest a man falling somewhat
short of the sainthood bestowed upon him by Carl Sandburg and popular myth.
And the indictments against the Lincoln presidency are worthy of serious
debate: his suspension of habeas corpus, his support for tariffs, his
expansion of the federal government during the war, etc. I mean only to
note, on this Lincoln's birthday weekend, that the intemperance that seems
endemic to Lincoln revisionism tends to harm rather than further its
cause.
![[Abraham Lincoln]](http://interactive.wsj.com/public/resources/images/edit_Lincoln02082001214632.gif)
In 1981, for example, Mel Bradford of the University of Dallas was
Ronald Reagan's pick to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. It
quickly emerged, however, that Bradford had championed a view of Lincoln as
"dishonest," an "American Caesar" and "pseudo-Puritan" guilty of grave
duplicity.
That doesn't make Bradford evil, or denigrate his literary credentials.
But clearly Mr. Reagan appreciated the incongruity of a Republican
president from Illinois appointing to a prominent position in his
administration a man who confessed in a page-one New York Times profile
that "in 1860 I would have been a Stephen Douglas Democrat." The result of
this intellectual Pickett's charge was Mr. Reagan's retreat from Bradford
-- and the appointment of Bill Bennett.
It's important here, of course, to distinguish between those, like the
denizens of LewRockwell.com, who believe with all their hearts that the
last, best hope for earth was in fact the Stars and Bars -- and those, like
Trent Lott or John Ashcroft, who belong to that larger category of
Southerners who can't help themselves when they hear the strains of "Dixie"
and do silly things like granting interviews to the journal Southern
Partisan that inevitably come back to haunt them.
Not least of the delicious ironies here is that, at a time when the
publication of a book in Mr. Reagan's own hand has even old liberals
conceding that they were wrong about the Gipper's smarts, this branch of
conservatism is stuck with a Reagan who is either a dummy or as duplicitous
as Dishonest Abe himself. Pretty hard to explain away the line in Mr.
Reagan's First Inaugural Address that "whoever would understand in his
heart the meaning of America will find it in the life of Abraham
Lincoln."
Still, the greatest weakness in this revisionism is the most obvious,
the idea that slavery would somehow have solved itself. That's a pretty big
"if." Certainly neither Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis thought slavery would
wither away; the expansion into the western territories that occasioned the
split was rightly seen by both sides as essential to its continuation.
Robert Fogel, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has written two books making
plain that slavery was in fact economically viable. To Lincoln, an
expanding slave-based South was fine for the elites, but it threatened the
free-wage system that to his mind represented American opportunity and
upward mobility.
The bargain struck in 1789, on Lincoln's reading, was to have
circumscribed slavery and left it on the road to extinction. But by
Lincoln's own day the Republic idealized by the South was not that of
Jefferson but of Calhoun, with slavery elevated from a necessary evil or
accident of history into a positive reflection of the natural order. Far
from revealing his insincerity and lack of scruples, Lincoln's measured
response in, say, the Emancipation Proclamation demonstrates his Whiggish
understanding that prudence was the consummate virtue for politicians
aiming to resolve contentious moral questions.
In Lincoln's view this new Southern consensus was aggressive, changing
everything and testing whether America as conceived could long endure. And
as long as we are all being strict constructionists here, is it not asking
a great deal to bless a secession that came not because Southern voters
didn't like the Union but because they didn't like the results of an
election in which they had participated? If our conservative Lincoln
revisionists are right, Al Gore had a better case in Florida than we
thought.
To: Rodger Schultz
Lincoln's Economic Legacy
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
[February 9, 2001]
Americans have been led to believe that when they celebrate Abraham
Lincoln’s birthday each year on February 12 they are celebrating freedom,
the preservation of the union, and a reaffirmation of the principles of
the Declaration of Independence. This belief is a testament to the notion
that in war the victors get to write the history.
Lincoln will probably be forever known as the "Great Emancipator" because
of the Emancipation Proclamation. But every Lincoln scholar knows something
that few Americans are aware of: The Emancipation Proclamation freed no
one, because it specifically exempted those areas of the southern states
that were at the time under the control of the federal armies while allowing
slavery to exist in the "loyal" border states of Maryland and Kentucky
and in Washington, D.C. itself.
"The principle [of the Proclamation] is not that a human being cannot
justly own another," the London Spectator observed on October 11, 1862,
"but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States" government.
As Lincoln stated in a famous, August 22, 1862 letter to New York Tribune
editor Horace Greeley, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save
the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save
the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save
it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."
The Emancipation Proclamation was a propaganda strategy designed to
deter England from supporting the Confederacy. It came as a complete surprise
to most
Northerners, who thought they were fighting and dying by the tens of
thousands to preserve the union. As a result, there were draft riots in
New York City; a desertion crisis was created in the U.S. army, with some
200,000 deserters, according to historian Gary Gallagher; and war bond
sales plummeted. According to James McPherson, the "dean" of "Civil War"
historians, Union soldiers "were willing to risk their lives for the Union,
but not for black freedom . . . . They professed to feel betrayed."
Slavery was ended in 1866 with the Thirteenth Amendment, but at the
cost of 620,000 lives; hundreds of thousands more that were crippled for
life; and the near destruction of almost half the nation’s economy. By
contrast, dozens of other countries (including Argentina, Colombia, Chile,
all of Central America, Mexico, Bolivia, Uruguay, the French and Danish
colonies, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela) ended slavery peacefully during
the first 60 years of the nineteenth century. Why not the U.S.?
Lincoln may have "saved" the Union in a geographic sense, but his war
destroyed the union defined as a voluntary association of states. Forcing
a state to remain in the union at gunpoint renders that state a conquered
province, not a genuine partner. This was the overwhelming sentiment of
Northern opinion makers at the outset of the war.
As Horace Greeley wrote on March 21, 1861: "The great principle embodied
by Jefferson in the Declaration is that governments derive their just powers
from the consent of the governed." If southerners wanted to secede, "they
have a clear right to do so." "Nine out of ten of the people of the North,"
Greeley wrote, were opposed to forcing South Carolina to remain in the
Union.
As of 1857, writes Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln’s Collected Works,
Lincoln had rarely ever mentioned the issue of slavery, and even then,
"when he spoke of respecting the Negro as a human being, his words lacked
effectiveness." What did preoccupy Lincoln’s mind throughout his twenty-eight
year political career prior to becoming president was the political agenda
of the Whig Party and of the man whom he revered most in life, the Kentucky
slaveowner Henry Clay, whom Lincoln eulogized in 1852 as "the great parent
of Whig principles" and "the fount from which my own political views flowed."
And those political views were clearly stated by Lincoln when he first
ran for the Illinois legislature in 1832: "My politics are short and sweet,
like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank . . . in favor
of the internal improvements system and a high protective tariff." These
three things -- protectionism, government subsidies to railroad and canal-building
companies, and central banking -- were called the "American System" by
Henry Clay. Economists have another word for them: "mercantilism."
Murray Rothbard accurately defined mercantilism as "a system of statism
which employed economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state
power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to individuals
or groups favored by the state." This is what Lincoln devoted his entire
political career to achieving. He was a master politician who once told
a friend that his career ambition was to be "the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois."
DeWitt Clinton was the notoriously corrupt governor of New York who is
credited with inventing the spoils system.
The so-called American System of mercantilism could only be implemented
by a highly centralized government of the sort that the U.S. Constitution
attempted to deter. That’s why it could only be put into place by force
of arms, which it was. As soon as Lincoln maneuvered the South Carolinians
into firing the first shot (at a customs house, Fort Sumter) tariff rates
were immediately raised to an average of 47 percent and higher, and remained
historically high for decades after the war.
During the war Lincoln established a number of tyrannical precedents,
including unconstitutionally conducting a war without the consent of Congress;
suspending habeas corpus; conscripting railroads and censoring telegraph
lines; imprisoning without trial some 30,000 northern citizens for merely
voicing opposition to the war; deporting a member of Congress, Clement
L. Vallandigham of Ohio, for opposing Lincoln’s income tax proposal at
a Democratic Party political rally; shutting down hundreds of Northern
newspapers and imprisoning their editors for questioning his war policies;
ordering federal troops to intimidate voters into voting Republican; and
intentionally waging war against civilians.
The second plank of the American System of mercantilism, central banking,
was achieved with the National Currency Acts of 1863 and 1864, and there
was a virtual explosion of government subsidies to railroads and other
businesses that bankrolled the Republican Party. The inevitable consequence
was the notorious corruption of the Grant administrations.
In 1861 Senator John Sherman, brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman
and a major power in the Republican Party, announced that "Those who elected
Mr. Lincoln expect him to secure to free labor its just right to the Territories
of the United States; to protect . . . by wise revenue laws, the labor
of our people; to secure the public lands to actual settlers . . . ; to
develop the internal resources of the country by opening new means of communications
between the Atlantic and Pacific."
Translating from the politician’s idiom into plain English, this meant
that Lincoln’s main objective was always protectionism for Northern manufacturers;
buying votes with cheap federal land sales; and the purchase of even more
votes and campaign contributions through a massive spoils system created
by government subsidies to the railroad industry. The corrupt political
strategy of DeWitt Clinton writ large is Abraham Lincoln’s true economic
legacy.
--------------
Thomas DiLorenzo is a professor of economics in the Sellinger School
of Business and Management at Loyola College in Baltimore. See his archive,
read an interview with the author, or send him MAIL.
See also Joseph Stromberg's classic article, The War for Southern
Independence: A Radical Libertarian Perspective
12 Posted on 02/10/2001 03:10:51 PST by VinnyTex
To: stand watie, daledoe, Vinny Tex
as lincoln was anti-Roman Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-black,anti-immigrant, anti- Indian, anti-Asian, anti-Latino, etc, i find NOTHING to admire about him.
I hope you are being ironic. Lincoln was far less any of these things than most people of the time. Look at his speeches. He wasn't obsessed about race or ethnicity to the extent people are today, but he did his best, given the limits imposed by the attitudes of the day, to treat other groups more "fairly". Those looking for "anti" sentiments in his day, will find them far, far, far more violently expressed elsewhere. Why after all, was Lincoln a Republican and not a member of the Democratic or American ("Know-Nothing") party?
As for Lincoln's economics, hadn't most of his policies been tried before by Whigs or Federalists? I can understand the revulsion against the Civil War, which brought violence and centralization to a new level, but does anyone really think that without Lincoln we would be living in a libertarian world? Even without the catastrophe of civil war, the state has increased its power in other countries. The Civil War was something like our French Revolution -- a time of violence and concentrated, arbitrary power that has left lasting scars. But there are other episodes of violence and sources of centralizing power in American history and life.
Also, do we really want the nation to be broken up into smaller units? I can understand the emotion behind this idea, but what guarantee is there that the smaller units will be better run or freer than the whole is now? Or that the process wouldn't continue to other secessions and divisions? There are also costs and frictions involved in living in smaller states. Some have said that if the country had broken up, it would have found its way back together by now.
19 Posted on 02/10/2001 09:20:40 PST by x
To: tpaine, A Hunter, Billbears, jimmy bob's uncle, Pearman, stand watie, daledoe, Vinny Tex, x
That speech was the case of the civil war? Could you elaborate a bit on that?
Lincoln you note, stated that the nation could not continue, half slave and half free. Either slavery would expand to encompass the entire nation, or it would be abolished. Fundamentally what Lincoln was calling for here was a war to abolish slavery, and overturn the results of the various compromises, both in the original constitution and later legislative compromises, which had allowed varying interpretations of the issue by different states. Thus he and his northern supporters, not the South, first declared their intention to abrogate the original constitution and power sharing agrrements which had allowed differing views on this civil rights issue to coexist within our nation, and fundamentally set the nation on the path to division and/or civil war.
I've always seen the war as essentially a constitutional matter. The southern states asseted that they could ignore the constitution & BOR's when it suited their purposes. The war & the 14th amendment has resolved that issue.
See above on who ignored the constitution. The right of secession BTW had long been asserted by Jefferson and the Democrat-Republicans as being implicit in the Declaration itself, and is really actualy hard to ignore.
But there is nothing in the constitution to prevent a state from demanding that the federal government ALSO abide by the constitution. The supreme court is the proper place to fight for states rights.
If the clear intent of the constitution is ignored by the SCOTUS, then other measures are justified
Maybe you could clarify yourself here. The Supreme Court is the proper place to fight for states right, but only if it respects "the clear intent" of the constitution, i.e. decides things your way. If it doesn't like the pre-civil war SCOTUS did with Plessey vs. Ferguson, are you justified in abolishing Habeous Corpus, jailing Confederate supporters without charges, and threatening the same SCOTUS with same if they don't go along with you?
Doesn't this sound more like "ignoring" the constitution?
26 Posted on 02/10/2001 11:47:16 PST by Okiereddust
To: x
1st, lincoln was a cold-hearted, emotionless racist, nothing more, nothing less. as an american indian i despise his memory, or rather legend. he would, given his violent racist character/beliefs, made a really good grand dragon.
his private correspondence, in his own hand BTW, reveals his plan to destroy the culture and ultimately the lives of ALL indians and to remove all other "undesireables" from the USA.
as for breaking this country into smaller units, i say let's get to it. i personally favor establishment of a new and free southeron republic, with freedom and liberty for all. this continent has plenty of room for Canada,Mexico,Southron Republic,Quebec & the USA.
a southron republic would have the sixth largest economy in the world, if we were free. not bad for what chuckie shumer once described as "a inbred, racist,stupid bunch of incestous crackers".
X, we are, i believe, NOT destined to be one nation for long;why not help us along by supporting a no-fault divorce.when dixie is free and independent, we can have the sort of God-fearing,armed-neutralist,conservative,strict-constructionist,FREE sort of republic of which i write and dream. the damnyankees would be able to have the godless, amoral, imperialist,meddling,marxist/socialist paradise that most of them seem to want.
who knows, in a few decades, the two countries might even become friends.
free dixie NOW, sw
28 Posted on 02/10/2001 11:50:41 PST by stand watie
To: Okiereddust
I've always seen the war as essentially a constitutional matter. The southern states asseted that they could ignore the constitution & BOR's when it suited their purposes. The war & the 14th amendment has resolved that issue.
See above on who ignored the constitution. The right of secession BTW had long been asserted by Jefferson and the Democrat-Republicans as being implicit in the Declaration itself, and is really actualy hard to ignore.
-- Exactly! The right of secession over constitutional issues is really why the war was fought. And it was resolved, unless we resort again to further force of arms.
We agree. Thanks.
======================================
But there is nothing in the constitution to prevent a state from demanding that the federal government ALSO abide by the constitution. The supreme court is the proper place to fight for states rights. If the clear intent of the constitution is ignored by the SCOTUS, then other measures [civil disobedience / force of arms] are justified.
Maybe you could clarify yourself here. The Supreme Court is the proper place to fight for states right, but only if it respects "the clear intent" of the constitution, i.e. decides things your way.
-- 'My' way? You don't agree that federal and states rights are clearly outlined there? -- Could we agree they need further clarification? In the SCOTUS?
If it doesn't like the pre-civil war SCOTUS did with Plessey vs. Ferguson, are you justified in abolishing Habeous Corpus, jailing Confederate supporters without charges, and threatening the same SCOTUS with same if they don't go along with you?
-- Of course not. I made no such defense of Abe's actions. You know that, and are trying to confuse the issue.
34 Posted on 02/10/2001 13:01:42 PST by tpaine
To: Fred25
gee, how awful!
my home state (TX)is and has been invaded by Mexico for a rather longtime now, with few real ill effects.
what is it about God-fearing, politically conservative, 2nd amendment-supporting, pro-life, predominately Catholic & Baptist immigrants, that is cause for concern?
my beautiful, educated,conservative,hard-working,ambitious adopted daughter is a citizen of Mexico. would that we had MORE like her and LESS of the arrogant, ignorant, ill- and/or un-educated,lazy,whining,socialist,hatefilled,native-born damnyankees in this country.
perhaps we could work out a swap-we'd resettle all the meddling, socialist, anti-american, damnyankees in their country (and pay Mexico to KEEP them! NOBODY would take them otherwise!)and import a whole bunch like my daughter, that wouldn't whine, would work,pay taxes,support life, etc.,etc.,etc.
free dixie NOW,sw
46 Posted on 02/11/2001 08:01:45 PST by stand watie
To: norton
Lincoln predated FDR, JFK, and WJC...
He would have been emperor...
Yes, Lincoln predated them, but they are not of his political lineage. Jefferson Davis was Emporer. So much so, that if you read the classic Southern boys history of Secession by the editor of the largest Newspaper in Richmond, you will find Davis referred to as 'The Tyrant'.
Davis was a Democrat.
Davis wanted blacks evenly dispersed thoughout the North.
Davis instituted the first Federal Draft in Anglo Saxon History.
Davis instituted the first direct tax in America.
The Confederacy never had a bill of rights or a Federal Court system.
Davis was never elected in an election.
Davis authorized the investigation of the personal affairs of all citizens of the South.
Davis authorized government oversight of all telegraphic communications in the South.
Davis authorized the seizure of any and all property at will by the Central government.
Davis overrode the Confederate Constitution and spent Government funds on national improvements without authorization (the cause of the Act of Nullification in 1832),
Davis embargoed all Southern exports, Davis masterminded a 150 million dollar bank fraud in April, 1860,
Davis took the Central governments money and lost it in a massive bank scheme in Europe,
Davis arrested anyone he felt like and refused to recognize Habeus Corpus whenever he felt like it for months at a time on a country wide basis,
Davis hung anyone he wanted at anytime for any reason,
Davis closed down any newspapers and sources of news he saw fit to close down.
The list goes on, but since you didn't have a clue to begin with, I will stop here.
Oh and yeah, Woodrow Wilson was the little boy who watched Davis's arrest by Federal authorities, who admired Robert E. Lee and considered the most memorable moment of his boyhood the moment when he got to shake Lee's hand when Woodrow was 14, who grem up in Columbia SC amongst the ashes left by Sherman, who studied Davis and modeled his implemtations of the Selective Service act, the IRS and the Fed after Davis's inspirations, and who bamboozeled Southern Democrats into buying into Socialist Reforms by waving aroung the old Confederate Flag from the White House.
Take you confederate trash and crawl back under your rock.
56 Posted on 02/11/2001 12:48:45 PST by The Cruiser
To: The Cruiser, unbob
[Somehow come Abe ONLY freed the slaves in the seceded states and not the north]
Perhaps you should read the article. The author explains it, though perhaps the sentences are too long for you, or perhaps you just skimmed over the article and posted it because you liked the title.
You mean the article at the start of this thread? Maybe you could show me the relevant sections.
[And prudence was hardly the nature of Lincoln's intemperate "A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand" speech, which was the real cause of the division, not his election.]
Oh ye of little history, explain how a speech in 1857 caused the split that came to light in 1832 and blossomed in hard fact in 1850? The South and the Democrats could easily have defeated Lincoln. Abe only got 39% of the vote. The truth is, that the South planned for Lincoln to win and split the Democratic party into three for that purpose. If you don't think so, then give a read to what happened at the Democratic Conventions in 1852, 1856 and 1860. It's all right there.
Of course the deep regional divisions had existed for a long time, and possibly the South might have seceeded fairly soon even if Lincoln hadn't been elected. It is hard to read Southern minds, especially not without a good more background than I have, but the real point of the Lincoln speech is that it demonstrates that Southern fears that the North planned to unleash a war on the South eventually to exert its dominance over this recalcitrant (in its view) region was accurate. It in other words demolishes the Northern claim that Lincoln unambiguously would have respected the Southern states constitutionally guaranteed self determination had the South not chosen to seceed, and that he started the war mainly to preserve the Union out of respect for the constitution, against the "rebellious" South.
As to the South easily winning, even though Lincoln only got 39% of the vote, by the quirks of the electoral college he would have still won the 1860 Presidential election even if the Democrats Party had remained united and had ended up getting every single vote that instead went for Douglas, Bell, or Breckenridge. It's hard to interpret the Democratic convention. There were hotheads that wanted to seceed at all costs in the Deep South, but there also were the border state people who seceeded, reluctantly, only when Lincoln started to raise an army.
61 Posted on 02/11/2001 19:05:19 PST by Okiereddust