Tuesday - January 06, 2004

Category Image Lincoln Biographies


I'm watching another biography of the tyrant Abraham Lincoln on PBS now. It's another typical deification of him, with all the regular apologists being interviewed, most notably the known plagiarist, Dorris Kearns Goodman. Of course no one talks about why Lincoln was so hated, no one mentions the politics which caused him to be elected, no one recalls the corruption and no one ever considers that there might have been other ways to resolve the secession of the deep south without bloodshed.

It's just more biased reporting by the victors.

What did Lincoln stand for? His political background consisted of supporting the dying Whig party, which was the worst of conspiracies between business and government. The Whigs believed that the wonderful roads, canals and railroads being built could be done better if only government designed and controlled it all. It was an early attempt at central planning, complete with the corrupt contracts for impossible engineering feats. These programs were so completely disastrous that most states revised their constitutions to specifically forbid any collusion of government with building projects.

Here are some facts countering popular myths about Lincoln and his times (My source is DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln):

The Emancipation Proclamation freed no slaves. William Seward mocked it by saying, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free." The London Spectator wrote, "The principle [of the Proclamation] is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States." Of course this is because a President can't enact laws without Congress, so it was a rare instance of him restraining his grasp of power.

Most people are aware of the suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus, allowing him to jail anyone at any time without charging them with a crime. He jailed almost the entire Maryland legislature, and every newspaper editor who disagreed with his decisions were immediately rounded up and imprisoned for the duration of the war. No wonder he got such good press!

The principle of secession as a right was not questioned by anyone until Lincoln jailed his detractors. DiLorenzo states that, "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 all the top commanders on both sides of the conflict during the War between the States."

Unlike every other President, Lincoln didn't even pretend to get a declaration of war. He simply mobilized the State Militias and invaded.

The United States is the only country in the world that fought a war to end slavery. This is often crowed about, that we even fought a war to end slavery, killing 600,000 men in the process. Yet slavery was ended before and after this date by all other countries of the world peacefully. Again we go to DiLorenzo:

Lincoln did pay lip service to various compensated emancipation plans, and he even proposed a compensated emancipation bill (combined with colonization) in 1862. But the man whom historians would later describe as one of the master politicians of all time failed to use his legendary political skills and his rhetorical gifts to do what every other country of the world where slavery once existed had done: end it peacefully, without resort to warfare. That would have been the course taken by a genuine statesman. Even though he assumed dictatorial powers to raise armies and wage war during the first year of his administration, he did not use them to spend tax dollars on compensated emancipation in even a few states.

So what was Lincoln's real agenda? Simply put, it is best stated in his own words:

I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legislature. 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. Abraham Lincoln, 1832

Unfortunately, most people today are in favor of a national bank, and surprisingly the other two main aims of the Whigs, and later the Republican party which resuscitated their ideology, are also accepted blithely today. But back in 1832, the idea of using government money for "internal improvements" was recognized for what it was, pure pork and corporate welfare.

His marriage to Mary Todd Lincoln was political in nature, her family was close to Henry Clay, his political mentor. Edgar Lee Masters described Clay as follows:

Clay was the champion of that political system which doles favors to the strong to win and to keep their adherence to the government. His system offered shelter to devious schemes and corrupt enterprises . . . He was the beloved son [figuratively speaking] of Alexander Hamilton with his corrupt funding schemes, his superstitions concerning the advantage of a public debt, and a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone. His example and his doctrines led to the creation of a party that had no platform to announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else.

Lincoln supported internal improvements and his most notable achievements in the Illinois legislature were colossal failures. According to his own law partner, William H. Herndon:

The gigantic and stupendous operations of the scheme dazzled the eyes of nearly everybody, but in the end it rolled up a debt so enormous as to impede the otherwise marvelous progress of Illinois. The burdens imposed by this Legislature under the guise of improvements became so monumental in size it is little wonder that at intervals for years afterwards the monster of [debt] repudiation often showed its hideous face above the waves of popular indignation.

George Nicolay and John Hay, later Lincoln's personal secretaries in the White House wrote:

The market was glutted with Illinois bonds; one banker and one broker after another, to whose hands they had been recklessly confided in New York and London, failed, or made away with the proceeds of sales. The system had utterly failed; there was nothing to do but repeal it, stop work on the visionary roads, and endeavor to invent some means of paying the enormous debt. This work taxed the energies of the Legislature in 1839, and for some years after. It was a dismal and disheartening task. Blue Monday had come after these years of intoxication, and a crushing debt rested upon a people who had been deceiving themselves with the fallacy that it would somehow pay itself by acts of the legislature.

Lincoln and his mentor Clay were the principle architects of this disaster. In other words, the people had to pay debts for monster projects that were failures except for one and to Lincoln the only important aspect: Lincoln's business supporters got rich and he was retained in office. It's a method of politicking that the Republicans, who took on the policy of publicly financing internal improvements, used to finance their own power base and keep them in office. In truth the strategy failed because the Whig party was blamed for the calamities that occurred through most of the northern states where the Whigs dominated, and they collapsed as a party. But the people of the Whig Party just reformed into the Republican party with all of the same ideas.

Lincoln's election to the executive branch marked the final victory of the Hamiltonian philosophy epitomized by Hamilton's proposed constitution of a strong, mercantilist central government with a permanent president and no state power. A strong, permanent president with expansive power is exactly how Lincoln reigned as tyrant. Despite the way that Lincoln is portrayed today, his brutal power grab was completely predictable and consistent with everything he said he would do.

This is getting long, so I'm going to stop now. Let me just conclude that Lincoln ruined our federal system and replaced it with a dictatorship, that was only undone by his timely (or should I say tardy?) death. In the meantime, he was responsible for the slaughter of more than half a million men, the destruction and impoverishment of half the nation, and forever robbing us of the right of self-determination. He was an astute politician, he knew that money could be pilfered only for so long, and debt can only be relieved by plunder. I don't think it's too much of an overstatement to say that the debts incurred by the Whigs from their Internal Improvement and used to pay for the political support of corrupt business, with requisite financial support to keep them in office, was only finally paid by destroying the south and plundering their wealth. Taxing them didn't work because they rebelled, he had to extract what he wanted with cannon.

Lincoln was an astute politician, who could have freed the slaves had that been his goal. Instead, he accomplished the goal he promised he would accomplish, and likewise just as he promised the slaves were freed only where he couldn't free them to maintain his control over the nation. The Emancipation Proclamation's only purpose was to encourage slave revolts in the states not yet conquered so that he might more readily conquer them as well, while he used the slaves in the already conquered states to further the war and his attempt at total dictatorship.

So how many people know any of these things about Lincoln? Not many. All we ever learn of him is how mournful he looks in pictures and his pious, self-serving comments about saving the Union which he was doing his level best to destroy. The ideals of the American Revolution were mostly lost.

Lincoln was not in the least bit admirable. He was a tyrant only slightly better than Franco, another tyrant who invaded his own people to overthrow an elected government. Someday, I hope, maybe a few hundred years from now, the truth will be better known.

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