Tag Archives: President Lincoln

Demolishing the Lincoln Myth, Yet Again, by David Gordon

Posted on July 25, 2020 | 1 comment

When the War Between the States began, Lincoln was far more concerned with collecting taxes than he was with ending slavery. From David Gordon at mises.org:

The Problem with Lincoln is the culmination of Tom DiLorenzo’s many years of research on Abraham Lincoln. It is a masterly summing-up and extension of his earlier classics The Real Lincoln (2002) and Lincoln Unmasked (2006). DiLorenzo is both a historian and an economist with an expert knowledge of Austrian economics and also of the public choice school. This background enables him to grasp what most other historians of the Civil War period miss, the centralizing economic plan behind Lincoln’s policies.

DiLorenzo calls attention to a vital fact that demolishes the mythological view that Lincoln’s primary motive for opposing secession in 1861 was his distaste for slavery. Precisely the opposite is true. It is well known that, in an effort to promote compromise, a constitutional amendment was proposed in Congress that forever forbade interference with slavery in states where it already existed. Lincoln referred to the proposal, the Corwin Amendment, in his first inaugural, stating that he was not opposed to the amendment, since it merely made explicit the existing constitutional arrangement regarding slavery. Of course, Lincoln was not telling the truth; nothing in the Constitution prior to the Corwin Amendment prohibited amendments to end slavery, so this new proposal did not just make the existing constitutional arrangement explicit. Readers can judge the Corwin Amendment for themselves, in a helpful set of original documents that our author includes in the book. (The Corwin Amendment is on p. 217.)

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Posted in Book Reviews, Civil Liberties, Government, History, Nonfiction, race relations, Taxes, War

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How Lincoln Destroyed the United States, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on July 24, 2020 | 2 comments

America’s political saint was no saint. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.com:

The title of Thomas J. DiLorenzo new book, The Problem with Lincoln, is an understatement.  Lincoln was far more than a problem.  He was the worst disaster ever to befall the United States.

Lincoln destroyed the federal republic established by the founding fathers, and he destroyed the Constitution that protected it. He violated every provision of, and every Amendment to, the Constitution.  He then rewrote, in effect, the Constitution and left the 10th Amendment out.

The Lincoln regime was a dictatorship.  Lincoln disregarded US law, the US Constitution, every right of the people, the power and authority of judges, and even exiled a US Representative.  DiLorenzo writes that “freedom of speech was virtually nonexistent in the Northern states for the duration of the Lincoln administration.” Lincoln ordered the arrest and imprisonment of everyone who disapproved of his invasion of the South or made the slightest criticism of him.  There were mass arrests of citizens and news paper editors of northern states.  A minimum of 38,000 citizens of northern states were imprisoned without due process.

Lincoln committed treason against the Constitution when he suspended Habeas Corpus.  No such power resides in the presidency.  Only Congress can suspend Habeas Corpus even in the case of rebellion and invasion.

US Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley wrote that it may be necessary to teach Taney a lesson. Lincoln had an arrest warrent written for Taney’s arrest, but did not serve it, apparently instead relying on Taney’s awareness of the warrant to bring him into line.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, History, Insurrection

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A President’s War on the Media, by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on July 8, 2017 | 1 comment

Which President waged the most virulent war on the media? That would be icon Abraham Lincoln, by far. From Thomas DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

After CNN was forced to retract yet another fake news story about “Russian collusion” it did what all Leftists do when caught in a lie:  It played “victim.”  It did so by claiming that President Trump’s calling out of the fake story, which CNN now admits was a fake, was an attack on freedom of speech in America.  So, according to CNN, publishing fake “news” is free speech, while pointing out the truth is an attack on free speech.

To hammer home the point that it, CNN, is the nation’s protector of free speech, the network attempted to taunt the president on the Fourth of July by tweeting an inscription that is chiseled into a wall at the “Newseum” in Washington, D.C.  They apparently thought that this would be a death blow to the president, for the quote was from the god of the state, Abe Lincoln.  “Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe,” Abe supposedly said.  Yes, just let them “know” that Vladimir Putin personally hypnotized Donald Trump, turning him into a Manchurian candidate, and then rigged all the election machinery in the United States to assure his election.  They will then be “safe” to know that Hillary Clinton is their real president.

Unfortunately for CNN, the Lincoln quote is more fake news because the quote itself is a fake, as proven by several researchers and reported by The Federalist Web site.  How telling –and appropriate — that CNN and the “Newseum” invoke this fake Lincoln quote as their motto.  Lincoln was a tyrant and a dictator with regard to the media, shutting down over 300 opposition newspapers in the North during the War to Prevent Southern Independence and imprisoning their editors and owners without due process.  No other president has ever come close to being as big an enemy of freedom of the press. 

As historian Dean Sprague wrote in Freedom Under Lincoln, in a chapter entitled “The Policy of Repression,” the “first step” in Lincoln’s “program against the anti-war newspapers” in the Northern states “had to start with the muzzling of the New York press” (p. 142).  The New York papers “dominated much of the nation,” meaning that many other newspapers followed their lead in reporting the news and editorializing on it.  The Journal of Commerce was the most influential of the New York newspapers, and it published a list of over 100 other Northern newspapers that had editorialized against the war in early 1861.

To continue reading: A President’s War on the Media

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Posted in Civil Liberties, History, Media, Uncategorized

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The Deification of Lincoln (and of the American State), by Thomas DiLorenzo

Posted on April 27, 2017 | 4 comments

There may be no historical figure in America more deified than Abraham Lincoln. Nobody has worked harder to bring the truth to light about Lincoln than Thomas DiLorenzo. From DiLorenzo at lewrockwell.com:

“The violence of the criticism aimed at Lincoln by the great men of his time on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line is startling.  The breadth and depth of the spectacular prejudice against him is often shocking for its cruelty, intensity, and unrelenting vigor.  The plain truth is that Mr. Lincoln was deeply reviled by many who knew him personally, and by hundreds of thousands who only knew of him.”

–Larry Tagg, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: America’s Most Reviled President

In his book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, historian Larry Tagg, a native of Lincoln, Illinois, constructs a powerful case that Abraham Lincoln was by far the most hated and reviled of all American presidents, North and South, during his lifetime.  For example, in May of 1864 the New York Times labeled Lincoln “a perjurer, a usurper, a tyrant, a subverter of the Constitution, a destroyer of the liberties of this country, a reckless desperado, a heartless trifler . . .  there is no circle in Dante’s Inferno full enough of torment to expiate his iniquities.” [But see Alex Kassel comment and SLL reply below.]

The Lacrosse, Wisconsin Democrat newspaper warned in November of 1864 that should Lincoln be reelected, “we hope that a bold hand will be found to plunge the dagger into the tyrant’s heart . . .”  Such views were commonplace in the North.

This all changed after Lincoln’s death, as the Republican Party recruited (and probably paid quite handsomely) the New England clergy to capitalize on the assassination for political propaganda purposes.  Professor Tagg explains this in a chapter entitled “The Sudden Saint.”  After viciously vilifying him for four years as an infidel, and worse, “pastors across America rewrote their Easter sermons” after Lincoln’s death on Good Friday, “to include a new, exalted view of Lincoln as an American Moses, a leader out of slavery, a national savior who was not allowed to cross over into the Promised Land.”  The Republican Party, with the help of a highly-politicized clergy, saw that “all their political enemies would fall before the sword that Lincoln’s death had put into their hands” in the post-war world.

To continue reading: The Deification of Lincoln (and of the American State)

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Lincoln and His Legacy, by Joseph Sobran

Posted on February 23, 2017 | Leave a comment

The Golden Pinnacle plowed fairly untilled literary soil with a less than flattering take on Abraham Lincoln. His historical record belies his contemporary deification, especially for libertarians. From Joseph Sobran at lewrockwell.com:

[Classic, February 19, 2008] — At this point it is probably futile to try to reverse the deification of Abraham Lincoln. Next year, if I know my countrymen, the bicentennial of his birth will be marked by stupendously cloying anniversary observances, all of them affirming, if not his literal divinity, at least something mighty close to it.

No doubt we will hear from the high priests and priestesses of the Lincoln cult: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Garry Wills, Harry V. Jaffa, and all the rest of the tireless hagiographers of academia, who regularly rate Honest Abe one of our two greatest presidents, right up there with Stalin’s buddy Franklin D. Roosevelt, father of the nuclear age and defiler of the U.S. Constitution. Such, we are told, is the Verdict of History.

But if Lincoln was so great, we must ask why nobody seems to have realized it while he was still alive. The abolitionists considered him unprincipled, Southerners hated him, and most Northerners opposed his war on the South. Only when the war ended and he was shot did people begin to transform him into a hero and martyr of the Union cause. But that cause was badly flawed.

The Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln always quoted selectively, says that the American colonies of Great Britain had become “free and independent states” — separate states, mind you, not the monolithic “new nation” he proclaimed at Gettysburg. The U.S. Constitution refers constantly to the states, but never to a “nation”; and this is a fact we should ponder.

To continue reading: Lincoln and His Legacy

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