Liberty MavenIt’s All Abraham Lincoln’s Fault
February 16th, 2009 2:00 am | by Marc Gallagher | Published in Big Government, Civil Liberties, Economics, Liberty, Maven Commentary, Money, Philosophy, Politics, War, government spending, national debt, rule of law, slavery | 13 Responses
We are in the midst of celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday at the same time Barack Obama is ready to put his signature on one of the largest spending bill’s in American history. It is quite appropriate. So appropriate to almost approach irony.
The United States was not a shining land of liberty prior to Lincoln’s Presidency. Slavery is the best and most popular testament to that. America was an imperfect country pursuing perfection. Lincoln made it worse. The fact that he is revered so universally from the surface dwellers is bothersome. However, the fact that so many historians make excuses for his authoritarian methods because he supposedly “freed the slaves” makes me downright ill.
Lincoln cared little for abolishing slavery. He cared about keeping the Union together and maintaining his own political interests. He was the first President to truly preside as a dictator. Some may argue that John Adams had dictatorial “qualities” as well, but Lincoln went far beyond the scope of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Lincoln and other Presidents after him like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and George W. Bush paved the way toward a more oppressive authoritarian federal government. Lincoln was the first though. It’s all his fault that we are high kicking toward socialism today. He kicked first. The rest have followed.
A recent article by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel explores the authoritarian side of Lincoln. First, Hummel shows evidence that Lincoln had little concern for freeing slaves.
Lincoln elevated the suppression of Southern independence above any concern for blacks. As he publicly explained to Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” Fortunate for the slaves that Lincoln ultimately concluded that freeing them offered the most military and political advantages.
So Lincoln was politically motivated, that doesn’t make him a dictator right? Well, that’s not all.
Lincoln’s war delivered a blow to civil liberties. The Union imprisoned without trial or charges at least 14,000 civilians. To be sure, the greater number were citizens of either the border states or the Confederacy, and many of those arrested secured release within a month or two after swearing a loyalty oath. Nonetheless, the federal government monitored and censored the mails and telegraphs, and shut down more than 300 newspapers for varying periods.
Hummel sums up Lincoln’s reign:
The presidency of Abraham Lincoln thus witnessed the simultaneous culmination and repudiation of the American Revolution.
How can a President repudiate the American Revolution and be considered our greatest President? I don’t think he can.
So why is Lincoln to blame for the economic enigma we find ourselves in today? The answer is found a bit earlier within Hummel’s excellent article.
The war occasioned protectionist tariffs, a vast array of internal excise taxes and the country’s first national income tax. The national debt climbed from a modest $65 million to $2.8 billion. This provided the justification for inflationary fiat money and nationally regulated banking.
I imagine Ron Paul or any other lawmaker standing up to blame Lincoln for our current financial woes would induce incredulous laughter from his/her colleagues and the media. It is too easy to ignore the truth when it comes to blind hero worship. These days, that is my greatest worry regarding Obama.
Without Lincoln it is certainly feasible that we’d still be living in an insolvent nation today. It took many well-intentioned yet bad economic decisions over the course of many years to get us to where we are now. However, it is fair to blame Lincoln for making those subsequent decisions possible and acceptable.
Now Barack Obama is using Lincoln as a political baseball bat in the hopes of winning us over. How appropriate.
For a majority of the uninitiated, public school educated masses, it’s working like a charm. For the rest of us, we are merely hoping to avoid the bat crashing down on our skulls.
February 16th, 2009 at 3:26 am (#)
This column was to be expected, as those Liberty heroes include Thomas Dilorenzo and co.
Let’s clear up one thing, my dear Mr Gallagher, that I am one of those public schooled ignorami (have been called that by Dilorenzo) and have read his junk as well as Jaffa’s and many others and have found the theory you present laughable.
I have already pointed to the complaint of Dilorenzo’s buddy Rockwell about the Constitution, how it is the real cause of all of those problems that you complain of, and to the several Presidents and Congresses before Lincoln who, one could say, paved the way for Lincoln to do those supposedly wrong acts.
It has been noted that the Confederacy, in respecting the rights of the States and others, lost the war. Indeed, several State goverments under the CSA refused to aid the Confederacy in its time of need. The CSA, it is also noted, composed of Southern States, from where many of the Framers and Founders came from, seemed to lack the political and military abilities of those Framers and Founders. But this bears nothing on Lincoln.
Up until the election of Lincoln, the South had gotten its way. It had provoked an unjust war with Mexico, had censored and jailed those who spoke out against slavery in those Southern States, had caused the warfare in Kanasa territory and had contributed to the Civil War’s coming by policies that instead of reasoning about slavery, made any dialogue impossible, just as the radical abolitionists had done. Lincoln was no radical abolitionist, who would have destroyed the nation to free the slaves. Dilorenzo and co. argument is a piece of hypocrisy, claiming Lincoln to be a radical abolitionist and then attacking him for something that he never was. Yes, Lincoln did want to free the slaves, but not at the cost of smashing up the nation.
It is also asserted that Lincoln had all those opportunities to settle the matter, by buying the slaves (and if he had done that, that action would have dwarfed the current government intervention into the economy; the parallel with the idea to buy up all the bad mortages is striking), by accepting the CSA as an independent nation (based by some on the supposed notion that Jefferson had about letting the seceeding States in his time go–which is another of those out of context quotes bandied about by the modern secesh) or by keeping slavery alive. But none of these things could have been done, although Lincoln did consider these solutions. The problem was not some economic thing that could have been handled rationally–rationality lay on the floor of the Senate, clubbed to death by that certain Southern Senator as he clubbed that Northern Senator. And slavery was a vital element in the South’s reason for secession–look at any of their ordinances of secession and you will see that their complaint is that Lincoln was hemming them in, denying them their so-called right to take their slaves into the federal territories, invoking States rights in a place (the territories)where it had no standing–see the Constitution about who and which government gets to organize the territories into States.
And let’s get practical for one minute. As you admit, the bulk of the arrests were in the border states, which were slave states and were favoring the South, full of symapthizers for the CSA. Washington D C was in enemy territory, or at least on its borders, with VA going for the CSA. To arrest possible spies or traitors, to fortify the area was the act of prudence, of a necessity that Jefferson and Jackson would have recognized. What? Would you have insited upon the laborious process of respecting the rights of the citizens in Maryland and then to watch the capitol be taken by the CSA? It is here that we can seperate the wolves in sheeps clothing, those civil rights advocates of the South from those who were for Lincoln and the North. The CSA would have loved it had Lincoln not done those things–it would have made their task of taking DC so much easier.
And there’s also this: the South, in not getting another Southern President who would have temporised with slavery, with the South professing the old faith in the gradual elimination of slavery(another Southern lie, as if any slave owner would have parted with his property)was shocked to find that a new age had arrived, with a large population in the free states pressing upon them–they had already lost the House long ago over that issue, and were holding the line in the Senate to prevent the Constitutional Amendment that would have legally banned slavery–and it was for this reason, the threat of that Amendment, that they chose secession and war.
Indeed, any Northern President would have been a threat–it is assumed by many Southerners that if McClellan had been elected, the CSA would have gotten its independence, as McClellan had campaigned on a peace platform. But why should he? in 1864, even with a stalemate around Atlanta and Petersburg, the CSA had lost, its economy and political structure a wreck–it would have been a nation easy to pick up by anyone.
And there’s more–but I shall leave you with this. Dilorenzo’s book, The Real Lincoln, was attacked by the reviewer at The Independent Institute as being badly bungled. Although the reviewer was sympathetic to Dilorenzo’s theory, he had made a mess of ti by misquotes and errors, of what the reviewer called fatally flawed scholarship–and here’s the good part: that Institute is where Dilorenzo(not to mention Higgs, Roberts and the gang at LRC) hang out when not writing for Lew Rockwell. Dilorenzo, I believe, sits on the board at that institute. It would be as if Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided had been attacked by a review in the Claremont Institute’s Review of Books. And Hummel’s work has probably also had a similar treatrment, even at a sympathetic site such as the Abbeville Institute or some other neoConfederate assembly.
February 18th, 2009 at 3:37 am (#)
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February 20th, 2009 at 1:55 am (#)
Actually, it is all Thomas Jefferson’s fault. It begins with the Louisiana Purchase. The salient points of the Purchase are these: It was an illegal action that broke the Constitution–admitted to by Jefferson himself. It was defended because it was necessary and that there is a law higher than the Constitution. And it was done by far sighted legislators and the executive for the citizens own good(see Jefferson’a letters to Breckenridge in late 1803 and to Calvin in 1810) It doubled the size of the nation, which increased the power of the central government (see Montesque’s Sprirt of the Laws for his theory, still held, that an increase in a nation’s land area will be an increase in its central govt’s power) The monies paid out went to France, a France under Napoleon, who waged war on Europe with those funds, bringin a visit by the Briritsh to the US in 1812–so much for avoiding entaglements in Europe’s wars. And the Purchase gave a huge push for Manifest Destiny, from which we got the Trail of Tears and the War with Mexico in 1846 (our most unjust war, bar none, as it was incited by the slave Staes and their interests to get land, not to mention the rip off done by the gold rush in California to take that part of Mexciso away from it) Whatever Lincoln did, or Obama, has roots and precedents in the action of the Purchase–
But you people honor Jefferson as some kind of Libertarian saint–What you people know, what homeschooled education you’ve goten, is hardly of any quality at all–it is just another set of alternative myths and legends.
February 20th, 2009 at 9:38 am (#)
RBurnett, you’ve posted here on dozens of occasions discussing the Louisiana purchase, and the foibles of Thomas Jefferson. What’s the point? Nobody here has ever stated that Jefferson was perfect. Nobody is perfect. There is no perfect example of a politician with respect to the values of Liberty. But it’s not a black and white world. I only maintain that on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being perfect in the eyes of liberty, Jefferson is a 9 where Lincoln is maybe a 2. Is it your position that Jefferson was less a friend of Liberty than Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, and so may others?
October 11th, 2009 at 10:54 pm (#)
youre an idot
October 12th, 2009 at 12:18 am (#)
Thanks for adding your "wisdom" to the discussion.
Enjoy,
Marc
December 9th, 2009 at 6:25 am (#)
I'm one of the folks that once had the same "blind hero worship" for Lincoln that you're talking about. While I still think very highly of him, it's true that he wasn't perfect.
It seems a little extreme to claim that anything is "all his fault." There are countless factors in any situation, and it isn't rational to pin everything on one person. However, you do offer an interesting perspective.
December 9th, 2009 at 6:25 am (#)
I'm one of the folks that once had the same "blind hero worship" for Lincoln that you're talking about. While I still think very highly of him, it's true that he wasn't perfect.
It seems a little extreme to claim that anything is "all his fault." There are countless factors in any situation, and it isn't rational to pin everything on one person. However, you do offer an interesting perspective.
December 9th, 2009 at 6:25 am (#)
I'm one of the folks that once had the same "blind hero worship" for Lincoln that you're talking about. While I still think very highly of him, it's true that he wasn't perfect.
It seems a little extreme to claim that anything is "all his fault." There are countless factors in any situation, and it isn't rational to pin everything on one person. However, you do offer an interesting perspective.
December 9th, 2009 at 2:52 pm (#)
I can't answer for Marc, but I strongly suspect the intention of the title was simply one of eye-catching hyperbole.
December 9th, 2009 at 2:52 pm (#)
I can't answer for Marc, but I strongly suspect the intention of the title was simply one of eye-catching hyperbole.
December 9th, 2009 at 3:22 pm (#)
Mike is correct… it was a bit of a "rhetorical flourish" as Tom Woods has been known to say.
Lincoln started the "Cult of the Presidency" where we worship the Executive as Catholics worship the Pope. That is a very dangerous road and we've been on it since Lincoln with a few breaks in between (Harding, Coolidge, etc..).
So no, it's not ALL his fault, but it can be said that he started it.
Enjoy,
Marc
December 9th, 2009 at 3:22 pm (#)
Mike is correct… it was a bit of a "rhetorical flourish" as Tom Woods has been known to say.
Lincoln started the "Cult of the Presidency" where we worship the Executive as Catholics worship the Pope. That is a very dangerous road and we've been on it since Lincoln with a few breaks in between (Harding, Coolidge, etc..).
So no, it's not ALL his fault, but it can be said that he started it.
Enjoy,
Marc