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Doris
Kearns Goodwin is a museum-quality specimen of a "court historian"
– an intellectual or pseudo-intellectual who is devoted to pulling the
wool over the public’s eyes by portraying even the most immoral,
corrupt, and sleazy politicians as great, wise, and altruistic men. Far
better men than their subjects, in fact. She earned this designation by
writing so-called "psychohistories" of FDR, Lyndon Johnson, the
Kennedy family and, most recently, Lincoln.
Psychohistory
became an academic fad in the 1960s, when Doris Kearns was a graduate student
in political science at Harvard. It is essentially an enterprise in which
those who are not especially well trained in psychology (her degree is in
political science) play amateur psychologist while authoring biographies of
famous people. It is a very dark art in which almost any devious or even
murderous act by the state can be (and has been) excused or rationalized. Not
all psychohistory is as dubious as this, but a good bit of it is –
including all of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s books.
Murray
Rothbard explained the role of the court historian in an essay entitled
"The State" in his book, For a
New Liberty. "[S]ince the early origins of the
state," he wrote, "its rulers have always turned, as a necessary
bolster to their rule, to an alliance with society’s class of
intellectuals. The masses do not create their own abstract ideas, or indeed
think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas
adopted and promulgated by the body of intellectuals . . ."
Moreover,
"the alliance is based on a quid pro quo: on the one hand, the intellectuals
spread among the masses the idea that the State and its rulers are wise,
good, sometimes divine, and at the very least inevitable . . . . In return
for this panoply of ideology, the State incorporates the intellectuals as
part of the ruling elite, granting them power, status, prestige, and material
security." The intellectuals use academic jargon to portray themselves
as "scientific experts" who assist our rulers in the practice of
what they call "statesmanship," a pleasant-sounding euphemism for what
normal people would think of as plain old, down-and-dirty politics.
Court
historians develop a "worshipful and fawning attitude" toward their
rulers, Rothbard wrote, and this attitude is especially prevalent
"toward the office and person of the president." Doris Kearns
Goodwin’s whitewashing of the Johnson presidency, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, is a
perfect example of this phenomenon. Contrary to the great Robert Caro’s
biographical masterpieces on Johnson (The Path to Power; Means of Ascent; and Master of the Senate), who
is portrayed there as arguably the dirtiest, nastiest, lying, corrupt
politician of the twentieth century, Goodwin informs us that Johnson was
really "formidable," "fascinating," "graceful,"
"generous," "dazzling," "giving,"
"generous," and much more.
She
met Johnson as a White House intern while still in graduate school, and ended
up on the White House staff. After Johnson left office our confessed
plagiarist (to be discussed in more detail below) spent a great deal of time
with Johnson in Texas preparing his biography. The man some thirty years her
senior would crawl into her bed at 5:30 A.M. every morning, she wrote, so
that she could "listen" to him talk. "I had reminded him of
his dead mother," she writes in the introduction to Lyndon Johnson
and the American Dream. (Am I the only one who thinks it is bizarre for a
married woman to admit publicly that she allowed a married man to slip into
her bed before dawn because she reminded him of his dead mother?). She
has been rewarded ever since with giant book contracts, television gigs,
fame, and fortune. It’s good to be a court historian.
Plagiarism
101
The
January 18, 2002 issue of The Weekly Standard "outed" Doris
Kearns Goodwin as a plagiarist, proving that her book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, used
numerous phrases and sentences without attribution from three other books: Time to Remember by
Rose Kennedy; The Lost Prince by
Hank Searl; and Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times, by
Lynne McTaggart. Once this was made public – and the almost identical
phrases in Goodwin’s book placed side by side of the originals from
which she plagiarized in numerous newspaper and magazine articles, Goodwin
admitted that she had previously reached a large "private settlement"
with Lynne McTaggart for plagiarizing her work. Part of the settlement
required Goodwin and her publisher to footnote McTaggart’s words in
future print runs of her book.
Such a
thing would normally ruin any normal intellectual, but not a valued court
historian who has lionized all the major champions of Big Government in
recent decades – FDR, Johnson, the Kennedys. The Boston Globe
came to Goodwin’s defense, claiming that she only lifted "two or
three paragraphs" (see Bo Crader, "Lynn McTaggart on Doris Kearns
Goodwin," The Weekly Standard online, January 23, 2002).
McTaggart shot that down, however, by responding that there were in fact
"dozens and dozens" of words, phrases, and whole paragraphs taken
verbatim from her book by Goodwin.
Other
court historians then attempted to resurrect Goodwin’s reputation, for
the good of "the cause." Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Morton Blum,
Robert Dallek and Sena Wilentz were among a group of court historians who
wrote a letter to the New York Times (published on Oct. 25, 2003)
trying to argue that "Ms. Goodwin did not intentionally pass off someone
else’s words as her own." But writing in the Nov. 13, 2003 issue
of Slate online, Timothy Noah brought up the embarrassing fact (to
Schlesinger & Co.) that the American Historical Association’s
"Statement on Plagiarism" does not recognize exemptions based on
intent. Professor Rick Shenkman of George Mason University surveyed
plagiarism standards at universities across America and found that none
of them provide an exemption for intent.
Goodwin
has also been accused of being a serial plagiarizer. An August 2002 Los
Angeles Times story by Peter King reported that there were many passages
in Goodwin’s book on the Roosevelts, No Ordinary Time, that
were apparently lifted directly from Joseph Lash’s Eleanor and Franklin and
Hugh Gregory Gallagher’s FDR’s Splendid Deception (See
Timothy Noah, "Historians Rewrite History: The Campaign to Exonerate
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Slate online, Nov. 13, 2003).
Despite
all the proof of plagiarism that would ruin other intellectuals, the only
"penalty" Goodwin suffered was having to disappear from her usual
forum on national television for a few months and to resign from the Pulitzer
Prize Committee. After that, she would soon be rewarded with a fat contract
from Simon and Schuster to write a "political biography" of Abraham
Lincoln, the movie rights to which were purchased by Steven Spielberg before
the book was even published. It’s good to be a court historian.
The
Latest Lincoln Whitewash
Goodwin’s
new book on Lincoln, like almost all others, doesn’t even bother to
make the pretense of being a scholarly search for historical truth. The book
is entitled Team of Rivals, and
the subtitle is "The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln."
Of course, to court historians like Goodwin "political genius" is
always a good thing, for what politicians demonstrate their ingenuity in is
fooling the public into going along with bigger and bigger government, which
always means less and less freedom and prosperity (and more and more power
and prestige for court historians). (In the acknowledgments to her book on
Johnson, Goodwin thanks a gaggle of Ivy League and literary leftists
including John Kenneth Galbraith and Studs Terkel).
Murray
Rothbard had a very different take on Lincoln’s "political
genius." In an essay entitled "Two Just Wars: 1776 and 1861"
(John Denson, ed., The Costs of War),
Rothbard admitted that Lincoln was indeed a "master politician."
But if history teaches us anything about politicians, he continued, it is
that a masterful politician is one who is a masterful "liar, conniver,
and manipulator." Proponents of the free society should fear "master
politicians," not idolize or deify them.
Goodwin
engages in an amusing orgy of worshipful exaggeration and pure hokum in her
first two chapters, describing Abe as a "political genius"
characterized by "decency," "morality,"
"kindness," sensitivity," "compassion,"
"honesty," and "empathy." To Goodwin it was moral, kind,
sensitive, and compassionate to micromanage the waging of war on fellow
civilians as well as combatants for four long years, including the bombing
and burning of entire cities and the killing of thousands of civilians. She
writes of Lincoln’s supposed "abhorrence of hurting another"
and his "remarkable empathy" towards those who were "in
pain" (p. 104).
He was
supposedly "our only poet-president" (she apparently doesn’t
think there’s anything poetic about Jefferson’s writings,
including the Declaration of Independence, or George Washington’s
Farewell Address, among many others). And on top of all that, Lincoln was
"uncommonly tenderhearted"; an "acolyte of pure reason and
remorseless logic" who had "daunting concentration, phenomenal memory,
acute reasoning faculties, and interpretive penetration." He was a man
"who had never met his intellectual equal"; "the very
embodiment of good temper and affability"; and "his magnanimity
always served him well." He was a "master among men" (no pun
intended, presumably, with the "master-slave" language).
Goodwin’s
apparent purpose in all this lavish praise for Lincoln’s intellect is
to excuse or cover up the fact that he had less than one year of formal
education and probably never even read The Federalist Papers. This did
not stop him, however, from claiming to re-found America.
Goodwin
cannot deny that Lincoln was not a believer in God, never joined a church,
and often mocked Christians and Christianity (nor can anyone else). So she
soft-pedals the fact by writing of "Lincoln’s inability to take
refuge in the concept of a Christian heaven." And rather than pointing
out what a colossal hypocrite he was to invoke Scripture so often in
his political speeches, she instead uses his absence of faith to suggest that
we should feel ever more sorry for him because he "confronted the
loss of loved ones without prospect of finding them in the afterlife."
She voices no special sympathy in the book for the 600,000 Americans who died
in Lincoln's war, or for their families, but repeatedly explains why we
should feel especially sorry for poor old depressed Abe.
The
book compares Lincoln to three of his rivals to become president: William
Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates (who would serve, respectively, as
his secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, and attorney general). In
keeping with the court historian’s practice of describing our rulers as
wiser, more moral, and even handsomer than the rest of us, Goodwin portrays
these men and their families as nearly Perfect People. Frances Seward
was "a tall, slender, comely woman, with large black eyes, an elegant
neck, and a passionate commitment to women’s rights and the antislavery
cause."
Kate
Chase, the widowed Stuart Chase’s daughter, was "beautiful and
ambitious" as well as "brilliant." Julia Coalter Bates was
"an attractive, sturdy, woman." And on and on.
Like
almost all books on Lincoln, history is distorted from the very first
chapter. Goodwin never passes up a chance to praise Lincoln’s political
"genius," and she does on page 9 by remarking that his February 27,
1860 speech at the Cooper Union in New York City was "the pinnacle of
his success" in lobbying for the Republican presidential nomination. But
she misses the point entirely about why the speech was such a success
before a large New York City audience of 1500. It was a success because in
the speech Lincoln pledged that the Republican Party would never interfere
with southern slavery, thereby eliminating the prospect that large numbers of
black people would ever live among New Yorkers and compete with them for
jobs. Slavery’s "presence among us makes that toleration and
protection [of slavery] a necessity," he said. How’s that for
"brilliant" logic: We must keep slavery because it already exists.
All the constitutional guarantees of slavery should be "fully and
fairly, maintained," said "the great emancipator," a line that
drew a thunderous applause from the New Yorkers.
The
crowd also cheered his support for the Republican Party’s opposition to
the extension of slavery into the territories for the same reasons. As
University of Virginia historian, Professor Michael Holt, writes in his
recent book, The Fate of Their Country, "Many
northern whites . . . wanted to keep slaves out of the West in order to keep
blacks out. The North was a pervasively racist society where free blacks
suffered social, economic, and political discrimination. Bigots, they sought
to bar African-American slaves from the West." This is another reason
why New Yorkers cheered Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech. This, and the
fact that they knew that he was also a lifelong advocate of
"colonization" – of deporting all of the free blacks in the
U.S. to Africa, Haiti, Central America, anywhere but here.
Incredibly,
Goodwin makes nothing of the fact that the notoriously crooked and corrupt
New York/Tammany Hall political boss Thurlow Weed was the first to assist
Lincoln in planning his presidential campaign. To Goodwin Weed was simply
another successful old Whig "statesman" like Lincoln.
Goodwin
also points out (p. 88) that until he joined the Republican Party Lincoln
"would remain a Steadfast Whig" like Seward, Bates, and Chase. She
also correctly states that after his election as president, the top
requirement for members of his cabinet was that they had to be former Whigs.
But she completely misses the significance of this point – of the total
victory of the old Whigs. For the previous thirty years the Whig Party was the
party of Henry Clay’s "American System," period. Lincoln
toiled as much as anyone in the political trenches of the Whig Party for
decades to attempt to secure the planks of this "system" –
protectionist tariffs, a monopoly central bank run by the federal government,
and corporate welfare for the railroad and road-building industries (and
later, free land giveaways). This is why they were Whigs: they were
the political water carriers of the mostly northern business and banking
elite, as their political descendants, the Republican Party, still are to
this day. Lincoln filled his cabinet with former Whigs like himself so as to
guarantee that the old Whig economic agenda would be a top priority.
The
distinguishing feature of these neo-mercantilist policies was that they were
all tools of political plunder that primarily benefited the rich and
politically well connected at the expense of the rest of society. But Goodwin
merely recites the standard description of them by fellow Lincoln idolaters
like Gabor Boritt, that the policies were somehow motivated by a desire that
"all men should receive a full reward for their labors."
There’s no mention of the actual effects of the policies, which
many generations of economists have deemed to be plunder and harmful to
prosperity. Only motivations matter to Lincoln idolaters like Goodwin
and Boritt, who always portray Abe’s motivations as nothing less than
angelic.
Students
of politics have understood for literally centuries that the key to success
in democratic politics is to use the coercive powers of the state to dispense
concentrated benefits (through spending, tariffs that block competition,
etc.) on well-organized special interest groups while dispersing and
disguising the costs among the general population. The so-called "American
System" was a textbook example of this age-old recipe for political
plunder. But as Rothbard noted in his essay on the state, there has always
been an unholy alliance between the state and certain intellectuals, with the
intellectuals playing the role of "experts" who attempt to fool the
public into believing that policies that in fact benefit only a small number
of special interests are really in "the public interest" or
"for the good of society." This is the role that is played here by
Goodwin (who has a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard and surely must
understand all of this) and by all other Lincoln cultists who comment on the
economic policies of the nineteenth century Whig/Republican regime.
Protectionist tariffs that make all goods more expensive for all consumers,
depress the economy generally, and disproportionately harm export-reliant
industries like agriculture, says Goodwin, were supposedly motivated by
Lincoln’s alleged desire that every American have "an unfettered
start, and fair chance, in the race of life." Of course, politicians always
claim in their speeches that their motivations and policies are pure as the
driven snow. The only way a free society can be maintained is if a large
enough segment of the public is educated enough (especially in economics) to
see through these lies and deceptions and educate their fellow citizens about
them. This job is made all the more difficult by the constant drumbeat of
misinformation that comes from the court historian class.
Facts
about a presidential candidate that would sound absolutely alarming to
any sane person living in a democracy are excused away by Goodwin. For
example, she does note that Lincoln’s family had a history of mental
illness, that he suffered severe depression himself, that he was a
megalomaniac as well as one of the most arrogant human beings anyone would
ever hope to encounter. (Another recent book on Lincoln argues that his
mental illness "made him stronger"!). As Goodwin writes,
"Conscious of his superior powers and the extraordinary reach of his
mind and sensibilities, Lincoln feared from his earliest days that these
qualities would never . . . bring him recognition among his fellows." A
politician with a history of mental illness, and who is aggressively arrogant
and ambitious beyond belief, is a frightening prospect. Just read almost
anything the founding fathers wrote about the need to control and constrain
politics and politicians with "the chains of the Constitution," as
Jefferson put it.
The proper
way to interpret these facts, Goodwin advises us, is to feel sorry for old
Abe, who suffered "tremendous sadness" whenever he thought that his
superhuman powers would not be recognized "by his fellows."
Although
this is supposed to be a book about Lincoln’s "political genius"
most of the means by which Lincoln eventually grabbed on to dictatorial
powers are not mentioned. There is no mention of his long career of writing
anonymous letters to the editor smearing his political opponents, for
example. There is no mention that he was a wealthy and politically-connected
railroad industry lobbyist. In discussing the Lincoln presidency Goodwin
makes no mention whatsoever of the fact that literally tens of thousands of
northern political dissenters were imprisoned without due process, that hundreds
of opposition newspapers were shut down, that elections were rigged, that
West Virginia was illegally separated from the rest of the state, that all
telegraph communication was censored, private firearms were confiscated in
violation of the Second Amendment, habeas corpus was illegally suspended, and
that for these reasons, among others, generations of scholars have written of
"the Lincoln dictatorship." She doesn’t even cite the two
pro-Lincoln books that catalogue all of this – Constitutional
Problems under Lincoln by James Randall and Fate of Liberty by
Mark Neely – despite all her boasts of having spent ten years
researching and writing the book (which has several thousand footnotes).
Goodwin
never attempts to compare any of Lincoln’s political pronouncements to
his actions, as should always be done in judging any
politician. This is typical of all "Lincoln scholars." She follows
Harry Jaffa in making a Very Big Deal of Lincoln’s statement that
"No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s
consent." But Lincoln not only supported, but was the secret author of a
constitutional amendment that passed the House and Senate shortly before his
inauguration that would have forbidden the federal government from ever
interfering with southern slavery ("the first thirteenth
amendment"). To Lincoln, it was perfectly OK for one man to govern
another man without his consent as long as everyone continued to pay federal
taxes. He welcomed the slave-owning border states into his union with open
arms. It was perfectly fine for one man to govern another man without that
man’s consent as long as they all remained part of the union and paid
federal taxes. Moreover, his invasion of the southern states was nothing if
it was not a war against consent. The south no longer consented to
being governed by Washington, D.C., and Lincoln waged the bloodiest war in
American history for four long years to deprive them of that right.
Like
Jaffa and other Lincoln cultists, Goodwin ignores or makes lame excuses for
most of Lincoln’s more unsavory speeches, like his famous White
Superiority Speech given in Peoria, Illinois, where he strongly opposed any
semblance of equality of the white and black races, opposed "making
citizens of Negroes," opposed making voters or jurors of them, opposed
inter-racial marriage, and even used the words "superior" and
"inferior" to define the "appropriate" relation between
the races. He supported the Illinois Black Codes and was a "manager"
of the Illinois Colonization Society, which sought to deport all the free
blacks out of the state. He also supported the Illinois constitution’s
provision to prohibit black people from migrating into the state. He once
defended a slave owner named Robert Matson who sought to re-acquire his runaway
slaves (he lost the case). As a man of the nineteenth century North, he was
an extreme racial bigot, a fact that is always swept under the rug. Thus,
perhaps the biggest lie that is told in Team of Rivals is the
statement on page 207 that "armies of scholars, meticulously
investigating every aspect of [Lincoln’s] life, have failed to find a
single act of racial bigotry on his part." In reality, these so-called
"armies of scholars" are not scholars at all but armies of court
historians who have distorted, covered up, and lied about the real
Lincoln.
Goodwin
puts a rather sophomoric spin on many of Lincoln’s more notorious acts.
For example, she does document that not only did he support the
constitutional amendment that would have prohibited the federal government
from ever interfering with southern slavery, but the amendment was his
idea. After he was elected but before he was inaugurated "He
instructed Seward to introduce these proposals in the Senate Committee of
Thirteen without indicating they issued from Springfield. The first resolved
that ‘the Constitution should never be altered so as to authorize
Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in the states.’"
Another recommendation that he instructed Seward to get through Congress was
that "all state personal liberty laws in opposition to the Fugitive
Slave Law be repealed" (p. 296). A number of northern states invoked the
Jeffersonian states’ rights doctrine to enact such laws which
effectively nullified the Fugitive Slave Law within their states. Lincoln
sought federal legislation that would have overridden these "personal
liberty laws," as they were called.
Rather
than drawing the obvious conclusion – that Lincoln wasn’t
particularly interested in the wellbeing of southern slaves, and that he was
a colossal hypocrite and an enemy of freedom – Goodwin praises
these odious positions because "they held the Republican Party
together."
Goodwin
doesn’t seem to notice the importance of the fact that when Seward
announced these two positions in a speech in Boston, "the galleries
erupted in thunderous applause." This was because the vast majority of
New Englanders were happy to see southern slavery persist; they did not want
any liberated black people living among them. They applauded thunderously to
Seward’s appeal to repeal the personal liberty laws for the same
reason: they wanted the few free blacks that lived among them to be sent away
as well.
Lincoln’s
political handler, the devious Tammany Hall political hack Thurlow Weed,
"loved the speech," writes Goodwin. Lincoln wrote Seward a letter
of congratulations, but then lied about being the author of the ideas. The
lies were OK according to Goodwin, though, because they "kept his
fractious party together."
Although
it was the southern states that were invaded by the largest army ever
assembled in the history of the world, and nearly the entire war was fought
south of the Mason-Dixon line, with vast stretches of the region laid waste
with entire towns and cities burned to the ground, Goodwin’s only sympathy
is with the North. Readers are supposed to feel sorrow for the fact that,
during the war, "the residents of Washington lived in a state of
constant fear," and "elsewhere in the North, anxiety was nearly as
great." Poor babies. Moreover, there is hardly any talk of death at all
in this very large book, apart from than the death of Lincoln’s son and
a former girlfriend. When Goodwin discusses the New York City draft riots of
July 1863 she notes that a regiment of federal soldiers finally "ended"
the "mob violence" but fails to mention how it was ended.
Acting upon direct orders from Lincoln, some 15,000 federal soldiers were
sent from the recently-concluded Battle of Gettysburg and ordered to fire
into the crowds. Hundreds, maybe thousands were killed in the streets of New
York. Yet to Goodwin it was the draft protests that were
"disgraceful" (p. 538), not the killing of thousands of protesters
by federal soldiers.
The
biggest assault on personal liberty in all of American history, the illegal
suspension of habeas corpus by Lincoln, is dealt with in two short paragraphs
in Goodwin’s 916-page book. The reader learns almost nothing about it,
which of course is the idea. She does mention that this illegal act
"aroused the wrath" of chief justice Roger B. Taney, but there is
no explanation at all of what Taney said in his opinion. Nor is there any
mention of the fact that Lincoln responded to Taney’s opinion by
issuing an arrest warrant for the chief justice, one of the most dictatorial
and tyrannical acts by any president in American history. Nor does the reader
learn that in 1866 the U.S. Supreme Court backed Taney’s opinion (Ex
Parte Milligan) that Lincoln had in fact acted illegally, ruling that no
one – not the president nor Congress – can suspend habeas corpus
where the civil courts are still operating, as they were in Maryland in 1861.
Nor is
there any mention of Seward’s notorious role as the head of a secret
KGB-style police force that was in charge of rounding up and imprisoning
thousands of political dissenters without due process. Seward is always
portrayed instead as "a great statesman" and a close personal
friend and confidant of poor, depressed old Abe.
Not
surprisingly, Goodwin’s discussion of the Emancipation Proclamation is,
shall we say, biased and incomplete. She does admit that it did not apply to
the border states that were still part of the union, but the excuse she makes
for this is that Lincoln "had no constitutional authority" there.
But wait a minute. Lincoln never admitted that the southern states ever left
the union. To him, they were part of the United States. If the Emancipation
Proclamation applied to Mississippi it should therefore have applied to
Maryland as well.
The
true explanation, as opposed to the one given by Goodwin and most other
Lincoln cultists, is that Lincoln’s position was: "You can keep
your slaves as long as you continue to pay taxes to the federal
government." Thus, parts of the union where slavery existed were
specifically exempted, as were various parts of the south, such as in
Louisiana, where the Union Army controlled the territory. The Emancipation
Proclamation only "freed" slaves where it was impossible to do so.
This is another important fact that Goodwin leaves out.
She
also fails to note that opinion makers around the world saw through the ruse
and denounced the Proclamation as hypocritical and nothing but crass
political theater since it only applied to "rebel territory."
Instead, she misleads her readers once again by saying that the only criticism
came from "conservatives" and southerners. This is unequivocally
untrue.
Goodwin’s
discussion of the imprisonment and deportation of Democratic Congressman
Clement Vallandigham of Ohio is also hopelessly biased and, in places, factually
incorrect. Vallandigham was Lincoln’s most outspoken critic in
Congress. At a time when southern cities were being bombed and destroyed,
tens of thousands of Americans were being killed, habeas corpus was
suspended, opposition newspapers shut down, and civil liberties in the North
all but nonexistent, Vallandigham gallantly protested. But to Goodwin the
main source of "violence" at this point in time was not the
bloodiest war in American history, but Congressman Vallandigham’s "violent
antiwar speeches that attracted national attention" (p. 503).
Here
Goodwin is at her best as a deceiving and misinforming court historian. She
cartoonishly portrays Vallandigham as a demonic Snidely Whiplash type
character (in contrast to all the daring and dashing Lincolnites), with
"a vindictive, ghastly grin" and a voice that was "a piercing
shriek." She makes no mention at all of the substance of what he said in
his congressional speeches denouncing the suspension of habeas corpus, the
shutting down of newspapers, etc., but only attempts to characterize
Vallandigham as some kind of nut.
Another
member of Congress who protested the illegal suspension of habeas corpus is
described by Goodwin has having given Congress a "liquor-fueled
harangue" in "language fit only for a drunken fishwife." None
of the substance of his complaints are revealed, either.
Sixty-seven
armed federal soldiers broke down the door to Vallandigham’s home in
Dayton, Ohio in April of 1863 and hauled him off to a military prison.
Goodwin cites a small Midwestern newspaper that was affiliated with the
Republican Party as her source for her statement that Vallandigham supposedly
fired several shots at the invaders. If he did, good for him, but the story
seems extremely unlikely, considering the source. Vallandigham was sent to
Tennessee, where the Confederates wanted nothing to do with him, so he went
into exile in Canada where he became the Ohio Democratic Party’s
gubernatorial nominee. This, too, "bothered" Lincoln according to Goodwin.
She expresses no concern over the abolition of civil liberties that such
actions entailed, including the dangerous precedent that was set. Her only
concern is with Lincoln’s "feelings."
According
to Goodwin it is not Vallandigham or his family that should be given any
sympathy over this whole episode, but poor old suffering Abe, since the
arrest "brought him pain." Not so much pain, however, that he would
change his mind or his actions
When
the Chicago Times reported on the imprisonment and deportation of
Vallandigham it was "incendiary coverage," according to Goodwin, so
the Lincoln administration shut the paper down. An Illinois newspaper.
Lincoln’s entire cabinet protested Vallandigham’s arrest, but to
no avail. Freedom of speech was not tolerated anywhere in the North by
the Lincoln administration, and especially not in politics.
Goodwin
claims that Lincoln’s overriding motivation was his deep and abiding
love for "democracy." But he had a very odd idea of democracy. His
"plan" for "reconstructing" the south, for example,
involved denying the right to vote to any man (women did not have the right
to vote) who had been in the Confederate army, served in the Confederate
government, or who materially aided the army or soldiers in any way. That
would have eliminated almost the entire male population from 16 to 50, and
then some. Then, if ten percent of the adult male population could be found
(it never was) that would take a loyalty oath and publicly denounce the
Confederacy, claiming that they were opposed to it all along, then they would
constitute the electoral "majority" that would eventually run state
and local governments in the South.
This
was called Lincoln’s "ten percent plan," which of course
makes a mockery of the whole idea of "democracy." It is merely a
recipe for a puppet government run by the Republican Party, i.e., by Lincoln.
Goodwin makes no comment about the absurdity of it all, but praises the idea
lavishly because, once again, "Lincoln had succeeded . . . in uniting
the Republican Party." (Obviously, the Republican Party would have
enthusiastically endorsed the idea of running all the southern state and
local governments, thereby eliminating forever any possibility of Democratic
Party opposition ever arising in the region.)
In
summary, I suppose the best thing that can be said of Team of Rivals
is that it could not possibly be as bad as the movie that Steven Spielberg
may someday make based on it.
Thomas DiLorenzo
Also
by Thomas DiLorenzo
Thomas
J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about
Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His
latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed
the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.
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© 2009 by LewRockwell.com
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