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The
answer to the question posed in the title of this article is: No. There are
no limits to the lies and misrepresentations about Lincoln’s political
legacy – and about those who question the Official Version of it
– that are spread by what I call the Lincoln cult. It almost seems
congenital. As soon as The Real Lincoln was
published in 2002, the Lincoln cult swung into action with outlandish and
outrageous misrepresentations of what I say in the book in an obvious attempt
to keep people from reading it. I was surprised to learn from various hatchet
men associated with the Claremont Institute, for example, that I am a
Marxist; that there is not a single Lincoln quote in my book (a blatant lie,
of course); that there is a defense of slavery in the book (another blatant
lie); that there is sympathy for Nazi Germany in the book (the biggest lie of
all); and on and on.
Various
"Lincoln scholars" have stood up during debates with me to declare
to audiences of laypersons such blatant falsehoods as: the Union Army never
caused the death of a single Southern civilian; no private property was
stolen during Sherman’s march; Lincoln never did a single thing that
was unconstitutional or illegal; I supposedly wrote that it would have been
fine had slavery lasted into the 20th century (this was actually
Lincoln’s opinion, not mine); Virginia did not reserve the right to
take back the powers it delegated to the central government at some future
date as a condition of ratifying the Constitution; the king of England did
not sign a peace treaty that named all the individual states; and myriad
other lies that are easily researched by simply consulting the plain facts of
history.
The
latest example of such shenanigans is an article entitled "The Limits of Lincoln Bashing" by one
Grant Havers, a Canadian philosophy professor, in the April 23 online edition
of Taki’s Magazine. Havers apparently believes that pointing out
how the actual facts of historical reality conflict with Harry
Jaffa’s stylized interpretations of Lincoln’s rhetoric
constitutes "bashing" as opposed to scholarship. He devotes only a paragraph
to myself and my writings, and every single thing he says about me in the
paragraph is false.
Havers
identifies me as a "paleoconservative historian" despite the fact
that I have never described myself in this way to anyone, either verbally or
in writing. In fact, I don’t even know what a paleoconservative is. I
know of several people who label themselves as such, but they seem to have
differing views on many issues, which leads me to believe that there is not
even one single definition of the term. Nor am I a historian (thank goodness)
but an economist with an interest in history, especially economic history.
So
much for the first half of Havers’ first sentence. The second half of
his first sentence discussing me and my work contains the preposterous
falsehood that I "have eagerly accepted Jaffa’s terms of discourse
while disputing its moral implications." In reality, I think Harry Jaffa
is a crackpot. I utterly reject his strange notion that Lincoln was a
champion of equality, a myth that is at the heart of everything Jaffa has
ever written on the subject. While it is true that Lincoln quoted
Jefferson’s "all men are created equal" words from the
Declaration on Independence on a few occasions, his entire adult life is a
demonstration that he was in fact as opposed to equality as any white man in
19th century America was, North or South. "I will say then
that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the
social and political equality of the white and black races," he said in his
September 18, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas. He repeated this on many
other occasions.
More
importantly, his lifelong actions prove that this was indeed his true
belief. He voted against black suffrage in Illinois; opposed allowing blacks
to testify in court in Illinois; voted against abolishing the slave trade in
Washington, D.C. during his one term in Congress; supported the Illinois
"Black Codes" that deprived the small number of free blacks who
resided in the state of any semblance of citizenship; supported the
"Corwin Amendment" to the Constitution that would have formally
enshrined slavery in the U.S. Constitution; and spent his entire adult life
advocating "colonization" or the deportation of black people from
the U.S. He was one of the "managers" of the Illinois Colonization
Society which sought to use state tax dollars to deport free blacks out of
the state.
Lincoln
was a masterful politician who could use tongue-twisting rhetoric to deceive
the public better than any American politician in history. In this regard he
was Bill Clinton times ten thousand. For example, referring to the part of
Declaration of Independence that mentions equality (while ignoring the fact
that the entire document was a declaration of the right of secession),
he said: "The African upon his own soil has all the natural
rights that instrument vouchsafes to all mankind" (emphasis added). The
italicized words are the key to understanding Lincoln on this point. He
considered black people to be some kind of alien beings, which is why he
called them "the Africans." More importantly, he believed that they
could never be equal here in America, but only "upon their own
soil" or "in their native clime," i.e., Africa, Haiti, Central
America, etc., as he often stated. Moreover, he also clearly believed that it
was undesirable to attempt to enforce racial equality in the U.S., as
he stated in the above quotation from the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Harry
Jaffa has spent his entire career spreading the Big Lie of Lincoln as a
champion of "equality" in order to justify the Republican
Party’s foreign policy agenda of military aggression and imperialism in
the name of spreading equality around the globe. (Spreading
"equality" around the globe at gunpoint sounds a lot like the
professed goals of 20th-century communism, doesn’t it?).
Jaffa’s
second Big Lie, one that was invented by Alexander Hamilton, repeated by
Webster, Joseph Story, John Marshall and others, including Lincoln, was that
there was never any such thing as state sovereignty in America. The
Constitution was supposedly ratified by some kind of national election
involving "the whole people." This lie was invented by Hamilton in
his propaganda war for a centralized, monopolistic state. Of course,
"the whole people" never had anything whatsoever to do with the
founding or the ratification of the Constitution (women didn’t even
have the right to vote until 1920). That was the job of the sovereign states,
as is clearly stated in Article 7 of the Constitution.
The
next falsehood about me and my work that Havers jams into one short paragraph
in Taki’s Magazine is that I allegedly put "the
responsibility for all American empire building on Abe’s shoulders
alone"; I am supposedly unaware that "pre-Lincoln America" had
certain "tendencies towards centralized power"; and that Lincoln
was not "the first architect of Leviathan in America."
Havers
has obviously not read my books. If there is one over-arching theme, it is
that Lincoln, as I have written, was the "political son of Alexander
Hamilton, the champion of a centralized governmental monarchy, or something
like it, coupled with British-style mercantilistic economic policies
(protectionist tariffs, central banking, corporate welfare) and an aggressive
foreign policy. After the death of Hamilton and his nemesis Jefferson, this
political mantle was carried on by the heirs of Hamilton’s Federalists,
the Whigs, including Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. I tell this story of the
struggle between the American advocates of Leviathan government
(Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln) and their Jeffersonian opponents in my books, but as
I said, Havers obviously did not bother to read them before posing as a
legitimate critic of them.
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.
Copyright
© 2009 by LewRockwell.com
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