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Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: Lincoln the
Racist
"Every other country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil
war . . . . How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans
when the hatred lingered for 100 years."
~ Ron Paul to Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" in 2007
The new Steven Spielberg movie about Lincoln is entirely based on a
fiction, to use a mild term. As longtime Ebony magazine executive
editor Lerone Bennett, Jr. explained in his book, Forced
into Glory: Abraham Lincolns White Dream: "There is a pleasant
fiction that Lincoln . . . became a flaming advocate of the [Thirteenth]
amendment and used the power of his office to buy votes to ensure its passage.
There is no evidence, as David H. Donald has noted, to support that
fiction". (Emphasis added).
In fact, as Bennett shows, it was the genuine abolitionists in Congress
who forced Lincoln to support the Thirteenth Amendment that ended
slavery, something he refused to do for fifty-four of his fifty-six years.
The truth, in other words, is precisely the opposite of the story told in
Spielbergs Lincoln movie, which is based on the book Team
of Rivals by the confessed plagiarist/court historian Doris
Kearns-Goodwin. (My LRC review of her book was entitled "A Plagiarists
Contribution to Lincoln Idolatry").
And who is David H. Donald, cited by Bennett as his authority? He is a
longtime Harvard University historian, Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln
biographer, and the preeminent mainstream Lincoln scholar of our time. One
would think that Goodwin would have considered his work, being a Harvard
graduate (in political science) herself.
The theme of the Spielberg movie is the subtitle of Goodwins book:
"The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln." Nothing gets a leftists
legs tingling more than someone who is very, very good at the methods of
political theft, plunder, subterfuge, and bullying. Goodwin the court
historian has devoted her life to writing hagiographies of the worst of the
worst political bullies FDR, Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys, and Lincoln. (It
was her book on the Kennedys that got her in trouble and forced her to admit
plagiarizing dozens of paragraphs, and paying a six-figure sum to the victim
of her plagiarism. That got her kicked off the Pulitzer prize committee and
PBS, but only for a very short while).
Lincolns "political genius" is grossly overblown in Goodwins
book. In addition the book, like virtually all other books on the subject,
completely misses the point. If Lincoln was such a political genius, he
should have used his "genius" to end slavery in the way the
British, French, Spaniards, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and all the Northern states
in the U.S. did in the nineteenth century, namely, peacefully.
Instead, the slaves were used as political pawns in a war that resulted in
the death of some 800,000 Americans according to the latest, revised
estimates of Civil War deaths that has come to be accepted by the history
profession. To this number should be added tens of thousands of Southern
civilians. Standardizing for todays population, that would be the equivalent
of more than 8 million dead Americans, with more than double that number
maimed for life.
Lincoln the "political genius" thanked his naval commander
Gustavus Fox for helping him maneuver/trick the Confederates into firing on
Fort Sumter, where no one was hurt let alone killed. This, Lincoln believed,
gave him the "right" to ignore the constitutional definition of
treason (Article 3, Section 3) as levying war upon the states, and levy war
upon the (Southern) states in order to "prove," once and for all,
that the American union was NOT voluntary, and NOT based on the principle of
consent of the governed, as Jefferson declared in the Declaration of
Independence. The main purpose of the war was to destroy the Jeffersonian
states rights vision of government and replace it with the Hamiltonian
vision of a highly centralized, dictatorial executive state that would pursue
a domestic policy of mercantilism (the Federalist/Whig/Republican Party
platform of protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare, and a national bank to
finance it all) and a foreign policy of empire and imperialism. The purpose
and result – of the war was to consolidate all political power in Washington,
D.C. and to render all states, North and South, as mere appendages of their
masters and overseers in Washington. This of course is exactly what happened
after the war and it happened by design, not coincidence.
A real statesman, as opposed to a monstrous, egomaniacal patronage
politician like Abe Lincoln, would have made use of the decades-long world
history of peaceful emancipation if his main purpose was to end slavery.
Of course, Lincoln always insisted that that was in no way his purpose. He
stated this very clearly in his first inaugural address, in which he even
supported the proposed Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, which would have
prohibited the federal government from EVER interfering with Southern
slavery. He and the U.S. Congress declared repeatedly that the purpose of
the war was to "save the union," but of course the war destroyed
the voluntary union of the founding fathers.
Jim Powells book, Greatest
Emancipations: How the West Ended Slavery, provides chapter and verse
of how real statesmen of the world, in sharp contrast to Lincoln, ended
slavery without resorting to waging total war on their own citizens. Among
the tactics employed by the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danes, and
others were slave rebellions, abolitionist campaigns to gain public support
for emancipation, election of anti-slavery politicians, encouragement and
assistance of runaway slaves, raising private funds to purchase the freedom
of slaves, and the use of tax dollars to buy the freedom of slaves. There
were some incidents of violence, but nothing remotely approaching the
violence of a war that ended up killing 800,000 Americans.
The story of how Great Britain ended slavery peacefully is the highlight
of Powells book. There were once as many as 15,000 slaves in England
herself, along with hundreds of thousands throughout the British empire. The
British abolitionists combined religion, politics, publicity campaigns,
legislation, and the legal system to end slavery there just two decades prior
to the American "Civil War."
Great credit is given to the British statesman and member of the House of
Commons, William Wilberforce. After organizing an educational campaign to
convince British society that slavery was immoral and barbaric, Wilberforce
succeeded in getting a Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, and within seven
years some 800,000 slaves were freed. Tax dollars were used to purchase the
freedom of the slaves, which eliminated the only source of opposition to
emancipation, wealthy slave owners. It was expensive, but as Powell notes, nothing
in the world is more expensive than war.
Powell also writes of how there was tremendous opposition to ending
slavery in the Northern states in the U.S, especially Connecticut, Maine, New
Hampshire, and Rhode Island, where violent mobs wrecked abolitionist printing
presses; a New Hampshire school that educated black children was dragged into
a swamp by oxen; free blacks were prohibited from residing in Illinois, Iowa,
Indiana, and Oregon; abolitionist "agitators" in Northern states
were whipped; and orphanages for black children were burned to the ground in
Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, Northern state abolitionists persevered and ended
slavery there peacefully. There were no violent and enormously destructive
"wars of emancipation" in New York or New England.
Cuba, Brazil, and the Congo also ended slavery peacefully in the
nineteenth century by real statesmen in those countries. But not in the
United States. "Some people have objected that the United States couldnt
have bought the freedom of all the slaves, because that would have cost too
much," Powell writes. "But buying the freedom of the slaves was not
more expensive than war. Nothing is more costly than war!" In fact, the
Norths financial costs of war alone would have been enough to purchase the
freedom of all the slaves, and then ended slavery legally and
constitutionally.
It is a myth that Lincoln toiled mightily in his last days to get a
reluctant Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, as portrayed in the
Spielberg movie. What he did spend his time on was micromanaging the waging
of total war on Southern civilians, who he always considered to be American
citizens, since he denied the legitimacy of secession. More importantly, as
documented by historians Phillip Magness and Sebastion Page in their book, Colonization
After Emancipation, Lincoln spent many long days at the end of his
life communicating with foreign governments and plotting with William Seward,
among others, to "colonize" all of "the Africans," as he
called them, out of the United States once the war was over.
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