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The presidential
oath of office contains a pledge to defend and protect the Constitution of
the United States, and by implication the liberties of the American people
that the document is intended to preserve. In light of this, can you name
which of the delegated powers in the U.S. Constitution allow the president to
invade his own country, mass murder his own American citizens, and bomb, burn
and plunder their cities? Can you explain how such acts would be consistent
with protecting the constitutional liberties of those unfortunate citizens?
If you think you can, then congratulations, you are a “Lincoln
Scholar.” If
not, do not despair. You are in decent company, including the five living
past presidents as of 1861, namely, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard
Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. Lincoln’s
predecessor, President James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, stated the truth when
he said the following:
Has the
Constitution delegated to Congress the power to coerce a State into
submission which is attempting to withdraw . . . from the Confederacy [of
states]? If answered in the affirmative, it must be on the principle that the
power has been conferred upon Congress to declare and to make war against a
State. After much serious reflection, I have arrived at the conclusion that
no such power has been delegated to Congress or to any other department of
the federal government (Senate Journal, 36th Congress, 2nd Session, 4
December 1860, 15–16).
Unlike Lincoln,
James Buchanan was a constitutionalist. His opinion that a president has no
constitutional right to invade his own country and murder his fellow citizens
has relegated him to the bottom of every ranking of American presidents by
the American history profession for generations. This doesn’t mean
he was wrong, only that a large segment of the history profession is
hopelessly corrupt. Buchanan understood, as did nearly everyone prior to
Lincoln, that the states did not give up any of their sovereignty when
they ratified the Constitution; they merely delegated several distinct powers
to the central government that was designed to act for their mutual
benefit.
Buchanan’s
position on secession is described in some detail by John Avery Emison in his
new book, Lincoln Über Alles: Dictatorship Comes
to America. It’s high
time that Americans grow up, says Emison, and confront the reality of their
own history, as opposed to the childish fairy tales concocted by the court
historians of the Church of Lincoln.
As for the other
living presidents mentioned above, the New Yorker Millard Fillmore, a former
Whig, opposed the war for its duration and never joined the new Republican
Party after the Whig Party imploded, as did most Northern Whigs. Franklin
Pierce of New Hampshire was a fierce critic of the war and especially of
Lincoln’s
Stalinist, police-state tactics in suppressing political opposition in the
North. New Yorker Martin Van Buren died in 1862 but opposed the war, and John
Tyler of Virginia, who also died in 1862, actually served in the Confederate
Congress.
These men were
all patriotic Americans who understood that waging war against the citizens
of any state was an act of treason. They understood this because, unlike
Lincoln, they had read, understood, and believed in the Constitution. As
Emison points out, Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution defines
treason as follows: “Treason against
the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or
in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort”
(emphasis added). As with all the founding documents, “United
States” is in
the plural, signifying that the free and independent states are united for
some specific purpose, in this case in delegating certain powers to the
central government, mostly for foreign policy reasons. Treason meant waging
war against the citizens of the states, not the government in
Washington, D.C. Lincoln’s war was nothing
if it was not a war prosecuted by the Republican Party against the Southern states.
It was therefore the very definition of treason under the U.S. Constitution.
The Lincoln Cult
sometimes claims that the so-called “insurrection
clause” of
the Constitution (Article 4, Section 4) gives the government the ability to
wage war on its own citizens, but this is a gross misreading of the document.
Article 4 states: “The United States shall guarantee to
every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect
each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of
the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic
violence.”
Lincoln violated
the first part of Article 4 by imprisoning members of the Maryland
legislature in 1861 and by occupying various southern states, ruling over
them with military dictatorships during the war. The war was not a domestic
insurrection within the Southern states. But even if one assumes that it was,
as Lincoln falsely did, it is important that the second part of Article 4
denotes that the central government cannot interfere in an insurrection
within any state unless first invited to do so by the legislature or governor
of that state. The governors of the Southern states never invited Lincoln to
invade them, bomb their cities, and murder their citizens by the thousands.
But then again, Lincoln believed that he was more important than the
Constitution.
In his chapter
entitled “Secession,
the Constitution, and the Law,” Emison
devastatingly critiques Lincoln Cultist James McPherson’s
one-sentence quip in his (McPherson’s) book, Battle Cry of Freedom, that
the states that entered the union after the original thirteen were creatures
of the central government and therefore were not sovereign over it and had no
right to secede. This quip has been endlessly repeated by Lincoln cultists in
their defense of Lincoln’s war despite the
fact that it is historically and constitutionally baseless. It is baseless
because of what the Supreme Court has called the “Equal
Footing Doctrine.” When Tennessee became the third new
state in 1796, for example, it was admitted “on an
equal footing with the original states in all respects whatsoever,”
phraseology that has been used ever since, Emison reminds us. This means
that, just as the original thirteen states were sovereign over the central
government, so are all the others. All states are equal under the
Constitution.
This fact
motivates Emison to ask the obvious question: “If all
the states are equal, do any states or combination of states have the legal
or moral authority to destroy another state and replace its lawfully elected
government with one imposed by military occupation? If so, which states have
such authority? How did they get it? Lincoln’s
answer to these questions was, essentially, “the
side with the most bayonets makes the rules.”
In his chapter
entitled “War
Crimes”
Emison details just how Lincoln “proved” his
new theories about the absolute and omnipotent powers of the federal
government to be “correct.” He
explains how the Lincoln regime reignited the horrors of total war in the
world, including the waging of total war on one’s own
citizens.
Among the language used to describe the waging of total war on Southern
civilians is “rampage,” “theft
and indiscriminate destruction of property,” “rob,
tyrannize, threaten,” “numerous
reports of rape,” and “woe
betide the region’s unprotected black women, against whom
acts of the most beastly an infamous character” were
perpetrated by Union Army soldiers.
Much of this
barbarism was the work of the “heroic”
General Sherman. Emison scoured numerous biographies of Sherman and found him
to be described in the following ways by those who knew him best: “A near
emotional cripple”; a dangerous man”; “traumatized,
marginalized, and self-loathing”; “a
caged lion . . . angry”; suffering from “delusional
misjudgment”; “suicidal
impulses”; “confessed
to his wife a death-wish for himself . . .”; “a man
of primal rage.”
“Sherman’s gone
in the head, he’s luny [sic],” said
Assistant Secretary of War Thomas Scott, as quoted by Emison. “It
would be dangerous to give [Sherman] command,” said
General Henry Halleck. Of course, Lincoln not only gave Sherman command, but
made him one of the top commanders, and the Republican Party turned him into
a national icon after the war. (Sherman spent the next 25 years after the war
orchestrating the campaign of genocide against the Plains Indians.)
Emison documents
with Sherman’s own
words how the man seemed to hate just about everyone especially blacks,
Mexicans, Jews, and Indians. He was not an enlightened egalitarian devoted to
black equality, as the buffoonish Lincoln cultist Victor Davis Hanson has
contended. This mentally-deranged maniac “justified” his
mass killing of civilians by inventing the “doctrine
of military necessity,” which
essentially said that anything goes in war, even the murder of innocent women
and children. Sherman’s armies would
later perfect this barbaric ideology during the Indian Wars, as Emison
recounts.
When backed into
a corner the Lincoln Cult usually resorts to the preposterous claim that
everything the Lincoln regime did (or did not do, such as peacefully
ending slavery, as the rest of the world did in the 19th century) was
justified because Northerners were enlightened about race and Southerners
were not. Evil Southerners had to be civilized, the story goes, even if that
meant killing them by the hundreds of thousands. But as Emison writes, “The
idea that . . . white Northerners . . . fought the Civil War to end slavery,
or were on the right side of the racial justice issue, is preposterous.” It is
“nothing
short of gullible self-deception, bordering on simple-mindedness.”
Your author is
not as generous as Emison in this regard. James McPherson, Doris
Kearns-Goodwin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and other Lincoln cultists are not
simple minded. They know what they are doing, and they know that it pays very
well careerwise and moneywise to be a court historian.
In another
attempt to allow Americans to wean themselves from childish self-deceptions
about their own history, Emison devotes a chapter to race in American
history. He discusses how slavery existed for hundreds of years in the North,
especially in New York, Boston, and Newport, Rhode Island, the hubs of the
transatlantic slave trade. The transatlantic slave trade “was
one of the foundations of New England’s
economic structure” for generations. The slave trade was
also “one of
the cornerstones of New York’s commercial
prosperity in the eighteenth century.”
Emison documents
the truth behind Tocqueville’s statement in Democracy in America that “the
problem of race” was even worse in the North than it was
in the South in the early nineteenth century. He presents a table of
seventy-six Northern Jim Crow Laws that were enacted beginning with
Vermont in 1777 and ending with New York in 1868. Jim Crow laws were a
Northern invention. In the decade preceding the War to Prevent Southern
Independence alone, California, Utah Territory, Indiana, Ohio, Kansas
Territory, Nebraska Territory, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and Oregon
disenfranchised all free blacks.
In 1839 Ohio’s
legislature passed “a resolution that
Negroes have no right to petition the legislature for any purpose whatever.”
Massachusetts banned interracial marriage in 1836, after Rhode Island did so
in 1822; during the same year (1836), state legislator Abraham Lincoln voted
for an Illinois resolution that “the elective
franchise should be kept pure from contamination by the admission of colored
votes”; In
1833 Connecticut criminalized “the
establishment of any school for persons of the African race”;
Ohio, Indiana and Illinois required “good behavior
bonds” from
free blacks; many Northern states enacted “Negro
Exclusion Laws”; the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled
that blacks were not citizens twenty years before the famous Dred Scott
decision; and Illinois amended its Constitution in 1862 to add a Negro
exclusion provision.
One very
interesting aspect of Lincoln Über Alles is Emison’s discussion
of the preponderance of “German
Forty-Eighters” in the Lincoln administration and at the
upper levels of his army. These men were German immigrants who participated
in an 1848 European political revolt that advocated highly centralized
government, despised state’s rights, and
believed that citizens needed to subordinate their personal interests to the
state. “Many
Forty-Eighters were Marxists; some considered themselves communists. One of
the Forty-Eighters was Marx’s own
brother-in-law . . . the Forty-Eighters saw themselves as international
agents of change.”
One of the more
prominent German immigrants in the Lincoln administration was Francis Lieber,
who Lincoln employed to write the military code for the U.S. Army, which was
known as the “Lieber Code.”
Another was General Franz Sigel, and officer in the Prussian army who fled
Europe and became a Union army general who gained notoriety for his defeat in
the Battle of New Market at the hands of VMI cadets. Sigel apparently
believed he would teach the sons of Virginia, including a descendant of
Thomas Jefferson’s who was killed in the battle, what it
meant to be an American. Emison describes numerous other German “revolutionaries” who
were given important commands in Lincoln’s
army.
A great many
German immigrants settled in the Midwest and were instrumental in Lincoln’s
nomination and election. Abe recognized this, and purchased several
German-language newspapers in order to bolster his German immigrant support.
Emison makes a very persuasive case that it was German immigrants who “put
him over the top” in six key states (Indiana, Iowa,
Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin) in the 1860 election. This perhaps
explains why so many prominent Germans, some of whom barely spoke English,
were commissioned as colonels, majors, or generals in Lincoln’s
army.
Emison views
Lincoln’s
relevance to modern America very differently than Mario Cuomo and Harold
Holzer, authors of Why Lincoln Matters: Today More Than Ever.
Cuomo and Holzer celebrate the fact that Lincoln has long been the
image/poster boy of America. In a textbook example of the kind of childish
simplemindedness that Emison refers to, Holzer has even said that “everything good” in
all of American history since 1865 is due to Abraham Lincoln.
Emison agrees
that Lincoln’s
influence is tremendous, but writes that “America
is haunted by Lincoln’s blood lust for
a coercive, dominant, unitary, unaccountable, debt-laden central government” whose
principle function is “the plunder of
society and the redistribution of wealth to the politically privileged elite
[like the Cuomo family] and their collection of political sycophants [like
Lincoln cultists] who help keep them in power.” In
this regard, “the two major parties have become the
party of Lincoln, each a metastatic twin of the other.”
Abraham Lincoln “opened the door to the Leviathan central
state that mandates, manipulates, and regulates virtually every aspect of
life in America and seeks unilateral hegemony around the globe.”
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.
Article
originally published on www.Mises.org. By
authorization of the author
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