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At
the outset of the War to Prevent Southern Independence both Abraham Lincoln
and the U.S. Congress declared publicly that the sole purpose of the war was
to save the union and not to interfere with Southern slavery. Lincoln himself
stated this very clearly in his first inaugural address and in many other
places. This fact bothers the court historians of the Lincoln cult who have
in the past forty years rewritten American history to suggest that slavery
was the sole cause of the war. (A generation ago, if one took a college
course on "the Civil War" it was likely that one would have read The Causes of the Civil War by Kenneth Stampp, a former
president of the American Historical Association.)
The
latest attempt to rewrite or whitewash history comes from one Richard Striner
in a December 13 New York Times article entitled "How Lincoln
Undid the Union." The gist of Striner’s argument is that: 1) a
compromise to save the union was in the works in Washington in December of
1860; but 2) Lincoln persuaded key members of the Republican Party to oppose
it because it might not have prohibited the extension of
slavery into the new territories, a key feature of the 1860 Republican Party
platform. Lincoln wanted to save the union, says Striner, but he wanted a
union that would put slavery "on the path to extinction."
What
rubbish. The notion that prohibiting the extension of slavery would somehow
magically cause the end of Southern slavery has always been totally
nonsensical. As University of Virginia Historian Michael Holt wrote in his
book, Fate of Their Country (p. 27), "Modern
economic historians have demonstrated that this assumption was false."
It is every bit as nonsensical as Lincoln’s crazy assertion that the
extension of slavery into the Territories would have somehow led to the re-introduction
of slavery into Maine, Massachusetts, and other states that had legally
abolished slavery! (He ludicrously said that a nation "could not
exist" half slave and half free). It is hard to believe that rational
human beings ever believed such things. It is unlikely that many Americans of
Lincoln’s time did.
Striner
pretends to be able to read Lincoln’s mind when he speculates that his
motivation was to put slavery "on the road to extinction." He does
not quote Lincoln himself as saying that this was his motivation; he merely
speculates and fabricates a story. But Lincoln and other prominent
Republicans did in fact state very clearly what their motivation was. There
is no need to speculate. As Professor Holt, the history profession’s
preeminent expert on the politics of the antebellum era wrote: "Many
northern whites also 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." Lincoln himself
clearly stated that "we" want the Territories "for free white
labor."
Thus,
part of Lincoln’s motivation for opposing the extension of slavery
– but making an ironclad defense of Southern slavery in his
first inaugural address – was pandering to northern white supremacist
voters (like himself) who did not want any blacks – free or slave
– living among them. There was also a protectionist motivation, as the
Republican Party wanted to prohibit competition for jobs from all blacks,
free or slave. Illinois – Land of Lincoln – even amended its
Constitution in 1848 to prohibit the emigration of black people into the
state, a position that was endorsed by Lincoln. (Lincoln was also a
"manager" of the Illinois Colonization Society, which sought to use
state tax funds to deport the small number of free blacks who resided in the
state.)
A
third motivation for Lincoln’s opposition to slavery extension was
purely political. If slaves entered the Territories, they would inflate the
congressional representation of the Democratic Party when the Territories
became states because of the Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution. That in
turn – and most importantly – would block the Republican
Party’s economic agenda. Professor Holt quotes Ohio Congressman
Joshua R. Giddings (p. 28) on this point: "To give the south the
preponderance of political power would be itself a surrender of our tariff,
our internal improvements, our distribution of proceeds of public lands . . .
. It is the most abominable proposition with which a free people were ever
insulted." It would destroy everything the Republican Party claimed to
stand for, in other words, i.e., mercantilist economics. This is the
real reason why Lincoln was so adamant about opposing the extension of
slavery into the territories.
Besides
his demonstrably false, speculative fantasies about Lincoln’s
supposedly saintly motivations, Striner presents a very distorted and
misleading account of the events of late 1860–early 1861. He quotes a
private letter from Lincoln expressing his opposition to the particular
compromise to save the union that was being sponsored by Senator John J.
Crittenden of Kentucky at the time, but makes no mention of Lincoln’s
own "compromise" that was also in the works. The high priestess of
the Lincoln Cult, Doris Kearns-Goodwin, describes Lincoln’s compromise
on page 296 of her book, Team of Rivals. As soon as he was elected,
Lincoln "instructed [William] Seward to introduce [the Corwin Amendment
to the Constitution] in the Senate Committee of Thirteen without indicating
they issued from Springfield." The Corwin Amendment, which did pass the
House and Senate, would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering
with Southern slavery. As Goodwin writes, Lincoln instructed Seward to make
sure that the amendment said that "the Constitution should never be
altered so as to authorize Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in
the states" where it existed. In addition, writes Goodwin, Lincoln
instructed Seward, who would become his Secretary of State, to get a federal
law introduced that would have made various personal liberty laws that
existed in some Northern states illegal. These state laws were meant to
nullify the federal Fugitive Slave Act, an act that Lincoln very strongly
supported. Far from putting slavery "on the path to extinction,"
these actions of Lincoln’s would have granted it more powerful
government support than ever. Thus, Lincoln’s actions in late
1860–early 1861 were exactly the opposite of how Professor Striner
portrays them as being with regard to the issue of slavery.
The
white supremacists of the North were very pleased indeed with Lincoln’s
assurances that he would do all that he could to prohibit black people from
ever living among them, first by keeping them out of the Territories, and
second by enshrining Southern slavery explicitly in the Constitution. He effectively
promised to keep black people far away from such places as Boston,
Massachusetts. Goodwin writes that when Seward went public and announced
these actions to a Boston audience he was met with "thunderous
applause."
On
March 4, 1861, Lincoln praised the Corwin Amendment in his first inaugural
address, offered his support of it, and said that while he believed slavery
to already be constitutional, he had no reservations about making it
"express and irrevocable" in the text of the U.S. Constitution.
These
actual historical facts paint a very different picture of Lincoln’s
machinations from the one based on Professor Striner’s baseless
speculations and historical distortions. More disturbingly, Professor
Striner, like all other Lincoln cultists, makes no mention at all of the fact
that Lincoln’s actions led to the mass murder of some 350,000 fellow
American citizens, including more than 50,000 Southern civilians, along with
an equivalent number of Northern war deaths. While virtually all the rest of
the world had ended – or was in the process of ending – slavery peacefully,
Lincoln cultists actually praise Lincoln for eschewing that
well-charted peaceful route to emancipation while plunging his country into
the bloodiest war in human history up to that point to supposedly "save
the union." There is
something awfully sick (and sickening) about this.
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.LewRockwell.com.
By authorization of the author
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