From Lew Rockwell.com:
Was Lincoln a Tyrant?
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
In a recent WorldNetDaily article, “Examining ‘Evidence’ of Lincoln’s Tyranny (April 23),” David Quackenbush accuses me of misreading several statements by the prominent historians Roy Basler and Mark Neely in my book, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. With regard to Basler, I quote him in Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, as suggesting that on the issue of slavery, post 1854, Lincoln’s “words lacked effectiveness.” Quackenbush says he was not referring to Lincoln’s comments on slavery here, but other things. I read him differently. What Basler said was that, yes, Lincoln used eloquent language with regard to human equality and “respecting the Negro as a human being,” but he offered no concrete proposals other than the odious colonization idea of his political idol, Henry Clay. As Basler wrote, “The truth is that Lincoln had no solution to the problem of slavery [as of 1857] except the colonization idea which he inherited from Henry Clay.” In the next sentence he mentions Lincoln’s eloquent natural rights language, then in the next sentence after that, he makes the “lacking in effectiveness” comment. What I believe Basler is saying here is that because Lincoln’s actions did not match his impressive rhetoric, his words did indeed lack effectiveness.
As Robert Johannsen, author of Lincoln, the South, and Slavery put it, Lincoln’s position on slavery was identical to Clay’s: “opposition to slavery in principle, toleration of it in practice, and a vigorous hostility toward the abolition movement” (emphasis added). Regardless of what Basler said, I take the position that Lincoln’s sincerity can certainly be questioned in this regard. His words did lack effectiveness on the issue of slavery because he contradicted himself so often. Indeed, one of his most famous defenders, Harry Jaffa, has long maintained that Honest Abe was a prolific liar when he was making numerous racist and white supremacist remarks. He was lying, says Jaffa, just to get himself elected. In The Lincoln Enigma Gabor Boritt even goes so far in defending Lincoln’s deportation/colonization proposals to say, “This is how honest people lie.” Well, not exactly. Truly honest people do not lie.
The problem with this argument, Joe Sobran has pointed out, is that Lincoln made these kinds of ugly comments even when he was not running for political office. He did this, I believe, because he believed in these things.
Basler was certainly aware of Lincoln’s voluminous statements in opposition to racial equality. He denounced “equality between the white and black races” in his August 21, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas; stated in his 1852 eulogy to Henry Clay that as monstrous as slavery was, eliminating it would supposedly produce “a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself;” and in his February 27, 1860 Cooper Union speech advocated deporting black people so that “their places be . . . filled up by free white laborers.” In fact, Lincoln clung to the colonization/deportation idea for the rest of his life. There are many other similar statements. Thus, it is not at all a stretch to conclude that Basler’s comment that Lincoln’s words “lacked effectiveness” could be interpreted as that he was insincere. It also seems to me that Johannsen is right when he further states that “Nearly all of [Lincoln’s] public statements on the slavery question prior to his election as president were delivered with political intent and for political effect.” As David Donald wrote of Lincoln in Lincoln Reconsidered, “politics was his life.” In my book I do not rely on Basler alone, but any means, to make my point that Lincoln’s devotion to racial equality was dubious, at best.
Quackenbush apparently believes it is a sign of sincerity for Lincoln to have denounced slavery in one sentence, and then in the next sentence to denounce the abolition of slavery as being even more harmful to human liberty. (I apparently misread the statement Lincoln once made about “Siamese twins” by relying on a secondary source that got it wrong and will change it if there is a third printing).
Quackenbush takes much out of context and relies exclusively on Lincoln’s own arguments in order to paint as bleak a picture of my book as possible. For example, in my book I quote Mark Neely as saying that Lincoln exhibited a “gruff and belittling impatience” over constitutional arguments that had stood in the way of his cherished mercantilist economic agenda (protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare, and a federal monopolization of the money supply) for decades. Quackenbush takes me to task for allegedly implying that Neely wrote that Lincoln opposed the Constitution and not just constitutional arguments. But I argue at great length in the book that Lincoln did resent the Constitution as well as the constitutional arguments that were made by myriad American statesmen, beginning with Jefferson. In fact, this quotation of Neely comes at the end of the chapter entitled “Was Lincoln a Dictator,” in which I recount the trashing of the Constitution by Lincoln as discussed in such books as James Randall’s Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, Dean Sprague’s Freedom Under Lincoln, and Neely’s Fate of Liberty. Lincoln’s behavior, more than his political speeches, demonstrated that he had little regard for the Constitution when it stood in the way of his political ambitions.
One difference between how I present this material and how these others authors present it is that I do not spend most of my time making excuses and bending over backwards to concoct “rationales” for Lincoln’s behavior. I just present the material. The back cover of Neely’s book, for example, states that thanks to the book, “Lincoln emerges . . . with his legendary statesmanship intact.” Neely won a Pulitzer Prize for supposedly pulling Lincoln’s fanny out of the fire with regard to his demolition of civil liberties in the North during the war.
Quackenbush dismisses the historical, constitutional arguments opposed to Lincoln’s mercantilist economic agenda, as Lincoln himself sometimes did, as “partisan zealotry.” Earlier in the book I quote James Madison, the father of the Constitution, as vetoing an “internal improvements” bill sponsored by Henry Clay on the grounds that “it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised in the bill is among the enumerated powers” of the Constitution. Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and John Tyler made similar statements. These were more than partisan arguments by political hacks and zealots. The father of the Constitution himself, Madison, believed the corporate welfare subsidies that Lincoln would later champion were unconstitutional.
Add to this Lincoln’s extraordinary disregard for the Constitution during his entire administration, and it seems absurd for Quackenbush or anyone else to portray him as a champion of the Constitution who was pestered by “political zealots.” Among Lincoln’s unconstitutional acts were launching an invasion without the consent of Congress, blockading Southern ports before formally declaring war, unilaterally suspending the writ of habeas corpus and arresting and imprisoning thousands of Northern citizens without a warrant, censoring telegraph communications, confiscating private property, including firearms, and effectively gutting the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
Even quite worshipful Lincoln biographers and historians called him a “dictator.” In his book, Constitutional Dictatorship, Clinton Rossiter devoted an entire chapter to Lincoln and calls him a “great dictator” and a “true democrat,” two phrases that are not normally associated with each other. “Lincoln’s amazing disregard for the . . . Constitution was considered by nobody as legal,” said Rossiter. Yet Quackenbush throws a fit because I dare to question Lincoln’s devotion to constitutional liberty.
Quackenbush continues to take my statements out of context when commenting on the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and he refuses to admit that Lincoln did in fact lament the demise of the Bank of the United Stated during the debates. His earlier claim that there was not a single word said during the Lincoln-Douglas debates about economic policy is simply untrue.
But the larger context is that even though most of the discussion during the debates centered on such issues as the extension of slavery into the new territories, they were really a manifestation of the old debate between the advocates of centralized government (Hamilton, Clay, Webster, Lincoln) and of decentralized government and states’ rights (Jefferson, Jackson, Tyler, Calhoun, Douglas). At the time of the debates Lincoln had spent about a quarter of a century laboring in the trenches of the Whig and Republican Parties, primarily on behalf of the so-called “American System” of protectionist tariffs, tax subsidies to corporations, and centralized banking. When the Whig Party collapsed Lincoln assured Illinois voters that there was no essential difference between he two parties. This is what he and the Whigs and Republicans wanted a centralized government for. As Basler said, at the time he had no concrete solution to the slavery issue other than to propose sending black people back to Africa, Haiti, or Central America. He did, however, have a long record of advocating the programs of the “American System” and implementing a financially disastrous $10 million “internal improvements” boondoggle in Illinois in the late 1830s when he was an influential member of the state legislature.
Lincoln spent his 25-year off-and-on political career prior to 1857 championing the Whig project of centralized government that would engage in a kind of economic central planning. When the extension of slavery became the overriding issue of the day he continued to hold the centralizer’s position. And as soon as he took office, he and the Republican party enacted what James McPherson called a “blizzard of legislation” that finally achieved the “American System,” complete with federal railroad subsidies, a tripling of the average tariff rate that would remain that high or higher long after the war ended, and centralized banking with the National Currency and Legal Tender Acts. It is in this sense that the Lincoln-Douglas debates really did have important economic ramifications.
Quackenbush complains that I do not quote Lincoln enough. He falsely states that there’s only one Lincoln quote in the entire book, which is simply bizarre. On page 85 alone I quote Lincoln the secessionist, speaking on January 12, 1848 (“The War with Mexico: Speech in the United States House of Representatives”): “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right --a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is the right confined to cases I which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.” That’s four sentences, by my count, and there are plenty of other Lincoln quotes in my book, contrary to Quackenbush’s kooky assertion.
But he has a point: I chose to focus in my book more on Lincoln’s actions than his words. After all, even Bill Clinton would look like a brilliant statesman if he were judged exclusively by his pleasant-sounding speeches, many of which were written by the likes of James Carville and Paul Begala. Yet, this is how many Lincoln scholars seem to do their work, even writing entire books around single short speeches while ignoring much of Lincoln’s actual behavior and policies.
I also stand by my argument that Lincoln was essentially the anti-Jefferson in many ways, including his repudiation of the principle in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. I don’t see how this can even be debatable. The Whigs were always the anti-Jeffersonians who battled with the political heirs of Jefferson, such as Andrew Jackson and John Tyler. Lincoln was solidly in this tradition, even though he often quoted Jefferson for political effect. He also quoted Scripture a lot even though, as Joe Sobran has pointed out, he never could bring himself to become a believer.
In this regard I believe the Gettysburg Address was mostly sophistry. As H.L. Mencken once wrote, “it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense.” It was the Union soldiers in the battle, he wrote, who “actually fought against self determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.” Regardless of what one believes was the main cause of the war, it is indeed true that the Confederates no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C. and Lincoln waged a war to deny them that right.
It’s interesting that even though the title of Quackenbush’s article had to do with “Evidence of Lincoln’s Tyranny,” in fourteen pages he does not say a single word about the voluminous evidence that I do present, based on widely-published and easily-accessible materials, of Lincoln’s tyrannical behavior in trashing the Constitution and waging war on civilians in violation of international law and codes of morality. Instead, he focuses on accusations of misplaced quotation marks, footnotes out of order, or misinterpretations of a few quotations.
April 27, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Re-Writing Economic History
From Lew Rockwell.com:
Rewriting Economic History
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
One thing that can never be admitted in polite academic company is the notion that economics had anything to do with the American War between the States. This may seem strange, since wars throughout all of economic history have had important economic components, but it is true nevertheless. For example Richard Ferrier, a critic of my book, The Real Lincoln, recently insisted in a WorldNetDaily interview that in the Lincoln-Douglas debates “there is not a word about [Lincoln’s] economic agenda. Not a word!’
Absolutely correct. There are many words, not just one. Such as during the July 17, 1858, debate in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln said to Douglas, “You remember we once had a national bank . . . the Supreme Court decided that the bank was unconstitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General Jackson himself asserted that he, as president, would not be bound to hold a national bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided to do so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. Jefferson, and acted upon it under official oath, in vetoing a charter for a national bank.”
Lincoln here was voicing his career-long animosity toward the Democratic Party’s opposition to central banking. Ferrier’s rather hysterical claim that there was “not a word” about any economic agenda in the Lincoln-Douglas debates is simply untrue.
Indeed, a major component of the debates – Lincoln’s opposition to the extension of slavery into the new territories – had a huge economic component. One of the reasons Lincoln and the Republican Party establishment gave for their opposition was, as he stated in his October 16, 1854, speech, that “the whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these [new] territories. We want them for the homes of free white people. This they cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted with them.”
Labor market protectionism was a basis for Lincoln’s opposition to the extension of slavery. A key strategy of the Republican Party was to buy votes from white laborers in the territories by promising to protect their jobs from competition with slave labor. This was not a very attractive position to hold, but it was indeed economically and politically motivated, despite Ferrier’s denials of any economic agenda appearing in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Ferrier invokes the authority of James McPherson, who also said there was no talk of banks in the debates, but McPherson is clearly wrong in light of the above quotation. There was no great emphasis on monetary policy, but Lincoln did bring it up.
Ferrier also misstates my position in asserting that “neo-Rebels,” whatever that may mean, argue that “the tariff was the cause of the war” (emphasis added).” I do not say this; he is setting up a straw-man argument. What I say in the book is that the tariff issue was one among many issues in the war, and one that has been studiously ignored or downplayed by people like Ferrier.
He argues that the Morrill Tariff of 1861 was passed before Lincoln was inaugurated and uses that fact to make the case that Lincoln did not care about the tariff and that it had nothing to do with secession. He is being deceptive here, since I say the same thing in The Real Lincoln. I do not claim that Lincoln was in office when the U.S. Senate passed the tariff shortly before his inauguration. What I do say, though, is that as the leader of the Republican Party and its presidential candidate he must have had a hand in the political maneuvering that was involved in getting the tariff passed. I also quote Richard Bensel, author of the book, Yankee Leviathan (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), as saying that the Morrill Tariff was “the centerpiece of the Republican Party platform” of 1860. If it was not “the” centerpiece it was certainly “a”centerpiece, and Lincoln, as the party’s presidential nominee, was expected to enforce it when elected.
As the great historian of tariff history, Frank Taussig, wrote in Tariff History of the United States (p. 158), the Morrill Tariff “was passed, undoubtedly, with the intention of attracting to the Republican Party, at the approaching Presidential election, votes in Pennsylvania and other States that had protectionist leanings.”
Several southern states had already seceded, including South Carolina in December, when it was apparent that the tariff would probably pass the Senate and would be enforced by Lincoln, the career-long protectionist. Again, this is not to say that the tariff was the sole cause of the war, but it was certainly relevant.
Lincoln did play a more direct role with regard to the tariff in his First Inaugural Address, as I argue in The Real Lincoln. There he stated, “The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion – no using force against, or among the people anywhere.”
I attempt to put this in historical context in my book. South Carolina nullified the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, forcing Andrew Jackson to back down and negotiate a lower tariff rate by 1833. That tariff originally had a 40 percent average rate. Southern statesmen continued to complain about tariffs, though, since according to Taussig, by 1860 the import-dependent South was paying some 80 percent of all tariffs. But by 1857, writes Taussig, the United States enjoyed the closest proximity to free trade that would exist in the nineteenth century, with an average tariff rate of around 15 percent.
Then in the 1859-1860 congressional session the House of Representatives passed the Morrill tariff, followed by the Senate in the next session, in early 1861, just before Lincoln’s inauguration. The average rate would soon be elevated to 47.06 percent, according to Taussig.
So, Southerners had been complaining bitterly about being plundered by the tariff, paying some 80 percent of it while, in their view, most of the money was being spent in the North. Then the Republican Party gains power and, before anyone expects a war, more than triples the average rate at a time when the tariff was the primary source of federal tax revenue; there was no income tax yet. Then Lincoln makes his First Inaugural Address and says it is his duty to “collect the duties and imposts” (among other things) and, as long as those much higher duties are collected, “there will be no invasion.”
My interpretation of these events is this: The tripling of the average tariff rate was the keystone of the Republican Party platform of 1860, as Richard Bensel argues. Once in power, Lincoln announced to the South, effectively: We are going to make tax slaves out of you by tripling the rate of taxation, and as long as you collect these taxes there will be no military invasion. He was not going to back down to the South Carolinian nullifiers, as Andrew Jackson did.
This was being done while the Confederate Constitution was outlawing protectionist tariffs altogether, which would have caused most of the trade of the world to be diverted from high-tariff Northern ports to lower-tariff Southern ones. Some Northern newspapers affiliated with the Republican Party were openly calling for the bombardment of Southern ports (before Fort Sumter). “Let the South adopt the free-trade system,” the Daily Chicago Times editorialized on December 10, 1860, and the North’s “commerce must be reduced to less than half of what it now is.” The Newark Daily Advertiser editorialized on April 2, 1861, that Southerners had apparently “taken to their bosoms the liberal and popular doctrine of free trade,” which “must operate to the serious disadvantage of the North.” The paper called South Carolina the “chief instigator” of these free-trade doctrines, and called for the “closing of the ports” in the South by military force. Ferrier’s casual dismissal of the role of the tariff in the war as only being of interest to “neo-Rebels” is ahistorical.
Ferrier continues to insist that economics (besides the economics of slavery) had nothing to do with Lincoln’s election and the South’s reaction to it, but the preeminent Lincoln scholar, Pulitzer Prize winning Lincoln biographer David Donald, would probably disagree. In his book, Lincoln Reconsidered (p. 106)., Donald quotes U.S. Senator John Sherman, the brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman and a major Republican Party figure in the U.S. Senate during the war, as explaining why Lincoln was elected: “Those who elected Mr. Lincoln,”said Senator Sherman, “expect him . . . to secure to free labor its just right to the Territories of the United States; to protect . . . by wise revenue laws, the labor of our people; to secure the public lands to actual settlers . . . ; to develop the internal resources of the country by opening new means of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific.”
David Donald claims to interpret this remark “from the politician’s idiom” into plain English by saying that Lincoln and the Republicans “intended to enact a high protective tariff that mothered monopoly, to pass a homestead law that invited speculators to loot the public domain, and to subsidize a transcontinental railroad that afforded infinite opportunities for jobbery.”
Donald left one thing out – the first sentence, in which the first goal of the Republican Party, according to Senator Sherman, was labor market protectionism. “To secure to free labor its just right to the Territories” meant to keep slavery out, not for moral but for purely economic and political reasons.
In conclusion, one of the most prominent Republicans of Lincoln’s time, and perhaps the most prominent Lincoln biographer of our time, are of the opinion that economics was at the heart of Lincoln’s ascendancy to the presidency. In Sherman’s interpretation, the basic stratagy of the party was to buy votes and campaign contributions from 1) protectionist manufacturers; 2) mining and timber companies who would get cheap federal land; 3) Subsidy-seeking railroad corporations and associated industries; and 4) white laborers who did not want competition for jobs from either freed blacks or slaves.
One is inclined to assume that the reason why people like Ferrier so hysterically deny that Lincoln had any economic motivations, despite having spent a 25-year political career promoting the Whig Party’s economic agenda, is that they are deathly afraid that the public will begin to develop an interest in the real Lincoln, as opposed to the fantasy Lincoln that has been created by the cartel of Lincoln scholars.
May 1, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
Rewriting Economic History
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
One thing that can never be admitted in polite academic company is the notion that economics had anything to do with the American War between the States. This may seem strange, since wars throughout all of economic history have had important economic components, but it is true nevertheless. For example Richard Ferrier, a critic of my book, The Real Lincoln, recently insisted in a WorldNetDaily interview that in the Lincoln-Douglas debates “there is not a word about [Lincoln’s] economic agenda. Not a word!’
Absolutely correct. There are many words, not just one. Such as during the July 17, 1858, debate in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln said to Douglas, “You remember we once had a national bank . . . the Supreme Court decided that the bank was unconstitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General Jackson himself asserted that he, as president, would not be bound to hold a national bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided to do so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. Jefferson, and acted upon it under official oath, in vetoing a charter for a national bank.”
Lincoln here was voicing his career-long animosity toward the Democratic Party’s opposition to central banking. Ferrier’s rather hysterical claim that there was “not a word” about any economic agenda in the Lincoln-Douglas debates is simply untrue.
Indeed, a major component of the debates – Lincoln’s opposition to the extension of slavery into the new territories – had a huge economic component. One of the reasons Lincoln and the Republican Party establishment gave for their opposition was, as he stated in his October 16, 1854, speech, that “the whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these [new] territories. We want them for the homes of free white people. This they cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted with them.”
Labor market protectionism was a basis for Lincoln’s opposition to the extension of slavery. A key strategy of the Republican Party was to buy votes from white laborers in the territories by promising to protect their jobs from competition with slave labor. This was not a very attractive position to hold, but it was indeed economically and politically motivated, despite Ferrier’s denials of any economic agenda appearing in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Ferrier invokes the authority of James McPherson, who also said there was no talk of banks in the debates, but McPherson is clearly wrong in light of the above quotation. There was no great emphasis on monetary policy, but Lincoln did bring it up.
Ferrier also misstates my position in asserting that “neo-Rebels,” whatever that may mean, argue that “the tariff was the cause of the war” (emphasis added).” I do not say this; he is setting up a straw-man argument. What I say in the book is that the tariff issue was one among many issues in the war, and one that has been studiously ignored or downplayed by people like Ferrier.
He argues that the Morrill Tariff of 1861 was passed before Lincoln was inaugurated and uses that fact to make the case that Lincoln did not care about the tariff and that it had nothing to do with secession. He is being deceptive here, since I say the same thing in The Real Lincoln. I do not claim that Lincoln was in office when the U.S. Senate passed the tariff shortly before his inauguration. What I do say, though, is that as the leader of the Republican Party and its presidential candidate he must have had a hand in the political maneuvering that was involved in getting the tariff passed. I also quote Richard Bensel, author of the book, Yankee Leviathan (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), as saying that the Morrill Tariff was “the centerpiece of the Republican Party platform” of 1860. If it was not “the” centerpiece it was certainly “a”centerpiece, and Lincoln, as the party’s presidential nominee, was expected to enforce it when elected.
As the great historian of tariff history, Frank Taussig, wrote in Tariff History of the United States (p. 158), the Morrill Tariff “was passed, undoubtedly, with the intention of attracting to the Republican Party, at the approaching Presidential election, votes in Pennsylvania and other States that had protectionist leanings.”
Several southern states had already seceded, including South Carolina in December, when it was apparent that the tariff would probably pass the Senate and would be enforced by Lincoln, the career-long protectionist. Again, this is not to say that the tariff was the sole cause of the war, but it was certainly relevant.
Lincoln did play a more direct role with regard to the tariff in his First Inaugural Address, as I argue in The Real Lincoln. There he stated, “The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion – no using force against, or among the people anywhere.”
I attempt to put this in historical context in my book. South Carolina nullified the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, forcing Andrew Jackson to back down and negotiate a lower tariff rate by 1833. That tariff originally had a 40 percent average rate. Southern statesmen continued to complain about tariffs, though, since according to Taussig, by 1860 the import-dependent South was paying some 80 percent of all tariffs. But by 1857, writes Taussig, the United States enjoyed the closest proximity to free trade that would exist in the nineteenth century, with an average tariff rate of around 15 percent.
Then in the 1859-1860 congressional session the House of Representatives passed the Morrill tariff, followed by the Senate in the next session, in early 1861, just before Lincoln’s inauguration. The average rate would soon be elevated to 47.06 percent, according to Taussig.
So, Southerners had been complaining bitterly about being plundered by the tariff, paying some 80 percent of it while, in their view, most of the money was being spent in the North. Then the Republican Party gains power and, before anyone expects a war, more than triples the average rate at a time when the tariff was the primary source of federal tax revenue; there was no income tax yet. Then Lincoln makes his First Inaugural Address and says it is his duty to “collect the duties and imposts” (among other things) and, as long as those much higher duties are collected, “there will be no invasion.”
My interpretation of these events is this: The tripling of the average tariff rate was the keystone of the Republican Party platform of 1860, as Richard Bensel argues. Once in power, Lincoln announced to the South, effectively: We are going to make tax slaves out of you by tripling the rate of taxation, and as long as you collect these taxes there will be no military invasion. He was not going to back down to the South Carolinian nullifiers, as Andrew Jackson did.
This was being done while the Confederate Constitution was outlawing protectionist tariffs altogether, which would have caused most of the trade of the world to be diverted from high-tariff Northern ports to lower-tariff Southern ones. Some Northern newspapers affiliated with the Republican Party were openly calling for the bombardment of Southern ports (before Fort Sumter). “Let the South adopt the free-trade system,” the Daily Chicago Times editorialized on December 10, 1860, and the North’s “commerce must be reduced to less than half of what it now is.” The Newark Daily Advertiser editorialized on April 2, 1861, that Southerners had apparently “taken to their bosoms the liberal and popular doctrine of free trade,” which “must operate to the serious disadvantage of the North.” The paper called South Carolina the “chief instigator” of these free-trade doctrines, and called for the “closing of the ports” in the South by military force. Ferrier’s casual dismissal of the role of the tariff in the war as only being of interest to “neo-Rebels” is ahistorical.
Ferrier continues to insist that economics (besides the economics of slavery) had nothing to do with Lincoln’s election and the South’s reaction to it, but the preeminent Lincoln scholar, Pulitzer Prize winning Lincoln biographer David Donald, would probably disagree. In his book, Lincoln Reconsidered (p. 106)., Donald quotes U.S. Senator John Sherman, the brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman and a major Republican Party figure in the U.S. Senate during the war, as explaining why Lincoln was elected: “Those who elected Mr. Lincoln,”said Senator Sherman, “expect him . . . to secure to free labor its just right to the Territories of the United States; to protect . . . by wise revenue laws, the labor of our people; to secure the public lands to actual settlers . . . ; to develop the internal resources of the country by opening new means of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific.”
David Donald claims to interpret this remark “from the politician’s idiom” into plain English by saying that Lincoln and the Republicans “intended to enact a high protective tariff that mothered monopoly, to pass a homestead law that invited speculators to loot the public domain, and to subsidize a transcontinental railroad that afforded infinite opportunities for jobbery.”
Donald left one thing out – the first sentence, in which the first goal of the Republican Party, according to Senator Sherman, was labor market protectionism. “To secure to free labor its just right to the Territories” meant to keep slavery out, not for moral but for purely economic and political reasons.
In conclusion, one of the most prominent Republicans of Lincoln’s time, and perhaps the most prominent Lincoln biographer of our time, are of the opinion that economics was at the heart of Lincoln’s ascendancy to the presidency. In Sherman’s interpretation, the basic stratagy of the party was to buy votes and campaign contributions from 1) protectionist manufacturers; 2) mining and timber companies who would get cheap federal land; 3) Subsidy-seeking railroad corporations and associated industries; and 4) white laborers who did not want competition for jobs from either freed blacks or slaves.
One is inclined to assume that the reason why people like Ferrier so hysterically deny that Lincoln had any economic motivations, despite having spent a 25-year political career promoting the Whig Party’s economic agenda, is that they are deathly afraid that the public will begin to develop an interest in the real Lincoln, as opposed to the fantasy Lincoln that has been created by the cartel of Lincoln scholars.
May 1, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
The American Anti-Civil Liberties Union
From Lew Rockwell.com:
The American Anti-Civil Liberties Union
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
In his brilliant essay, "The Anatomy of the State," Murray Rothbard wrote that state power always relies on the manipulation of public opinion perhaps as much as its use of force and coercion (See his Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays). Since the class of people constituting the state always necessarily consists of only a small portion of the population, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that "their government is good, wise, and at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives." This is where intellectuals come in: "Promoting this [statist] ideology among the people is the vital social task of the ‘intellectuals.’"
The intellectual’s livelihood in the free market is never too secure, but "the State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a secure and permanent berth in the State apparatus; and thus a secure income and the panoply of prestige." Thus, there has long been the tradition of the "court historian" who is "dedicated to purveying the rulers’ views of their own and their predecessors’ actions." This doesn’t apply to all intellectuals, of course, nor is it restricted to historians; economists are as guilty as anyone.
A sterling example of this phenomenon is how intellectuals have dealt with the abuse of civil liberties. During the Clinton administration, for example, the war on drugs was greatly escalated, which involved mass confiscation of private property under asset forfeiture laws and an assault on privacy rights. The government began spying on internet communications, the administration used confidential FBI files against its political enemies, there was the use of fraudulent search warrants, roving wire taps, IRS prosecutions of political opponents, attacks on the Second Amendment, and on and on.
While some intellectuals were concerned about these civil rights abuses, a large number of academics, journalists, and "public intellectuals" defended them vociferously by attacking the integrity of federal judges who were investigating the abuses, issuing statements that Clinton was "no worse" than some of his predecessors, and even inviting Clinton as an honored speaker at the American Bar Association convention after he was found in contempt of court for lying under oath. Only with the support of the intellectual class can our rulers get away with the destruction of civil liberties. This effort is perhaps why Clinton was impeached but not convicted.
Having just written a book on Abraham Lincoln that includes a chapter on Lincoln’s suspension of civil liberties in the North, I have been struck by how so many intellectuals, for more than a century, have behaved in manner similar to the Clinton court intellectuals in providing intellectual cover to Lincoln’s demolition of civil liberties in the Northern states.
One recent example is Richard Ferrier, who in an interview on WordNetDaily defended the Lincoln administration’s arresting without a warrant, brief imprisonment, and ultimate deportation of Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham for making speeches in opposition to the Lincoln administration in and around his hometown of Dayton, Ohio.
Vallandigham was snatched from his family in the middle of the night by federal soldiers and sent to the Southern states, after which he went to Canada. The Ohio Democratic Party made him its gubernatorial nominee in absentia.
Ferrier defends Lincoln, who had suspended the writ of habeas corpus to make such military arrests possible, by saying that Lincoln was especially gentle in just escorting Vallandigham to the Southern states (Vallandigham’s wife and children might not have agreed), and that Vallandigham was a trouble maker anyway. Ferrier further argues that Vallandigham organized sometimes violent protests in Canada.
This is a completely bizarre argument, considering that at the time another Ohio resident, General Ulysses S. Grant, was intentionally waging war on civilians in the Shenandoah Valley by burning hundreds of houses to the ground , burning all the crops, and killing or confiscating all livestock. Hundreds of New Yorker draft protesters were shot dead by federal soldiers during the New York City draft riots of 1863. But Ferrier is concerned about a single man, Vallandigham, organizing allegedly "violent’ anti-war protests in Canada.
According to Mark Neely, author of Fate of Liberty, there were more than 13,000 arrests of Northern civilians during the war after Lincoln had (unconstitutionally) suspended the writ of habeas corpus, including dozens, if not hundreds, of newspaper editors and owners who were critical of the Lincoln administration. Ferrier brushes this off by saying that many of these people were Confederate spies. But how could he know this if there were no trials and no due process? As Dean Sprague wrote in Freedom Under Lincoln, with all these civilian arrests and imprisonments by military authorities,
The laws were silent, indictments were not found, testimony was not taken, judges did not sit, juries were not impaneled, convictions were not obtained and sentences were not pronounced. The Anglo-Saxon concept of due process, perhaps the greatest political triumph of the ages and the best guardian of freedom, was abandoned.
Neely gives an account in his book of how Lincoln’s military became quite proficient at torturing Northern civilians who had been arbitrarily arrested without a warrant. On page 110 of Fate of Liberty he writes, "Handcuffs and hanging by the wrists were rare, but in the summer of 1863, the army had developed a water torture that came to be used routinely." Upon learning of the use of torture, no one in the Lincoln administration "expressed any personal outrage or personal feeling at all" over it, "including Lincoln’s secretary of state" William Seward.
Another part of Ferrier’s "defense" of Lincoln’s civil liberties abuses includes his argument that civil liberties abuses also occurred in the Confederacy. He apparently believes that two wrongs make a right.
Ferrier is carrying forward a long tradition of court intellectuals who have excused the tyrannical behavior of the state during the Lincoln administration. After writing of Lincoln’s "amazing disregard" for constitutional liberty and calling him a "dictator," Clinton Rossiter in Constitutional Dictatorship nevertheless referred to Lincoln’s "superlative example" as a "true democrat" whose actions established an "illustrious precedent." Literally hundreds of newspapers were shut down by the Lincoln administration, but "freedom of speech and press" somehow "flourished almost unchecked," wrote Rossiter.
In his otherwise masterful book, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, James G. Randall says there are no hard data on the exact number of civilian arrests, but he is nevertheless sure that the reported number must be "exaggerated." Mass arrest of civilians without a warrant or charges being filed was not an attack on constitutional liberty but merely "out of keeping with the normal tenor of American law." And the thousands of arbitrary arrests, after all, were ordered by Lincoln "with the best of motives."
In his otherwise outstanding book, Freedom Under Lincoln, Dean Sprague "defends" Lincoln by observing that "no political prisoner was put to death." Along these lines, Randall even went so far as to say that, yes, Lincoln established a secret police force under Secretary of State William Seward that arbitrarily arrested thousands of Northern citizens, but "it was exceedingly mild by modern standards." Writing in 1950, Randall was making the "he wasn’t as bad as Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini" defense.
In 1862 there was a small "war" between federal soldiers and the Santee Sioux Indians of Minnesota. At the end of the hostilities 303 Indians who were merely present at the conclusion of the fighting were arrested, imprisoned, and scheduled to be executed after military "trials" or tribunals that lasted about ten minutes each, according to David Nichols, author of Lincoln and the Indians. As Nichols explains, Lincoln was fearful that the European powers might be encouraged to be more supportive of the Confederacy if they learned of a mass execution of 303 men whose guilt had not been proven beyond reasonable doubt, so he pared the number down to just 39. This turned out to be the largest mass execution in American history yet, incredibly, some historians praise rather than criticize the Lincoln administration for it because "it could have been worse."
One frequently finds an "ends-justifies-the-means" mentality in all the "defenses" of civil liberties abuses during the Lincoln administration. Randall was a progressive, and he applauded the fact that disposing of the Constitution allowed Lincoln to destroy the system of states rights and federalism, which Randall euphemistically called "federal-state readjustment." Lincoln "believed in purposeful government," said Randall, and all outstanding presidents were "strong executives" who enlarge the size and scope of the state. He used the phrase "living constitution," perhaps coining it for the first time.
Literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote in Patriotic Gore of how Lincoln can be compared to Lenin and Bismarck because he, like the other two, "established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples" by becoming "an uncompromising dictator." Lincoln, Lenin and Bismarck were all succeeded by newly formed government bureaucracies so that "all the bad potentialities of the policies he had initiated were realized, after his removal, in the most undesirable way."
Mark Neely excoriated Wilson’s views, however, as being wrongheaded and based on "Wilson’s own extremist theories of individual freedom" (Fate of Liberty, p. 231). But Wilson’s views of individual liberty seem to have been almost identical to the views of Thomas Jefferson and many other founders who feared centralized governmental power. They are "extremist" only to those who are comfortable with such powers and the loss of individual liberty they entail.
But it is just this kind of argumentation that apparently won Neely a Pulitzer Prize for Fate of Liberty, where on the back cover it is announced that, thanks to Neely’s literary efforts, "Lincoln emerges from this account with his legendary statesmanship intact . . ." A job well done.
May 2, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com
The American Anti-Civil Liberties Union
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
In his brilliant essay, "The Anatomy of the State," Murray Rothbard wrote that state power always relies on the manipulation of public opinion perhaps as much as its use of force and coercion (See his Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays). Since the class of people constituting the state always necessarily consists of only a small portion of the population, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that "their government is good, wise, and at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives." This is where intellectuals come in: "Promoting this [statist] ideology among the people is the vital social task of the ‘intellectuals.’"
The intellectual’s livelihood in the free market is never too secure, but "the State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a secure and permanent berth in the State apparatus; and thus a secure income and the panoply of prestige." Thus, there has long been the tradition of the "court historian" who is "dedicated to purveying the rulers’ views of their own and their predecessors’ actions." This doesn’t apply to all intellectuals, of course, nor is it restricted to historians; economists are as guilty as anyone.
A sterling example of this phenomenon is how intellectuals have dealt with the abuse of civil liberties. During the Clinton administration, for example, the war on drugs was greatly escalated, which involved mass confiscation of private property under asset forfeiture laws and an assault on privacy rights. The government began spying on internet communications, the administration used confidential FBI files against its political enemies, there was the use of fraudulent search warrants, roving wire taps, IRS prosecutions of political opponents, attacks on the Second Amendment, and on and on.
While some intellectuals were concerned about these civil rights abuses, a large number of academics, journalists, and "public intellectuals" defended them vociferously by attacking the integrity of federal judges who were investigating the abuses, issuing statements that Clinton was "no worse" than some of his predecessors, and even inviting Clinton as an honored speaker at the American Bar Association convention after he was found in contempt of court for lying under oath. Only with the support of the intellectual class can our rulers get away with the destruction of civil liberties. This effort is perhaps why Clinton was impeached but not convicted.
Having just written a book on Abraham Lincoln that includes a chapter on Lincoln’s suspension of civil liberties in the North, I have been struck by how so many intellectuals, for more than a century, have behaved in manner similar to the Clinton court intellectuals in providing intellectual cover to Lincoln’s demolition of civil liberties in the Northern states.
One recent example is Richard Ferrier, who in an interview on WordNetDaily defended the Lincoln administration’s arresting without a warrant, brief imprisonment, and ultimate deportation of Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham for making speeches in opposition to the Lincoln administration in and around his hometown of Dayton, Ohio.
Vallandigham was snatched from his family in the middle of the night by federal soldiers and sent to the Southern states, after which he went to Canada. The Ohio Democratic Party made him its gubernatorial nominee in absentia.
Ferrier defends Lincoln, who had suspended the writ of habeas corpus to make such military arrests possible, by saying that Lincoln was especially gentle in just escorting Vallandigham to the Southern states (Vallandigham’s wife and children might not have agreed), and that Vallandigham was a trouble maker anyway. Ferrier further argues that Vallandigham organized sometimes violent protests in Canada.
This is a completely bizarre argument, considering that at the time another Ohio resident, General Ulysses S. Grant, was intentionally waging war on civilians in the Shenandoah Valley by burning hundreds of houses to the ground , burning all the crops, and killing or confiscating all livestock. Hundreds of New Yorker draft protesters were shot dead by federal soldiers during the New York City draft riots of 1863. But Ferrier is concerned about a single man, Vallandigham, organizing allegedly "violent’ anti-war protests in Canada.
According to Mark Neely, author of Fate of Liberty, there were more than 13,000 arrests of Northern civilians during the war after Lincoln had (unconstitutionally) suspended the writ of habeas corpus, including dozens, if not hundreds, of newspaper editors and owners who were critical of the Lincoln administration. Ferrier brushes this off by saying that many of these people were Confederate spies. But how could he know this if there were no trials and no due process? As Dean Sprague wrote in Freedom Under Lincoln, with all these civilian arrests and imprisonments by military authorities,
The laws were silent, indictments were not found, testimony was not taken, judges did not sit, juries were not impaneled, convictions were not obtained and sentences were not pronounced. The Anglo-Saxon concept of due process, perhaps the greatest political triumph of the ages and the best guardian of freedom, was abandoned.
Neely gives an account in his book of how Lincoln’s military became quite proficient at torturing Northern civilians who had been arbitrarily arrested without a warrant. On page 110 of Fate of Liberty he writes, "Handcuffs and hanging by the wrists were rare, but in the summer of 1863, the army had developed a water torture that came to be used routinely." Upon learning of the use of torture, no one in the Lincoln administration "expressed any personal outrage or personal feeling at all" over it, "including Lincoln’s secretary of state" William Seward.
Another part of Ferrier’s "defense" of Lincoln’s civil liberties abuses includes his argument that civil liberties abuses also occurred in the Confederacy. He apparently believes that two wrongs make a right.
Ferrier is carrying forward a long tradition of court intellectuals who have excused the tyrannical behavior of the state during the Lincoln administration. After writing of Lincoln’s "amazing disregard" for constitutional liberty and calling him a "dictator," Clinton Rossiter in Constitutional Dictatorship nevertheless referred to Lincoln’s "superlative example" as a "true democrat" whose actions established an "illustrious precedent." Literally hundreds of newspapers were shut down by the Lincoln administration, but "freedom of speech and press" somehow "flourished almost unchecked," wrote Rossiter.
In his otherwise masterful book, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, James G. Randall says there are no hard data on the exact number of civilian arrests, but he is nevertheless sure that the reported number must be "exaggerated." Mass arrest of civilians without a warrant or charges being filed was not an attack on constitutional liberty but merely "out of keeping with the normal tenor of American law." And the thousands of arbitrary arrests, after all, were ordered by Lincoln "with the best of motives."
In his otherwise outstanding book, Freedom Under Lincoln, Dean Sprague "defends" Lincoln by observing that "no political prisoner was put to death." Along these lines, Randall even went so far as to say that, yes, Lincoln established a secret police force under Secretary of State William Seward that arbitrarily arrested thousands of Northern citizens, but "it was exceedingly mild by modern standards." Writing in 1950, Randall was making the "he wasn’t as bad as Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini" defense.
In 1862 there was a small "war" between federal soldiers and the Santee Sioux Indians of Minnesota. At the end of the hostilities 303 Indians who were merely present at the conclusion of the fighting were arrested, imprisoned, and scheduled to be executed after military "trials" or tribunals that lasted about ten minutes each, according to David Nichols, author of Lincoln and the Indians. As Nichols explains, Lincoln was fearful that the European powers might be encouraged to be more supportive of the Confederacy if they learned of a mass execution of 303 men whose guilt had not been proven beyond reasonable doubt, so he pared the number down to just 39. This turned out to be the largest mass execution in American history yet, incredibly, some historians praise rather than criticize the Lincoln administration for it because "it could have been worse."
One frequently finds an "ends-justifies-the-means" mentality in all the "defenses" of civil liberties abuses during the Lincoln administration. Randall was a progressive, and he applauded the fact that disposing of the Constitution allowed Lincoln to destroy the system of states rights and federalism, which Randall euphemistically called "federal-state readjustment." Lincoln "believed in purposeful government," said Randall, and all outstanding presidents were "strong executives" who enlarge the size and scope of the state. He used the phrase "living constitution," perhaps coining it for the first time.
Literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote in Patriotic Gore of how Lincoln can be compared to Lenin and Bismarck because he, like the other two, "established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples" by becoming "an uncompromising dictator." Lincoln, Lenin and Bismarck were all succeeded by newly formed government bureaucracies so that "all the bad potentialities of the policies he had initiated were realized, after his removal, in the most undesirable way."
Mark Neely excoriated Wilson’s views, however, as being wrongheaded and based on "Wilson’s own extremist theories of individual freedom" (Fate of Liberty, p. 231). But Wilson’s views of individual liberty seem to have been almost identical to the views of Thomas Jefferson and many other founders who feared centralized governmental power. They are "extremist" only to those who are comfortable with such powers and the loss of individual liberty they entail.
But it is just this kind of argumentation that apparently won Neely a Pulitzer Prize for Fate of Liberty, where on the back cover it is announced that, thanks to Neely’s literary efforts, "Lincoln emerges from this account with his legendary statesmanship intact . . ." A job well done.
May 2, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com
When You Know You're Doing Something Right
From Lew Rockwell.com:
When You Know You’re Doing Something Right
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
You know you’re doing something right when you are the object of cheap shots, lies, and smears by a paid agent of the state whose job is to make up excuses and "justifications" for all the state’s wars and other military misadventures. A case in point is a dishonest and quite hysterical "review" of my book, The Real Lincoln, by one Mackubin Thomas Owens, in the May 4 Washington Times. Owens identifies himself as a professor of defense economics at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
He begins his "review" by charging that my book is based on "Marxist economic analysis," revealing a deep ignorance of economics on his part. For one thing, for more than twenty years I have been associated with the Austrian and Public Choice Schools of economics, the two most consistent anti-socialist schools of thought that exist. In my book I describe the seventy year economic debate between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, with the former group lobbying relentlessly for protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare, and inflationism through central banking. They wanted centralized government in order to enact their central plan and accumulate political power by handing out patronage to protectionist and subsidy-seeking industries. Lincoln was the political heir of Alexander Hamilton and spent most of his twenty-eight year political career prior to becoming president promoting this economic agenda.
The Jeffersonians opposed all of this, and their opposition was ended during the War Between the States, when all of the previously-debated policies were adopted (in the first eighteen months of the Lincoln administration). The whole classical liberal tradition is one of condemning interventionist economic policies precisely because they are a means of "legally plundering" one group of citizens at the expense of another. This kind of analysis has its roots in Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham (who spoke of "sinister interests), Frederic Bastiat, the British Manchester Schoool, and above all, the Austrian School of economics. It has nothing to do with Marx’s defunct theories of class warfare.
This is what many Southerners were complaining about for decades preceding the war – that they were especially being plundered by the protectionist tariff, which Lincoln and the Republican Party tripled as soon as he took office. There is no Marxian class analysis here, only traditional Public Choice analysis rooted in the classical liberal tradition.
Owens also tells several outright lies of the sort that, one would hope, would get any Naval Academy cadet kicked out of the Academy for violating its Honor Code. He writes that I say in my book that "slavery had nothing to do with the war." I unequivocally do not; I say just the opposite. This is a lie.
He is also deceptive and deceitful by quoting his hero, Harry Jaffa, as once remarking that the late Mel Bradford’s discussions of all of Lincoln’s many racist remarks -- and there were many -- were also highlighted by white supremacist "White Citizens Councils." He is implying that Bradford must have agreed with these characters, as must I. But these people quoted Lincoln’s racist remarks ("I . . . am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary," Ottawa Ill., Aug. 21, 1858) because they approved of them. I quoted them because they are an ugly side of Lincoln that has been well hidden from public view by state propagandists like Owens. That is the deceit that Owens attempts to perpetrate.
Owens says that I claim that John C. Calhoun was the architect of the doctrine of state sovereignty, which I do not. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, authors of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 that enunciated the doctrine of nullification, came first, as did myriad other members of the founding generation. Since Calhoun defended slavery, Owens is dishonestly trying to make it appear that only such people as Calhoun ever spoke of states’ rights.
Owens doesn’t marshal any real arguments other than to quote his hero, Harry Jaffa. He notes that I quote an 1848 speech Lincoln made in Congress on the topic of the Mexican War in which he defended the right of secession. Owens invokes Jaffa, who has tried to explain this away with the silly semantic game of pretending that the founders distinguished between revolution and secession. Of course, the American Revolution was a war of secession from England. Such word games are a pathetic and unconvincing attempt to rewrite history in Clintonian fashion.
After beginning his article by calling me a Marxist, Owens ends it by labeling me a libertarian. He assumes that Lincoln was a champion of Lockean liberalism, and therefore thinks it odd that I would criticize Lincoln. But Lincoln was always perfectly content to allow Southern slavery to exist, as long as the Southern states remained in the Union. When the deep South first seceded and the upper South – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas – did not, Lincoln was happy to have these slave states as part of the Union. He orchestrated the secession of western Virginia (unconstitutionally, according to his own attorney general) to bolster his electoral college vote in 1864 and again, was not opposed to the existence of slavery there.
He opposed the extension of slavery in the new territories, but the reasons he gave for this were that he and the Republican Party wanted to preserve these territories for white labor (which would then vote Republican), and that because of the Three-Fifths clause of the Constitution, slavery in the territories would have artificially inflated the level of congressional representation by the Democratic Party. What kind of Lockean is it who supports slavery, promises to uphold it "where it exists" and to even strengthen it by enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act?
And what kind of Lockean is it who: Launches a military invasion without the consent of Congress, unilaterally and unconstitutionally suspends the writ of habeas corpus and imprisons more than 13,000 Northern dissenters (i.e., political prisoners), censors all telegraph communications, shuts down hundreds of opposition newspapers and imprisons their editors and owners, orders federal troops to interfere with Northern elections, confiscates private property, including firearms, establishes a secret police force to round up and imprison political dissenters, tortures civilian prisoners by hanging them by their wrists and with water torture (see Mark Neely’s Fate of Liberty), and wages a four-year war on civilians as well as combatants? I suppose that would be Owens’s definition of a "Lockean liberal."
Here are some references that describe all these offenses and more: Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln by James G. Randall; Freedom Under Lincoln by Dean Sprague; Fate of Liberty by Mark Neely, Constitutional Dictatorship by Clinton Rossiter; and The Hard Hand of War by Mark Grimsley. This is part of the vast literature that does exist on the real Lincoln that state propagandists like Owens never mention other than to dismiss it.
May 7, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
When You Know You’re Doing Something Right
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
You know you’re doing something right when you are the object of cheap shots, lies, and smears by a paid agent of the state whose job is to make up excuses and "justifications" for all the state’s wars and other military misadventures. A case in point is a dishonest and quite hysterical "review" of my book, The Real Lincoln, by one Mackubin Thomas Owens, in the May 4 Washington Times. Owens identifies himself as a professor of defense economics at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
He begins his "review" by charging that my book is based on "Marxist economic analysis," revealing a deep ignorance of economics on his part. For one thing, for more than twenty years I have been associated with the Austrian and Public Choice Schools of economics, the two most consistent anti-socialist schools of thought that exist. In my book I describe the seventy year economic debate between the Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, with the former group lobbying relentlessly for protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare, and inflationism through central banking. They wanted centralized government in order to enact their central plan and accumulate political power by handing out patronage to protectionist and subsidy-seeking industries. Lincoln was the political heir of Alexander Hamilton and spent most of his twenty-eight year political career prior to becoming president promoting this economic agenda.
The Jeffersonians opposed all of this, and their opposition was ended during the War Between the States, when all of the previously-debated policies were adopted (in the first eighteen months of the Lincoln administration). The whole classical liberal tradition is one of condemning interventionist economic policies precisely because they are a means of "legally plundering" one group of citizens at the expense of another. This kind of analysis has its roots in Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham (who spoke of "sinister interests), Frederic Bastiat, the British Manchester Schoool, and above all, the Austrian School of economics. It has nothing to do with Marx’s defunct theories of class warfare.
This is what many Southerners were complaining about for decades preceding the war – that they were especially being plundered by the protectionist tariff, which Lincoln and the Republican Party tripled as soon as he took office. There is no Marxian class analysis here, only traditional Public Choice analysis rooted in the classical liberal tradition.
Owens also tells several outright lies of the sort that, one would hope, would get any Naval Academy cadet kicked out of the Academy for violating its Honor Code. He writes that I say in my book that "slavery had nothing to do with the war." I unequivocally do not; I say just the opposite. This is a lie.
He is also deceptive and deceitful by quoting his hero, Harry Jaffa, as once remarking that the late Mel Bradford’s discussions of all of Lincoln’s many racist remarks -- and there were many -- were also highlighted by white supremacist "White Citizens Councils." He is implying that Bradford must have agreed with these characters, as must I. But these people quoted Lincoln’s racist remarks ("I . . . am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary," Ottawa Ill., Aug. 21, 1858) because they approved of them. I quoted them because they are an ugly side of Lincoln that has been well hidden from public view by state propagandists like Owens. That is the deceit that Owens attempts to perpetrate.
Owens says that I claim that John C. Calhoun was the architect of the doctrine of state sovereignty, which I do not. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, authors of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 that enunciated the doctrine of nullification, came first, as did myriad other members of the founding generation. Since Calhoun defended slavery, Owens is dishonestly trying to make it appear that only such people as Calhoun ever spoke of states’ rights.
Owens doesn’t marshal any real arguments other than to quote his hero, Harry Jaffa. He notes that I quote an 1848 speech Lincoln made in Congress on the topic of the Mexican War in which he defended the right of secession. Owens invokes Jaffa, who has tried to explain this away with the silly semantic game of pretending that the founders distinguished between revolution and secession. Of course, the American Revolution was a war of secession from England. Such word games are a pathetic and unconvincing attempt to rewrite history in Clintonian fashion.
After beginning his article by calling me a Marxist, Owens ends it by labeling me a libertarian. He assumes that Lincoln was a champion of Lockean liberalism, and therefore thinks it odd that I would criticize Lincoln. But Lincoln was always perfectly content to allow Southern slavery to exist, as long as the Southern states remained in the Union. When the deep South first seceded and the upper South – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas – did not, Lincoln was happy to have these slave states as part of the Union. He orchestrated the secession of western Virginia (unconstitutionally, according to his own attorney general) to bolster his electoral college vote in 1864 and again, was not opposed to the existence of slavery there.
He opposed the extension of slavery in the new territories, but the reasons he gave for this were that he and the Republican Party wanted to preserve these territories for white labor (which would then vote Republican), and that because of the Three-Fifths clause of the Constitution, slavery in the territories would have artificially inflated the level of congressional representation by the Democratic Party. What kind of Lockean is it who supports slavery, promises to uphold it "where it exists" and to even strengthen it by enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act?
And what kind of Lockean is it who: Launches a military invasion without the consent of Congress, unilaterally and unconstitutionally suspends the writ of habeas corpus and imprisons more than 13,000 Northern dissenters (i.e., political prisoners), censors all telegraph communications, shuts down hundreds of opposition newspapers and imprisons their editors and owners, orders federal troops to interfere with Northern elections, confiscates private property, including firearms, establishes a secret police force to round up and imprison political dissenters, tortures civilian prisoners by hanging them by their wrists and with water torture (see Mark Neely’s Fate of Liberty), and wages a four-year war on civilians as well as combatants? I suppose that would be Owens’s definition of a "Lockean liberal."
Here are some references that describe all these offenses and more: Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln by James G. Randall; Freedom Under Lincoln by Dean Sprague; Fate of Liberty by Mark Neely, Constitutional Dictatorship by Clinton Rossiter; and The Hard Hand of War by Mark Grimsley. This is part of the vast literature that does exist on the real Lincoln that state propagandists like Owens never mention other than to dismiss it.
May 7, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
More Ad Hominem
From Lew Rockwell.com:
More ad hominem
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: February 26, 2002
1:00 am Eastern
By Thomas J. DiLorenzo
© 2010 WorldNetDaily.com
Once again, a spokesman from something called the "Declaration Foundation," David Quackenbush, has chosen personal insult and ad hominem arguments in response to my comments on Lincoln. He begins his Feb. 22 piece, "Apparent Inaccuracies," not by criticizing anything that I actually said, but saying that I argue "as if," in his opinion, I value free trade more than the abolition of slavery. He thereby underhandedly accuses me of sympathizing with slavery. This is a complete distortion of my position, and a straw man argument.
It is apparently the policy of the Declaration Foundation that anyone who criticizes Lincoln is slandered by the likes of Mr. Quackenbush as somehow being in favor of slavery. And he has the gall to conclude his article with the claim that he is not making ad hominem arguments.
Quackenbush asserts that "there is no legal right to secession," but this issue was never decided in any other way but Lincoln's use of military violence. In the first half of the 19th century, every cadet at West Point was taught constitutional law by the Pennsylvania abolitionist William Rawle, whose book on the Constitution argued that there was indeed a constitutional right to secession.
Most Americans – North and South – believed this as of 1860, as judged by the 1,000 Northern newspaper articles surveyed by historian Howard Cecil Perkins in his book, "Northern Editorials on Secession." Virginia, North Carolina and Rhode Island explicitly stated in their articles of ratification of the Constitution that they reserved the right to secede if the federal government ever became destructive of their liberties, giving the lie to Quackenbush's assertion that no state ever had a right to leave the Union under any circumstances. The Declaration Foundation is apparently in the business of either ignoring or rewriting history.
Quackenbush takes Lincoln's comments on central banking out of context to accuse me of inaccuracies. As I show in my book, "The Real Lincoln," Lincoln was devoted for 30 years to the Whig agenda of the federal government's monopolization of the money supply – so much so that he even had to bring it up in his comment on the Dred Scott decision, as Quackenbush admits. He was a passionate supporter of centralized government through money monopolization for his entire political career.
Quackenbush is unequivocally wrong when he says that he cannot find "a single word in any of the [Lincoln-Douglas] debates, that refers in any way, to an economic agenda." To be charitable, I will assume that, despite his claims of being a world champion Lincoln expert, Quackenbush never got around to reading the July 17, 1858, speech of Lincoln's in response to Douglas in Springfield, Ill., in which Lincoln says: "You remember we once had a national bank … the Supreme Court decided that the bank was constitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General [Andrew] Jackson himself asserted that he, as president, would not be bound to hold a national bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided it to be so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. [Thomas] Jefferson, and acted upon it under official oath, in vetoing a charter for a national bank."
Yes, Lincoln is also discussing slavery in this speech, but it is relevant that he made it a point to insert his career-long animosity toward the Democratic Party's opposition to central banking as well, and to devote considerable space to it. This sounds like an economic agenda to me, despite Quackenbush's refusal to acknowledge it.
Quackenbush opens his article with a thinly veiled, and absurd accusation that I must somehow be unconcerned about the horrors of slavery. Then he claims something to be true that is not – that there is no economic agenda of any kind mentioned in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. And he has the chutzpah to conclude with an appeal to discuss only the "actual statesmanship of the actual Lincoln" and not any unpleasant facts that I or anyone else might bring up, which he dismisses with more ad hominem as "wild imaginings." The man just can't help himself with the personal smears. Charming.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas J. DiLorenzo is author of "The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War" (Forum/Random House) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
More ad hominem
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: February 26, 2002
1:00 am Eastern
By Thomas J. DiLorenzo
© 2010 WorldNetDaily.com
Once again, a spokesman from something called the "Declaration Foundation," David Quackenbush, has chosen personal insult and ad hominem arguments in response to my comments on Lincoln. He begins his Feb. 22 piece, "Apparent Inaccuracies," not by criticizing anything that I actually said, but saying that I argue "as if," in his opinion, I value free trade more than the abolition of slavery. He thereby underhandedly accuses me of sympathizing with slavery. This is a complete distortion of my position, and a straw man argument.
It is apparently the policy of the Declaration Foundation that anyone who criticizes Lincoln is slandered by the likes of Mr. Quackenbush as somehow being in favor of slavery. And he has the gall to conclude his article with the claim that he is not making ad hominem arguments.
Quackenbush asserts that "there is no legal right to secession," but this issue was never decided in any other way but Lincoln's use of military violence. In the first half of the 19th century, every cadet at West Point was taught constitutional law by the Pennsylvania abolitionist William Rawle, whose book on the Constitution argued that there was indeed a constitutional right to secession.
Most Americans – North and South – believed this as of 1860, as judged by the 1,000 Northern newspaper articles surveyed by historian Howard Cecil Perkins in his book, "Northern Editorials on Secession." Virginia, North Carolina and Rhode Island explicitly stated in their articles of ratification of the Constitution that they reserved the right to secede if the federal government ever became destructive of their liberties, giving the lie to Quackenbush's assertion that no state ever had a right to leave the Union under any circumstances. The Declaration Foundation is apparently in the business of either ignoring or rewriting history.
Quackenbush takes Lincoln's comments on central banking out of context to accuse me of inaccuracies. As I show in my book, "The Real Lincoln," Lincoln was devoted for 30 years to the Whig agenda of the federal government's monopolization of the money supply – so much so that he even had to bring it up in his comment on the Dred Scott decision, as Quackenbush admits. He was a passionate supporter of centralized government through money monopolization for his entire political career.
Quackenbush is unequivocally wrong when he says that he cannot find "a single word in any of the [Lincoln-Douglas] debates, that refers in any way, to an economic agenda." To be charitable, I will assume that, despite his claims of being a world champion Lincoln expert, Quackenbush never got around to reading the July 17, 1858, speech of Lincoln's in response to Douglas in Springfield, Ill., in which Lincoln says: "You remember we once had a national bank … the Supreme Court decided that the bank was constitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General [Andrew] Jackson himself asserted that he, as president, would not be bound to hold a national bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided it to be so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. [Thomas] Jefferson, and acted upon it under official oath, in vetoing a charter for a national bank."
Yes, Lincoln is also discussing slavery in this speech, but it is relevant that he made it a point to insert his career-long animosity toward the Democratic Party's opposition to central banking as well, and to devote considerable space to it. This sounds like an economic agenda to me, despite Quackenbush's refusal to acknowledge it.
Quackenbush opens his article with a thinly veiled, and absurd accusation that I must somehow be unconcerned about the horrors of slavery. Then he claims something to be true that is not – that there is no economic agenda of any kind mentioned in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. And he has the chutzpah to conclude with an appeal to discuss only the "actual statesmanship of the actual Lincoln" and not any unpleasant facts that I or anyone else might bring up, which he dismisses with more ad hominem as "wild imaginings." The man just can't help himself with the personal smears. Charming.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas J. DiLorenzo is author of "The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War" (Forum/Random House) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Constitutional Con Men
From Lew Rockwell.com:
Constitutional Con Men
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
During my May 7 debate with Harry Jaffa at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, Jaffa made several statements that literally caused some jaws to drop in the audience along with looks of utter disbelief. (His supporters grinned and nodded approvingly). He stated, for instance, that "Lincoln never did anything that was unconstitutional;" that Virginia never reserved the right to withdraw from the Union when she ratified the Constitution; and that the British government never recognized the colonies or states individually in the Treaty of Paris. There was never any such thing as state sovereignty, in other words, and nothing Lincoln ever did – even unilaterally suspending the writ of habeas corpus and having the military arrest thousands of Northern citizens – violated the Constitution.
One gets a very different perspective if one reads Jonathan Elliot’s Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, edited by James McClellan and Mel Bradford and reprinted by J. River Press in 1989 – or the original ratification documents, for that matter. One finds that this is what the Virginia delegates said:
We, the delegates of the people of Virginia . . . Do, in the name and behalf of the people of Virginia, declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression, and that every power not granted thereby remains with them at their will . . .
New York made a similar declaration: "We, the delegates of the people of New York . . . do declare and make known that the powers of government may be reassumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness . . ." And Rhode Island made an almost identical declaration: "We, the delegates of the people of Rhode Island and Plantations, duly elected . . . do declare and make known . . . that the powers of government may be resumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness . . ."
Jaffa is the master of what Joe Stromberg calls the "dark art" of "reinterpreting" documents such as these to mean not what they say in plain English but what he wishes them to say in a way that is consistent with his political proclivities.
During the debate Jaffa relied on his quite substantial reputation to simply declare that the British government did not recognize the states individually in the 1783 Treaty of Paris at the conclusion of the American Revolution. I could only respond that I made it a point to re-read the treaty in preparation for the debate, and that Jaffa was wrong. I should have brought a copy of the Treaty with me, for here is what Article I says:
His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz. New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to be free, sovereign and independent States; and he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the Government, proprietory and territorial rights of the same, and every part thereof. ("Treaty with Great Britain," in Charles Eliot, ed., The Harvard Classics, vol. 43, American Historical Documents, p. 175).
This is important, for the founding documents consistently make the point that the states are sovereign and are establishing a Union to act as their agent. That’s why, whenever the phrase "United States" appears in the Constitution, it is in the plural – to signify that the individual sovereign states were voluntarily banding together to form the Union. This use of language was turned on its head by force of arms from 1861 to 1865 when, as Shelby Foote writes in his book, The Civil War, Americans quit saying "the United States are" and began saying "the United States is," signifying the transformation from a confederacy of sovereign states to a consolidated, monolithic empire.
The one comment of Jaffa’s that drew gasps and looks of disbelief was his insistence that Lincoln never did anything that was unconstitutional. These people were obviously aware that the Constitution does not provide for a dictator but a president, and that generations of historians have referred to Lincoln as a "dictator" but a benevolent one. "Dictatorship played a decisive role in the North’s successful effort to maintain the Union by force of arms," wrote Clinton Rossiter in Constitutional Dictatorship. Lincoln’s "amazing disregard for the Constitution was considered by nobody as legal," Rossiter also proclaimed. "If Lincoln was a dictator, it must be admitted that he was a benevolent dictator," wrote James Ford Rhodes in his History of the United States, a statement that was repeated almost verbatim by James G. Randall in Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln.
The main reason why generations of historians have labeled Lincoln a dictator (but also made an ends-justify-the-means defense of his dictatorial behavior) is probably the fact that on April 27, 1861, two weeks after Fort Sumter, he unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and eventually ordered the federal army to arrest between 13,000 and 38,000 Northern civilians who were suspected of opposing his administration (this is the range of estimates that exists in published literature). These people were never given any due process at all.
The chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney, issued an opinion that such an act was unconstitutional because only Congress has the power to do so. He cited former chief Justice John Marshall as saying that "it is for the legislature to say so" if habeas corpus is to be suspended; he cited Justice Joseph Story as concurring with that opinion, as did English and American precedents; and he pointed out that the suspension of habeas corpus appears in the Constitution under the section on legislative, not executive powers.
If an American president can unilaterally suspend habeas corpus, Taney wrote, then "the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws; but every citizen holds life, liberty and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found." Lincoln simply ignored Taney’s opinion.
The jaw droppers at the Independent Institute debate must have also been aware of Lincoln’s demolition of the First Amendment during his administration to have reacted with such looks of disbelief. There were hundreds of opposition newspapers in the North, and many of them were shut down and their editors and owners thrown into military prisons without any due process. For example, on May 18, 1864 Lincoln issued an order to General John Dix that read as follows: "You will take possession by military force, of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce . . . and prohibit any further publication thereof . . . you are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison . . . the editors, proprietors and publishers of aforesaid newspapers." Dix complied, and hundreds of newspapers were censored (see Dean Sprague’s Freedom Under Lincoln).
The history books also discuss how federal troops were ordered to interfere with Northern elections (Lincoln won New York by 7,000 votes in 1864 "with the help of federal bayonets," according to David Donald in Lincoln Reconsidered); all telegraph communication was censored; the railroads were nationalized; new states were created unconstitutionally; and the Tenth Amendment was all but destroyed by the war.
Even Lincoln’s own attorney general, Edward Bates, was of the opinion that Lincoln’s orchestration of the secession of western Virginia from the rest of the state was unconstitutional. Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution reads: "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any state be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress" (emphasis added).
West Virginia was unconstitutionally carved out of Virginia, and since it did not even exist as a state, its non-existent legislature could not have consented, as required by the Constitution. A puppet government was established in Alexandria, Virginia, run by Republican Party operatives, which guaranteed a few more electoral votes for Lincoln in the 1864 election.
I’m sure Jaffa can come up with some tongue-twisting, Clintonian "spin" as to why these realities are not really realities. He’s been doing it all his life. And he absolutely must continue doing so, for the entire case against states’ rights rests on the assumption that Lincoln was only enforcing the Constitution when he launched his invasion. The Southern states were dissatisfied with the results of a duly constituted election, and that is no reason to secede. Jaffa repeated this during the debate and has done so in many of his writings. His position is that no state ever has a right to secede, for any reason, as long as the constitutional rules of elections are followed. Presumably, this would hold true if say, a Southern sectional candidate were to be elected president and, with his party in control of Congress, enacted a flat 80 percent income tax on the Northern states and a 20 percent flat tax on the Southern states, while making interstate migration illegal. That was roughly the tax situation after Lincoln was elected, with Southerners paying as much as 80 percent of all tariff revenues which, at the time, were the primary form of federal taxation.
If Lincoln was not, in fact, a devoted champion of the Constitution, the whole anti-states’ rights house of cards collapses. If he disregarded the Constitution and acted like a dictator, no matter how noble his ends might have been, then the sanctity-of-the-Constitution argument against secession goes out the window. This, in my opinion, is why Jaffa must continue to make such outrageously ahistorical statements.
May 15, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
Constitutional Con Men
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
During my May 7 debate with Harry Jaffa at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, Jaffa made several statements that literally caused some jaws to drop in the audience along with looks of utter disbelief. (His supporters grinned and nodded approvingly). He stated, for instance, that "Lincoln never did anything that was unconstitutional;" that Virginia never reserved the right to withdraw from the Union when she ratified the Constitution; and that the British government never recognized the colonies or states individually in the Treaty of Paris. There was never any such thing as state sovereignty, in other words, and nothing Lincoln ever did – even unilaterally suspending the writ of habeas corpus and having the military arrest thousands of Northern citizens – violated the Constitution.
One gets a very different perspective if one reads Jonathan Elliot’s Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, edited by James McClellan and Mel Bradford and reprinted by J. River Press in 1989 – or the original ratification documents, for that matter. One finds that this is what the Virginia delegates said:
We, the delegates of the people of Virginia . . . Do, in the name and behalf of the people of Virginia, declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the people of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression, and that every power not granted thereby remains with them at their will . . .
New York made a similar declaration: "We, the delegates of the people of New York . . . do declare and make known that the powers of government may be reassumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness . . ." And Rhode Island made an almost identical declaration: "We, the delegates of the people of Rhode Island and Plantations, duly elected . . . do declare and make known . . . that the powers of government may be resumed by the people whenever it shall become necessary to their happiness . . ."
Jaffa is the master of what Joe Stromberg calls the "dark art" of "reinterpreting" documents such as these to mean not what they say in plain English but what he wishes them to say in a way that is consistent with his political proclivities.
During the debate Jaffa relied on his quite substantial reputation to simply declare that the British government did not recognize the states individually in the 1783 Treaty of Paris at the conclusion of the American Revolution. I could only respond that I made it a point to re-read the treaty in preparation for the debate, and that Jaffa was wrong. I should have brought a copy of the Treaty with me, for here is what Article I says:
His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz. New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to be free, sovereign and independent States; and he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the Government, proprietory and territorial rights of the same, and every part thereof. ("Treaty with Great Britain," in Charles Eliot, ed., The Harvard Classics, vol. 43, American Historical Documents, p. 175).
This is important, for the founding documents consistently make the point that the states are sovereign and are establishing a Union to act as their agent. That’s why, whenever the phrase "United States" appears in the Constitution, it is in the plural – to signify that the individual sovereign states were voluntarily banding together to form the Union. This use of language was turned on its head by force of arms from 1861 to 1865 when, as Shelby Foote writes in his book, The Civil War, Americans quit saying "the United States are" and began saying "the United States is," signifying the transformation from a confederacy of sovereign states to a consolidated, monolithic empire.
The one comment of Jaffa’s that drew gasps and looks of disbelief was his insistence that Lincoln never did anything that was unconstitutional. These people were obviously aware that the Constitution does not provide for a dictator but a president, and that generations of historians have referred to Lincoln as a "dictator" but a benevolent one. "Dictatorship played a decisive role in the North’s successful effort to maintain the Union by force of arms," wrote Clinton Rossiter in Constitutional Dictatorship. Lincoln’s "amazing disregard for the Constitution was considered by nobody as legal," Rossiter also proclaimed. "If Lincoln was a dictator, it must be admitted that he was a benevolent dictator," wrote James Ford Rhodes in his History of the United States, a statement that was repeated almost verbatim by James G. Randall in Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln.
The main reason why generations of historians have labeled Lincoln a dictator (but also made an ends-justify-the-means defense of his dictatorial behavior) is probably the fact that on April 27, 1861, two weeks after Fort Sumter, he unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and eventually ordered the federal army to arrest between 13,000 and 38,000 Northern civilians who were suspected of opposing his administration (this is the range of estimates that exists in published literature). These people were never given any due process at all.
The chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney, issued an opinion that such an act was unconstitutional because only Congress has the power to do so. He cited former chief Justice John Marshall as saying that "it is for the legislature to say so" if habeas corpus is to be suspended; he cited Justice Joseph Story as concurring with that opinion, as did English and American precedents; and he pointed out that the suspension of habeas corpus appears in the Constitution under the section on legislative, not executive powers.
If an American president can unilaterally suspend habeas corpus, Taney wrote, then "the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws; but every citizen holds life, liberty and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found." Lincoln simply ignored Taney’s opinion.
The jaw droppers at the Independent Institute debate must have also been aware of Lincoln’s demolition of the First Amendment during his administration to have reacted with such looks of disbelief. There were hundreds of opposition newspapers in the North, and many of them were shut down and their editors and owners thrown into military prisons without any due process. For example, on May 18, 1864 Lincoln issued an order to General John Dix that read as follows: "You will take possession by military force, of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce . . . and prohibit any further publication thereof . . . you are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison . . . the editors, proprietors and publishers of aforesaid newspapers." Dix complied, and hundreds of newspapers were censored (see Dean Sprague’s Freedom Under Lincoln).
The history books also discuss how federal troops were ordered to interfere with Northern elections (Lincoln won New York by 7,000 votes in 1864 "with the help of federal bayonets," according to David Donald in Lincoln Reconsidered); all telegraph communication was censored; the railroads were nationalized; new states were created unconstitutionally; and the Tenth Amendment was all but destroyed by the war.
Even Lincoln’s own attorney general, Edward Bates, was of the opinion that Lincoln’s orchestration of the secession of western Virginia from the rest of the state was unconstitutional. Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution reads: "New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any state be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress" (emphasis added).
West Virginia was unconstitutionally carved out of Virginia, and since it did not even exist as a state, its non-existent legislature could not have consented, as required by the Constitution. A puppet government was established in Alexandria, Virginia, run by Republican Party operatives, which guaranteed a few more electoral votes for Lincoln in the 1864 election.
I’m sure Jaffa can come up with some tongue-twisting, Clintonian "spin" as to why these realities are not really realities. He’s been doing it all his life. And he absolutely must continue doing so, for the entire case against states’ rights rests on the assumption that Lincoln was only enforcing the Constitution when he launched his invasion. The Southern states were dissatisfied with the results of a duly constituted election, and that is no reason to secede. Jaffa repeated this during the debate and has done so in many of his writings. His position is that no state ever has a right to secede, for any reason, as long as the constitutional rules of elections are followed. Presumably, this would hold true if say, a Southern sectional candidate were to be elected president and, with his party in control of Congress, enacted a flat 80 percent income tax on the Northern states and a 20 percent flat tax on the Southern states, while making interstate migration illegal. That was roughly the tax situation after Lincoln was elected, with Southerners paying as much as 80 percent of all tariff revenues which, at the time, were the primary form of federal taxation.
If Lincoln was not, in fact, a devoted champion of the Constitution, the whole anti-states’ rights house of cards collapses. If he disregarded the Constitution and acted like a dictator, no matter how noble his ends might have been, then the sanctity-of-the-Constitution argument against secession goes out the window. This, in my opinion, is why Jaffa must continue to make such outrageously ahistorical statements.
May 15, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright 2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
Machan, Secession And Slavery
From Lew Rockwell.com:
Machan, Secession, and Slavery
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
My friend Tibor Machan has courageously entered the fray over the issue of Lincoln and secession with a typically eloquent essay, "Lincoln, Secession and Slavery," on the Cato Institute’s website (June 1). I say "courageous" because his essay is not entirely a hymn of praise to Father Abraham, the standard prerequisite for "Lincoln scholarship" in America. Anyone who offers even the slightest criticism of Lincoln risks being smeared, lied about, and accused of the vilest intentions by the cult of "Lincoln scholars."
Machan does (rather timidly) admit to Lincoln’s "blemished record of following the ideal of free government in his political life" by suspending the writ of habeas corpus and ordering mass arrests of tens of thousands of Northern civilian opponents of his regime including dozens, if not hundreds, of newspaper editors and owners. And he correctly points out that when it suited his political purposes Lincoln clearly advocated secession, as he did in an 1848 speech about the Mexican War and with his unconstitutional orchestration of the secession of western Virginia during the war.
I use the word "timid" because generations of historians have agreed with Clinton Rossiter, author of Constitutional Dictatorship, when he called Lincoln a "dictator" and said that Lincoln’s "amazing disregard" for the Constitution was "considered by nobody as legal." In his 1998 book, Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era, Herman Belz expresses an odd puzzlement over "the persistence of the dictatorship convention" in descriptions of Lincoln by the scholarly community. There’s nothing puzzling about it, however; the "dictatorship convention" persists because it is true.
Machan’s analysis suffers from the exclusion of some very important facts. For example, he correctly states that many Southerners "endorsed out-and-out racist ideas" but this was true of the entire western world – including the Northern United States – during the Victorian era. To his credit, he points out that Lincoln also held such ideas by repeatedly stating his opposition to "bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races" (Aug. 21, 1858, debate with Stephen Douglas in Ottawa, Illinois).
In assessing the reasons for the war it is important to recognize that, as Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1945 Macmillan edition, p. 359): "[T]he prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known." As Eugene Berwanger wrote in The Frontier Against Slavery (p. 97), "In virtually every phase of existence [in the North], Negroes found themselves systematically separated from whites." They were excluded or assigned to "Jim Crow" sections of all means of transportation; could not enter most hotels, restaurants, and other public buildings; had to sit in "Negro pews" in church; and were almost completely segregated from the white population.
Many Northern states adopted laws like Indiana’s which prohibited Negroes and mulattos from entering the state; did not recognize contracts with them; fined employers who encouraged black employees to enter the state; prohibited blacks from voting, marrying white persons (punishable by imprisonment), or testifying in court against white persons. Illinois – the "Land of Lincoln" – prohibited the immigration of black people into the state. Lincoln never expressed opposition to this, and even supported a state program to "colonize," i.e., deport, free blacks out of Illinois.
Lincoln and most Northerners did more than make racist statements; they discriminated against and legally abused the small number of free blacks among them. In states such as Indiana, the inability of blacks to testify in court against whites invited criminal abuse. This pervasive and institutionalized Northern racism is one reason why the standard story that hundreds of thousand of Northerners gave their lives during the war for the benefit of black strangers in the South is bizarre.
Machan’s abstract statements that a group that secedes from a political union should have no right to "take along hostages" and that the slaves would probably have preferred to keep the Union intact are complicated by actual American history. Both Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens and the preeminent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison believed that slavery was "more secure in the Union than out of it," as Stephens stated. This is because of the Fugitive Slave Act, which Lincoln wholeheartedly supported. The Act compelled the Northern states to capture runaway slaves. They were provided due process, but local magistrates were paid $10 for returning a slave to his owner, and only $5 for granting him freedom. It was a gigantic federal subsidy to prop up the institution of slavery, and would have become defunct with secession, making the enforcement of slavery much more costly. This is why Garrison and other Northern abolitionists advocated the secession of the Northern states. ("No Covenant with Death" was the secessionist banner across Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator).
Machan is not entirely correct in stating that "the citizens of the union who intended to go their own way" were "kidnapping" slaves. Only a small percentage of Southerners owned slaves, who were mostly on the large plantations. The average Confederate soldier was a yeoman farmer, laborer, or merchant who did not own slaves and had no interest in maintaining the institution. As James McPherson wrote in What They Fought For: 1861-1865, most Confederate soldiers believed they were fighting against a tyrannical federal government that was invading their country and threatening their homes and families.
Another relevant fact is that the upper South – Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas – initially voted to remain in the Union after the lower South had seceded. Virginia voted two-to-one to remain in the Union and Lincoln was pleased to have her, slaves and all. It was only after Lincoln launched an invasion of Virginia’s sister states that she reversed herself and seceded after taking a popular vote; the other three states of the upper South then followed suit. Lincoln’s unconstitutional invasion was the main reason for Virginia’s secession. Machan’s condemnation of all Southerners as "kidnappers" is patently unfair and inaccurate.
Machan expresses concern for "unwilling third parties" during an act of secession but he ignores the fact that Lincoln conscripted tens of thousands of unwilling third parties, many of whom who were sent to grisly deaths in the war. Thousands of other conscripts were maimed for life. The fate of some of these men was truly horrific. In the May 1864 "Battle of the Wilderness" Ulysses S. Grant’s army suffered 2,246 soldiers killed and 12,037 wounded in just 48 hours. The battle was fought in a dense Virginia forest that caught on fire, trapping hundreds of wounded men who perished in the fire. Gordon Rhea cites a first-hand account of the scene in The Battle of the Wilderness: May 5-6, 1864 (p. 451): "Forest fires raged, ammunition trains exploded; the dead were roasted . . . ; the wounded, roused by its hot breath, dragged themselves along, with their torn and mangled limbs, in the mad energy of despair . . . ; and every bush seemed hung with shreds of blood-stained clothing . . . hell itself had usurped the place of earth."
There were draft riots in New York City and elsewhere after the conscription law was put into place (see Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots). Federal troops shot and killed hundreds of New York City antiwar protesters. Tens of thousands of Northern men either deserted or evaded the draft by hiding out in the mountains of Pennsylvania and elsewhere. In short, Machan’s "unwilling third parties" defense of Lincoln is not much of a defense if it does not incorporate a concern for all unwilling third parties.
Moreover, the purpose of the war was "to save the Union," as Lincoln said over and over again, not to free the slaves. (Actually, the war destroyed the Union as a voluntary association of states). As Machan notes, in his August 22, 1862 letter to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, Lincoln very clearly stated his position that if he could "save the Union" without freeing a single slave, he would do so. The issue of slavery was an ex post facto rationale for the war, at best.
The US Congress supported Lincoln’s position in mid-1861 when it issued a resolution on the purpose of the war. The war was not being waged, Congress declared,
". . . in any spirit of oppression, or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those [Southern] states, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the constitution, and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several states unimpaired." (W.A. Dunning, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction, p. 13)
As I argue in The Real Lincoln, the Constitution that was established by the founders was largely overthrown by the war and replaced with what Columbia University law professor George P. Fletcher calls "our secret Constitution," one that promotes "egalitarianism, nationalism, and democracy" rather than liberty. The Southern states were in fact made into conquered provinces run by puppet governments set up by the Republican Party. The Tenth Amendment was effectively abolished, making a mockery out of the Congress’s "dignity, equality, and rights of the several states" pronouncement. The main purpose (and effect) of the war was to consolidate governmental power in Washington by military dictatorship. That is what 320,000 Northern men died for.
Lincoln and the Republican Party didn’t advocate consolidation for its own sake. Republican Senator John Sherman explained why Lincoln was elected in 1861 when he said: "Those who elected Mr. Lincoln expect him to secure to free labor its just right to the territories . . . to protect by wise revenue laws, the labor of our people; to secure the public lands to actual settlers . . . to develop the internal resources of the country by opening new means of communications between the Atlantic and Pacific."
David Donald "reinterprets" this in Lincoln Reconsidered to say that "Lincoln and the Republicans intended to enact a high protective tariff that mothered monopoly, to pass a homestead law that invited speculators to loot the public domain, and to subsidize a transcontinental railroad that afforded infinite opportunities for jobbery."
Donald left one thing out, however: The Republican Party’s opposition to the extension of slavery (but not Southern slavery) in its 1860 Platform was based on its desire to win votes from white laborers by promising to protect them from the labor market competition that slavery – or even the existence of freed blacks – would bring. None of this could have been achieved if the Southern states were allowed to secede and to quit paying federal taxes, especially the tariff on imported goods.
The Northern states ended slavery peacefully, as did dozens of other countries during the first half of the nineteenth century. This includes the British and Spanish empires and the French and Danish colonies. Only in the US was war and massive death associated with emancipation. Yet, Machan argues that for the US to have chosen the peaceful path to emancipation that the entire rest of the world had taken would be "obscene." But this must be weighed against the actual costs of the war, which included 620,000 deaths. Standardizing for today’s population, this would be the equivalent of more than 5 million deaths, or over 100 times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam. Not to mention the destruction of the Southern economy, the death of federalism and states’ rights, and the evisceration of the Constitution.
In Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men Jeffrey Hummel estimates that some 50,000 Southern civilians perished during the war, as Lincoln’s army waged war on civilians as well as combatants with its indiscriminate bombardment of Southern cities, even after Confederate troops had evacuated. This number of deaths has to include thousands of slaves. Machan’s analysis illegitimately ignores all of these obscene costs imposed on the nation by Lincoln’s war.
If Lincoln deserves the designation "Honest Abe," he should be taken at his word that he never intended to disturb Southern slavery and that the Emancipation Proclamation (which freed no one) was only a war measure intended to discourage European support for the Confederacy. Of all the countries on earth, the United States dealt with the issue of slavery in the worst possible way because of Lincoln’s obscene ambition (a "little engine that knew no rest," as William Herndon quaintly described it) to consolidate state power for the benefit of the Northern plutocracy that got him elected. It is doubtful that one in a million Northerners voted for Lincoln because they thought he would wage the bloodiest war in history up to that point to free the slaves, a power that no president possessed at the time.
A genuine statesman – as opposed to a cynical, manipulating, power-mad politician – would have done what England did and vigorously pursued a policy of compensated emancipation over five years. By the 1880s slavery was nonexistent throughout the world, and there is no reason to believe that America would have remained the lone exception on earth.
Two of the most prominent libertarians of Lincoln’s time – the British historian of liberty, Lord Acton, and the Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner – opposed Lincoln’s war. Lord Acton, who closely followed all the events of the war, concluded that slavery was not Lincoln’s main concern , but destroying the system of federalism and states rights (which Lincoln called "saving the Union") was. He took Lincoln at his word. In a November 4, 1866, letter to General Robert E. Lee Lord Acton wrote that "I saw in States’ rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy . . . . you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo."
Spooner, the author of the 1845 book, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery and a celebrated abolitionist, wrote in his 1870 essay, "No Treason," that "all these cries of having ‘abolished slavery,’ of having ‘preserved the union,’ of establishing a ‘government by consent,’ and of ‘maintaining the national honor’ are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats – so transparent that they ought to deceive no one." Thanks to 140 years of propaganda in the government schools, these "cheats" now appear to deceive nearly everyone.
These two nineteenth-century libertarian giants had a much clearer picture of Abraham Lincoln and his real agenda than does my friend Tibor Machan.
June 4, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
Machan, Secession, and Slavery
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
My friend Tibor Machan has courageously entered the fray over the issue of Lincoln and secession with a typically eloquent essay, "Lincoln, Secession and Slavery," on the Cato Institute’s website (June 1). I say "courageous" because his essay is not entirely a hymn of praise to Father Abraham, the standard prerequisite for "Lincoln scholarship" in America. Anyone who offers even the slightest criticism of Lincoln risks being smeared, lied about, and accused of the vilest intentions by the cult of "Lincoln scholars."
Machan does (rather timidly) admit to Lincoln’s "blemished record of following the ideal of free government in his political life" by suspending the writ of habeas corpus and ordering mass arrests of tens of thousands of Northern civilian opponents of his regime including dozens, if not hundreds, of newspaper editors and owners. And he correctly points out that when it suited his political purposes Lincoln clearly advocated secession, as he did in an 1848 speech about the Mexican War and with his unconstitutional orchestration of the secession of western Virginia during the war.
I use the word "timid" because generations of historians have agreed with Clinton Rossiter, author of Constitutional Dictatorship, when he called Lincoln a "dictator" and said that Lincoln’s "amazing disregard" for the Constitution was "considered by nobody as legal." In his 1998 book, Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era, Herman Belz expresses an odd puzzlement over "the persistence of the dictatorship convention" in descriptions of Lincoln by the scholarly community. There’s nothing puzzling about it, however; the "dictatorship convention" persists because it is true.
Machan’s analysis suffers from the exclusion of some very important facts. For example, he correctly states that many Southerners "endorsed out-and-out racist ideas" but this was true of the entire western world – including the Northern United States – during the Victorian era. To his credit, he points out that Lincoln also held such ideas by repeatedly stating his opposition to "bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races" (Aug. 21, 1858, debate with Stephen Douglas in Ottawa, Illinois).
In assessing the reasons for the war it is important to recognize that, as Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1945 Macmillan edition, p. 359): "[T]he prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known." As Eugene Berwanger wrote in The Frontier Against Slavery (p. 97), "In virtually every phase of existence [in the North], Negroes found themselves systematically separated from whites." They were excluded or assigned to "Jim Crow" sections of all means of transportation; could not enter most hotels, restaurants, and other public buildings; had to sit in "Negro pews" in church; and were almost completely segregated from the white population.
Many Northern states adopted laws like Indiana’s which prohibited Negroes and mulattos from entering the state; did not recognize contracts with them; fined employers who encouraged black employees to enter the state; prohibited blacks from voting, marrying white persons (punishable by imprisonment), or testifying in court against white persons. Illinois – the "Land of Lincoln" – prohibited the immigration of black people into the state. Lincoln never expressed opposition to this, and even supported a state program to "colonize," i.e., deport, free blacks out of Illinois.
Lincoln and most Northerners did more than make racist statements; they discriminated against and legally abused the small number of free blacks among them. In states such as Indiana, the inability of blacks to testify in court against whites invited criminal abuse. This pervasive and institutionalized Northern racism is one reason why the standard story that hundreds of thousand of Northerners gave their lives during the war for the benefit of black strangers in the South is bizarre.
Machan’s abstract statements that a group that secedes from a political union should have no right to "take along hostages" and that the slaves would probably have preferred to keep the Union intact are complicated by actual American history. Both Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens and the preeminent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison believed that slavery was "more secure in the Union than out of it," as Stephens stated. This is because of the Fugitive Slave Act, which Lincoln wholeheartedly supported. The Act compelled the Northern states to capture runaway slaves. They were provided due process, but local magistrates were paid $10 for returning a slave to his owner, and only $5 for granting him freedom. It was a gigantic federal subsidy to prop up the institution of slavery, and would have become defunct with secession, making the enforcement of slavery much more costly. This is why Garrison and other Northern abolitionists advocated the secession of the Northern states. ("No Covenant with Death" was the secessionist banner across Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator).
Machan is not entirely correct in stating that "the citizens of the union who intended to go their own way" were "kidnapping" slaves. Only a small percentage of Southerners owned slaves, who were mostly on the large plantations. The average Confederate soldier was a yeoman farmer, laborer, or merchant who did not own slaves and had no interest in maintaining the institution. As James McPherson wrote in What They Fought For: 1861-1865, most Confederate soldiers believed they were fighting against a tyrannical federal government that was invading their country and threatening their homes and families.
Another relevant fact is that the upper South – Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas – initially voted to remain in the Union after the lower South had seceded. Virginia voted two-to-one to remain in the Union and Lincoln was pleased to have her, slaves and all. It was only after Lincoln launched an invasion of Virginia’s sister states that she reversed herself and seceded after taking a popular vote; the other three states of the upper South then followed suit. Lincoln’s unconstitutional invasion was the main reason for Virginia’s secession. Machan’s condemnation of all Southerners as "kidnappers" is patently unfair and inaccurate.
Machan expresses concern for "unwilling third parties" during an act of secession but he ignores the fact that Lincoln conscripted tens of thousands of unwilling third parties, many of whom who were sent to grisly deaths in the war. Thousands of other conscripts were maimed for life. The fate of some of these men was truly horrific. In the May 1864 "Battle of the Wilderness" Ulysses S. Grant’s army suffered 2,246 soldiers killed and 12,037 wounded in just 48 hours. The battle was fought in a dense Virginia forest that caught on fire, trapping hundreds of wounded men who perished in the fire. Gordon Rhea cites a first-hand account of the scene in The Battle of the Wilderness: May 5-6, 1864 (p. 451): "Forest fires raged, ammunition trains exploded; the dead were roasted . . . ; the wounded, roused by its hot breath, dragged themselves along, with their torn and mangled limbs, in the mad energy of despair . . . ; and every bush seemed hung with shreds of blood-stained clothing . . . hell itself had usurped the place of earth."
There were draft riots in New York City and elsewhere after the conscription law was put into place (see Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots). Federal troops shot and killed hundreds of New York City antiwar protesters. Tens of thousands of Northern men either deserted or evaded the draft by hiding out in the mountains of Pennsylvania and elsewhere. In short, Machan’s "unwilling third parties" defense of Lincoln is not much of a defense if it does not incorporate a concern for all unwilling third parties.
Moreover, the purpose of the war was "to save the Union," as Lincoln said over and over again, not to free the slaves. (Actually, the war destroyed the Union as a voluntary association of states). As Machan notes, in his August 22, 1862 letter to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, Lincoln very clearly stated his position that if he could "save the Union" without freeing a single slave, he would do so. The issue of slavery was an ex post facto rationale for the war, at best.
The US Congress supported Lincoln’s position in mid-1861 when it issued a resolution on the purpose of the war. The war was not being waged, Congress declared,
". . . in any spirit of oppression, or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those [Southern] states, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the constitution, and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several states unimpaired." (W.A. Dunning, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction, p. 13)
As I argue in The Real Lincoln, the Constitution that was established by the founders was largely overthrown by the war and replaced with what Columbia University law professor George P. Fletcher calls "our secret Constitution," one that promotes "egalitarianism, nationalism, and democracy" rather than liberty. The Southern states were in fact made into conquered provinces run by puppet governments set up by the Republican Party. The Tenth Amendment was effectively abolished, making a mockery out of the Congress’s "dignity, equality, and rights of the several states" pronouncement. The main purpose (and effect) of the war was to consolidate governmental power in Washington by military dictatorship. That is what 320,000 Northern men died for.
Lincoln and the Republican Party didn’t advocate consolidation for its own sake. Republican Senator John Sherman explained why Lincoln was elected in 1861 when he said: "Those who elected Mr. Lincoln expect him to secure to free labor its just right to the territories . . . to protect by wise revenue laws, the labor of our people; to secure the public lands to actual settlers . . . to develop the internal resources of the country by opening new means of communications between the Atlantic and Pacific."
David Donald "reinterprets" this in Lincoln Reconsidered to say that "Lincoln and the Republicans intended to enact a high protective tariff that mothered monopoly, to pass a homestead law that invited speculators to loot the public domain, and to subsidize a transcontinental railroad that afforded infinite opportunities for jobbery."
Donald left one thing out, however: The Republican Party’s opposition to the extension of slavery (but not Southern slavery) in its 1860 Platform was based on its desire to win votes from white laborers by promising to protect them from the labor market competition that slavery – or even the existence of freed blacks – would bring. None of this could have been achieved if the Southern states were allowed to secede and to quit paying federal taxes, especially the tariff on imported goods.
The Northern states ended slavery peacefully, as did dozens of other countries during the first half of the nineteenth century. This includes the British and Spanish empires and the French and Danish colonies. Only in the US was war and massive death associated with emancipation. Yet, Machan argues that for the US to have chosen the peaceful path to emancipation that the entire rest of the world had taken would be "obscene." But this must be weighed against the actual costs of the war, which included 620,000 deaths. Standardizing for today’s population, this would be the equivalent of more than 5 million deaths, or over 100 times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam. Not to mention the destruction of the Southern economy, the death of federalism and states’ rights, and the evisceration of the Constitution.
In Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men Jeffrey Hummel estimates that some 50,000 Southern civilians perished during the war, as Lincoln’s army waged war on civilians as well as combatants with its indiscriminate bombardment of Southern cities, even after Confederate troops had evacuated. This number of deaths has to include thousands of slaves. Machan’s analysis illegitimately ignores all of these obscene costs imposed on the nation by Lincoln’s war.
If Lincoln deserves the designation "Honest Abe," he should be taken at his word that he never intended to disturb Southern slavery and that the Emancipation Proclamation (which freed no one) was only a war measure intended to discourage European support for the Confederacy. Of all the countries on earth, the United States dealt with the issue of slavery in the worst possible way because of Lincoln’s obscene ambition (a "little engine that knew no rest," as William Herndon quaintly described it) to consolidate state power for the benefit of the Northern plutocracy that got him elected. It is doubtful that one in a million Northerners voted for Lincoln because they thought he would wage the bloodiest war in history up to that point to free the slaves, a power that no president possessed at the time.
A genuine statesman – as opposed to a cynical, manipulating, power-mad politician – would have done what England did and vigorously pursued a policy of compensated emancipation over five years. By the 1880s slavery was nonexistent throughout the world, and there is no reason to believe that America would have remained the lone exception on earth.
Two of the most prominent libertarians of Lincoln’s time – the British historian of liberty, Lord Acton, and the Massachusetts abolitionist Lysander Spooner – opposed Lincoln’s war. Lord Acton, who closely followed all the events of the war, concluded that slavery was not Lincoln’s main concern , but destroying the system of federalism and states rights (which Lincoln called "saving the Union") was. He took Lincoln at his word. In a November 4, 1866, letter to General Robert E. Lee Lord Acton wrote that "I saw in States’ rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy . . . . you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo."
Spooner, the author of the 1845 book, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery and a celebrated abolitionist, wrote in his 1870 essay, "No Treason," that "all these cries of having ‘abolished slavery,’ of having ‘preserved the union,’ of establishing a ‘government by consent,’ and of ‘maintaining the national honor’ are all gross, shameless, transparent cheats – so transparent that they ought to deceive no one." Thanks to 140 years of propaganda in the government schools, these "cheats" now appear to deceive nearly everyone.
These two nineteenth-century libertarian giants had a much clearer picture of Abraham Lincoln and his real agenda than does my friend Tibor Machan.
June 4, 2002
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives
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