The Limits of Lincoln Bashing
Between the warring camps vying for ownership of the true “American conservatism,” a remarkable consensus has emerged around the status of Abraham Lincoln and his legacy. In the conservative house divided, almost everyone agrees that the president was the prophet of democratic imperialism and that his war with the South was a mere dress rehearsal for global crusades for democracy which began half a century after his assassination. Naturally, the so-called paleoconservatives and neoconservatives disagree on the merits of Lincoln’s putative policy, but they don’t disagree that he led the advance guard of this project to create the world in America’s image and likeness. This dispute is no mere academic matter, since those who control the Lincoln legacy also manufacture the grist for any number of ideological mills.
Anyone who has read the history of the debates over Lincoln’s legacy—I recommend Merrill D. Peterson’s Lincoln In American Memory—knows that there is nothing new about the attempts of various ideologues to project revisionist meanings upon his name and historical record. As David Donald once observed, Lincoln is “everybody’s grandfather.” Almost immediately after the president’s assassination, Americans have been scrambling to join the president’s burgeoning family of descendants. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer, alienated many a pastor in America with his suggestion that the president had never sincerely accepted the tenets of Christianity. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “robber baron” capitalists and socialistic populists predictably clashed over which side Lincoln might have taken in their class war: the business elite represented Abe as a devotee of laissez-faire while the leftist progressives enlisted the president in their struggle against the new “slavery” of child labor and low wages. While the radical abolitionist Frederick Douglas was confident, at least in his old age, that Lincoln had been a supporter of racial equality, the white supremacist Thomas Dixon (whose novel The Clansman inspired D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”) was equally convinced that the president was an enemy of racial mixing.
It was only with the American decision to enter World War One, however, that we see the first steps towards the refashioning of Lincoln as an enemy of global tyranny. (Even the architects of the Spanish-American War almost twenty years earlier had not invoked Lincoln’s memory with such intensity.) As Richard Gamble has documented in The War for Righteousness, millions of Protestant progressives justified President’s Wilson war on behalf of democracy on the grounds that the struggle against Wilhelmine Germany was simply a global version of the fight against Dixie slavery. They called upon the spirit of Honest Abe to lead American Christians into triumph over the German “pagans” (apparently Lutherans qualified for such a title.) Yet this first attempt to portray Lincoln as a global democrat bogged down in the face of disillusionment over the heavy loss of American lives and Wilson’s failure to apply his own principles of democracy in the aftermath of the disastrous Versailles Treaty, which set the stage for World War Two. Irving Babbitt, that well-respected conservative, refused to accept any parallel between the statesmanlike presidency of Lincoln and the imperial presidency of Wilson.
Even attempts to invoke Lincoln during the war against Nazi Germany did not fully crystallize into his image as a global democrat. While Carl Sandburg, the famous biographer of Lincoln, persuaded FDR to invoke the image of Lincoln, Roosevelt prudently avoided excessive analogies between the Civil War and the war against Hitler, which could have cost the Democrats millions of votes in Dixie. It is only in the Cold War period that we find the successful re-creation of Lincoln as a democratic universalist—an image so successful that even Lincoln’s enemies have bought into it.
With the publication of Harry Jaffa’s Crisis Of The House Divided: An Interpretation Of The Issues In The Lincoln-Douglas Debates in 1959, the stage was set for a bold attempt to represent the president as a dedicated builder of democracy everywhere. Jaffa, a brilliant student of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, has argued for over forty years that Lincoln’s aims were universal in nature. (The sequel to this book, A New Birth Of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln And The Coming Of The Civil War, was published in 2000.) For Lincoln was the first president to understand that the great American experiment would not survive unless the republic spread democracy far and wide. Jaffa conflated the self-interest of the nation with this ideological experiment, which he unabashedly admitted was a “messianic” one. The American South, in Jaffa’s view, was simply a home-grown version of Nazism. Of course, prominent neoconservatives (like Robert Kagan and Richard Brookhiser) make similar claims that Lincoln stood for “universal human equality,” anytime, anywhere. Indeed, it is now a neoconservative credo that Lincoln would support an “end” to tyranny everywhere, as President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address made clear. Yet Jaffa has been the most determined fashioner of a Lincoln who looked forward to the day when the American eagle would spread its wings to liberate the darkest tyrannies of the world, just as it once did on the fields of Gettysburg. A “new birth of freedom” would now echo throughout the world, since America’s values are the world’s values. The Lincoln biographer Allen Guelzo has praised Jaffa’s Crisis as the greatest book ever written on Lincoln in the twentieth century. Undoubtedly, cosmopolitan elites who favor a more globalist role for America desire an image of Lincoln as the “last and greatest founding father” (in David Gelernter’s term) who would support endless expansionism in the cause of liberty.
Conservatives from the late 1950s onwards, who opposed Lincoln as a tyrannical enemy of Southern self-determination and a creator of the “Imperial” presidency, have not necessarily disputed all the details of Jaffa’s portrayal of Lincoln. They obviously never shared Jaffa’s idolatrous view that Abe was a “god-like” statesman who needed to crush the South in order to advance the cause of liberty, but they have never questioned his more serious view that Lincoln was a democratic imperialist. In the days when National Review still represented traditional American conservatism, two stalwart contributors to the magazine in the 1950s and 1960s, Willmoore Kendall and Frank Meyer, accepted the basic accuracy of Jaffa’s portrayal while they hotly disputed the benefits of this legacy. Although Kendall and Meyer blamed Lincoln for creating a “Caesarist” dictatorship over the republic, they did not challenge Jaffa’s view that the president had a global ambition to spread equality across all of creation. (Among the early contributors to National Review, only Richard Weaver praised Lincoln as a true statesman.) Mel Bradford, who often debated with Jaffa, agreed with his longtime opponent that Lincoln’s “gnostic” love of equality logically leads to endless revolutions at home and interventions abroad. Richard Gamble, in critiquing the logic of Irving Babbitt’s praise of Lincoln as a prudent statesman, apparently agrees with Jaffa that Lincoln fully intended to impose the Declaration of Independence on the rest of the world, just as he had upon the Confederacy. With the exceptions of Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried (neither of whom is a fan of Lincoln), I can’t think of other paleos in recent memory who resist this Jaffaite portrait of the “globalizing democrat” Abe.
Perhaps most famously, the paleoconservative historian Thomas DiLorenzo has eagerly accepted Jaffa’s terms of discourse while disputing its moral implications. DiLorenzo draws a straight line between Lincoln’s “imperial” presidency and every single intervention in the name of “democracy” that followed the Civil War. (Ron Paul got in hot water with the neocons in late 2007 for admitting on “Meet the Press” that he sympathized with DiLorenzo’s portrait of Lincoln.) In his most recent work, Lincoln Unmasked, DiLorenzo asserts that the president’s unprecedented suppression of antiwar dissent during his presidency has rightly inspired his neoconservative admirers to clamp down on civil liberties during the “war on terror.” This image of Lincoln is useful to DiLorenzo, for it allows him to put the responsibility for all American empire-building on Abe’s shoulders alone. Yet pre-Lincoln America was not utterly devoid of tendencies towards centralized power. DiLorenzo’s hero, Thomas Jefferson, was not particularly shy about suppressing dissent during his presidency (as Leonard Levy has shown ). If Barry Shain is correct, a “conservative” founder like Madison was not loath to justify the growth of the federal government at the expense of the states. In short, Lincoln was not the first architect of Leviathan in America; indeed, special war-time presidential powers quickly expired after the end of hostilities and it took a whole half century to restore these (during the Wilson presidency), as Irving Babbitt observed in his Democracy and Leadership.
Anybody who reads Lincoln carefully will find it very difficult to tease out of his many speeches a consistent message of democratic universalism. As a child of the Second Great Awakening, Lincoln was profoundly influenced by faith traditions that emphasized the intractable depravity of man. To be sure, Lincoln occasionally entertained hopes that Americans could put aside their differences over slavery in a peaceful manner. As a Calvinist, however, who understood God as an impersonal taskmaster, Lincoln could not believe that all human beings desire freedom and just leave it at that. For the president also recognized (famously, in his Peoria speech of 1854) that it is just as likely that humanity loves slavery, too. If we human beings desire freedom, it tends to be for ourselves alone. In disputing the “self-evident” nature of the Declaration, Lincoln was expressing the view (again, borne of Calvinist realism) that it is all too human to doubt the equality of all human beings. (This skepticism on the president’s part probably explains why he thought mass colonization of the freed slaves to Africa or Central America was the only way to prevent the racial violence which would characterize the Reconstruction period.) There is nothing particularly rational about Christian love, despite the lip-service which both the Yanks and the Rebs paid to this credo. In short, Lincoln’s realistic view about human nature hardly qualifies him as a democratic globalist who wants to liberate the republican lurking in the hearts of people around the world. Perhaps only Straussians who portray Lincoln as “Christian” simply in a Machiavellian sense could have missed the sincerely felt Calvinism in this president’s thought.
In accepting the neocon image of Lincoln as a democratic universalist, paleos have made the task of their enemies that much easier. For the president has now been baptized as their hero, whom they can call upon when the circumstances demand it. Why have so few paleoconservative historians at least defended Lincoln’s “realistic” actions in the arena of foreign policy? I am not suggesting that paleos indulge in the occultist art of presidential hagiography. Nevertheless, every time a neocon commentator repeats mantras about “new births of freedom” which in reality call for new wars in the name of Lincoln, it is easy to cite situations when he was prepared to live with political arrangements which fell short of republican standards. In his First Inaugural Address, the president offered the South promises to enforce the Fugitive Slave laws and protect existing slavery with a constitutional amendment (obviously these proposals were rebuffed). After the Trent affair of 1861 provoked angry calls, particularly from most of his cabinet, for a war with Britain, Lincoln wisely refused to give into these forces, especially the pressure to invade Canada. (John A. MacDonald, a good Burkean Tory who later became Canada’s first prime minister, was very grateful to the president for his prudence and restraint in this matter.) When the Poles rebelled against Czarist Russia in 1863, Secretary of State William Seward, acting on the president’s wishes, assured the Russians that America would not interfere in this conflict (funny how neocons today omit this fact as they extend NATO’s influence ever closer to Russia’s borders).
I don’t doubt that neos and paleos will always play politics with Lincoln’s legacy. It may not be very dramatic or glamorous to portray Lincoln as a tough-minded realist, instead of a proto-Bush Republican, but perhaps America could enjoy a little less excitement after five long years of failed democracy-building.
Comments
Having been invoked in this judicious assessment of the Lincoln legacy, allow me to
register my agreement with Grant’s admonition against Lincoln-bashing on the paleo right.
While Jaffa and his neocon look-alikes have instrumentalized our sixteenth president as
an icon for global democracy-building and for the pursuit of equality
through public administration, there is no reason for us to imitate their ideologically-
driven hysteria from the opposite side. Although Lincoln’s invasion of the
South had disastrous consequences, he was probably a sincere
but misguided American patriot. He also faced a difficult internal situation and was
not interested in mucking around on other continents in order to impose a utopian vision.
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Bill Clibton said in his commencement speech at Knox College, in Galesburg ,Illinois last year “I got tickled listening to the parallel stories of Abraham Lincoln coming here as a Republican and me coming as a Democrat. I was thinking that Knox has always been remarkably consistent. This university was born in the throes of the anti-slavery movement and was revolutionary from its beginning in being open to people of color and to women. So this is not such a balancing act after all, because if I had been alive when you gave the degree to Abraham Lincoln, I would have been a Republican. And if he were alive today, I think he’d be a Democrat.” So there you have it - Lincoln was really a Democrat all along!
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To say that Dr. DiLorenzo has been misrepresented by this article is putting it mildly.
Perhaps most famously, the paleoconservative historian Thomas DiLorenzo has eagerly accepted Jaffa’s terms of discourse while disputing its moral implications.
First of all, DiLorenzo is hardly a paleoconservative. He’s a libertarian of the Austrian School. Mr. Havers hasn’t done his homework.
Second, DiLorenzo rejects Jaffa utterly, including Jaffa’s “terms of discourse” (“freedom”, “equality”, “Proposition Nation”). The issue in 1861 was simple: the tariff. And neither Jaffa nor the author of this article seem to know anything about the perfidious Morrill Tariff, or about what harm tariffs do, or about economics at all. (And on this website Mr. Havers is hardly alone in this ignorance). The author would do well to actually read Dishonest Abe’s First Inaugural: He had no intention of touching slavery, and intended to insure it for perpetuity; but he sure was going to ram the tariff down Dixie’s throat! Mr. Havers hasn’t done his homework.
Lincoln was not the first architect of Leviathan in America.
Nor did DiLorenzo ever say that he was! DiLorenzo clearly see Lincoln in the Hamilton-Clay Federalist-Whig tradition of centralized statism, fake “nations”, and fiat money. Mr. Havers hasn’t done his homework. I would go further and argue that this tradition goes back to the founding of the Whigs in 1678 and extends forward to the so-called “Neo-Conservatives”.
The attempt to separate this website from Neoconservatism fails again. The Neocons really don’t believe in “democratic universalims”, it being as it was for Dishonest Abe a fig leaf for their economic and nationalist ambitions. Mr. Havers, Sam Francis, Mr. Piatik, and Mr. Richert all agree with the Whig-Lincoln-Neocon definition of Federal Power and Gringo Nationalism. Just as Republicans are Democrats at 80 cents to the dollar, so Paleos are Neocons who just think melanin is important (it isn’t).
Time for Dixons, Jeffersonians, and Burkeans all to pull out of the shell of moribund “Paleoconservatism”, now that Lincolnism-Whiggery and paganism have found a home here.
The author would do well to read The Real Lincoln and deal with its arguments. And Richard Gamble agrees that DiLorenzo is correct.
I shall alert Dr. DiLorenzo of Havers’s article. Maybe Dr. DiLorenzo will consider responding on LewRockwell.com .
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I think there is a good point contained in Mr. Havers’ thesis, albeit he gets a bit too carried away with it.
I’d agree that the tendency of some Southron paleos to render Lincoln into a larger-than-life monster may be just as unfortunate as Jaffa and his idolatory. We’re talking about a man, not a superman (whether good or evil).
But shifting from this to an attitude of asking “What Would Lincoln Do? No, really?” hardly seems an improvement.
Still, again, I do think the thesis has merit—just as most Americans can’t hear criticism of Lincoln without being mortified beyond belief, some Southern partisans can’t hear his name without losing all capacity for self-control & cool thinking.
This may be a function of their passion re/ war crimes committed against our ancestors, though, so I’m not inclined to see it as something entirely pernicious.
I don’t know if Mr. Havers has a copy of DiLorenzo’s “The Real Lincoln” handy, but if so I suggest a quick perusal would indicate that DiLorenzo and the libertarian critics of Lincoln are in fact doing something like what is recommended here.
That is, portraying Lincoln as somebody more interested in banking & railroad interests and tariffs and commerce, etc., than somebody genuinely interested in messianic liberation projects.
It’s important to recognize that paleocon/paleolibertarian
critics of Lincoln can be divided into two distinct camps.
Consider the analogy to Iraq: Some criticize it as just a scheme to ensure access to oil, others criticize it from a very different angle, criticize *its own professed principles*, as being a fanatical crusade.
There’s probably some truth to both assertions.
In any event, my point is that there are two very different and distinct critiques of Lincoln: One is based on the assumption that he was a proto-Putin, so to speak, while others operate on the assumption that he was exactly who he is claimed to be.
I think both critiques to be of value, because it is the *symbol* of Lincoln rather than the man himself (he’s dead, after all) that does the damage today.
The libertarians erode the Straussian position by making it clear that the Straussian idol does not live up to Straussian expectations, while those who attack the professed principles of Lincoln’s war make the point that the Straussian expectations are themselves warped and wrong.
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“The Neocons really don’t believe in “democratic universalims”, it being as it was for Dishonest Abe a fig leaf...”
Sid demonstrates my point.
There are those who angrily denounce neocons (or Lincoln) for being charlatans who pretend to believe in “democratic universalism"… and then there are those (like me) who denounce democratic universalism itself.
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A very good and welcome corrective to those ideologues who try to tailor history in accord with their own agendas.
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My chief complaint about the Jaffa-led Lincoln Cult is that it joins its idol in distorting the nature of the American Constitution. Lincoln joined John Marshall in asserting that the Constitution wasratified by one American people rather than 13 sovereign states, which would have made secession impossible, and Jaffa, et al., insist that this is true. As I demonstrate irrefutably in _Virginia’s American Revolution..._, ch. 3, it just ain’t so. The fact that the Jeffersonian account of ratification comports with reality has cosmic meaning for the American regime.
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One of the great overlooked aspects of Lincoln was his nearly lifelong membership in the Whig party. He only reluctantly joined the Republicans after the definitive demise of the Whigs. The Whigs were the (moderately) conservative party of the day (compared to the Jacksonian Democratic Party). His hero was the anti-slavery slave-owning Kentuckian Henry Clay. Clay and the Whigs had a national constituency, unlike the strictly Northern Republicans. Lincoln was not an aboltionist, as the term was understood in those days (he disapproved of the breed, believing they made the prospect of solving the slavery problem less likely with their shrill rhetoric). He was a believer in slavery limitation, however, believing it would lead to emancipation and possible relocation of the freed slaves to Africa or elsewhere. This was a widely-supported program by many prominent Americans. Even Southern spokesmen paid lip service to the idea (both before and after the civil war!). Although the civil war was a disaster, both Lincoln and the Southern statesmen believed it would be a short affair. Both sides pressed their prosecution of the war; in the case of the Confederacy, the effort was pressed long after any rational hope of success passed (Jefferson Davis even hoped to continue the war from the Southwest after the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia).
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“protect existing slavery with a constitutional amendment (obviously these proposals were rebuffed)”
Congress passed by a two-thirds majority this 13th amendment which was to be permanent. It did not go to the states to be ratified because the South was not interested in returning under any circumstance and as Mr. Cundiff points out, the tariff was of utmost importance. Tariffs had been a source of conflict beginning in the early 1800’s and something which my great, great grandfather complained about in a speech during an 1845 political campaign.
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The tariff was a minor issue. It became a “major” issue after the civil war, as Confederate apologists strove to rework the history of the conflict so as to minimize slavery as the motivating factor for secession (slavery had become generally odious in the country and the world by then). As for whether the constitution was ratified by the states or “the people”, one need look no further than the document itself, which specifies that it be ratified by conventions of the people (not the state legislatures, which would have been the logical organs of ratification if the document was to be ratified in the name of the states).Hence the document begins with the famous “We the people of the United States” clause. The anti-federalists were well aware that the constitution would create a national government with powers potentially greater than those of the states and attempted to restrain that government with the Bill of Rights (a partial success at best).
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Mr. Van O., your confusion about the meaning of the word “states” is very common. In fact, it is propagated by John Marshall in _McCulloch v. Maryland_, even though Marshall knew better. Marshall knew that “states” did not necessarily mean “state governments” because he was in the minority in the Virginia General Assembly when it adopted Madison’s _Report of 1800_. In the Report, Madison answered pro-Sedition Act northern legislatures’ claim that the states had had nothing to do with ratification by pointing out that “state” can have any of several referants: 1) the territory of a state (as in, “I’m in Connecticut"); 2) the government of a state (as in, “Texas has capital punishment"); or the sovereign people of a state (as in, “The states ratified the Constitution"). The states ratified the Constitution, each for itself. If one American people had ratified, some kind of majority’s act would have bound the whole, yet Rhode Island remained separate from the Union for many months after the Constitution was implemented.
As I said, Marshall was in the General Assembly when Madison explained this, and when the Report was adopted. It is obvious, indeed, that the states ratified the Constitution. In fact, the Constitution itself says that it will take effect among the ratifying states as soon as nine states have ratified. It takes a lawyer with an agenda (Hamilton, Webster, Marshall, Lincoln) to deny this fact.
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“Hence the document begins with the famous ‘We the people of the United States’ clause.”
No, the reason for that wording is very obvious when you think about it, and has been pointed out by a number of historians. The original draft did actually name each state individually. However, since no one could know before the fact which states would actually ratify, it had to be changed to something more general.
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Oops. Sorry, Mr. Van Oosbree. Upon rereading, my post doesn’t really address your point. Never mind :)
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I haven’t read Lincoln unmasked, but I do admire DiLorenzo’s work and am critical of Lincoln’s legacy.
That said, I appreciate this critique. I would make another observation. A lot of the paleo Lincoln bashing has been focused on “Lincoln was a racist and not a real abolitionist.” as if that fact will stem the anti-Southern assault from the neocons and the Left.
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A lot of the paleo Lincoln bashing has been focused on “Lincoln was a racist and not a real abolitionist.”
That’s more of a response to the claim that Lincoln was an enlightened individual who believed that blacks were equals to whites, and that the “Civil War” was waged in order to set them free.
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Two things to note:
Anyone who thinks that Lincoln was a Calvinist needs to go back out and come in again. You can’t know very much about either Lincoln or Calvin and believe that. Lincoln talked about God and his governance often enough, but so did lots of other folks in the 19C. There’s a lot more to being a Calvinist than that.
Anyone who thinks that the tariff was a minor issue until Confederate apologists made it a major issue after the war either doesn’t know very much about American politics from 1815-1861 or is grinding an axe. Things like debate over internal improvements, the Tariff of Abominations, and the Nullification Crisis are the bigger pieces of evidence for the claim that the tariff was major. I wouldn’t argue that the tariff was THE issue, but it was a major issue. To say that Confederate apologists made it up after the war is simply not true to the basic historical facts.
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To D Greene:
I would suggest that you read Allen Guelzo’s biography of Lincoln for an extensive discussion of Lincoln’s adherence to Calvinism. Guelzo won the Lincoln Prize for this work. What have YOU won? And what, pray tell, constitutes this “real” Calvinism that you allegedly know better than your wiser interlocutors?
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To Marie Claire:
I’ve probably the same number of prizes as you, but that really isn’t the point.
I don’t know Guelzo’s book. If Guelzo argues that Lincoln is influenced by Calvinist thought, fine. If Guelzo claims that Lincoln is a Calvinist, then he is just as wrong as Grant Havers is.
To start with, a “real” Calvinist would be a Christian. Lincoln wasn’t. That seems a basic point to me. I’m not claiming any special knowledge about “real Calvinism.” I’m simply saying that it’s confused and confusing to call people who don’t even confess, for example, the contents of the Apostle’s Creed “Calvinists.”
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As a former student of the late Mel Bradford, I know well his antipathy towards Lincoln, a sentiment he shared with many Southern Agrarians. And yet, I think they may have gotten him wrong. Indeed, the greatest tragedy for the South was not the election of Lincoln, but his assassination; when Lincoln died, so did the hopes for an “easy” peace. A reconciliation between the North and South may not have been possible. Who knows? But it was certainly not possible under the radical Republicans. Lincoln at least wanted a true reconciliation.
As for what side Lincoln would be on in the economic wars, one thing we can say for sure is that he was against corporate power, at a time when the corporation was assuming a greater role in economic and political organization. He left us with this warning: Corporations have been enthroned… An era of corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people…until wealth is aggregated in a few hands…and the Republic is destroyed.
As to Lincoln and Christianity, I think it clear that he was suspicious of the Christianity that he knew, which is not the same thing as being opposed to Christianity. To make an analogy, if the only thing I knew about Christianity came from Television preachers, I would regard it as a strange set of beliefs. Fortunately, I have other sources. No one can really be blamed for reacting to the public presentation of Christianity.
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To D Greene:
I am curious to know where (other than in mere opinion) it has been demonstrated that Lincoln did NOT hold to the tenets of the Apostles Creed. Furthermore, if Guelzo is a little beyond you, I suggest you read Kierkegaard on the basic inscrutable nature of any person’s faith. Lip service to the Apostles’ Creed does not mean a person is authentically a Christian. I am sure you are familiar with the existence of pharisees.
That aside, I think it’s a bit tedious and frankly anachronistic to be arguing over the sincerity of this man’s faith when it is clear that he agonized -in a very Christian manner - over the choices he had to make with the lives of those under his charge.
Your questioning of his faith only helps the Straussian cause. And I think, by now, that’s boring.
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Americans had been arguing over the tariff since 1788 without fighting a war. Furthermore, the Republicans wer not in a position to impose a high tariff in any case (as pointed out by Alexander Stevens). A tariff is wholly constitutional and one of the first congressional acts passed by the 1788 Congress. It most definitely worked against the interests of Southern slave owners, who wanted the cheapest manufactured goods in return for their slave-produced commodities (a classic pattern of economic colonialism - commodities exchanged in return for manufactured goods).
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“It takes a lawyer with an agenda (Hamilton, Webster, Marshall, Lincoln) to deny this fact. “
Or someone who hasn’t read the PIG to the U.S. Constitution. Great book by the way! Should be required reading for Con law students.
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Furthermore, the Republicans wer not in a position to impose a high tariff in any case (as pointed out by Alexander Stevens).
The Repubs already had! The Morrill Tariff with its sky high duties was passed 28 Feb 1861. Mr. Oosbee needs to read DiLorenzo on what any tariff does to any economy that trades on an international Market, as did Dixie in 1861.
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To Sid:
The Morrill Tariff was passed by a DEMOCRATIC administration, not a REPUBLICAN one, in the dying days of the Buchanan administration. Maybe you should do your homework for once.
And if you want to argue about economics, consider this. The South’s attachment to slavery held back the development of the entire nation, the South included: slavery is far pricier than capitalism. Yes, your hero DiLorenzo claims that the North could have compensated the Southern slave-owners (as the British did in the 1830s throughout their empire), but the Brits were facing a fraction of the number of slaves that the South had. My point is that the South was stubbornly hanging onto slavery and even desired to expand it in the Western territories and Central America.
Don’t they teach all this in high schools anymore?
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Wow.
I guess there are lots of things that are beyond me.
To Marie Claire:
If Lincoln’s faith is inscrutable to Kierkegaard and me, then it is also inscrutable to Guelzo and you.
You have mistaken the point. I did not say that assent to the Apostles’ Creed was sufficient to make one authentically Christian. I do say that it is necessary. There aren’t debates about whether a man like Stonewall Jackson was a Christian, because it’s clear from his life, work, and letters that he was. If we rule out such tests as assent to the Creed, then we’re left with nonsense about the manner of the agonizing that a person does.
I’m not a Straussian, but if the truth about a man like Lincoln advances their cause I’m not bothered by that.
It is unfortunate that you declare an attempt to be accurate and truthful “tedious,” “anachronistic,” and “boring.”
Re. the issue of doing homework. The Democrat Buchanan didn’t have to sign the bill, but it was passed by a Republican Congress after seven Southern states had seceded. One does wonder what gets taught in high school these days.
To Theordore M. Van Oosbree:
Are you saying that the tariff can’t be a major cause of the war because the argument had been going on since 1788?? That’s all the more reason to take it seriously as one of the major causes for the war.
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Last Sunday, I was attending church with my parents in Lafayette, LA and one of the songs sung was “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I was shocked to discover that a conservative, southern congregation would sing it.
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Lost in the ruckus are the reasons why the average Joe Southerner fought in the war. Neither slavery nor the tariff had much to do with that.
Mr. Allen: a few Sundays ago the “Battle Hymn” was sung in my church (I live in the South). Everyone sang it with vigor. I bowed my head in silence.
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Poor Miss Marie Claire. Doesn’t even know that the Congress, not the Administration, passed the horrid Morrill Tariff; the Congress in fact passes all tariffs and all laws. As for the makeup of that Congress, because Miss Marie want do her High School homework, cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_United_States_Congress
What is more, the party breakdown is from the beginning of the Congress. By Feb 1861, many Southern Democrats had left, giving Repub majorities.
Also for your homework: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Tariff
though DiLorenzo is better. I’ll have a pop quiz in class tomorrow on this articles, so study tonight, Miss Marie!
Lincoln started his war over tariffs, not slavery.
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To all the DiLorenzoites out there: it is time for facts, not neocon (that is, neoconfederate) fictions:
1) if the tariff issue was so important, why doesn’t it arise in the Lincoln-Douglas debates (remember boys, the main issue was slavery, ja?)
2) the Morrill bill was passed AFTER seven states seceded in the South. How can the tariff then be the cause of secession? As the secessionists themselves admitted, it was all about states’ rights (especially the right to own slaves).
3) A Democrat still signed the bill into law, ok?
4) if the paleolibs are so hot for the Confederacy, maybe they should read a book on how the Dixie Congress imposed tariffs too. So much for laissez-faire in the South!
These are the facts and they are not in dispute, at least among the literate.
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“....one of the songs sung was “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
I was shocked to discover that a conservative, southern
congregation would sing it.”
It’s shocking that *any* purportedly Christian congregation would
sing it.
We should be grateful the musical “Camelot” hadn’t been written yet,
or they’d have jammed a few bits from that into the liturgy while
they were at it.
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“But where in the world
Is there in the world
A man so *extraordinaire*?
C’est moi! C’est moi,
I’m forced to admit.
‘Tis I, I humbly reply.
That mortal who
These marvels can do,
C’est moi, c’est moi, ‘tis I.
I’ve never lost
In battle or game;
I’m simply the best by far.
When swords are crossed
‘Tis always the same:
One blow and au revoir!
C’est moi! C’est moi!”
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OK Miss Marie
1) if the tariff issue was so important, why doesn’t it arise in the Lincoln-Douglas debates (remember boys, the main issue was slavery, ja?)
Lincoln opposed slavery in the new territories, not slavery as such. And why? He hated Black people and didn’t want Blacks competing with Whites for the benefits of the Homesteading Act. Remember that in the IL state legislature, Lincoln supported Black Codes (Jim Crow was a Yankee invention) and even opposed allowing Blacks to move to ML. Douglas’ Kansas-Nebraska act dealt with this. Remember “Bleeding Kansas”? The Whites in Kansas hated Blacks and fought to keep them out.
This and the Dred Scott decision (also dealing with Blacks moving to territories and “Free” states) are the background of the 1858 debates. DOUGLAS, not Lincoln, the first debaate (Peoria) raised the question of Black settlement deliberately to embarrass Lincoln with the anti-Black racialist population of IL. Lincoln would have rather talked about the BUS and repealing the low Walker Tariff.
What is more, in the Jonesboro debate, Lincoln clearly said that Blacks to be not the equals of Whites. Lincoln’s real program was the American Colonization Society. The Abolitionists knew this, and did not support Lincoln in 1858 and 1860.
Finally, Lincoln not only supported the Corwin Amendment, but was actually the instigator of it. So much for Father Abraham setting Blacks free. Were Miss Marie herself among the literate, she would bother to read Abe’s FIRST Inaugural, where he made all this plain. Also made plain in that speech that he was going to afflict Dixie with the tariff.
2) the Morrill bill was passed AFTER seven states seceded in the South. How can the tariff then be the cause of secession? As the secessionists themselves admitted, it was all about states’ rights (especially the right to own slaves).
Because Lincoln ran on a pro-tariff platform! It got him the nomination when he the Pennsylvania delegation how pro-tariff he was. (note: PA) With his election the cotton states that seceded—states that had to sell on an international market and would have been despoiled and reduced to destitution by the inflation and retaliation which the tariff would have caused (vide my next post). (and indeed, it took Dixie a century to recover economically )
3) A Democrat still signed the bill into law, ok? .
And pray tell, Miss Marie, what state was James Buchanan from? PA! A state whose manufacturers pined for the high tariff.
4) if the paleolibs are so hot for the Confederacy, maybe they should read a book on how the Dixie Congress imposed tariffs too. So much for laissez-faire in the South!</i>
already answered by another writebacker.
So much for Miss Marie’s literacy.
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Now I’m sorry to have to go over this again, but Miss Marie and Mr. Piatak’s lust for tariffs obliges me.
Learned at Dr. DiLoreno’s knee:
What does ANY tariff do. Let’s say shoes in Gringoland cost $50 a pair. An English manufacturer comes in and sells at $40. The Marie-Claires and Piataks of the Gringo shoe industry demand a tariff at $100, and after they pay off politicians, they get it. Do American shoe manufacturers keep their shoes at $50? NO! They raise raise their prices, competition missing, to $95 Dollars! The blue collar worker suddenly faces the cost of everything almost doubled. What does he do but go to his boss and demand more money, money that the manufacturer has because of higher prices.
Now apply this to Dixie in 1828 and 1861. Southerners as all Gringos were faced with the prospect of everything, from blankets to shoes to frying pans, doubling in cost. Yet here’s the difference from the Yankee worker. Southerners could not demand more pay, because Southerners had to sell their chief product, cotton, on an INTERNATIONAL market, and thus couldn’t raise their prices to meet the corresponding rise cost of living. They would have been undersold in the international market, so say nothing of retaliation from foreign states.
So Deep Dixie revolted against her being despoiled are reduced to destitution. Note that the northern states of Dixie not only did not at first secede, but VA and NC actually voted against secession in the early spring of 1861. After all they were not cotton states. Only when Dishonest Abe called up the troops to enforce the Morrill tariff did these state realized that the principle of states’ rights would be gone for good.
And Ft Sumpter, Lincoln’s excuse for calling up the troops, wasn’t a fort; it was a tax office. In the shelling of the “fort”, there was only one death: a mule. Some reason to start Gringoland’s bloodiest war!
Bottom line: Abe’s Corwin Amendment would have guaranteed slavery in Dixie for perpetuity. His issue was tariffs.
Another thought: Had Dishonest Abe really wanted to end slavery, there would have been an costless and bloodless way to do it. Let Dixie go and then refuse to enforce the Fugative Slave Act (from the Compromise of 1850). Blacks could then quite easily have escaped north, the cost of slavery would have become too onerous, and slavery would have ended, as it ended everywhere else in the 19th Century: bloodlessly.
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Sid deserves the “Stalin Prize” for revisionist history, unless his hero Tommy Di has won it first. Anyway, finally there is a partial admission that slavery was more important than tariffs as a cause to the Civil War. Yes, slavery in the “territories” was the issue. As Harry Jaffa has shown, Lincoln knew that the planters’ aristocracy wanted expansionism, into the W. territories and Central America. Had the South seceded, it is likely that there would have been war over the slavery expansion issue (esp. if the North refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law). As for the paleo-leftist complaint that Lincoln was a racist who opposed racial equality, well, he and 99.9% of all other Americans (including Yanks) fit this bill in 1861. Had Abe come across as Dr. King in 1861, he would have gone down to electoral defeat anywhere in the US. Even a few abolitionists (and most Yanks) supported colonization after emancipation. Sorry Sid, but Lincoln wasn’t alone in this regard. (By the way, are you really a rightist? You sound like the kind of New Left historian whom Tommy Di praises.)
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This discussion underscores why we sit fanning in the hot balconey while the neo-cons and cultural Marxists command the stage. Bottom-line: the War Between the States wrecked the original intent of the Constitution, and neither the states’ right crew nor the protectionist-nationalists are served by it. We need to leave Abe in the dust and start finding and promoting an(other) Constitutionalist post haste.
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“I was shocked to discover that a conservative, southern congregation would sing it.”
Public schools. Take your children out! At 64 years of age, I home school the last of my five daughters, Dixie, who is currently in the sixth grade. Everyone should do likewise if they cannot afford to send their children to private school, although one has to be extremely careful of even private ones these days.The first question to ask of a private school administrator is “Do you discriminate against Confederate symbols?” This will save time and can also be asked of the few good public schools left, as there are some that still educate rather than indoctrinate.
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Mr. Cundiff, it’s time to abandon ship. You were right, of course, to point out the idiocy of Havers, Marie Claire, et al., but this site has become _their_ toy, _their_ thing (cf. Cosa Nostra). May I respectfully suggest that you follow DiLorenzo? Despite their more than occasional descents into Lockean fantasy, despite their devotion to the “wisdom” of the young, the unlettered, and the Randian slime, and despite the shallow and blatant careerism of certain members of the Mises Institute staff, the paleolibertarian crowd have more to offer: more willingness to listen (except on the Israel question, of course), more of interest to say, and less tolerance for the Spencers, Haverses, and Epsteins of this world (not quite enough intolerance for this last boy wonder, alas, whose success in getting his name in print by hitching his wagon to Ron Paul’s star is second only to TW’s). The bratty arrogance of Marie Claire epitomizes the New and Improved attitude chez Taki’s Magazine: you done good here; don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.
See you around--elsewhere!
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That’s right pclaudel, take your ball and go home. This site is not for immature losers, still lacking a high school ed.
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Let’s not forget the most important point about Abe Lincoln: He was a politician.
“As for the paleo-leftist complaint that Lincoln was a racist who opposed racial equality, well, he and 99.9% of all other Americans (including Yanks) fit this bill in 1861”
Exactly.
This means that Lincoln thought that blacks were not actually human, not as the white man was. It is childish to believe that Lincoln cared about the freedom of blacks. He did not feel their pain! He did not want the blacks wandering around America causing no end of trouble. He wanted them out of America. If they were back in the jungle or slaves in some other country, it was not important. Just out of white America. That was the final solution, if you will.
It is silly to believe that Lincoln started a war rid America of the pesky Negroes. It is highly likely that he started a war to keep power in his hands. Lincoln was a rich railroad lawyer. He knew which side his bread was buttered on. When the South was brought back into line, Lincoln knew that with his connections, he would be a very rich man.
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There are no limits to the lies and misrepresentations about Lincoln’s political legacy – and about those who question the Official Version of it – that are spread by what I call the Lincoln cult. It almost seems congenital. As soon as The Real Lincoln was published in 2002, the Lincoln cult swung into action with outlandish and outrageous misrepresentations of what I say in the book in an obvious attempt to keep people from reading it. I was surprised to learn from various hatchet men associated with the Claremont Institute, for example, that I am a Marxist; that there is not a single Lincoln quote in my book (a blatant lie, of course); that there is a defense of slavery in the book (another blatant lie); that there is sympathy for Nazi Germany in the book (the biggest lie of all); and on and on.
Various “Lincoln scholars” have stood up during debates with me to declare to audiences of laypersons such blatant falsehoods as: the Union Army never caused the death of a single Southern civilian; no private property was stolen during Sherman’s march; Lincoln never did a single thing that was unconstitutional or illegal; I supposedly wrote that it would have been fine had slavery lasted into the 20th century (this was actually Lincoln’s opinion, not mine); Virginia did not reserve the right to take back the powers it delegated to the central government at some future date as a condition of ratifying the Constitution; the king of England did not sign a peace treaty that named all the individual states; and myriad other lies that are easily researched by simply consulting the plain facts of history.
The latest example of such shenanigans is an article entitled “The Limits of Lincoln Bashing” by one Grant Havers, a Canadian philosophy professor, in the April 23 online edition of Taki’s Magazine. Havers apparently believes that pointing out how the actual facts of historical reality conflict with Harry Jaffa’s stylized interpretations of Lincoln’s rhetoric constitutes “bashing” as opposed to scholarship. He devotes only a paragraph to myself and my writings, and every single thing he says about me in the paragraph is false.
Havers identifies me as a “paleoconservative historian” despite the fact that I have never described myself in this way to anyone, either verbally or in writing. In fact, I don’t even know what a paleoconservative is. I know of several people who label themselves as such, but they seem to have differing views on many issues, which leads me to believe that there is not even one single definition of the term. Nor am I a historian (thank goodness) but an economist with an interest in history, especially economic history.
So much for the first half of Havers’ first sentence. The second half of his first sentence discussing me and my work contains the preposterous falsehood that I “have eagerly accepted Jaffa’s terms of discourse while disputing its moral implications.” In reality, I think Harry Jaffa is a crackpot. I utterly reject his strange notion that Lincoln was a champion equality, a myth that is at the heart of everything Jaffa has ever written on the subject. While it is true that Lincoln quoted Jefferson’s “all men are created equal” words from the Declaration on Independence on a few occasions, his entire adult life is a demonstration that he was in fact as opposed to equality as any white man in 19th century America was, North or South. “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he said in his September 18, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas. He repeated this on many other occasions.
More importantly, his lifelong actions prove that this was indeed his true belief. He voted against black suffrage in Illinois; opposed allowing blacks to testify in court in Illinois; voted against abolishing the slave trade in Washington, D.C. during his one term in Congress; supported the Illinois “Black Codes” that deprived the small number of free blacks who resided in the state of any semblance of citizenship; supported the “Corwin Amendment” to the Constitution that would have formally enshrined slavery in the U.S. Constitution; and spent his entire adult life advocating “colonization” or the deportation of black people from the U.S. He was one of the “managers” of the Illinois Colonization Society which sought to use state tax dollars to deport free blacks out of the state.
Lincoln was a masterful politician who could use tongue-twisting rhetoric to deceive the public better than any American politician in history. In this regard he was Bill Clinton times ten thousand. For example, referring to the part of Declaration of Independence that mentions equality (while ignoring the fact that the entire document was a declaration of the right of secession), he said: “The African upon his own soil has all the natural rights that instrument vouchsafes to all mankind” (emphasis added). The italicized words are the key to understanding Lincoln on this point. He considered black people to be some kind of alien beings, which is why he called them “the Africans.” More importantly, he believed that they could never be equal here in America, but only “upon their own soil” or “in their native clime,” i.e., Africa, Haiti, Central America, etc., as he often stated. Moreover, he also clearly believed that it was undesirable to attempt to enforce racial equality in the U.S., as he stated in the above quotation from the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Harry Jaffa has spent his entire career spreading the Big Lie of Lincoln as a champion of “equality” in order to justify the Republican Party’s foreign policy agenda of military aggression and imperialism in the name of spreading equality around the globe. (Spreading “equality” around the globe at gunpoint sounds a lot like the professed goals of 20th-century communism, doesn’t it?).
Jaffa’s second Big Lie, one that was invented by Alexander Hamilton, repeated by Webster, Joseph Story, John Marshall and others, including Lincoln, was that there was never any such thing as state sovereignty in America. The Constitution was supposedly ratified by some kind of national election involving “the whole people.” This lie was invented by Hamilton in his propaganda war for a centralized, monopolistic state. Of course, “the whole people” never had anything whatsoever to do with the founding or the ratification of the Constitution (women didn’t even have the right to vote until 1920). That was the job of the sovereign states, as is clearly stated in Article 7 of the Constitution.
The next falsehood about me and my work that Havers jams into one short paragraph in Taki’s Magazine is that I allegedly put “the responsibility for all American empire building on Abe’s shoulders alone”; I am supposedly unaware that “pre-Lincoln America” had certain “tendencies towards centralized power”; and that Lincoln was not “the first architect of Leviathan in America.”
Havers has obviously not read my books. If there is one over-arching theme, it is that Lincoln, as I have written, was the “political son of Alexander Hamilton, the champion of a centralized governmental monarchy, or something like it, coupled with British-style mercantilistic economic policies (protectionist tariffs, central banking, corporate welfare) and an aggressive foreign policy. After the death of Hamilton and his nemesis Jefferson, this political mantle was carried on by the heirs of Hamilton’s Federalists, the Whigs, including Clay, Webster, and Lincoln. I tell this story of the struggle between the American advocates of Leviathan government (Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln) and their Jeffersonian opponents in my books, but as I said, Havers obviously did not bother to read them before posing as a legitimate critic of them.
-Thomas Dilorenzo
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Great post Dr. Dilorenzo!
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There`s so much wrong about this article I wouldn`t know where to start. The war against Germany a “continuation of the Civil War?
Let`s be clear. With our two strongest defenders (the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans) and our abundance of every known food and minerals, we here are virtually impregnable. To ignore the Founders advice about alliances and to go about the world seeking monsters is wrong, WRONG, and sure to lead to disaster. I still remember my Uncle Nick in the `50`s, wheezing and suffering from the gassing he endured in France in 1918.
In the end we are a banana republic when leaders like Lincoln, GW Bush, HW Bush, Woodrow Wilson, FDR and virtuall every modern President ignores the Constitution and embroils us in a crusade for todays ism.
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If I could add one small comment to Marie, it would be to ask her, with all due respect to her strongly held opinions, to calm down a little. Yes, Mr Cundiff is often extremely irritating to read but in this instance he has made some valid points which need to be considered seriously and without name-calling.
While by no means as well-read on the subject of Lincoln as some of the responders clearly are, I have to readily admit that my sympathies lean more to the South in that horrible Civil War if for no other reason than that they, as a whole, acted much more honorably than the North. And I fail to see any benefits to American society that resulted from that bloody mess.
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Wasn’t an orthodox Christian believer?
Wanted a stronger federal government?
Didn’t think states were more powerful than the federal government?
Suppressed a rebellion?
Didn’t believe in racial equality?
Blast that George Washington!
Your quarrel’s with him, boys!
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To Charlie:
It’s DiLorenzo and Gamble who claim that the world wars were a continuation of the Civil War, not me.
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