The Real Lincoln : A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War

The Real Lincoln : A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas DiLorenzo. Hardcover: 384 pages. (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2002), $10.85.

Review by Ryan Setliff

The Real Lincoln : A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War is destined to be a classic! DiLorenzo offers an insightful expose on the Real Lincoln, his unconstitutional regime and unnecessary war. Columnist Joseph Sobran calls it, "a devastating critique of America's most famous President." Many Americans nostalgically venerate Abraham Lincoln as the greatest President throughout American history. His standing as the Great Emancipator and a champion of black equality has become part of a celebrated, albeit erroneous American mythology. This book carries the endorsement of acclaimed black conservative Walter Williams who also repudiates the myth the slavery abolition was the moral cause and catalyst for Lincoln's war. The lionized Abe Lincoln of today has an almost cult following, but he was not very popular in his time except among government bureaucrats, politically-connected special interests and industrialists. Some leaders in Mid-Atlantic States even contemplated secession and the formation of a central confederacy. Marshall DiLorenzo masterfully dethrones the entrenched myths perpetuated for years by biased historians and revisionist ideologues which give such moral imperative to the cause that Lincoln championed.

As DiLorenzo notes, "although Lincoln is generally credited with having `saved the Union,' in reality he destroyed the idea of the Union as a voluntary association of states by forcing the Southern States to remain in the Union at gunpoint." DiLorenzo prudently examines the nature of the American polity that our founding fathers gave us and elaborates upon the compact nature of the Union. The author boldly confronts the idea of secession as treason, and makes it clear that it was the guiding principle animating the first American War for Independence. He cites the learned wisdom of the Founding Fathers, which makes it clear secession is a reserved right of the States. It was the States after all that delegated powers and the sovereignty which animated the Union. Moreover, the Union was not self-constituted, but was constituted in Convention. The essence of federalism is dual sovereignty and a diffusion of powers. DiLorenzo explains how the origins of secession and how it was taken for granted by High Federalists in New England, and implicit in the Tenth Amendment. Secession as taught at West Point from William Rawle's famous commentaries on the Constitution convinced a great multitude of military leaders. The first movement toward secession came not from the South, but from the Hartford Convention in New England in the early 1800's.

DiLorenzo expends a chapter confronting the lies that herald Lincoln as champion of racial equality and an advocate for black liberation. As abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced Lincoln, he declared, he "had not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins." DiLorenzo also repudiates tireless egalitarian-abolitionist myths about the Union cause and makes light of Lincoln's views on slavery and race. In 1850, Lincoln defended the slave owner's right to own property, in declaring "when they remind us of their constitutional rights [to own slaves], I acknowledge them, not grudgingly but fully and fairly; and I would give them any legislation for the claiming of their fugitives" When the Congress ended slavery in the District of Columbia in 1862, it concurrently appropriated funds for emigration to deport those freed blacks to Africa. Lincoln's Secretary of State William Seward flamboyantly proclaimed, "The motive of those who protested against the extension of slavery had always really been concern for the welfare of the white man, and not an unnatural sympathy for the negro." Abraham Lincoln's famous Emancipation Proclamation was little more than a pragmatic political device, albeit a clever one, as it would deter British and French involvement on the Confederate side. Lincoln even admitted this fact in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase: "The original proclamation has no... legal justification, except as a military measure." As Lincoln's confidant William Seward proclaimed, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in where we can set them free." The Proclamation only freed slaves in the Confederate States of America. DiLorenzo gives a great deal of substantive argument and quotations to further undermine "the great egalitarian emancipator" myth. Lincoln's racial views are not too PC either, as he proclaimed: "I can conceive of no greater calamity than the assimilation of the negro into our social and political life as our equal." Not surprisingly, Lincoln favored measures to deport the slaves. Not the Lincoln they taught you about in public schools is it?

DiLorenzo chronicles a long history of abuses and usurpations by the northern elites, the Republican Party, and the Lincoln and Grant administrations. Lincoln's abuses were not solely perpetrated against southerners, as he unconstitutionally jailed dissidents in the north, suspended the legislature, conscripted men in mass, and he suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the whole nation and without the consent of Congress. The writ of habeas corpus was embodied in the Anglo-American common law tradition and integral to the preservation of due process. Supreme Court Justice Taney ruled the measure unconstitutional. Taney surmised that no American President enjoyed "more regal and absolute power" over personal liberties than a monarch, and it was not the intent of the founding fathers. "Lincoln rationalised this suspension of constitutional liberties-at least in his own mind-with the rhetorical tool of falsely equating the Constitution with the Union," notes DiLorenzo. Secretary of State Seward boasted, "that he could `ring a bell' and have a man arrested in Ohio, New York, or any other state, and was apparently thrilled that he thus had even more power over the population than the Queen of England had." Lincoln even espoused his own war powers doctrine, which justified absolute power in the executive when coupled with the Commander-in-Chief clause. Lincoln was a law unto himself. The author further probes the unconstitutional legal plunder games of Lincoln's Whigs and Republicans as they pilfered the treasury for special interest subsidies, which has been nicknamed "The Era of Good Stealings." The aftermath of the Lincoln regime was arguably one of the most corrupt times in the history of the nation.

The lingering legacy of the Lincoln and the Reconstruction regime was a profound change in the character of the American system of government. Frankly, America today borders on being a top-down unitary state no different than France or UK, with the States relegated to little more than administrative constituent units answering to Washington. As Walter Williams trenchantly observes, "Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. DiLorenzo gives an account of how this came about in The Real Lincoln." The federalism of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe is sadly a thing of the past, as is dual sovereignty and the idea of "government by consent of the governed." I've heard friends and prior classmates define the essence of federalism as "subordination" and even "centralization." This might show how public education is an abysmal failure, though perhaps there is a modicum of truth to such statements as the statist centralizing actions and unconstitutional precedents set by Lincoln horribly and perhaps irrevocably disfigured the constitutional republic of our forefathers. Additionally, in the absence of the precedents set by Lincoln, I doubt the total assault on the Constitution furthered by the TR, Wilson, FDR, and the New Deal would have been quite so easy.

H.L. Mencken surmised the disingenuousness of Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address: "The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination - that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves." Mencken is right on the money in denouncing the Orwellian lies of Abe. Such arguments by Lincoln were "absurd" notes DiLorenzo, because "if the Southern States were permitted to secede peacefully, representative government would still have existed in the Southern Confederacy as well as the Northern one." The War of Northern Aggression settled by force whether states could secede. The great principle enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" was replaced by the dictum of Thrasymachus (i.e. Plato's Republic): "Justice is nothing but the advantage of the stronger." Honest Abe's dictatorial rule of thumb is just like that of King George III that is to simply say `might makes right.' The Union was tethered together not by "rule by consent of the governed," but by blood and the bayonet. Online columnist Karen de Coster said it best: "Lincoln was a ruthless dictator of the most contemptible sort. A conniving and manipulative man, and a scoundrel at heart, he was nowhere near what old guard historians would have us believe." Anyhow, DiLorenzo is to be commended for his solid critique of the Lincoln regime and showing the Real Lincoln-warts and all.