[Peace-discuss] The Lincoln cult

[E. Wayne Johnson]

Carl wrote:
> I can find only one statement of a contrary view by a present-day 
> American
> politician:
>
> "Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of 
> getting rid of
> slavery. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil 
> war.   Slavery
> was phased out in every other country of the world. It should have 
> been done as
> the British empire did -- buy the slaves and release them. How much 
> would that
> cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans?  And the hatred  lingered 
> for 100
> years.  Every other major country in the world got rid of slavery 
> without a
> civil war." 
Of course, this was then-Presidential-Candidate Ron Paul, and he was 
attacked vigourously
by the media, the Democrats, and the neocons as a "racist" for making 
this statement,
which is an absurd accusation.
*

Actually, Lincoln is considered to be "just a man" and therefore 
fallible, among many
libertarians.  I got this note just today in an invitation to join a 
"Truth about Lincoln" facebook group:


Lincoln Worship is in full swing this year, being the bicentennial of 
his birth and all. It's our goal that the truth gets a wider hearing. As 
the FDR myth is slowly getting revised due to the current regime's 
seeming desire to resurrect him, it's only fair that the true legacy of 
America's first dictator share some of the limelight.

Follow the links and you will understand the timeliness of our group:

Great introductory articles -

The basic case against Lincoln: 
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo44.html

"The Mythical Lincoln": 
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo12.html

"The Unknown Lincoln": http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo26.html

Lincoln indicts himself: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/young8.html

"Civil War Revisionism," by Donald Miller (with links to lots of great 
books!):http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/miller5.html


Two books (by Tom DiLorenzo) -

The Real Lincoln:

a review - 
http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=207&sortorder=issue
the reaction - 
http://mises.org/article.aspx?Id=973&FS=Confronting+the+Lincoln+Cult
a critique of the critics - 
http://www.lewrockwell.com/ostrowski/ostrowski39.html
the book - http://www.mises.org/store/Real-Lincoln-The-P172.aspx

Lincoln Unmasked:

a review - http://mises.org/misesreview_detail.aspx?control=312
the book - http://www.mises.org/store/Lincoln-Unmasked-P324.aspx


If you've browsed the links, by now you should see why these are the 
first books we point to and why the author has caused such a stir. Dig 
around Amazon.com and elsewhere and you'll find many other authors.

Although the following sources are drawn from only two (of my favorite) 
websites, the articles and opinions come from many writers and will lead 
you to a variety of different sources if you care to do the work.

King Lincoln Archive: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/lincoln-arch.html

Audio/Video:

DiLorenzo Interview - http://mises.org:88/DiLorenzo_QandA
"Lincoln Unmasked" - 
http://mises.org/multimedia/video/ASC2007/ASC2007-DiLorenzo.wmv
"Lincoln's Tarriff War" - 
http://mises.org/Controls/Media/MediaPlayer.aspx?Id=2405

more audio: http://mises.org/mp3/Pres/Pres3a.mp3
http://mises.org/mp3/ASC8/ASCLinc.mp3


C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> The Lincoln birthday celebrations seem to have included little attempt 
> to learn
> from the past. Lincoln is celebrated -- by few more than the current 
> president,
> who insists upon a resemblance -- but there's little critique of the 
> devastation
> over which Lincoln presided.  The end of chattel slavery is taken to be a
> retrospective justification of his launching of the war.  (The actual 
> economic
> and social position of American slaves and their families in the years 
> after
> the Civil War is less attended to.)
>
> I can find only one statement of a contrary view by a present-day 
> American
> politician:
>
> "Lincoln should never have gone to war; there were better ways of 
> getting rid of
> slavery. Six hundred thousand Americans died in a senseless civil 
> war.   Slavery
> was phased out in every other country of the world. It should have 
> been done as
> the British empire did -- buy the slaves and release them. How much 
> would that
> cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans?  And the hatred  lingered 
> for 100
> years.  Every other major country in the world got rid of slavery 
> without a
> civil war."
>
> Lincoln was not a principled opponent of slavery (altho' he may have 
> become so).
> His position before secession was that the federal government did not 
> possess
> the constitutional power to end slavery in states where it already 
> existed; he
> supported the Corwin Amendment, which would have explicitly prohibited 
> Congress
> from interfering with slavery in states where it existed.
>
> In the midst of the war, Lincoln wrote (to Horace Greeley), "My 
> paramount object
> in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to 
> destroy
> slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would 
> do it, and
> if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I 
> could save
> it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What 
> I do
> about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps 
> to save the
> Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would 
> help to
> save the Union."
>
> And what was "saving the Union" about?  All would admit today that the 
> *effect*
> of Lincoln's policy was to establish a much more powerful central 
> government in
> the United States.  (Hence the old line that the Civil War was about a 
> verb:
> "the United States is" vs. "the United States are.")  But the *cause* 
> of the war
> was the conflict between two ruling groups who exploited labor 
> differently -- by
> slavery in the South, by the wage-contract in the North. They came 
> into conflict
> after the Mexican War and the vast increase of US territory that 
> followed it.
>
> "Both groups wanted to control the western half of the continent, and the
> Northern agrarians became increasingly anti-slavery as they faced the 
> prospect
> of competing against a forced-labor system.  But favoring free soil 
> did not mean
> agitating to free the black man.  The majority of Western farmers were 
> not
> abolitionists ... Their objective was to exclude both the white 
> planter and the
> black [workers] from the trans-Mississippi marketplace.  That goal, 
> and the
> attitude which produced it, gave Abraham Lincoln his victory over the
> abolitionist element in the newly rising Republican party." (W. A. 
> Williams)
>
> The Radical Republicans (and Lincoln) were not necessarily 
> abolitionist and only
> adventitiously democratic. They just wanted the trans-Mississippi 
> empire farmed
> with wage-labor, not slave-labor.  (Hence the central Republican party 
> plank was
> "no extension of slavery.")
>
> Options other than war were available to Lincoln, and he was aware of 
> them. Advice came from the most distinguished American military figure 
> of the day, Gen. Winfield Scott (1786-1866). He served on active duty 
> as a general longer than any other man in American history and may 
> have been the ablest American commander of his time; he devised the 
> Anaconda Plan that would be used to defeat the Confederacy. In a 
> letter addressed to  Governor Seward on the day preceding Lincoln's 
> inauguration (March 3, 1861), he suggested that the president had four 
> possible courses of action:
>    --adopt the Crittenden Compromise (which restored the Missouri 
> Compromise line: slavery would be prohibited north of the 36° 30′ 
> parallel and guaranteed south of it);
>    --collect duties outside the ports of seceding States or blockade 
> them;
>    --conquer those States at the end of a long, expensive, and 
> desolating war, and to no good purpose; or,
>    --say to the seceded States, "Wayward sisters, depart in peace!" 
> (Scott was retired from the service Nov. 1, 1861, and was succeeded by 
> General McClellan.)
>
> I think a true democrat (therefore necessarily a socialist) would have 
> opposed
> the war in 1860 -- but obviously not because s/he would have supported 
> slavery.
> When Karl Marx wrote on behalf of the International Working Men's 
> Association
> to congratulate Lincoln on his re-election (1864), he gave as his 
> principal
> reason that, with the distraction of slavery removed, the struggle 
> between
> capital and labor was clearer: slavery had been the reason Northern 
> workers
> "were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their 
> European
> brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to 
> progress has
> been swept off by the red sea of civil war."
>
> One of the few recent scholarly studies not to observe the Lincoln 
> cult is
> William Marley's "Mr. Lincoln Goes to War" (2006).  From a review:
>
> "Focusing on the North's road to war in 1861, he argues that Abraham 
> Lincoln
> made armed force a first choice, rather than a last resort, in 
> addressing the
> Union's breakup ... Marvel describes the president's course of action as
> 'destructive and unimaginative.' The confrontation at Fort Sumter 
> ended any
> chance of avoiding conflict, he writes ... Lincoln's early and 
> comprehensive
> infringement of such constitutional rights as habeas corpus set dangerous
> precedents for future autocratic executives."
>
> Illustrating the important principle that the poets often get there 
> first,
> Gore Vidal's "Lincoln: A Novel" (1984) made a similar argument a
> generation ago. But the theme was absent from this week's celebrations.
>
> --CGE
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