Interesting read on Lincoln

When Dictatorship Came to Americaby Thomas J. DiLorenzoThe presidential oath of office contains a pledge to defend andprotect the Constitution of the United States, and by implication theliberties of the American people that the document is intended topreserve. In light of this, can you name which of the delegated powersin the U.S. Constitution allow the president to invade his owncountry, mass murder his own American citizens, and bomb, burn andplunder their cities? Can you explain how such acts would beconsistent with protecting the constitutional liberties of thoseunfortunate citizens? If you think you can, then congratulations, youare a “Lincoln Scholar.” If not, do not despair. You are in decentcompany, including the five living past presidents as of 1861, namely,Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, andJames Buchanan. Lincoln’s predecessor, President James Buchanan ofPennsylvania, stated the truth when he said the following:Has the Constitution delegated to Congress the power to coerce aState into submission which is attempting to withdraw . . . from theConfederacy [of states]? If answered in the affirmative, it must be onthe principle that the power has been conferred upon Congress todeclare and to make war against a State. After much seriousreflection, I have arrived at the conclusion that no such power hasbeen delegated to Congress or to any other department of the federalgovernment (Senate Journal, 36th Congress, 2nd Session, 4 December1860, 15–16).Unlike Lincoln, James Buchanan was a constitutionalist. His opinionthat a president has no constitutional right to invade his own countryand murder his fellow citizens has relegated him to the bottom ofevery ranking of American presidents by the American historyprofession for generations. This doesn’t mean he was wrong, only thata large segment of the history profession is hopelessly corrupt.Buchanan understood, as did nearly everyone prior to Lincoln, that thestates did not give up any of their sovereignty when they ratified theConstitution; they merely delegated several distinct powers to thecentral government that was designed to act for their mutual benefit.Buchanan’s position on secession is described in some detail by JohnAvery Emison in his new book, Lincoln Über Alles: Dictatorship Comesto America. It’s high time that Americans grow up, says Emison, andconfront the reality of their own history, as opposed to the childishfairy tales concocted by the court historians of the Church of Lincoln.As for the other living presidents mentioned above, the New YorkerMillard Fillmore, a former Whig, opposed the war for its duration andnever joined the new Republican Party after the Whig Party imploded,as did most Northern Whigs. Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire was afierce critic of the war and especially of Lincoln’s Stalinist,police-state tactics in suppressing political opposition in the North.New Yorker Martin Van Buren died in 1862 but opposed the war, and JohnTyler of Virginia, who also died in 1862, actually served in theConfederate Congress.These men were all patriotic Americans who understood that waging waragainst the citizens of any state was an act of treason. Theyunderstood this because, unlike Lincoln, they had read, understood,and believed in the Constitution. As Emison points out, Article III,Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution defines treason as follows:“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying Waragainst them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid andComfort” (emphasis added). As with all the founding documents, “UnitedStates” is in the plural, signifying that the free and independentstates are united for some specific purpose, in this case indelegating certain powers to the central government, mostly forforeign policy reasons. Treason meant waging war against the citizensof the states, not the government in Washington, D.C. Lincoln’s warwas nothing if it was not a war prosecuted by the Republican Partyagainst the Southern states. It was therefore the very definition oftreason under the U.S. Constitution.The Lincoln Cult sometimes claims that the so-called “insurrectionclause” of the Constitution (Article 4, Section 4) gives thegovernment the ability to wage war on its own citizens, but this is agross misreading of the document. Article 4 states: “The United Statesshall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form ofGovernment, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and onApplication of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when theLegislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence.”Lincoln violated the first part of Article 4 by imprisoning members ofthe Maryland legislature in 1861 and by occupying various southernstates, ruling over them with military dictatorships during the war.The war was not a domestic insurrection within the Southern states.But even if one assumes that it was, as Lincoln falsely did, it isimportant that the second part of Article 4 denotes that the centralgovernment cannot interfere in an insurrection within any state unlessfirst invited to do so by the legislature or governor of that state.The governors of the Southern states never invited Lincoln to invadethem, bomb their cities, and murder their citizens by the thousands.But then again, Lincoln believed that he was more important than theConstitution.In his chapter entitled “Secession, the Constitution, and the Law,”Emison devastatingly critiques Lincoln Cultist James McPherson’sone-sentence quip in his (McPherson’s) book, Battle Cry of Freedom,that the states that entered the union after the original thirteenwere creatures of the central government and therefore were notsovereign over it and had no right to secede. This quip has beenendlessly repeated by Lincoln cultists in their defense of Lincoln’swar despite the fact that it is historically and constitutionallybaseless. It is baseless because of what the Supreme Court has calledthe “Equal Footing Doctrine.” When Tennessee became the third newstate in 1796, for example, it was admitted “on an equal footing withthe original states in all respects whatsoever,” phraseology that hasbeen used ever since, Emison reminds us. This means that, just as theoriginal thirteen states were sovereign over the central government,so are all the others. All states are equal under the Constitution.This fact motivates Emison to ask the obvious question: “If all thestates are equal, do any states or combination of states have thelegal or moral authority to destroy another state and replace itslawfully elected government with one imposed by military occupation?If so, which states have such authority? How did they get it?Lincoln’s answer to these questions was, essentially, “the side withthe most bayonets makes the rules.”In his chapter entitled “War Crimes” Emison details just how Lincoln“proved” his new theories about the absolute and omnipotent powers ofthe federal government to be “correct.” He explains how the Lincolnregime reignited the horrors of total war in the world, including thewaging of total war on one’s own citizens. Among the language used todescribe the waging of total war on Southern civilians is “rampage,”“theft and indiscriminate destruction of property,” “rob, tyrannize,threaten,” “numerous reports of rape,” and “woe betide the region’sunprotected black women, against whom acts of the most beastly aninfamous character” were perpetrated by Union Army soldiers.Much of this barbarism was the work of the “heroic” General Sherman.Emison scoured numerous biographies of Sherman and found him to bedescribed in the following ways by those who knew him best: “A nearemotional cripple”; a dangerous man”; “traumatized, marginalized, andself-loathing”; “a caged lion . . . angry”; suffering from “delusionalmisjudgment”; “suicidal impulses”; “confessed to his wife a death-wishfor himself . . .”; “a man of primal rage.”“Sherman’s gone in the head, he’s luny [sic],” said AssistantSecretary of War Thomas Scott, as quoted by Emison. “It would bedangerous to give [Sherman] command,” said General Henry Halleck. Ofcourse, Lincoln not only gave Sherman command, but made him one of thetop commanders, and the Republican Party turned him into a nationalicon after the war. (Sherman spent the next 25 years after the warorchestrating the campaign of genocide against the Plains Indians.)Emison documents with Sherman’s own words how the man seemed to hatejust about everyone especially blacks, Mexicans, Jews, and Indians. Hewas not an enlightened egalitarian devoted to black equality, as thebuffoonish Lincoln cultist Victor Davis Hanson has contended. Thismentally-deranged maniac “justified” his mass killing of civilians byinventing the “doctrine of military necessity,” which essentially saidthat anything goes in war, even the murder of innocent women andchildren. Sherman’s armies would later perfect this barbaric ideologyduring the Indian Wars, as Emison recounts.When backed into a corner the Lincoln Cult usually resorts to thepreposterous claim that everything the Lincoln regime did (or did notdo, such as peacefully ending slavery, as the rest of the world did inthe 19th century) was justified because Northerners were enlightenedabout race and Southerners were not. Evil Southerners had to becivilized, the story goes, even if that meant killing them by thehundreds of thousands. But as Emison writes, “The idea that . . .white Northerners . . . fought the Civil War to end slavery, or wereon the right side of the racial justice issue, is preposterous.” It is“nothing short of gullible self-deception, bordering onsimple-mindedness.”Your author is not as generous as Emison in this regard. JamesMcPherson, Doris Kearns-Goodwin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and otherLincoln cultists are not simple minded. They know what they are doing,and they know that it pays very well careerwise and moneywise to be acourt historian.In another attempt to allow Americans to wean themselves from childishself-deceptions about their own history, Emison devotes a chapter torace in American history. He discusses how slavery existed forhundreds of years in the North, especially in New York, Boston, andNewport, Rhode Island, the hubs of the transatlantic slave trade. Thetransatlantic slave trade “was one of the foundations of New England’seconomic structure” for generations. The slave trade was also “one ofthe cornerstones of New York’s commercial prosperity in the eighteenthcentury.”Emison documents the truth behind Tocqueville’s statement in Democracyin America that “the problem of race” was even worse in the North thanit was in the South in the early nineteenth century. He presents atable of seventy-six Northern Jim Crow Laws that were enactedbeginning with Vermont in 1777 and ending with New York in 1868. JimCrow laws were a Northern invention. In the decade preceding the Warto Prevent Southern Independence alone, California, Utah Territory,Indiana, Ohio, Kansas Territory, Nebraska Territory, Wisconsin,Minnesota, Iowa, and Oregon disenfranchised all free blacks.In 1839 Ohio’s legislature passed “a resolution that Negroes have noright to petition the legislature for any purpose whatever.”Massachusetts banned interracial marriage in 1836, after Rhode Islanddid so in 1822; during the same year (1836), state legislator AbrahamLincoln voted for an Illinois resolution that “the elective franchiseshould be kept pure from contamination by the admission of coloredvotes”; In 1833 Connecticut criminalized “the establishment of anyschool for persons of the African race”; Ohio, Indiana and Illinoisrequired “good behavior bonds” from free blacks; many Northern statesenacted “Negro Exclusion Laws”; the Connecticut Supreme Court ruledthat blacks were not citizens twenty years before the famous DredScott decision; and Illinois amended its Constitution in 1862 to add aNegro exclusion provision.One very interesting aspect of Lincoln Über Alles is Emison’sdiscussion of the preponderance of “German Forty-Eighters” in theLincoln administration and at the upper levels of his army. These menwere German immigrants who participated in an 1848 European politicalrevolt that advocated highly centralized government, despised state’srights, and believed that citizens needed to subordinate theirpersonal interests to the state. “Many Forty-Eighters were Marxists;some considered themselves communists. One of the Forty-Eighters wasMarx’s own brother-in-law . . . the Forty-Eighters saw themselves asinternational agents of change.”One of the more prominent German immigrants in the Lincolnadministration was Francis Lieber, who Lincoln employed to write themilitary code for the U.S. Army, which was known as the “Lieber Code.”Another was General Franz Sigel, and officer in the Prussian army whofled Europe and became a Union army general who gained notoriety forhis defeat in the Battle of New Market at the hands of VMI cadets.Sigel apparently believed he would teach the sons of Virginia,including a descendant of Thomas Jefferson’s who was killed in thebattle, what it meant to be an American. Emison describes numerousother German “revolutionaries” who were given important commands inLincoln’s army.A great many German immigrants settled in the Midwest and wereinstrumental in Lincoln’s nomination and election. Abe recognizedthis, and purchased several German-language newspapers in order tobolster his German immigrant support. Emison makes a very persuasivecase that it was German immigrants who “put him over the top” in sixkey states (Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin) inthe 1860 election. This perhaps explains why so many prominentGermans, some of whom barely spoke English, were commissioned ascolonels, majors, or generals in Lincoln’s army.Emison views Lincoln’s relevance to modern America very differentlythan Mario Cuomo and Harold Holzer, authors of Why Lincoln Matters:Today More Than Ever. Cuomo and Holzer celebrate the fact that Lincolnhas long been the image/poster boy of America. In a textbook exampleof the kind of childish simplemindedness that Emison refers to, Holzerhas even said that “everything good” in all of American history since1865 is due to Abraham Lincoln.Emison agrees that Lincoln’s influence is tremendous, but writes that“America is haunted by Lincoln’s blood lust for a coercive, dominant,unitary, unaccountable, debt-laden central government” whose principlefunction is “the plunder of society and the redistribution of wealthto the politically privileged elite [like the Cuomo family] and theircollection of political sycophants [like Lincoln cultists] who helpkeep them in power.” In this regard, “the two major parties havebecome the party of Lincoln, each a metastatic twin of the other.”Abraham Lincoln “opened the door to the Leviathan central state thatmandates, manipulates, and regulates virtually every aspect of life inAmerica and seeks unilateral hegemony around the globe.”November 12, 2009Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics atLoyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; LincolnUnmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe and HowCapitalism Saved America. His latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: HowJefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What ItMeans for America Today.Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole orin part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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