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The American Mythology
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Land of the Free, Home of the Brave indeed. :rolleyes:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo32.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo32.html
Lincoln’s 'Second American Revolution'
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
James McPherson and other prominent historians sometimes speak of Abraham Lincoln’s "Second American Revolution" (the title of one of McPherson’s books). They are correct to portray Lincoln as a revolutionary, but the reasons they give for this are incomplete or inaccurate. He led a revolution all right, but it was an anti-American revolution against virtually all the founding principles of this country. It was a revolution against: free-market capitalism (Lincoln was a devoted mercantilist); the principles of the Declaration of Independence; the Constitution; the system of states’ rights and federalism that was created by the founders; and the prohibitions against waging war on civilians embodied in the international law of the time as well as the canons of Western Christian civilization.
LINCOLN VERSUS THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
One of the most absurd Lincoln myths is that he was devoted to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Harry Jaffa and his followers have perpetuated this myth for decades based on their own stylized interpretations of a few lines of Lincoln’s speeches. In reality, however, Lincoln’s words and actions thoroughly and completely repudiated every one of the main principles of the Declaration.
The Jaffaites usually dwell only on the "all men are created equal" line of the Declaration and ignore the rest of it. Not only is this selective reading of the Declaration intellectually dishonest; it is wrong. Lincoln denounced racial equality over and over again throughout his entire adult life. He did not believe that all men are created equal. In his August 21, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas he said "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races" and that "I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary."
"Anything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the Negro," he said in the same speech, "is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse."
"Free them and make them politically and socially our equals?" he continued. "My own feelings will not admit of this . . . . We cannot, then make them equals."
In his book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett, Jr. writes that "On at least fourteen occasions between 1854 and 1860 Lincoln said unambiguously that he believed the Negro race was inferior to the White race. In Galesburg, he referred to ‘the inferior races.’ Who were ‘the inferior races’? African Americans, he said, Mexicans, who he called mongrels . . ."
For his entire adult life Lincoln advocated deporting all the black people in America to Africa, Central America, or Haiti ("colonization") and was a member of the American Colonization Society. "There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children," he said in his 1852 eulogy to Henry Clay. Ten years later, in his December 1, 1862 message to Congress, he said, "I cannot make it better known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization." He held these views until the day he died. As Joe Sobran has remarked, Lincoln’s position was that black people could be "equal" all right, but not here in the U.S.
Lincoln supported the Illinois constitution, which prohibited the emigration of black people into the state; he supported the Illinois Black Codes, which deprived free blacks of any semblance of citizenship or economic freedom; in his First Inaugural he supported a proposed constitutional amendment that would have prohibited the federal government from interfering with slavery; and he was a staunch supporter of the Fugitive Slave Act which coerced the Northern states to round up runaway slaves and return them to slavery. He did denounce slavery in principle, as did most political, military, and business leaders of the era. But as historian Robert Johannsen explained in Lincoln, the South, and Slavery, his position was opposition to slavery in principle, toleration of it in practice, and a vigorous hostility to the abolition movement. The notion that Lincoln was a champion of equality is an Orwellian absurdity.
LINCOLN’S WAR AGAINST CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED
A most important principle of the Declaration is the idea that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. In 1861 nearly every opinion maker in the country, North and South, held this as a cherished belief and, as such, thought that using military force to coerce any state to remain in the Union would be an act of tyranny and a repudiation of the Declaration of Independence. As the Bangor Daily Union wrote on November 13, 1860, the Union "depends for its continuance on the free consent and will of the sovereign people of each state, and when that consent and will is withdrawn on either part, their Union is gone." A state coerced into the Union is "a subject province" and may never be "a co-equal member of the American Union."
The New York Journal of Commerce editorialized on January 12, 1861, that opposing secession changes the nature of government "from a voluntary one, in which the people are sovereigns, to a despotism where one part of the people are slaves" to the federal government. This was the view of the majority of Northern newspapers at the time according to Howard Cecil Perkins, editor of the two-volume book, Northern Editorials on Secession.
After Thomas Jefferson was elected president the New England Federalists plotted for over a decade to secede from the Union. Their efforts culminated in the Hartford Secession Convention of 1814, where they decided against secession. The movement was led by George Washington’s Secretary of War and Secretary of State, Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering. All during this time, no one questioned the right of any state to secede because this was the Revolutionary generation, and they revered the Jeffersonian dictum that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Senator Pickering announced that, because of this belief, secession was "the" principle of the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was, after all, a Declaration of Secession from the British Empire. Lincoln’s war destroyed this fundamental tenet of the Declaration.
There was also a vigorous secession movement in the "middle states" – Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York – in the late 1850s, as described by William C. Wright in The Secession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States.
As H. L. Mencken sagely pointed out in an essay on Abraham Lincoln, it was the Confederates who were fighting for consent of the governed; they no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C., and Lincoln waged war to deprive them of that consent. And it is important to keep in mind that neither Lincoln nor the U.S. Congress ever said that they were launching and invasion of the Southern states for any reason having to do with Southern slavery. They did not launch an invasion because the slaves were deprived of consent. Lincoln declared his purpose in the war in his famous August 22, 1862 letter to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, which was published in the Tribune: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, 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."
Of course, Lincoln only "saved" the Union geographically; he destroyed the Union philosophically by destroying its voluntary nature. His version of "saving the Union" is analogous to the situation where a woman leaves her husband because he has been abusing her. The husband drags his wife back into the home, chains her to the bedpost, and threatens to shoot her and burn the house down with her in it if she leaves again. The Union has been restored! But what kind of Union is it? It is the kind of coercive Union that has existed in the U.S. since 1865.
The U.S. Congress also declared on July 22, 1861 that the purpose of the war was to destroy the secession movement (i.e., the voluntary Union) and nothing more:Resolved: . . . That this war is not prosecuted upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and all laws made in pursuance thereof and to preserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several states unimpaired; and that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease.
Thus, the official purpose of the war, as explained to the entire world by Lincoln and the U.S. Congress, was not to interfere with "the rights or established institutions" of the Southern states, i.e., slavery, but to "preserve the Union." This was a clever euphemism for "destroying once and for all the system of states’ rights and federalism designed by the founding fathers." And as will be seen shortly, Lincoln eviscerated constitutional liberties in the North, which permanently weakened the constitutional protections of liberty for all Americans. . . . .
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Comments
Which is precisely why he is more than qualified to explain how the so-called "Civil War" was motivated by economics rather than slavery.
Also why he isn't subject to peer review or loss of tenure for writing fiction.
I will be waiting for you to dispute any of the facts laid out above such as how the U.S. Army has quite a habit of MURDERING Americans and stealing their property.