Results of Civil War:

LINCOLN LEFT NO PLAN OR EXIT STRATEGY AT WAR'S END: WHAT HAPPENED AND WHAT WAS DONE- RECONSTRUCTION!

President "Staggering" Johnson who took over after Lincoln, tried to block emancipation in his home state and keep the states slaves AFTER the war. He despised blacks, tried to get out of Lincoln's inauguration, some believe he was the contact in the White House that was to put a letter on Lincoln's desk after Lee's victory in Gettysburgh setting terms for the end of the war. ( Since there was no Lee victory, we'll never know).

To acknowledge Johnson however means having to discuss THE REALITY of America after the Civil War. Not idealistic promises BUT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED.

The first sign of trouble was probably that Johnson refused to mourn Lincoln, refused to lead the nation in mourning him, AND MADE NO COMMENT ABOUT HIS DEATH.

I think it's time to bring up the Reconstruction in a new thread. The true litmus test of what was fought for.

What really happened after the war Lincoln supporters don't like to mention. "Pay no attention to the results....."

Johnson surprised Mr. Lincoln himself when he asked if his presence was necessary for the inauguration; "This Johnson is a queer man," Mr. Lincoln told Shelby M. Cullom.1

The public was also surprised when a sick Johnson fortified himself with liquor in order to prepare for his swearing-in as Vice President on March 5, 1865. His subsequent speech in the Senate chamber was a strange humiliation of himself and everyone else present. "I am a-goin' for to tell you here to-day; yes, I'm a-goin for to tell you all, that I'm a plebian! I glory in it; I am a plebian! The people—yes, the people of the United States have made me what I am; and I am a-goin' for to tell you here to-day—yes, to-day, in this place—that the people are everything."
Frederick Douglass later contended that Johnson revealed another aspect of his character that day: "On this inauguration day, while waiting for the opening of the ceremonies, I made a discovery in regard to the vice president—Andrew Johnson. There are moments in the lives of most men, when the doors of their souls are open, and unconsciously to themselves, their true characters may be read by the observant eye. It was at such an instant I caught a glimpse of the real nature of this man, which all subsequent developments proved true. I was standing in the crowd by the side of Mrs. Thomas J. Dorsey, when Mr. Lincoln touched Mr. Johnson, and pointed me out to him. The first expression which came to his face, and which I think was the true index of his heart, was one of bitter contempt and aversion.
Johnson was unique among Southerner senators at the outbreak of the war in retaining his seat rather than supporting the Confederacy. He supported emancipation, but opposed the application of the Emancipation Proclamation to Tennessee and opposed the extension of rights and assistance to blacks after the war.

Obstinate and opinionated, insecure and class-conscious, well-dressed but frequently ill-tempered, Johnson as President quarreled with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and with Congress over Reconstruction and the Tenure of Office Act. He was impeached on February 24, 1868. Conviction failed by one vote—in part because of the weakness of the case and in part because of opposition to Senator Benjamin Wade succeeding Johnson as President.
Although Johnson waited patiently to occupy the presidential quarters, his failure to pay the customary acts of condolence infuriated Mrs. Lincoln, who was sensitive to any slight of her husband or herself . She later wrote that "My own intense misery, has been augmented by the same thought—that, that miserable inebriate Johnson, had cognizance of my husband's death..
http://www.mrlincolnswhitehouse.org/inside.asp?ID=91&subjectID=2

The answer to the question posed in the title of this article is: No. 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 20^th 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 19^th 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 20^th-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.

April 29, 2008

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, (Three Rivers Press/Random House). His latest book is Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe (Crown Forum/Random House).

Critics decided they "didn't give a damn" on Wednesday after the world premier of a new musical version of the American Civil War epic "Gone With the Wind."

http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSHAR36168520080423?rpc=401&feedType=RSS&feedName=oddlyEnoughNews&rpc=401

"Lincoln is theology, not historiology. He is a faith, he is a church, he is a religion, and he has his own priests and acolytes, most of whom have a vested interest in [him] and who are passionately opposed to anybody telling the truth about him."

~ Lerone Bennett, Jr.,
Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, p. 114

The gigantic collection of myths, lies, and distortions that comprise The Legend of Abraham Lincoln is the ideological cornerstone of the American warfare/welfare state. It has been invoked for generations to make the argument that if the policies of the U.S. government are not "the will of God," then at least they are the will of "Father Abraham." Moreover, this legend – this false history of America – did not arise spontaneously. It was invented and nurtured by an intergenerational army of court historians who, as Murray Rothbard once said, are absolutely indispensable to any government empire. All states, said Rothbard, depend for their existence on a series of myths about their benevolence, heroism, greatness, or even divinity.

Since very few Americans have spent much time educating themselves about Lincoln and nineteenth-century American history (much of which has been falsified anyway), it is easy for members of what I call the Lincoln Cult to dismiss all literary criticisms of Lincoln as the work of "neo-Confederates," their code-word for "defenders of slavery" (as though anyone in America today would defend slavery), or "racist." Although they label themselves "Lincoln scholars," the last thing they want is honest scholarship when it comes to the subject of Lincoln and his war. They are, at best, cover-up artists and pandering court historians who feed at the government grant trough, "consuming" tax dollars to support their "research" and their overblown university positions.

But they’ve got a big problem (more than one, actually). The big problem is the publication of a 662-page book by the distinguished African-American author Lerone Bennett, Jr. entitled Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. The book was originally published in 1999 and was recently released in paperback. Bennett was a longtime managing editor of Ebony magazine and, among other things, the author of a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., What Manner of Man. Although several "Civil War" publications have labeled yours truly as the preeminent Lincoln critic of our day, Forced into Glory is a much more powerful critique of Dishonest Abe than anything I have ever written. The Lincoln Cult, which would not dare to personally attack a serious African-American scholar like Bennett, has largely ignored the book instead.

When they are not ignoring the book and hoping that it (and the author) would just go away, they "have responded by recycling the traditional Lincoln apologies," writes Bennett. (Being a "Lincoln scholar" means taking some of Lincoln’s unsavory words and deeds, such as his lifelong support for the policy of "colonization" or deportation of all black people in America, and dreaming up excuses for why he was supposedly "forced" into taking that position).

Bennett argues that "academics and [the] media had been hiding the truth for 135 years and that Lincoln was not the great emancipator or the small emancipator or the economy-sized emancipator." He presents chapter and verse of how the Emancipation Proclamation freed no one, since it only applied to "rebel territory," and specifically exempted all the slave-owning/Union-controlled border states and other areas that were occupied by the U.S. army at the time. He quotes James Randall, who has been called the "greatest Lincoln scholar of all time," as writing, "the Proclamation itself did not free a single slave." It was the Thirteenth Amendment that finally ended slavery, he correctly notes, and Lincoln was dragged into accepting it kicking and screaming all the way.

So what was the purpose of the Proclamation? Primarily to placate the genuine abolitionists with a political sleight of hand, says Bennett, and to deter Britain and France from formally recognizing the Confederate government.

Since so few Americans are aware of these facts, Bennett correctly concludes that "the level of ignorance on Abraham Lincoln and race in the United States is a scandal and a rebuke to schools, museums, media, and scholars." This of course is no accident; it’s exactly the way the state wants it to be.

Bennett is especially critical of how the Lincoln Cult uses black historical figures as pawns in its defense of "Father Abraham." For example, he contends that there is no way to get around the fact that Lincoln was a lifelong white supremacist, loudly proclaiming that he was opposed to "making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people." He said far worse things than that, as Bennett documents. The typical response of the Lincoln Cult is to "find a slave or a former slave or, better, a Black officeholder to say that he adores Lincoln and doesn’t care what people say . . . "

Why, one would ask, is such a distinguished African-American journalist so incensed over the Lincoln myth? It is because of his twenty years of painstaking research, resulting in this book, that proves, among other things, what a vulgar racist Lincoln was. Bennett provides quote after quote of Lincoln’s own words, habitually using the N-word so much that people in Washington thought he was weirdly consumed by his racism. Bennett tells of first-hand accounts by some of Lincoln’s generals of how they left a meeting with him during a crisis in the war in which the president spent most of his time in the meeting telling off-color "darkie" jokes (Lincoln’s language). General James Wadsworth, for example, was "shocked by the racism in the Lincoln White House."

I will not repeat any of this language here; suffice it to say that Bennett has scoured Lincoln’s Collected Works and demonstrates that he used the N-word about as frequently as your modern-day "gangster rapper" does. Bennett also describes how this has all been covered up by the Lincoln Cult. Despite the hundreds of examples that are right there in black and white in Lincoln’s own speeches, "Carl Sandburg, who spent decades researching Lincoln’s life, denied that Lincoln used the N-word." And "Harold Holzer, who edited a collection of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, was surprised that Lincoln used the N-word twice in the first Lincoln-Douglas debate." (Lincoln personally edited the transcripts of the debates, so there is no question that he said these things).

Bennett is also incensed by the fact that Lincoln never opposed Southern slavery but only its extension into the territories. Indeed, in his first inaugural address he pledged his everlasting support for Southern slavery by making it explicitly constitutional with the "Corwin Amendment," that had already passed the U.S. House and Senate.

The reason Lincoln gave for opposing the extension of slavery was, in Lincoln’s own words, that he didn’t want the territories to "become an asylum for slavery and [N-word, plural]." He also said that he didn’t want the white worker to be "elbowed from his plow or his anvil by slave [N-word, plural]." It was all economics and politics, in other words, and not humanitarianism or the desire to "pick the low-hanging fruit" by stopping slavery in the territories.

Lincoln not only talked like a white supremacist; as a state legislator he supported myriad laws and regulations in Illinois that deprived the small number of free blacks in the state of any semblance of citizenship. Bennett gives us chapter and verse of how he supported a law that "kept pure from contamination" the electoral franchise by prohibiting "the admission of colored votes." He supported the notorious Illinois Black Codes that made it all but impossible for free blacks to earn a living; and he was a "manager" of the Illinois Colonization Society that sought to use state tax revenues to deport blacks out of the state. He also supported the 1848 amendment to the Illinois constitution that prohibited the immigration of blacks into the state. As president, he vigorously supported the Fugitive Slave Act that forced Northerners to hunt down runaway slaves and return them to slavery for a bounty. Lincoln knew that this law had led to the kidnapping of an untold number of free blacks who were thrown into slavery.

It is understandable how a man like Lerone Bennett, Jr., armed with this knowledge, would begin to question The Legend of Abraham Lincoln.

Perhaps the most important reason why Bennett was motivated to spend twenty years of his life (and longer) researching this book is his knowledge of Lincoln’s obsession with "colonization" or deportation. This was what Bennett calls Lincoln’s "white dream," his dream of simply deporting all the black people out of America.

Bennett tells the story of how, near the end of his life, Lincoln was still "dreaming." He asked General Benjamin Butler to estimate for him how many ships it would take, after the war was over, do deport all black people from America. "Beast" Butler came back to him with an answer he didn’t want to hear: There was no way that his dream could be accomplished with the sailing fleet that was currently at hand.

Bennett details Lincoln’s obsession with "colonization" by describing how he proposed to Congress compensated emancipation of slaves in Washington, D.C. and the border states, accompanied by immediate deportation. (Lincoln used the word "deportation" as much or more than "colonization"). Thus, the purpose was not freedom for the slaves so much as it was to rid America of all blacks. It’s a good bet that you were never taught this in school; read Forced into Glory and improve your knowledge of the real Lincoln (and of the excuse-making Lincoln Cult that has mis-educated generations of Americans).

Many Americans are aware that Lincoln once said something about America being "the last best hope" on earth. Numerous books have been written about Lincoln with those words in the title. But the context of these words reveals Lincoln’s darkest side, not his "greatness," as the Lincoln Cult maintains. The context is that these words were included in Lincoln’s plea to Congress to "colonize" any freed slaves. He did not believe a multiracial society was desirable and, as Bennett says, seemed "terrified" at the prospect of inter-racial marriage. Colonization was what he meant by "the last best hope" for America, as Bennett shows. "In support of the White Dream," he writes, "Lincoln mobilized the State Department, the Interior Department, the Treasury Department, and the Smithsonian Institution . . . . Lincoln’s ethnic cleansing plan was the official policy of the American government." Perhaps this is a possible reason why the same government did next to nothing for the ex-slaves after the war.

Bennett doesn’t buy into the Lincoln Cult’s tall tale that he "evolved" during the war and embraced equality. He quotes the man Lincoln had put in charge of "Negro emigration" as saying that Lincoln "remained a colonizationist and racist until his death."

The real heroes, in Bennett’s view, are the genuine abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Lincoln was never an abolitionist per se and, in fact distanced himself and ridiculed them whenever possible.

January 12, 2008