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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee · Joined: 25 May 2003

200 for Abe the Warmonger

February 11, 2009 in News by James Bovard | 8 comments

Thursday is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln. I would be perplexed by the Lincoln cult if I thought the prime Lincoln idolizers gave a damn about individual liberty. Lincoln is lionized not because he saved self-government, but primarily because he sanctified and vastly extended Leviathan.

Here is a riff I did on Lincoln for a National Review Online symposium on Lincoln 8 years ago, and a snippet on Abe from Attention Deficit Democracy

James Bovard, February 2001:

How can the same people who vigorously support indicting Serbian leaders for war crimes also claim that Lincoln was a great American president?

Lincoln bears ultimate responsibility for how the North chose to fight the Civil War. The attitude of some of the Northern commanders paralleled those of Bosnian Serb commanders more than many contemporary Americans would like to admit.

In a September 17, 1863, letter to the War Department, Gen. William Sherman wrote: �The United States has the right, and � the � power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle � if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.� President Lincoln liked Sherman�s letter so much that he declared that it should be published.

On June 21, 1864, before his bloody March to the Sea, Sherman wrote to the secretary of war: �There is a class of people [in the South] � men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.� How would U.N. war crimes investigators react if Slobodan Milosevic had made this comment about ethnic Albanians?

On October 9, 1864, Sherman wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant: �Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.� Sherman lived up to his boast � and left a swath of devastation and misery that helped plunge the South into decades of poverty.

General Grant used similar tactics in Virginia, ordering his troops �make all the valleys south of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad a desert as high up as possible.�

The Scorched Earth tactics the North used made life far more difficult for both white and black survivors of the Civil War.

Lincoln was blinded by his belief in the righteousness of federal supremacy. The abuses and tyranny that he authorized set legions of precedents that subverted the vision of government the Founding Fathers bequeathed to America.

****From Attention Deficit Democracy (Palgrave, 2006):

The more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans� rights. President Abraham Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth century presidents�and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Lincoln swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom or self-rule. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly shut down hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed �that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.�

***

Lysander Spooner, a Massachusetts abolitionist, ridiculed President Lincoln�s claim that the Civil War was fought to preserve a �government by consent.� Spooner observed, �The only idea . . . ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this�that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.�

http://www.antiwar.com/blog/

On the other hand · Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Location: I walk along the avenue

Well, there's no law saying every American has to approve of the way Lincoln prosecuted the war.

H.L. Mencken on the Gettysburg Address...

Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee · Joined: 25 May 2003

H.L. Mencken was kind of a far right wing type as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.L._Mencken

mises · Joined: 05 Nov 2007 Location: retired

On the other hand · Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Location: I walk along the avenue

Ya-ta Boy · Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: Established in 1994

ontheway · Posted: Sat Feb 14, 2009 7:43 am Post subject:

Hater Depot · Joined: 29 Mar 2005

[quote="The OP"]Here is a riff I did on Lincoln for a National Review Online symposium[quote]

So, I guess mainstream conservatives hate Lincoln too...

catman · Joined: 18 Jul 2004

lewrockwell.com also bashes the "cult of Lincoln" quite often.

They also try to downplay the significance of slavery.

On the other hand · Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Location: I walk along the avenue

Ontheway wrote about Mencken:

Ya-ta Boy · Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: Established in 1994

There is a rather famous story about one guy who was deported by Lincoln. It's full of black comedy.

Clement Vallandigham was a Copperhead from Ohio, which means he was a Democrat who supported the Confederacy. As a newspaper editor and member of the US House, he was something of a celebrity and a leading figure in the Copperhead faction (venomous attacks without warning, unlike a rattlesnake).

Soon after General Burnside issued a General Order against speaking in sympathy with the enemy, Vallandigham made a public speech in which he said the aim of the war was to free the blacks and enslave the whites and that 'King Abraham' should be removed from office.

He was arrested and sentenced to military prison but Lincoln intervened and had him deported to the Confederacy. From there he slipped out and went to Canada and ran for governor of Ohio from Canada, but lost.

He slipped back into the US and ran on the same ticket with McClellan in 1864. The authorities ignored him.

After the war, he was a lawyer. He somehow managed to shoot himself while demonstrating how his client was innocent. He died of his wounds.

Kuros · Joined: 27 Apr 2004

The stakes were enormously high in that war, and Lincoln did what he had to do. It wasn't always pretty.

But did not Lincoln advance liberty? His war freed the slaves and shattered the slavocracy.

If America is, or ever was, one of the preeminent examples of libertarianism in practice, is it not so because Lincoln chose to defend it?

Certainly he suspended Habeas Corpus, but the Suspension Clause (Art. 1 Sec. 9 Clause 2) allowed him to do so in times of insurrection. It wasn't until after the war that the Supreme Court gave its first test on whether there was an insurrection, which it believed could only be met when the Supreme Court itself no longer functioned.

Ya-ta Boy · Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: Established in 1994

Ya-ta Boy · Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: Established in 1994

Some good books on Lincoln's speeches:

1) Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. Garry Wills

2) Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President. Harold Holzer. (Winner of the Lincoln Prize)

3) Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural. Ronald C. White, Jr. (a New York Times Notable Book)

Cooper Union is especially good for showing the power of Lincoln's legal reasoning. The other two show his rhetorical brilliance and artistry with words.

Kuros · Joined: 27 Apr 2004