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"Every other country in the world got rid of slavery without a
civil war . . . . How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000
Americans when the hatred lingered for 100 years."
~ Ron Paul to Tim Russert on "Meet the
Press" in 2007
The new Steven Spielberg movie about Lincoln is entirely based on a
fiction, to use a mild term. As longtime Ebony magazine executive
editor Lerone Bennett, Jr. explained in his book,
Forced into Glory: Abraham
Lincoln’s White Dream: "There
is a pleasant fiction that Lincoln . . . became a flaming advocate of the
[Thirteenth] amendment and used the power of his office to buy votes to
ensure its passage. There is no evidence, as David H. Donald has noted, to
support that fiction". (Emphasis added).
In fact, as Bennett shows, it was the genuine abolitionists in
Congress who forced Lincoln to support the Thirteenth Amendment that
ended slavery, something he refused to do for fifty-four of his fifty-six
years. The truth, in other words, is precisely the opposite of the story told
in Spielberg’s Lincoln movie, which is based on the book Team of Rivals by
the confessed plagiarist/court historian Doris Kearns-Goodwin. (My LRC review
of her book was entitled "A Plagiarist’s Contribution to Lincoln
Idolatry").
And who is David H. Donald, cited by Bennett as his authority? He is a
longtime Harvard University historian, Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln
biographer, and the preeminent mainstream Lincoln scholar of our time. One
would think that Goodwin would have considered his work, being a Harvard
graduate (in political science) herself.
The theme of the Spielberg movie is the subtitle of Goodwin’s
book: "The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln." Nothing gets a
leftist’s legs tingling more than someone who is very, very good at the
methods of political theft, plunder, subterfuge, and bullying. Goodwin the
court historian has devoted her life to writing hagiographies of the worst of
the worst political bullies – FDR, Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys, and
Lincoln. (It was her book on the Kennedys that got her in trouble and forced
her to admit plagiarizing dozens of paragraphs, and paying a six-figure sum
to the victim of her plagiarism. That got her kicked off the Pulitzer prize
committee and PBS, but only for a very short while).
Lincoln’s "political genius" is grossly overblown in
Goodwin’s book. In addition the book, like virtually all other books on
the subject, completely misses the point. If Lincoln was such a political
genius, he should have used his "genius" to end slavery in the way
the British, French, Spaniards, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and all the Northern
states in the U.S. did in the nineteenth century, namely, peacefully.
Instead, the slaves were used as political pawns in a war that resulted in
the death of some 800,000 Americans according to the latest, revised
estimates of Civil War deaths that has come to be accepted by the history
profession. To this number should be added tens of thousands of Southern
civilians. Standardizing for today’s population, that would be the
equivalent of more than 8 million dead Americans, with more than double that
number maimed for life.
Lincoln the "political genius" thanked his naval commander Gustavus Fox for helping him maneuver/trick the
Confederates into firing on Fort Sumter, where no one was hurt let alone
killed. This, Lincoln believed, gave him the "right" to ignore the
constitutional definition of treason (Article 3, Section 3) as levying war
upon the states, and levy war upon the (Southern) states in order to
"prove," once and for all, that the American union was NOT
voluntary, and NOT based on the principle of consent of the governed, as
Jefferson declared in the Declaration of Independence. The main purpose of
the war was to destroy the Jeffersonian states’ rights vision of
government and replace it with the Hamiltonian vision of a highly
centralized, dictatorial executive state that would pursue a domestic policy
of mercantilism (the Federalist/Whig/Republican Party platform of
protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare, and a national bank to finance it
all) and a foreign policy of empire and imperialism. The purpose – and
result – of the war was to consolidate all political power in
Washington, D.C. and to render all states, North and South, as mere
appendages of their masters and overseers in Washington. This of course is
exactly what happened after the war and it happened by design, not
coincidence.
A real statesman, as opposed to a monstrous, egomaniacal patronage
politician like Abe Lincoln, would have made use of the decades-long world
history of peaceful emancipation if his main purpose was to end
slavery. Of course, Lincoln always insisted that that was in no way his
purpose. He stated this very clearly in his first inaugural address, in which
he even supported the proposed Corwin Amendment to the Constitution, which
would have prohibited the federal government from EVER interfering with
Southern slavery. He – and the U.S. Congress – declared
repeatedly that the purpose of the war was to "save the union," but
of course the war destroyed the voluntary union of the founding
fathers.
Jim Powell’s book, Greatest Emancipations: How the
West Ended Slavery,
provides chapter and verse of how real statesmen of the world, in sharp
contrast to Lincoln, ended slavery without resorting to waging total war on
their own citizens. Among the tactics employed by the British, French,
Spanish, Dutch, Danes, and others were slave rebellions, abolitionist
campaigns to gain public support for emancipation, election of anti-slavery
politicians, encouragement and assistance of runaway slaves, raising private
funds to purchase the freedom of slaves, and the use of tax dollars to buy
the freedom of slaves. There were some incidents of violence, but nothing
remotely approaching the violence of a war that ended up killing 800,000
Americans.
The story of how Great Britain ended slavery peacefully is the
highlight of Powell’s book. There were once as many as 15,000 slaves in
England herself, along with hundreds of thousands throughout the British
empire. The British abolitionists combined religion, politics, publicity
campaigns, legislation, and the legal system to end slavery there just two
decades prior to the American "Civil War."
Great credit is given to the British statesman and member of the House
of Commons, William Wilberforce. After organizing an educational campaign to
convince British society that slavery was immoral and barbaric, Wilberforce
succeeded in getting a Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, and within seven
years some 800,000 slaves were freed. Tax dollars were used to purchase the
freedom of the slaves, which eliminated the only source of opposition to
emancipation, wealthy slave owners. It was expensive, but as Powell notes, nothing
in the world is more expensive than war.
Powell also writes of how there was tremendous opposition to ending
slavery in the Northern states in the U.S, especially Connecticut, Maine, New
Hampshire, and Rhode Island, where violent mobs wrecked abolitionist printing
presses; a New Hampshire school that educated black children was dragged into
a swamp by oxen; free blacks were prohibited from residing in Illinois, Iowa,
Indiana, and Oregon; abolitionist "agitators" in Northern states
were whipped; and orphanages for black children were burned to the ground in
Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, Northern state abolitionists persevered and ended
slavery there peacefully. There were no violent and enormously destructive
"wars of emancipation" in New York or New England.
Cuba, Brazil, and the Congo also ended slavery peacefully in the
nineteenth century by real statesmen in those countries. But not in the
United States. "Some people have objected that the United States
couldn’t have bought the freedom of all the slaves, because that would
have cost too much," Powell writes. "But buying the freedom of the
slaves was not more expensive than war. Nothing is more costly than
war!" In fact, the North’s financial costs of war alone would have
been enough to purchase the freedom of all the slaves, and then ended slavery
legally and constitutionally.
It is a myth that Lincoln toiled mightily in his last days to get a
reluctant Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, as portrayed in the
Spielberg movie. What he did spend his time on was micromanaging the waging
of total war on Southern civilians, who he always considered to be American
citizens, since he denied the legitimacy of secession. More importantly, as
documented by historians Phillip Magness and Sebastion Page in their book, Colonization After Emancipation,
Lincoln spent many long days at the end of his life communicating with
foreign governments and plotting with William Seward, among others, to
"colonize" all of "the Africans," as he called them, out
of the United States once the war was over.
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