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I am humble
Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate
for the legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old
woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank . . . in favor of the
internal improvements system and a high protective tariff.
~ Abraham
Lincoln, 1832
Lincoln and the
Republicans “intended to enact
a high protective tariff that mothered monopoly, to pass a homestead law that
invited speculators to loot the public domain, and to subsidize a
transcontinental railroad that afforded infinite opportunities for jobbery.
~ David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered
[T]he
Thirty-seventh Congress [1861-63] ushered in four decades of
neo-Hamiltonianism: government for the benefit of the privileged few.
~ Leondard Curry,
Blueprint for Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First
Civil War Congress
The very first
public statement that Abraham Lincoln made after being inaugurated as the
sixteenth president was an ironclad defense of slavery: “I have
no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of
slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do
so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He
then quoted the Republican Party platform of 1860 that said essentially the
same thing; pledged his support for the Fugitive Slave Clause of the
Constitution “with no mental reservations”; and
supported a proposed constitutional amendment (the “Corwin
Amendment”) that
would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering
with slavery. In fact, it was Lincoln who instructed William Seward to see
that the Corwin Amendment made it through the U.S. Senate, which it did (and
the House of Representatives as well).
In the same
speech, Lincoln promised a military invasion and “bloodshed” in
any state that refused to collect the federal tariff on imports, which had
just been more than doubled two days before his inauguration. “[T]here
needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be
forced upon the national authority,” he continued.
Thus, mere minutes after taking an oath to protect the constitutional
liberties of American citizens, Abraham Lincoln threatened to orchestrate the
murder of many of those same citizens.
What on earth was
he talking about? What would cause a president to wage war on his own
citizens whose liberties he had just pledged to protect? Lincoln explained in
the very next sentence: “The power
confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and
places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts;
but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no
invasion, no using force against or among the people anywhere”
(emphasis added). He promised to murder American citizens over tax
collection.
This was
necessary, in the mind of Lincoln, if he was to deliver on what his party
elected him to do, as stated in the quotations at the beginning of this
article: to enact a high protective tariff, give away public lands mostly to
mining, railroad, and timber corporations, and lavish the railroad
corporations, among others, with corporate welfare. This was the old “American
System” of
Alexander Hamilton, which was endorsed for decades by Lincoln’s Whig
Party, and finally the Republicans. The overwhelming majority of Southern
congressmen had for decades been ardently opposed to all of these things. But
now, they must be forced into it, or so Lincoln thought, for the sake of
revenue collection. (At the time, the tariff on imports accounted for more
than 90 percent of all federal tax revenues.)
Southerners (as
well as Northerners) needed to be forced to pay for the empire of corporate
welfare that the Republican Party hoped would keep it in power for decades.
(It did: the Republican Party essentially monopolized national politics for
the next half century.) That is why there had to be a war, in the minds of
Lincoln and the Republican Party. They were perfectly willing to enshrine
slavery explicitly in the Constitution, but there would be no compromise over
collecting the newly doubled tariff.
This is also why
opposition to war in the North had to be brutally repressed, as it was, and a
myth of “national
unity”
invented. Much of the story of how the Republican Party engaged in a
Stalinist spasm of political repression is told by historian William Marvel
in his book, Lincoln’s
Darkest Year: The War in 1862, which
I highly recommend. (Marvel is a renowned Lincoln scholar, winner of the
Lincoln Prize and the Douglas Southall Freeman Award.)
The Republican
Party’s
first act of political chicanery was to begin kicking out of the U.S. Senate
men like Democratic Senator Jesse Bright of Indiana, who “lacked
enthusiasm for Abraham Lincoln’s war against the
South,”
writes Marvel. Using the excuse that, in the years before the war, Senator
Bright “had
known and admired [fellow Senator] Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, the
Republican Party accused Senator Bright, one of the most senior members of
the Senate, of “retroactive treason” and
expelled him with a bare two-thirds majority vote.
The Congressional
Globe propagandized that “only a traitor
would advocate peace,” and newspapers
all over the North that were openly affiliated with the Republican Party (as
was common during that period of time) quoted this statement. As for Northern
newspapers that did not support the waging of war on their fellow Americans,
the government had already begun to “squelch the most
effective . . . criticism by stopping distribution, seizing equipment, and
arresting publishers. Unionist mobs had collaborated in that suppression of
free speech during the summer of 1861, destroying the offices of antiwar
journals and attacking the editors.”
Even “Francis
Scott Key’s own
grandson understood how dangerous it had become to utter an unpopular opinion
in the Land of the Free,” Marvel
sarcastically writes. The grandson of the author of “The
Star Spangled Banner” was a Baltimore
newspaper editor who had been thrown into “the
bowels of a coastal fort” without any due
process for editorializing against the Lincoln administration’s
suppression of free speech.
“The
party that dominated the United States Senate intended to formalize the
concept that meaningful dissent [to the political agenda of the Republican
Party] amounted to treason.” After kicking
Senator Bright out of office the leaders of the “Grand
Ole Party” then “wished
to end their day early in order to prepare for a grand party that had
occupied Mary Lincoln’s attention for
some weeks.”
Marvel writes that White House employees quickly began calling Mrs. Lincoln “the
American Queen” who, according to one senator, appeared
at the party “looking like she was wearing a flower pot
on her head.” Many
of the generals, admirals, Supreme Court justices, and foreign counsels who
attended the party, writes Marvel, considered Lincoln to be “a
vulgar provincial lacking in either sincerity or statesmanlike qualities.”
Without bothering
to amend the Constitution, the Republican Party in 1861 invented a brand new
definition of “treason.”
Treason, to Lincoln and the Republican Party, meant opposition to them.
This was very different from the actual definition of treason in Article I,
Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution: “Treason against
the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or
in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort”
(emphasis added). As with all of the founding documents, “United
States” is in
the plural, signifying that the free and independent states (as they are
called in the Declaration of Independence) are united in forming a compact of
states for their own mutual benefit. The central government was to be their
agent.
Treason under the
Constitution consists of levying war against “them,” the
states. This of course is exactly what Lincoln and the Republican Party did.
Their war on the South was the very definition of treason under the U.S.
Constitution. Long before George Orwell’s
time, they distorted the meaning of the word to mean exactly the opposite of
what the founding fathers intended it to mean. As the perpetrators of treason
as defined by the Constitution, they accused their political opponents
– those who opposed the levying of war” on
the states – of treason.
Marvel writes
that on his very first day in office as Lincoln’s
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton “would exercise a
cool, dictatorial demeanor” as he commenced
to enforce the new definition of treason. The U.S. government was failing to
recruit enough soldiers for its war despite the fact that it was offering
enlistment “bounties” of as
much as $415. Despite the totalitarian crackdown on Northern antiwar
newspapers, there was still pervasive verbal opposition to the war in
Northern cities. Consequently, Stanton “unilaterally
abolished” that
freedom of speech on August 8, 1862, writes Marvel. Having enacted a policy
of military conscription, Stanton “appointed a
special judge advocate to deal with dissent and issued instructions for local
and federal law officers to imprison anyone who ‘may be
engaged, by act, speech, or writing, in discouraging volunteer enlistments,
or in any way giving aid and comfort to the enemy . . .’” The
vagueness of this order allowed the government to imprison anyone who said
anything negative about Lincoln, the Republican Party, or their war on fellow
citizens.
“With
renewed vigor,” writes Marvel, “U.S.
marshals of predominantly Republican pedigree started rounding up malcontents
almost all of them Democrats on the excuse that their vocal disagreement with
presidential policies discouraged men from volunteering.” Any
Northern newspaper writers who dared to criticize the “Grand
Ole Party” were
treated very roughly. “In August of 1861
. . . a mob of Granite State soldiers attacked the editors of a Democratic
Concord [New Hampshire] newspaper and destroyed their office.” “On
August 14 Dennis Mahony, the Irish editor of the Dubuque Herald, was
arrested by Iowa’s U.S. marshal, H.M. Hoxie a crony of
Republican governor Samuel Kirkwood . . . . Mahony had been preaching peace
for months . . .” “In
jail Mahony met David Sheward, his counterpart at the Constitution and
Union, of Fairfield, Iowa.” These men joined
in prison “the
editors of Illinois newspapers, some Illinois judges, and a few other
celebrity dissidents for the long journey to Washington,” where
they were thrown into “the Old Capitol
Prison.”
Apparently, administration critics from “The
Land of Lincoln” had to be imprisoned in Washington, D.C.
where they could be especially carefully watched.
Newspapers
affiliated with the Republican Party “crowed
over the administration’s latest assault
on free speech,” which speaks volumes about the rotten,
totalitarian mindset of the scoundrels who ran the Republican Party of the
1860s. Marvel writes of how “prominent
Democrats” all
throughout the North were jailed for such things as advising voters to vote
for peace candidates; laughing at a local “Home
Guard”
company; or making “saucy” comments
about Lincoln.
Even Democrats
running for Congress were imprisoned before election day, as was the case of
William J. Allen, a “peace Democrat
from southern Illinois” who “went
to jail in that mid-August orgy of repression because of opinions expressed
during a political campaign.” Allen was
running for reelection. Many of his fellow Democrats “were
not released [from one of Lincoln’s gulags] until
after the fall elections.” Some of them
languished in prison “until they
relinquished . . . the right to sue their arresting officers for false
imprisonment.” Thousands of Northern citizens “felt
the hand of some sheriff or provost marshal clutching their shoulders”
[figuratively speaking], writes Marvel.
Republican Party
thugs were not above beatings and murder of Northern civilians who
dissented from the “Grand Ole Party” line.
A group of Republican “volunteers in the
town of Troy [Kansas] severely beat a citizen whose political observations
they resented,” says Marvel. “Political
animosity led to the murder of another man in southeastern Missouri.” The
local Republican Party-affiliated newspaper editorialized in favor of the
murder, writing that the man “had no right to
be disloyal to the government” by advocating
peace, equating the Republican Party with “government.” The
paper also named other local citizens who would make for “acceptable
targets.” Such
were the origins of the “Grand Ole Party.”
All of this
occurred in just the first few months of the war. During the next several
years hundreds of thousands of Northern men would be enslaved by
conscription; hundreds of thousands of European mercenaries would be paid to
wage war on Americans from the Southern states; hundreds of opposition
newspapers would be shut down; a dissenting member of Congress, Clement
Vallandigham of Ohio, would be deported; hundreds of draft protesters in New
York City would be shot and killed in the streets by Union army soldiers; and
the entire Constitution would be ignored.
All of this “antidraft,
antiwar, antiadministration sentiment” led
the Republican Party to form “secret societies,”
writes Marvel, that would produce a deluge of pro-Republican propaganda for
years and years after the war was over. The “Union
League” was
one such society. One of the things the Republican Party propaganda machine
did was to manufacture the myth (i.e., lie) of “national
unity”
during the war, suggesting that Northerners were united in waging total war
on their fellow citizens. The truth is that it was the Republican Party that
waged war on the South, not a “united”
Northern population. (I have written elsewhere of how there was such a
desertion crisis in the Union Army that entire regiments frequently deserted
on the eve of battle.) The myth of “national unity” is a
Grand Ole Lie.”
Thomas DiLorenzo
Also
by Thomas DiLorenzo
Thomas
J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about
Dishonest Abe and How Capitalism Saved America. His
latest book is Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed
the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today.
Article
originally published on www.Mises.org. By
authorization of the author
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