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The violence of
the criticism aimed at Lincoln by the great men of his time on both sides of
the Mason-Dixon line is startling. The breadth and depth of the spectacular
prejudice against him is often shocking for its cruelty, intensity, and
unrelenting vigor. The plain truth is that Mr. Lincoln was deeply reviled by
many who knew him personally, and by hundreds of thousands who only knew of
him.
~ Larry Tagg, The Unpopular Mr.
Lincoln: The Story of America’s Most Reviled President
This quotation is
the theme of Larry Tagg’s 2009 book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln,
which utilizes thousands of primary sources to make the case that no American
president was more reviled by his contemporaries – at home and abroad
– during his own lifetime than Abraham Lincoln was. Tagg is no Southern
apologist: He is a native of Lincoln, Illinois, and profusely thanks Harold
Holzer, one of the high priests of the Lincoln cult, in his acknowledgements.
This book establishes Mr. Tagg as a card-carrying member of the cult.
Anyone who has
read The Real Lincoln (or
scanned the "King Lincoln Archive" at LewRockwell.com) would not be
surprised at all to hear that Lincoln was hated and reviled by most of the
"great men" (and the Northern masses) of his time. As Tagg
hesitantly admits in his Introduction, Lincoln was widely criticized
in the North as a "bloody tyrant" and a "dictator" for
his "arbitrary arrests, the suspension of habeas corpus, and the
suppression of newspapers . . ." More specifically, imprisoning tens
of thousands of Northern civilians without due process for
verbally opposing his policies; shutting down over 300 opposition newspapers;
deporting an opposing member of Congress; confiscating firearms and other
forms of private property; intimidating and threatening to imprison federal
judges; invoking military conscription, income taxation, an internal revenue
bureaucracy, and huge public debt; and ordering the murder of hundreds of
draft protesters in the streets of New York City in July of 1863 are all good
reasons why Lincoln was so widely despised.
Tagg quotes the abolitionist
Wendell Phillips as saying that Lincoln was "a first-rate second-rate
man." Historian George Bankroft called him "ignorant, self-willed,
and is surrounded by men some of whom are almost as ignorant as
himself." The Lacrosse, Wisconsin Democrat newspaper
editorialized in November of 1864 that "If Abraham Lincoln should be
reelected for another term of four years of such wretched administration, we
hope that a bold hand will be found to plunge the dagger into the
tyrant’s heart for the public welfare." In May of 1864 the New
York Times said this of Lincoln:
No living man was
ever charged with political crimes of such multiplicity and such enormity as
Abraham Lincoln. He has been denounced without end as a perjurer, a usurper,
a tyrant, a subverter of the Constitution, a destroyer of the liberties of
his country, a reckless desperado, a heartless trifler over the last agonies
of an expiring nation. Had that which has been said of him been true there is
no circle in Dante’s Inferno full enough of torment to expiate his
iniquities.
The inside cover
of The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln claims that it is the first book ever
written on how unpopular Lincoln really was. Well, not really.
"Mainstream" Lincoln scholar David Donald remarked in Lincoln Reconsidered that
Lincoln was wildly unpopular in his own time. Edgar Lee Masters wrote of the
near universal hatred of Lincoln by his contemporaries in Lincoln the Man;
and historian Frank L. Klement, author of Lincoln’s Critics: The Copperheads of
the North, spent a career researching and writing
about Lincoln’s Northern critics. Freedom Under Lincoln by Dean
Sprague and Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln by James Randall
also discuss the critics of Lincoln’s tyrannical and dictatorial
behavior, although these authors do their best to whitewash it all.
The most
interesting chapter of The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln is the final Epilogue
entitled "The Sudden Saint." Here Mr. Tagg explains how the
Republican Party, with the aid of the Northern Yankee or neo-Puritan clergy,
created out of thin air the myth of the "sainted" and
"beloved" Abraham Lincoln. In order to understand why the role of
the neo-Puritan, New England clergy was so important, one must understand
that it was their neo-Puritanical religious fanaticism that fueled the
war-making ideology of the North during the war. In his essay,
"America’s Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861," Murray Rothbard
accurately described it as "a fanatical and emotional neo-Puritanism
driven by a fervent ‘postmillenialism’ which held that, as a
precondition for the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, man must set up a
thousand-year Kingdom of God on Earth." Moreover, this
"kingdom" is "to be a perfect society . . . free of sin,"
especially slavery, alcohol, and Catholicism.
Thus, the
Northern "war against slavery" was not so much motivated by the
injustice of slavery and the plight of the slaves, but the desire to use
the military force of government to create a perfect society, a Kingdom
of God on Earth. That’s why peaceful emancipation, which is what
occurred in all the Northern states that ended slavery, was out of the
question. (There were still slaves in New York City as late as 1853, and in
parts of New England into the early 1860s). Instead, explains Rothbard:
The Northern war
against slavery partook of fanatical millennialist fervor, of a cheerful
willingness to uproot institutions, to commit mayhem and mass murder, to
plunder and loot and destroy, all in the name of high moral principle and the
birth of a perfect world.
This is why the
quintessential Yankee religious fanatic, Julia Ward Howe, referred to all the
mass murder, burning and plundering of cities, and destruction of the war as "the
glory of the coming of the Lord" in her "Battle Hymn of the
Republic." To Julia Ward Howe, the death of more than 600,000 Americans
was "glorious."
So it should not
be surprising that the Yankee clergy teamed up with the Republican Party
after Lincoln’s death to deify him. Lincoln’s assassination was a
miracle of luck as far as they were concerned, for it put in their lap an
opportunity to deify their Big Government political agenda along with Lincoln
himself. As Larry Tagg explains, the Republican Party "saw that his
death was a propaganda windfall – Lincoln could be made to stand for
the North, for freedom . . . "
As for the
Republican Party, they knew that they were all complicit in war crimes for
having intentionally waged war on Southern civilians for four years, and
continued Lincoln’s political tactic of invoking Scripture to attempt
to "justify" their war crimes. (Unlike Lincoln, many other
Republicans were actually Christians.) Thus, after Lincoln was assassinated
and died on Good Friday, "pastors across America rewrote their Easter
sermons," writes Tagg, "to include a new, exalted view of Lincoln
as an American Moses, a leader out of slavery, a national savior who was not
allowed to cross over into the Promised Land."
Of course, they
all knew that in his first inaugural address Lincoln supported a
constitutional amendment that would have explicitly enshrined slavery in the
Constitution; that he wrote a public letter to Horace Greeley explaining that
his sole objective in the war was "to save the union" and not to
disturb slavery; and that his real "last best hope" was
"colonization," or the deportation of all black people from
America. This all had to be forgotten, and history rewritten. And it was.
Senator James Grimes of Iowa immediately recognized that the deification of
Lincoln by the Yankee clergy and the Republican Party "has made it
impossible to speak the truth of Abraham Lincoln hereafter."
Tagg explains how
it was Secretary of War Edwin Stanton who decided to use Lincoln’s
funeral as a massive propaganda tool as he "made the martyr’s
corpse a traveling exhibit of Southern wickedness." The funeral
procession took a 1600-mile route, and Stanton prohibited anyone to obscure
the damage done by the assassin’s bullet so that the corpse would
appear as gruesome as possible.
The Yankee
preachers joined in the political scheme to deify Lincoln, a man many of them
had condemned just months earlier. One such hypocrite was Henry Ward Beecher
of Brooklyn, New York, the "greatest preacher of the age" according
to Tagg. (Presumably, only Northern preachers can compete for such a title).
Beecher "had attacked the President through the previous four
years," writes Tagg, but now he "heaped only praise on
Lincoln." "Beecher and the Radicals [i.e., Republicans] soon saw
that all their [political] enemies would fall before the sword that
Lincoln’s death had put in their hands, and they widened its swath to
wound the Democratic press," says Tagg.
It wasn’t
just the religious rhetoric of the Yankee preachers that intimidated all
critics of the Republican Party regime, which would enjoy monopoly rule for
the next several generations. The Republican Party supplied the requisite
violence and intimidation. "The Democratic papers quickly realized that
if they didn’t repent their opposition to Lincoln, they risked ruin by
mobs like the ones that had gutted their offices in the first summer of the
war." Tagg refers here to how the Lincoln administration organized
Republican Party goon squads to roam the country and literally destroy the
printing presses of opposition newspapers while soldiers often imprisoned
(without due process) the editors and owners of many of the newspapers. This
is all described in the above-mentioned books, Freedom Under Lincoln
and Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln.
Mistakenly
believing that once the war was over, free speech had been restored in the
North, one observer of the Lincoln funeral "sent up a cheer for
Jefferson Davis" and "was set upon by mourners and nearly torn to
pieces." A Chicago man said of Lincoln’s assassination in the
lobby of a hotel, "it served him right." He was shot to death in
front of dozens of witnesses, but "there was no arrest, no one would
have arrested the man, " writes Tagg. Americans were imprisoned all over
the North for making similar statements. "The doors of local jails
rattled shut behind men in every city who were herd exulting the news
of Lincoln’s death" (emphasis added). The editor of a Maryland
newspaper was "killed by a mob after he had published criticism of
Lincoln." Such mobs traveled from one paper after another that was
supportive of the Democratic Party and "emptied their contents into the
street amid the applause of an immense crowd" while warning other
Democratic newspapers of similar treatment.
Media opposition
to the Republican Party, which was the federal government for the next
several generations, was rendered prostate. The South was under military
occupation for twelve years after the war. Consequently, ministers there were
ordered to deliver sermons deifying Lincoln while many Southern newspapers
were forced to do the same. These editors were "installed by Union
armies" in the occupied South, as Tagg explains. Southern journalists
were made to understand that the penalty for challenging the newly-invented
Lincoln mythology was the "terror of confiscation and
imprisonment." Not surprisingly, there were "sudden proclamations
of Lincoln’s nobility" all throughout the South as well as the
North. Thus were born the myths and superstitions about America’s most
reviled president.
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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