Introduction

How did America in the twenty-first century end up with a government that is so highly centralized that the president alone can order the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars without the consent of Congress, let alone the public? How did we end up with a government that creates severe economic hardship for average citizens while showering big, politically-connected businesses with literally trillions of dollars in "bailout" money? Is this the real purpose of the Fed, as opposed to all of its happy talk about its supposed duty to "stabilize" the economy? And why is it that the Constitution is completely ignored, if not ridiculed, by the same Washington politicians who all that take an oath to defend the Constitution?

How did the federal judiciary become mere accomplices in our government-for-the-privileged-only "democracy" that routinely tells citizens to get lost whenever they inquire about how their tax dollars are being spent? And is it really desirable to have over half of the entire adult population "on the government dole" in one form or another so that they never oppose an expansion of the state for fear of losing their own subsidies? How and when was this system created?

The answer to all of these questions is that ideas do matter, and that the vast majority of Americans long ago abandoned the Jeffersonian ideas that "that government is best which governs least"; that if we are to have a central government, it must be "bound by the chains of the Constitution"; that the only possible way of controlling the federal Leviathan state is by empowering the citizens through political communities organized at the state and local level ("states’ rights"); that citizens, if left to their own devices, will prosper by pursuing their own self-interests under a rule of law; and that the only legitimate purpose of government is the protection of our God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Americans are fond of quoting Jefferson, George Will once wrote, but "we live in Hamilton’s country." George Will was right. The great debate between Jefferson and Hamilton over the nature of government in America was decisively won by the Hamiltonian nationalists by the end of the nineteenth century (Grover Cleveland was the last president who had genuine Jeffersonian sympathies). Hamiltonian nationalism has festered ever since and has become the reigning American political philosophy, leaving us with the current economic debacle. Hamilton himself condemned Jefferson’s political philosophy shortly after President Jefferson delivered his first inaugural address by calling it "the symptom of a pygmy mind."

What is Hamiltonian nationalism? Hamilton himself argued at the constitutional convention for a "permanent president" who would appoint all the governors of the states, who would in turn have veto power over all state legislation. States’ rights would have been destroyed, and America would have essentially become a monarchy. That’s where America stands today, for all practical purposes. Especially since the advent of the federal income tax in 1913, the states are mere appendages of the central state who can be easily bribed into doing whatever the federal executive wants them to do. All it takes is a threat to withdraw a few million dollars in highway grants. Consequently, Americans have long been servants rather than masters of their own central government as their presidents wield dictatorial powers.

American presidents have far more dictatorial powers than any European monarchs of Hamilton’s time had. Today an American president can, on his own, order the bombing of any country in the world without offering an explanation to anyone; eavesdrop on any phone conversation or email; and imprison citizens without due process by calling them "enemy combatants." The "imperial presidency" was a part of Hamilton’s grand plan, and that is exactly what we have today.

Hamilton was a foreign policy imperialist who wanted to go to war with France (for starters) in order to pursue "imperial glory" (and "glory" for himself as well). Jefferson, on the other hand, understood that war was always and everywhere the great destroyer of wealth and liberty. Hamilton was the original neo-con when it comes to foreign policy.

Hamilton was the founding father of central banking, according to a Fed publication entitled A History of Central Banking in America. He wanted a bank run by politicians out of the nation’s capital and partly capitalized with tax dollars as a vehicle for financing his other main objective: corporate welfare. As the founder of America’s first central bank, the Bank of the United States, he wanted to use the bank to subsidize his (and his political party’s) political power base, which was primarily Northern merchants and bankers, such as his political mentor Robert Morris.

It was Morris who urged President George Washington to appoint Hamilton as the first treasury secretary despite the fact that he had little knowledge and no experience in finance (apart from being a clerk for slave-owning molasses exporters in the Caribbean as a teenager) when the Revolutionary War ended. The Fed’s trillion-dollar bailout of irresponsible bankers is Hamilton nationalism par excellence.

Hamilton was also the founding father of "crony capitalism" in America with all of his schemes for subsidizing businesses and his advocacy of protectionism, as outlined in his famous Report on Manufactures. He coined the phrase "The American System" to describe this Americanized version of British mercantilism (corporate welfare, protectionism, and central banking).

America’s national debt now stands at about $10 trillion; $70 trillion and counting if one includes the unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicare, government pensions, and who knows whatever other promises will be made during the current crisis. This too is pure Hamiltonianism, for it was Hamilton who called the public debt "a public blessing." It was a blessing, he said, because it would help to grow the state by attaching the wealthier people of the country to the state. As government bondholders they would always be relied upon to support higher taxes and a bigger government, reasoned America’s Machiavelli, a man whom his nemesis Jefferson once called "a political colossus." "We need a government of more energy," Hamilton once complained to George Washington.

Hamilton succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in this regard. It is not only the bondholders but also the investment bankers who market the bonds for the government who have long been a powerful political force for bigger government. That’s why the Treasury Secretary is almost always the CEO of Goldman Sachs or some other Wall Street financial institution such as the New York Fed. Ever since the New Deal, politicians have realized, in fine Hamiltonian tradition, that the poor as well as the rich can be bribed into becoming reliable lobbyists for statism, all at the expense of the middle class taxpayers.

Hamilton did caution against "excessive debt," but then he spent the rest of his life recklessly advancing the cause of excessive and unconstitutional government, excessive debt and all. It was Hamilton who first invented the notion of "implied powers" of the Constitution, and taught generations of lawyers how to subvert the General Welfare and Commerce Clauses of the Constitution to render its restrictions on federal power meaningless. As constitutional historian Clinton Rossiter wrote in Alexander Hamilton and the Constitution, ever since the 1930s "the principles of nationalism and broad construction [of the Constitution] expounded by Hamilton and his disciples" monopolized "discussion of constitutional law." The "formula" for unlimited government, Rossiter approvingly proclaimed, was invented by Hamilton and refined by his political disciples: "the commerce power + the war powers + the power to tax and spend for the general welfare x the loosest possible reading of the words ‘necessary and proper.’"

Just as the ideas of Karl Marx provided the ideological rationale for socialism during the twentieth century, Hamilton’s mercantilist/nationalist/monarchist ideas comprise the essential ideological underpinnings of the American empire. In his book, Hamilton’s Republic, Michael Lind assembled essays and excerpts from essays and speeches from a pantheon of Hamiltonian-minded politicians, pundits, and intellectuals throughout history. Among Hamilton’s ideological disciples who contributed to America becoming "Hamilton’s country," writes Lind, are: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Croly (founding editor of The New Republic), historian Samuel Beer, James Wilson, John Jay, George Washington, John Marshall, Daniel Webster, Edward Everett, Francis Lieber, Abraham Lincoln, Samuel Huntington, Henry Cabot Lodge, Walter Lippmann, George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, John Quincy Adams, Friedrich List, Henry Carey, FDR, and Lyndon Johnson.

Lind is correct when he writes that "however powerful Jeffersonian rhetoric remains in American public discourse, it is the Hamiltonians who have won the major struggles to determine what kind of country the United States would be." The above-mentioned men may have relied mostly on persuasion and propaganda, but force, coercion, and the waging of total war on American civilians as well as combatants was also necessary. "Lincoln and Grant settled the question of whether the United States was a nation-state [the Hamiltonian view] or a loose alliance among sovereign states [the Jeffersonian view]," writes Lind. In the eyes of Hamiltonian nationalists the legitimacy of the powers of the central government always comes down to this argument – that might makes right.

The U. S. Constitution

The U.S. Constitution, written in 1787, made slavery officially legal in the newly-created United States. This was upheld by seven out of nine Justices on the Supreme Court in 1857. 19 of the original 55 Framers were slaveholders. General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a signer for South Carolina, in speaking before the South Carolina House of Representatives, on January 17, 1788, pointed out forcefully that the scheme of government in process of ratification strengthened the institution of chattel slavery; for it made it legally impossible for the national government ever to emancipate slaves and gave the slave states the right to hunt down fugitive blacks who had escaped to non-slave states. Under the Articles of Confederation, a fugitive slave who made it to a non-slave state was legally free… There was, in brief, even at the time of the Civil War, according to competent historians, no clear secular trend in the United States toward abolition, north or south… The fact is that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document.[1]

Even before the Articles of Confederation went into effect in 1781, numerous figures in politics and the military were agitating for a further strengthening of the federal center. These people took the name “Federalist.” Their efforts ultimately resulted in adoption of the federal constitution of 1788.

There was also a cohort in the in the Convention of members insistent on proposing a reinforcement of the central government while maintaining the primary place of the States in the American polity—a truly federal, rather than national, government.

Whereas advocates of ratification took the name “Federalist,” their opponents—particularly in Virginia—called themselves “Republicans.”

The chief issue in dispute in the ratification campaign was whether the proposed constitution would be consistent with the state–centered constitutionalism that the Patriots had fought for during the Revolution. Federalist insisted it would, while Republicans feared it would not.

The Federalists always insisted during the ratification debates— knowing they had to in order to win approval of the Constitution—that the States were individual parties to a federal compact. Spelling out the logic of the compact, three states— Virginia, Maryland, and Rhode Island—explicitly reserved (in the act of ratifying the Constitution) their right to secede from the Union. And one can easily deduce a right to secession from the language of the Tenth Amendment: because the Constitution does not prohibit secession, that power, like all the other “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to by it to the States,” is “reserved to the states.”

If a state or section of the country no longer felt itself represented in, or fairly treated by, the Federal Government, then it had the right to dissolve its association with that government. It could secede from the Union. The use of force to stop a state from seceding was unconstitutional since the Union itself was a creature of the states. It had been wholly created by them.[2]

Lincoln’s later response was that the Preamble of the Constitution stated that the Union derived its power from the people as a whole, and that they alone could dissolve it. President Andrew Jackson, himself a Southerner, had threatened in 1832 to send troops to force South Carolina to allow the collection of the Federal tariff if that state persisted in its assertion that it could “nullify” any Federal law it did not agree with. Jackson’s message to the people of the offending state read, “Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent the execution of the laws deceived you. The object is disunion. Disunion by armed force is treason.” On that occasion South Carolina had backed down.

The Federalists became the Whigs in the 1830s, and then the Republicans in the 1850s (and thereafter). It is telling that during the War to Prevent Southern Independence, European commentators on the war, including such luminaries as Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill, quite naturally referred to the Northern Army in their writings as the army of "the Federalists."[3]

Lincoln’s “Whiggery” Background

Abraham Lincoln's Whig party loyalty is not part of the popular legend of this supposedly great president. That legend took shape in the years after the War and was fostered by the Republican Party, whose interest it served. Republican spokesmen were concerned to define their cause as the party of the victorious Union, not merely as the successor to the Whigs. The Grand Old Party had no reason to want to share the mantle of the Great Emancipator with the defunct Whigs. Later, during the twentieth century, those attracted to the Lincoln legend were often D/democrats—with both a capital and lowercase D—, to whom Lincoln's Whig identity seemed an anomaly, even an embarrassment, something to be minimized or explained away. If only he had been a Jacksonian, one feels, such admirers could have understood him so much better.[4] But in stubborn historical reality, Lincoln was a Whig for more years than he was a Republican, and a loyal Whig too. He joined the party as a young man, as soon as it was formed, and became one of a faithful band of Whig members in the Illinois state legislature from 1834 to 1841. He campaigned hard for Harrison in 1840, headed the Illinois campaigns of Henry Clay in 1844 and Zachary Taylor in 1848, and would have been a presidential elector in 1852 had Winfield Scott carried Illinois.[5] In the light of Lincoln's later career, it is particularly noteworthy that in 1848, faced with the challenge of the Free Soil party, Lincoln went on a campaign tour of Massachusetts, working hard to keep New England's antislavery Whigs from defecting to the ticket of Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams.[6] How does one explain the attraction that the Whig party had for Lincoln? In the first place, of course, the policies of the party, particularly its support for government aid to “internal improvements.”

The Whigs came to unite around economic policy, celebrating Clay's vision of the "American System"[7] which favored government support for a more modern, industrial economy in which education and commerce would equal physical labor or land ownership as a means of productive wealth. Whigs sought to promote manufacturing through protective tariffs (as had Alexander Hamilton 40 years prior), a growth-oriented monetary policy with a new Bank of the United States, and a vigorous program of "internal improvements"[8]—-especially to roads, canal systems, and railroads-—funded by the proceeds of public land sales. The Whigs also promoted public schools, private colleges, charities, and cultural institutions.

The Whigs wanted to deepen the socio-economic system by adding more and more layers of complexity, such as banks, factories, and railroads. In general, the Democrats were more successful at enacting their policies on the national level, while the Whigs were more successful in passing modernization projects, such as canals and railroads, at the state level, but not the federal (which had to wait until Abraham Lincoln's presidency to be fully realized).

Opponents of the party ridiculed it as a reconstitution of the old Federalist Party. While the party did have strong support in areas historically known as Federalist strongholds, it was mainly formed by disillusioned Jeffersonian Republicans (Clay, a 10 year Republican leader in Congress, joined the party), and southerners who disliked Jackson's power grabs and stance during nullification crisis. In its early form, the Whig Party was united only by opposition to the policies of President Andrew Jackson, especially his opposition to the Bank of the United States.

The Whigs, also known as the "whiggery," appealed more to the professional and business classes: doctors, lawyers, merchants, ministers, bankers, storekeepers, factory owners, commercially-oriented farmers and large-scale planters. In general, commercial and manufacturing towns and cities voted Whig, save for strongly Democratic precincts in Irish Catholic and German immigrant communities; the Democrats often sharpened their appeal to the poor by ridiculing the Whigs' aristocratic pretensions. Protestant religious revivals also injected a moralistic element into the Whig ranks. Many called for public schools to teach moral values; others proposed prohibition to end the liquor “problem”.

1852 was the beginning of the end for the Whigs. The deaths of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster that year severely weakened the party. The Compromise of 1850 fractured the Whigs along pro- and anti-slavery lines. With the Whig Party dead, Lincoln joined the new Republican Party.[9]

The Republican Party

The Republican Party was created in 1854 in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act that would have allowed the expansion of slavery into Kansas . They were opposed to the expansion of slavery into new territories for fear of tipping the balance of power in favor of the Democrats. This is not the same as "opposed to slavery."

The Republican Party is and always has been the party of state capitalism. That, along with the powers and perks it provides its leaders, is the whole reason for its creation and continued existence. By state capitalism I mean a regime of highly concentrated private ownership, subsidized and protected by government. The Republican Party has never, ever opposed any government interference in the free market or any government expenditure except those that might favor labor unions or threaten Big Business. Consider that in its origination, it was the party of high tariffs – when high tariffs benefited Northern big capital and oppressed the South and most of the population.

There is nothing particularly surprising that there should be a party of state capitalism in the United States; and certainly nothing surprising in the necessity for such a party to present itself as something else. Put in terms the Founding Fathers would have understood, the interests Republicans serve are merely the court party – what Jefferson referred to as the tinsel aristocracy and John Taylor as the paper aristocracy. The American Revolution was a revolt of the country against the court. Jeffersonians understood that every political system divides between the great mass of unorganized folks who mind their own business – that, is, the country party – and the minority who hang around the court to manipulate the government finances and engineer government favors. It is much easier and quicker to get rich by finding a way into the treasury than by hard work. That is mostly what politics is about. Of course, schemes to plunder society through the government must never be seen as such. They must be powdered and perfumed to look like a public good.

Contrary to what we might hope, there was nothing in the New World to inhibit the formation of a court party. In fact, the immense riches of an undeveloped continent merely increased incentives for courtiers. The number of projects that could be imagined as worthy of government support was infinite. In America there were not even any firmly established institutions of credit and currency, control of which was always the quickest route to big riches. Neither was there anything in a democratic system to inhibit state capitalism. The great mass of the citizens could usually be circumvented by people whose fulltime job was lining their pockets by swindling the voters. Lincoln's triumph is most realistically seen as the permanent victory of the court party, a victory that had been sought ever since Alexander Hamilton. The Lincoln regime eliminated all barriers to making the federal government into a machine to transfer money to those interests the party represented (and as many others as needed to be paid off to support the operation).

Hamilton had justified the government enriching his friends at no risk to themselves because "a public debt is a public blessing." The Whigs sometimes argued that the paper issued by their banks was "the people's money" and therefore morally superior as a currency to "government money." Lincoln presented himself as a candidate for the presidency with the slogan "Vote Yourself a Farm!" Once the obstructionism of those troublesome Southerners was broken, ordinary folks could get themselves a farm for free out of the public lands. Some ordinary folks did get land – but most of the free land, millions of acres, went to government-connected corporations. Saving the Union, freeing the slaves but keeping them out of the North, and giving opportunity to the common people, when filtered through Lincoln's masterful rhetoric, gave the party of Big Business a lock on the righteous vote for a long time to come.

The very name of the Republican Party is a lie. The name was chosen when the party formed in the 1850s to suggest a likeness to the Jeffersonian Republicans of earlier history. This had a very slender plausibility. One of the main goals of the new party was "free soil" – preventing slavery (and Negroes) from existence in any territories, that is, future states.

It is quite true that in the 1780s Jefferson, and indeed most Southerners, had voted to exclude slavery from the Northwest Territory – what became the Midwest, a region to which Virginia had by far the strongest claim by both charter and conquest. However, the sentiments and reasoning that supported that restriction were very different from those of the Republican Free-Soilers of the 1850s.

To detect the lie, all you have to do is look at the stance of Jefferson himself and most of his followers, Northern and Southern, in the Missouri controversy of 1819–1820. The effort to eliminate slavery from Missouri and all the territories, the first version of Lincoln's free-soil policy, was denounced by Jefferson as a threat to the future of the Union and a transparent Northern power grab. It was "the fire-bell in the night." In the 1780s the foreign slave trade was still open. In 1819 no more slaves were being imported and the black population was increasing naturally in North America at a greater rate than anywhere else in the world (as it always has). At that point, Jefferson said, the best course for the eventual elimination of slavery was not to restrict it but to disperse it as thinly as possible.

The Southern Republicans who had criticized and sought to restrict slavery in the 1780s had in mind the long-term welfare of all Americans. The Northern Republicans of the 1850s who raised a truly hysterical and exaggerated campaign against what they called "the spread of slavery" were entirely different people with entirely different motives. Not even to mention, of course, that the Northern Republicans were totally committed to a mercantilist agenda, every plank of which Jeffersonians had defined themselves by being against. The Republicans of the 1850s exactly represented those parts of the country and those interests that had been the most rabid opponents of Jefferson and his Republicans.[10]

Lincoln’s “peculiar misfortune”

According to Joshua Shenk, in Lincoln’s Melancholy, “In three key criteria—the factors that produce depression, the symptoms of what psychiatrists call major depression, and the typical age of onset—the case of Abraham Lincoln is perfect. It could be used in a psychiatry book to illustrate a typical depression.”[11]

Lincoln was not depressed in his late teens and early twenties—at least not so far as anyone could see. It wasn’t until 1835 that serious concern emerged about Lincoln’s mental health. That summer, remembered the school teacher Mentor Graham, Lincoln “somewhat injured his health and Constitution.” “He became emaciated,” said Henry McHenry, a farmer in the area, “and his best friends were afraid that he would craze himself—make himself derange.”

The anxiety in the community was widespread, both for Lincoln’s immediate safety, and for his long-term mental health. Lincoln “told me that he felt like committing suicide often,” remembered Mentor Graham, and his neighbors mobilized to keep him safe. Another villager said, “Lincoln was locked up by his friends…to prevent derangement or suicide.” People wondered if Lincoln had fallen of the deep end. “That was the time the community said he was crazy,” remembered Elizabeth Abell.[12]

Lincoln’s second breakdown, in the winter of 1840-1841, bore a striking similarity to the first. It came after a long period of intense work, when Lincoln pushed himself hard. January 1 was the deadline on which the State of Illinois owed $175,000 in debt interest. If the state didn’t make its payments, it would go into receivership. Given how Lincoln’s political fate had become tied to the debt debacle, and given the practical necessity of securing the funds to pay the debt, Lincoln was under considerable pressure.[13]

Then, under profound personal stress—and in a stretch of bleak weather—he collapsed. Once again, he spoke openly about his misery, hopelessness, and thoughts of suicide. He was unable to work. Again, his friends feared that he might kill himself. Lincoln himself despaired that he would never recover.

According to the criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, this second breakdown qualifies Lincoln for the diagnosis of “major depressive disorder, recurrent.” Strictly speaking, the illness is characterized by two or more major depressive episodes, separated by at least a month. More broadly, it suggests an underlying problem that can be expected to surface in various ways through out a person’s life.[14]

Lincoln submitted himself to the care of a medical doctor. He was diagnosed as suffering with hypochondriasis, a form of melancholia. Treatment included the ingestion of arsenic, laudanum (opium and alcohol), strychnine, and mercury. Since mercury binds to the central nervous system, it produces quick effect on mood: depression, anxiety, irritability, and “hostility to the point of sudden rages and even violence.”[15]

At a time when newspapers were stuffed with ads for substances to cure all manner of ailments, it wasn’t unusual for Lincoln to seek help at the pharmacy. And in fact, Lincoln had a charge account at the Corneau and Diller drugstore, at 122 South Sixth Street in Springfield. There he bought a number of substances, including opiates, camphor, sarsaparilla and cocaine. Opium in particular was considered indispensable for chronic mental conditions. Also popular at the time was a pill known as the “blue mass,” a ubiquitous treatment prescribed for everything from tuberculosis to hypochondriasis. These small round pills, about the size of a peppercorn, were made of pure ground mercury with a bit of rosewater and honey added for flavor.[16]

To whatever extent Lincoln used medicines; his essential view of depression discounted the possibility of transformation by an external agent. He believed that his suffering proceeded inexorably from his constitution, that it was his lot to bear. The main therapies Lincoln employed reflected this understanding. After his depression emerged in his mid-twenties, and took a deeper hold in his thirties, Lincoln turned to humor for help.[17] The idea of humor as a therapy has deep roots. The mid-nineteenth-century Manual of Psychological Medicine refers to the case to the case of a French actor who, despairing and melancholy, seeks help from a physician. The doctor recommends that his patient see a comic play for relief.[18]

Lincoln’s jokes often played on racial and ethnic stereotypes. Lincoln exhibited racist speech using the pejorative for "Negro" up until the last days of his life. He consistently frequented "black face" comedy shows that denigrated blacks in stereotypical ways.[19]

Lincoln: The Great Emancipator

In 1860 the Republicans promoted their candidate as the "rail-splitter," the poor boy who had made good, an example and representative of the "common people." This image, of course, had nothing to do with the Lincoln of 1860, with his agenda, or with the important issues of the time. This was not new. It was mimicry of the Whig campaign of 1840. (The "log cabin" gambit has been used and re-used as when the Wall Street lawyer Wendell Wilkie was promoted as a simple Hoosier country lad, and a rich New England candidate were marketed as "a good ole boy" from Texas.)

The truth is, Lincoln was one of the highest-paid corporate trial lawyers in the nation before becoming President and whose clients included every major railroad corporation in the Midwest. And even though he was married to the daughter of a wealthy slave-owning Kentucky family, he is still portrayed as a poor, backwoods “rail-splitter” and “man of the people.”

As Frederick Douglass pointed out, Lincoln's party was pre-eminently the party of rich, white men. In the free-soil debates before the war, Republican leaders dwelt not on the evil of slavery, but on their intention to keep the black scourge out of the new territories, which must be reserved for white men only.

Lincoln stated in his August 21, 1858 debate with Stephen Douglas, “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races.”

Lincoln opposed the immigration of black people into Illinois, supported the Illinois Black Codes, which deprived the small number of free blacks who resided in the state of any semblance of citizenship; and was a leader in the Illinois Colonization Society, which persuaded the state legislator to allocate funds to “colonize,” or deport free blacks.[20]

Lincoln: The Great Inflationist

When Lincoln first entered Illinois politics in 1832, he announced: “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.” It is revealing that Lincoln, ever the careful wordsmith and trial lawyer, listed a national bank as his first priority.

A national bank was arguably the lifeblood of the Whig Party, and the main reason for its coming into existence in the early 1830s. (1832 was the year of the big political showdown over the rechartering of the Bank of the United States.) Few politicians of the era were more devoted to resurrecting the bank than Lincoln was. In The Rise and Fall of the Whig Party, University of Virginia historian Michael Holt wrote of how, during the 1840, 1844, and 1848 national elections Lincoln “crisscrossed the state [of Illinois] ardently and eloquently defending specific Whig programs like a national bank.” Not only did he defend the programs, writes Holt, but “few people in the party were so committed to its economic agenda as Lincoln.”[21]

University of Georgia economist Richard Timberlake, author of a treatise on American monetary history entitled Monetary Policy of the United States, agreed with Professor Holt’s assessment of the importance of central banking to the Whigs. “To the Whigs…a national bank was their life—the vital principle—without which they could not live as a party—the power which was to give them power…To lose it, was to lose the fruits of the election, with the prospect of losing the party itself.”[22]

In other words, The Whigs and Lincoln always intended to use a national bank, and its printing of paper money that was not redeemable in gold or silver, as the means of financing the colossal patronage schemes that they hoped would keep them in power indefinitely. On December 26, 1839, Lincoln gave a speech in opposition to the Independent Treasury System[23] and in support of inflationary finance through the mechanism of what economists call “fiat money.” The long-winded speech was a fiery denunciation of the responsible policies of the system condemning it as guilty of generating economic instability, being administratively costly compared to other systems, and an insecure depository of money. None of these charges turned out to be true.[24]

In his book, What Has Government Done to Our Money, economist Murray Rothbard clearly explained the significance of the phrase “suspension of specie payment” that was the source of all the conflict and controversy. This explanation clarifies just what it was that Lincoln and his fellow Whigs and Republicans were so doggedly determined to achieve for so many decades:

The bluntest way for government to foster…inflation is to grant banks the special privilege of refusing to pay their obligations, while yet continuing in their operation. While everyone else must pay their debts or go bankrupt, the banks are permitted to refuse redemption of their receipts, at the same time forcing their own debtors to pay when their loans fall due. The usual name for this is “a suspension of specie payments.” A more accurate name would be “license for theft,” for what else can we call a government permission to continue business without fulfilling one’s contract?[25]

When Lincoln became president, and the Southern Democrats had left Congress, the old Whig coalition was finally entrenched in power. It immediately raised tariff rates ten times, commenced the building of a government-subsidized transcontinental railroad, and replaced the Independent Treasury System with a nationalized money supply. On February 25, 1862, the Legal Tender Act[26] empowered the Secretary of the Treasury to issue paper money (“greenbacks”) that was not immediately redeemable in gold or silver. The National Currency Acts of 1863 and 1864 created a system of nationally chartered that could issue bank notes supplied to them by the new comptroller of the currency, and placed a ten percent tax on state bank notes to drive them out of business and establish a federal monetary monopoly for the first time in American history.

This ended once and for all the separation of money and state in America. As economists Murray Rothbard wrote in his treatise, A History of Money and Banking in the United States, ‘In that way, the Republican Party, which inherited the Whig admiration for paper money and governmental control and sponsorship of inflationary banking, was able to implant the soft-money tradition permanently in the American system.”[27]

As the government’s paper money flooded the banks, “greenback” dollars became so devalued that by July 1864 they were worth only 35 cents in gold, even though they were not issued until mid-1863.[28]

Lincoln: The Great War Criminal

In response to opponents of his war measures, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus—the ancient English protection against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. Article I of the Constitution empowers Congress to suspend access to the writ in times of emergency, but Lincoln acted as both legislator and executive (as he had when he called for volunteers for a war congress had not yet agreed to fund).

Lincoln used the arbitrary powers he had thus granted himself to muzzle opposition, whether in the form of critical newspapers, Democratic politicians, or potentially unfriendly legislators, in numerous ways. In Maryland, this took the form of imprisoning state legislators who disagreed with him.

Of course, the most astonishing constitutional innovation Lincoln made was his Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. By that act, which he justified on the basis of his war powers as president, Lincoln abolished slavery—but only in those portions of the Confederacy not occupied by the Union.

Historian Lee Kenneth was right when he wrote, in Marching Through Georgia, that had the Confederates somehow won, they would have been justified in “stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command” as war criminals; for their launching an invasion without the consent of Congress, illegally suspending the writ of habeas corpus and imprisoning tens of thousands of Northern political opponents, shutting down some three hundred opposition newspapers, censoring all telegraph communications, imprisoning a large percentage of the duly elected legislators of Maryland as well as the mayor of Baltimore, illegally orchestrating the secession of West Virginia, systematically disarming the border states in violation of the Second Amendment, and especially for waging war on civilians.[29]

In 1860 international law – and the US government’s own military code – prohibited the intentional targeting of civilians in war, although it was recognized that civilian casualties are always inevitable. "Foraging" to feed an army was acceptable, but compensation was also called for. The kind of wanton looting and destruction of private property that was practiced by the Union army for the entire duration of the war was forbidden, and perpetrators were to be imprisoned or hanged. International law, the US army’s own military code, and common rules of morality and decency that existed at the time were abandoned by the Union army from the very beginning. A special kind of soldier was used to pillage and plunder private property in the South during the war. In The Hard Hand of War, Mark Grimsley writes that the federal Army of the Potomac "possessed its full quotient of thieves, freelance foragers, and officers willing to look the other way," and that "as early as October 1861" General Louis Blenker’s division "was already burning houses and public buildings along its line of march" in Virginia. Prior to the Battle of First Manassas in the early summer of 1861 the Army of the Potomac was marked by "robbing hen roosts, killing hogs, slaughtering beef cattle, cows, the burning of a house or two and the plundering of others."

Unable to subdue their enemy combatants, many Union officers waged war on civilians instead, with Lincoln’s full knowledge and approval. Grimsley describes how Union Colonel John Beatty warned the residents of Paint Rock, Alabama, that "Every time the telegraph wire was cut we would burn a house; every time a train was fired upon we would hang a man; and we would continue to do this until every house was burned and every man hanged between Decatur and Bridgeport." Beatty ended up burning the entire town of Paint Rock to the ground.

The Union army did not merely gather food for itself; it pillaged, plundered, burned, and raped its way through the South for four years. Grimsley recounts a first hand account of the sacking of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December of 1862:

Great three-story houses furnished magnificently were broken into and their contents scattered over the floors and trampled on by the muddy feet of the soldiers. Splendid alabaster vases and pieces of statuary were thrown at 6 and 700 dollar mirrors. Closets of the very finest china were broken into and their contents smashed . . . rosewood pianos piled in the street and burned . . . Identical events occurred in dozens of other Southern cities and towns for four years.

Sherman was the plunder-in-chief, and he had three solid years of practice for his March to the Sea. In the autumn of 1862 Confederate snipers were firing at Union gunboats on the Mississippi River. Unable to apprehend the combatants, Sherman took revenge on the civilian population by burning the entire town of Randolph, Tennessee, to the ground. In a July 31, 1862 letter to his wife Sherman explained that his purpose in the war was "extermination, not of the soldiers alone, that is the least part of the trouble, but the people."

In the spring of 1863, after the Confederate Army had evacuated, Sherman ordered his army to destroy the town of Jackson, Mississippi. They did, and in a letter to General Ulysses S. Grant Sherman boasted that "The inhabitants [of Jackson] are subjugated. They cry aloud for mercy. The land is devastated for 30 miles around."[30]

Meridian, Mississippi was also destroyed after the Confederate Army had evacuated, after which Sherman wrote to Grant: "For five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire, and I have no hesitation in pronouncing the work well done. Meridian . . . no longer exists."[31]

The indiscriminate bombing of Southern cities, which was outlawed by international law at the time, killed hundreds, if not thousands of slaves. The slaves were targeted by Union Army plunderers as much as anyone. As Grimsley writes, "With the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked." A typical practice was to put a hangman’s noose around a slave’s neck and threaten to hang him unless he revealed where the household’s jewelry and silverware were hidden. Some slaves were beaten to death by Union soldiers.

General Phillip Sheridan engaged in the same kind of cowardly, criminal behavior in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in the autumn of 1864, after the Confederates had finally evacuated the valley. General Grant ordered him to turn the valley into a "desert," and he and his army did. A sergeant in Sheridan’s army, William T. Patterson, described the pillaging, plundering, and burning of Harrisonburg, Bridgewater, and Dayton Virginia:

The work of destruction is commencing in the suburbs of the town . . . The whole country around is wrapped in flames, the heavens are aglow with the light thereof . . . such mourning, such lamentations, such crying and pleading for mercy I never saw nor never want to see again, some were wild, crazy, mad, some cry for help while others throw their arms around Yankee soldiers necks and implore mercy.[32]

It is important to recognize that at the time the Valley was populated only by women, children, and old men who were too feeble to be in the army. In letters home some of Sheridan’s soldiers described themselves as "barn burners" and "destroyers of homes." One soldier wrote that he had personally burned more than 60 private homes to the ground, as Grimsley recounts. After Sheridan’s work of destruction and theft was finished Lincoln grandly conveyed to him his personal thanks and "the thanks of a nation."

So What Were the Causes of the War

Some say simplistically that the Civil War was fought over slavery. Unfortunately, there is no "simple" reason. The causes of the war were a complex series of events that began long before the first shot was fired. Competing nationalisms, political turmoil, the definition of freedom, the preservation of the Union, the fate of slavery and the structure of our society and economy could all be listed as significant contributing factors in America's bloodiest conflict.

In the words of John B. Gordon, Maj. Gen. CSA , in his book, "Reminiscences Of The Civil War", (Chapter I)

Abolition of slavery was far from being the cause of the prolonged conflict. Neither its destruction on the one hand, nor its defense on the other, was the energizing force that held the contending armies to four years of bloody work. I apprehend that if all living Union soldiers were summoned to the witness stand, every one of them would testify that it was the preservation of the American Union and not the destruction of Southern slavery that induced him to volunteer at the call of his country. As for the South, it is enough to say that perhaps 80 % of her armies were neither slaveholder, nor had the remotest interest in the institution. No other proof, however, is needed than the undeniable fact that at any period of the war from its beginning to near its close, the South could have saved slavery by simply laying down its arms and returning to the Union.

The South maintained with the depth of religious conviction that the Union formed under the Constitution was a Union of consent and not of force; that the original States were not the creatures but the creators of the Union; that these States had gained their independence, their freedom, and their sovereignty from the mother country, and had not surrendered these on entering the Union; that by the express terms of the Constitution all rights and powers not delegated were reserved to the States; and the South challenged the North to find one trace of authority in that Constitution for invading and coercing a sovereign State.

The North, on the other hand, maintained with the utmost confidence in the correctness of her position that the Union formed under the Constitution was intended to be perpetual; that sovereignty was a unit and could not be divided; that whether or not there was any express power granted in the Constitution for invading a State, the right of self-preservation was inherent in all governments; that the life of the Union was essential to the life of liberty; or, in the words of Webster, "liberty and union are one and inseparable."

To the charge of the North that secession was rebellion and treason, the South replied that the epithets of rebel and traitor did not deter her from the assertion of her independence, since these same epithets had been familiar to the ears of Washington and Hancock and Adams and Light Horse Harry Lee. In vindication of her right to secede, she appealed to the essential doctrine, "the right to govern rests on the consent of the governed," and to the right of independent action as among those reserved by the States. The South appealed to the acts and opinions of the Fathers and to the report of the Hartford Convention of New England States asserting the power of each State to decide as to the remedy for infraction of its rights; to the petitions presented and positions assumed by ex-President John Quincy Adams; to the contemporaneous declaration of the 8th of January assemblage in Ohio indicating that 200,000 Democrats in that State alone were ready to stand guard on the banks of the border river and resist invasion of Southern territory; and to the repeated declarations of Horace Greeley and the admission of President Lincoln himself that there was difficulty on the question of force, since ours ought to be a fraternal Government.

In answer to all these points, the North also cited the acts and opinions of the same Fathers, and urged that the purpose of those Fathers was to make a more perfect Union and a stronger government. The North offset the opinions of Greeley and others by the emphatic declaration of Stephen A. Douglas, the foremost of Western Democrats, and by the official opinion as to the power of the Government to collect revenues and enforce laws, given to President Buchanan by Jere Black, the able Democratic Attorney-General.

Thus the opposing arguments drawn from current opinions and from the actions and opinions of the Fathers were piled mountain high on both sides. Thus the mighty athletes of debate wrestled in the political arena, each profoundly convinced of the righteousness of his position; hurling at each other their ponderous arguments, which reverberated like angry thunderbolts through legislative halls, until the whole political atmosphere resounded with the tumult. Long before a single gun was fired public sentiment North and South had been lashed into a foaming sea of passion; and every timber in the framework of the Government was bending and ready to break from "the heaving ground-swell of the tremendous agitation." Gradually and naturally in this furnace of sectional debate, sectional ballots were crystallized into sectional bullets; and both sides came at last to the position formerly held by the great Troup of Georgia: "The argument is exhausted; we stand to our guns."[33]

The great conflict between the limited, decentralized government and free-trade Jeffersonians, and the Hamiltonian champions of a more active, centralized, protectionist state began manifesting itself in a North–South dispute over tariff policy in the early 1820s. In 1824 Henry Clay sponsored a tariff bill that was passed into law and that approximately doubled the average tariff rate. The agricultural South was immediately alarmed, for it was well understood that protectionist tariffs almost exclusively benefited Northern manufacturers while forcing Southerners to pay more for everything from farm tools to woolen blankets. To the South, it was all cost and no benefit. The South would abide by a modest “revenue” tariff of 10-15 percent, just sufficient to pay most of the expenses of running the central government, but not a protectionist tariff designed to thwart international competition. Thus, the region’s political leaders saw Henry Clay’s Tariff of 1824 as an instrument of plunder and a break with the constitutional contract that called for taxes that were uniform and proportioned to the states according to population.

Emboldened by their success with the tariff increase of 1824, the economic nationalist in Congress, led once again by Lincoln’s idol, Henry Clay, succeeded in increasing the tariff rate even further, to an average rate of almost 50 percent in 1828. This “Tariff of Abominations” was loudly denounced throughout the South.

There were a few Southern protectionists and advocates of “internal improvement” spending by government, but in general, the South was adamantly opposed to the whole package of protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare, and central banking that would become the keystone of the Northern-dominated Whig Party for the next twenty-five years and, after that, of the Republican Party. In 1825, the South Carolina legislature adopted a set of resolutions condemning protectionist tariffs, government subsidies to corporations, and a national bank.

As industry in the North expanded it looked towards southern markets, rich with cash from the lucrative agricultural business, to buy the North's manufactured goods. However, it was often cheaper for the South to purchase the goods abroad. In order to "protect" the northern industries Jackson slapped a tariff on many of the imported goods that could be manufactured in the North. When South Carolina passed the Ordinance of Nullification in November 1832, refusing to collect the tariff and threatening to withdraw from the Union, Jackson ordered federal troops to Charleston. A secession crisis was averted when Congress revised the Tariff of Abominations in February 1833.

The Panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression began to gnaw like a hungry animal on the flesh of the American system. The disparity between northern and southern economies was exacerbated. Before and after the depression the economy of the South prospered. Southern cotton sold abroad totaled 57% of all American exports before the war. The Panic of 1857 devastated the North and left the South virtually untouched. The clash of a wealthy, agricultural South and a poorer, industrial North was intensified by abolitionists who were not above using class struggle to further their cause.

As soon as the new Republican Party gained enough power, it succeeded in getting the U.S. House of Representatives to pass the highly protectionist Morrill Tariff during the 1859-1860 session of Congress. The Republican Party used the severe recession of 1857 as an excuse to propose protectionism as a “cure.”

Protectionism was so important to the Republican Party of 1860 (and beyond) that in his book, Yankee Leviathan, historian Richard Bensel labeled it the “keystone” of the Republican Party platform of 1860. According to a July 1944 article in the prestigious American Historical Review by Professor Reinhard H. Luthin entitled “Abraham Lincoln and the Tariff,” Lincoln had been an ardent protectionist for his entire political career. He claimed to have made more speeches on that subject than any other, and he stumped for the Whig’s Party protectionist presidential candidates in numerous elections.

Lincoln cleverly used his livelong reputation as a staunch protectionist to secure the Republican Party nomination and once elected, openly stumped for senatorial passage of the Morrill Tariff. In a February 19, 1861, speech in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, he told his audience that no other issue—none—was more important to their congressional representatives than raising tariffs.

In his first inaugural address, Lincoln shockingly threw down the gauntlet of war over the tariff issue, literally threatening the invasion of any state that failed to collect the newly doubled tariff. Fail to collect the tariff, as the South Carolinians did in 1828, and there will be a military invasion, Lincoln announced. He would not back off when it came to tax collection, as President Andrew Jackson had done some three decades earlier.

Since the seceded States clearly had no intention of sending tariff revenues to Washington, D.C., Lincoln announced a naval blockade of the Southern ports as one of his first acts of war. This is how America’s thirty-seven-year tariff war was turned into a shooting war.

Economists Robert A. McGuire and T. Norman Van Cott surely understated their case in the peer-reviewed economics journal Economic Inquiry in 2002, when they concluded after analyzing the role of tariffs in precipitating the War Between the States that “the tariff issue may in fact have been even more in the North-South tensions that led to the War than many economists and historians currently believe.”[34]

Lincoln’s Legacy

In many ways, Lincoln's legacy hinges on the question of whether states did in fact possess a constitutional right of secession. If they did, then virtually everything Lincoln did as president was illegal at best, immoral at worst. If Lincoln had no legal power and no constitutional duty to maintain the Union against secessionist movements, then Lincoln might well deserve the title "war criminal", and should be viewed with contempt.

If everyone at the time of the adoption of the Constitution agreed that it established a strong central government, in which the powers of the states were radically attenuated, is this not conclusive proof that the Southern position of 1860–61 was wrong?

Lincoln falsely claimed that the Union preceded the states, and was therefore not subject to their sovereignty. Former syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick eloquently stated in his 1957 book, The Sovereign States: "The delusion that sovereignty is vested in the whole people of the United States is one of the strangest misconceptions of our public life." Lincoln espoused this fable in order to make the preposterous argument that no such thing as state sovereignty ever existed; the states were never at any time free and independent of the federal government; they did not in fact create the federal government by ratifying the Constitution; and that, therefore, no group of citizens could ever secede from the federal government.

Lincoln claimed that the federal government was really created by the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, despite the fact that the former document does not have the legal authority that the Constitution has. But the Declaration itself is an expression of state sovereignty, a fact which contradicts Lincoln’s whole thesis. The concluding paragraph declares to the world that the colonists were seceding from the British Empire as citizens of the free and independent American states, not as the people as a whole. "These colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown . . . and that as Free and Independent States, they have full power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do."[35]

When the Revolution ended, the King of England entered into a peace treaty not with "the United States" or "the people as a whole" but with the individual states. Article 1 of the Treaty with Great Britain states:

His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, vis, New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia to be free, sovereign and independent States; that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs and successors, Relinquishes all claims to the Government, proprietary and territorial rights of The same, and every part thereof.[36]

It is a documented fact that, as of early 1861, the big majority of opinion makers in the North believed that the Union was a voluntary union and that using military force to coerce a state to remain in the Union was an act of tyranny that would destroy the Union as a voluntary association of states. Before Fort Sumter, dozens of Northern newspapers editorialized in favor of a constitutional or legal right of secession on behalf of the Southern states. These Northern newspapers believed that governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that whenever a political community no longer consented then it had a right to secede from the contract.[37] Instead, we repeatedly hear the hoary slogan that Lincoln "saved the Union." He may have "saved" it geographically, but he destroyed it philosophically, which is much more important.

Alexis de Tocqueville, whom everyone regards as a brilliant observer and chronicler of the American system of government, wrote in Democracy in America that "The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality . . . . If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact . . . the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right."[38] Tocqueville could never have imagined that barely thirty years later an American president would commit the barbaric act of having his armies murder 300,000 fellow citizens (the equivalent of more than 5 million standardizing for today's population) and destroy their economy to deny them the right of secession.

Patrick Henry's great-grandson, Edward Fontaine, wrote the following in 1870:

While living in retirement with his family, as planter, and practicing lawyer, the pamphlet containing the Constitution and the additional 12 amendments adopted by the majority of States requisite to make them part of the instrument, was brought to him and examined by him most carefully in the presence of my father and Mr. Dandridge.

He seemed to have been suspicious of the character of some of the framers of the Constitution, and of the crafty politicians through whose hands it had passed since its adoption by Virginia, that he feared they had not only altered the amendments adopted by the Virginia convention, but had tampered with the body of the instrument itself.

After reading it carefully, satisfying himself that they had not changed the original paper, he read carefully the amendments to the tenth. When he read this he threw down the pamphlet upon the table, and remarked with great solemnity:

“I find that these shrewd Northern Statesmen have outwitted our Southern men again in the wording of these amendments. They determined when this Constitution was framed to make this a great consolidated National Government of all the people of the States. To secure this object they inserted in its preamble the words 'We, the People of the United States,' instead of We, the States.

  Their object was to make it a government of a majority of the whole people, that is a Government of the Northern People; for they have this majority; and under such a government holding this power they can and will exercise it oppressively to the South for their own advantage. To prevent this, and to hinder this majority from doing whatever they may think proper for 'the general welfare,' which they will construe to mean their own sectional welfare, I wrote the first 20 amendments adopted, and recommended by the Convention of Virginia in these words: 'Each State in the Union shall respectively retain every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by this Constitution delegated to the Congress of the United States, or to the departments of the Federal Government.'

This was intended to secure the rights of the States, and to prevent the exercise of doubtful powers by the Federal Government, but they have omitted it, and substituted for it this equivocal thing to which they have tacked the objectionable and dangerous words of 'the people.' 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, 'or to the people.' Why did they add, 'or to the people?' They determined to make it a consolidated government. They added these words to neutralize the amendment of Virginia, and they have done it effectually. This government cannot last. It will not last a century. We can only get rid of its oppression by a most violent and bloody struggle.”[39]

Thus the War to Prevent Southern Independence was predicted by Patrick Henry in 1789 because of the Northern greed and lust for dominance he recognized in the US Constitution. Whatever one thinks about the Constitution, it ceased to exist as seven articles and twelve articles of amendments when eleven states announced in 1861 that they were no longer under its authority. The seven articles and their three branches of government remained in force in the Northern states, but the so-called Bill of Rights evaporated under Lincoln's dictatorial rule. Thousands of Northern protesters were arrested and denied Habeas Corpus. Hundreds of Northern newspapers were shut down and their editors and publishers thrown in prison to rot for years. 620,000 died from 1861 to 1865 and for what - so that all Americans could live under the protection of the US Constitution?

In the aftermath of the war, Southerners were forced back in the Union. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were rammed into the Constitution at gunpoint. The Southern States were under Federal military rule for twelve years. No Southern Congressman was allowed back in the Congress until his state ratified the 14th Amendment. The 17th Amendment provided for the direct election of Senators. The US Constitution was in effect a contract between the states and the people. The people were represented in the federal government in the House of Representatives, the members of which were elected by popular vote. The states were represented in the Senate, and Senators were appointed by the State legislatures. When the 17th Amendment forced the popular vote for Senators, the Constitution, the contract, ceased to exist. It was rendered technically null and void. Lincoln had rendered it meaningless, but the 17th made it official.[40]

Shortly before his death, General Lee – in a characteristically graceful reply to a kind note he'd received from Lord Acton – explained that "the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people [were] the safeguard to the continuance of a free government." By suppressing the option of secession, which is the ultimate peaceful check on the ambitions of a central government, the North had destroyed that safeguard.

In words that have the undeniable heft of fulfilled prophecy, Lee predicted that "the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it."[41]

Today, it’s easy to see the "ruin" of which Lee wrote. Those ruling us have pledged something in excess of $8 trillion – more than half of this year's gross domestic product – to provide a financial cushion for the politically connected criminals who preside over our financial system. In that fact we can see the real nature of the "Union" created by Lincoln: It is a forced marriage between the ignorant or deceived host and eager, esurient parasites.

The logic of Lincoln's triumph, wrote biographer Charles C.L. Minor, is that "the right to govern is paramount over the right to live, that man is made for government, rather than government for man, and that for men to claim the right of self-government is to deserve and incur the death penalty." This is why the Power Elite exalts Lincoln's name above all others and celebrates him as the Holy State made Flesh.

Lincoln's political mentor was Senator Henry Clay, a Kentucky slave owner. Lincoln exhibited racist speech using the pejorative for "Negro" up until the last days of his life. He consistently frequented "black face" comedy shows that denigrated blacks in stereotypical ways. Lincoln always supported fugitive slave laws in Illinois and nationally. His lukewarm Emancipation Proclamation was only an attempt to stave off the radical abolitionists who were pressing for full freedom for all Black Americans. Lincoln's Proclamation promised to emancipate blacks in areas currently in rebellion (in which Lincoln had no jurisdiction), and did not emancipate slaves in the areas that had not seceded or were militarily re-occupied. It was a halfway measure designed to obfuscate Lincoln's true agenda, i.e., deportation for colonization of the native born African American population. Lincoln's speeches, including the Gettysburg Address, were high sounding but did not include African Americans in the great American ideal of freedom for all. "All men are created equal" did not include blacks until Lincoln had been assassinated and was not able to obstruct the final version of the thirteenth amendment. Lincoln pursued the War for two years with pro-slavery Democrat generals like McClellan, Halleck and Pope. Certainly Lincoln's incompetence was responsible for extending the War, causing loss of life for over 650,000 Americans North and South.

It's very clear from Lincoln’s own speeches and writings that he did not believe in racial equality. On June 13, 1836, Lincoln wrote a letter to the editor of the Sangamo Journal that gives some insight into his views on race. In the letter he wrote, "I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burthens. Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms, (by no means excluding females.)"

To look further into Lincoln’s ideas about race, there is this quote, which was made on September 18, 1858 in a speech during the famous Lincoln/Douglas debates. (The quote can be found on page 145 of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler.)

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races–that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the Negro should be denied everything. I do not understand that because I do not want a Negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife."

Four years later, in an Aug. 22, 1862, letter to New York Tribune Editor Horace Greeley, Lincoln wrote:

"If I could save the union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race I do because I believe it helps to save the union."

In a speech in Clinton, Illinois on September 2, 1858, Lincoln addresses the complaint of his opponent Stephen Douglas that a Lincoln/Republican victory will lead to mass race mixing. He points out that the charge is not true and that the slave States are the states that have the most amount of race mixing based on the number of mulattoes that are reported in the 1850 census to be in the slave States. Lincoln said, "In the slave States there were, in 1850, three hundred and forty-eight thousand mulattoes – all of home production; and in the Free States there were less than sixty thousand mulattoes – and a large number of them were imported from the South." Clearly he sees race mixing as wrong and the creation of mulattoes as something to be avoided

Lincoln was an ambitious, indecisive, manipulative, misguided, and decidedly racist and desperately craved some kind of long lasting historical legacy. Lincoln was slow coming to grips with the true nature of the War. Lincoln maintained all along that this War was being fought for Union, failing to ever grasp the eventual importance of the slave issue except to use blacks as a political pawn piece to win the war. Lincoln comes across as Machiavellian and insensitive when he finally issues the Emancipation Proclamation only as a military strategy to keep England and France out of the War. Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers after he had successfully maneuvered the South into firing on Sumter. Before his call for the 75,000, Virginia and North Carolina had not seceded and were not predisposed to go out. By his actions, he forced these states out and then proceeded to ineptly preside over a botched, bloody, protracted war that could have been averted by more clear headed, adroit diplomacy before the initial Battle of Manassas. Manassas led to Shiloh and, by then, the need to justify somehow the already horrific loss of life. Certainly, once the eleven states seceded, it was the effective end of American slavery because then the slaves could escape across international borders. A slave in Mississippi, once into Indiana, would have been free from pursuit, thus signaling the ultimate demise of the slave system. Lincoln's myopia regarding this key point precipitated not only the war deaths of so many Americans, but also set in motion the raw emotions and scapegoating that marked the brutal "reconstruction" of the South.

The pursuit of the war and reconstruction only exacerbated racist feelings that whites felt toward blacks and necessitated the Civil Rights marches led by leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. almost a century after this sad period in American history. Americans today are still dealing with the issues that Lincoln did not deal with during his tenure as president. In the South over 90% of the fighting men never owned slaves and were fighting for their families, homes and farms. The Union invader was fighting only for Union, not emancipation. Abraham Lincoln was undoubtedly the deeply flawed, morally shallow politician, and you should sincerely wonder why Lincoln merits such an exalted position on the National Mall. You should realize that the mythologized Lincoln did not die Christ-like for his country's sins. He was not the Man of the Age, but a man who was given the highest position in the American Pantheon simply because he was capable of murdering and plundering his fellow citizens for no more, and no less, than Empire.

In Conclusion

In the schoolbook account of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln rose to the Presidency and took the steps needed to end slavery. He led the country in a great Civil War against the slaveholding states that seceded, restored these states to the Union, and ended slavery. Accordingly, historians rate Abraham Lincoln as one of our greatest presidents.

The war did enable Lincoln to "save" the Union, but only in a geographic sense. The country ceased being a Union, as it was originally conceived, of separate and sovereign states. Instead, America became a "nation" with a powerful federal government. Although the war freed four million slaves into poverty, it did not bring about a new birth of freedom, as Lincoln and historians such as James McPherson and Henry Jaffa say. For the nation as a whole the war did just the opposite: It initiated a process of centralization of government that has substantially restricted liberty and freedom in America, as historians Charles Adams and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel have argued Adams in his book, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (published in 2000); and Hummel in his book, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996).

The term Civil War is a misnomer. The South did not instigate a rebellion. Thirteen southern states in 1860-61 simply chose to secede from the Union and go their own way, like the thirteen colonies did when they seceded from Britain. A more accurate name for the war that took place between the northern and southern American states is the War for Southern Independence.

Abraham Lincoln caused the greatest slaughter of Americans in our history. In one of the greatest acts of political hypocrisy in human history, Lincoln decided to fight a long bloody civil war to brutally impose federal rule on the South.

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America prohibited the importation of slaves (Article I, Section 9). With no fugitive slave laws in neighboring states that would return fugitive slaves to their owners, the value of slaves as property drops owing to increased costs incurred to guard against their escape. With slaves having a place to escape to in the North and with the supply of new slaves restricted by its Constitution, slavery in the Confederate states would have ended without war. A slave's decreasing property value, alone, would have soon made the institution unsustainable, irrespective of more moral and humanitarian considerations.

The rallying call in the North at the beginning of the war was "preserve the Union," not "free the slaves." Although certainly a contentious political issue and detested by abolitionists, in 1861 slavery nevertheless was not a major public issue. Protestant Americans in the North were more concerned about the growing number of Catholic immigrants than they were about slavery. In his First Inaugural Address, given five weeks before the war began, Lincoln reassured slaveholders that he would continue to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.

Did saving the Union justify the slaughter of such a large number of young men? The Confederates posed no military threat to the North. Perhaps it would be better to let the southern states go, along with their 4 million slaves. If it was going to win, the North needed a more compelling reason to continue the war than to preserve the Union. The North needed a cause for continuing the war, as Lincoln put the matter in his Second Inaugural Address; that it was willed by God, where "the judgments of the Lord" determined the losses sustained and its outcome.

The Emancipation Proclamation was a "war measure," as Lincoln put it. Foreign correspondents covering the war recognized it as a brilliant propaganda coup. Emancipation would take place only in rebel states not under Union control, their state sovereignty in the matter of slavery arguably forfeited as a result of their having seceded from the Union. The president could not abolish slavery; if not done at the state level, abolition would require a constitutional amendment. Slaveholders and their slaves in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Tennessee, and parts of Virginia and Louisiana occupied by Union troops were exempt from the edict. Slaves in the Confederacy would be "forever free" on January 1, 1863 one hundred days after the Proclamation was issued but only if a state remained in "rebellion" after that date. Rebel states that rejoined the Union and sent elected representatives to Congress before January 1, 1863 could keep their slaves. Such states would no longer be considered in rebellion and so their sovereignty regarding the peculiar institution would be restored. As the London Spectator put it, in its October 11, 1862 issue, "The principle [of the Proclamation] is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States."

Why were business and political leaders in the North so intent on keeping the southern states in the Union? It was, to paraphrase Charles Dickens, solely a fiscal matter. The principal source of tax revenue for the federal government before the Civil War was a tariff on imports. There was no income tax, except for one declared unconstitutional after its enactment during the Civil War. Tariffs imposed by the federal government not only accounted for most of the federal budget, they also raised the price of imported goods to a level where the less-efficient manufacturers of the northeast could be competitive.

Observers in Britain looked beyond the rhetoric of "preserve the Union" and saw what was really at stake. Charles Dickens views on the subject were typical:

Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils. The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.[42]

Karl Marx seconded this view:

The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty.[43]

The South fought the war for essentially the same reason that the American colonies fought the Revolutionary War. The central grievance of the American colonies in the 18th century was the taxes imposed on them by Britain. Colonists particularly objected to the Stamp Act, which required them to purchase an official British stamp and place it on all documents in order for them to be valid. The colonists also objected to the import tariff that Britain placed on sugar and other goods (the Sugar Act).

After the enactment of what was called the "Tariff of Abomination" in 1828, promoted by Henry Clay, the tax on imports ranged between 20-30%. It rose further in March 1861 when Lincoln, at the start of his presidency, signed the Morrill Tariff into law. This tax was far more onerous than the one forced on the American colonies by Britain in the 18th century.[44]

Lincoln coerced the South to fire the first shots when, against the initial advice of most of his cabinet, he dispatched ships carrying troops and munitions to resupply Fort Sumter, site of the customs house at Charleston. Charleston militia took the bait and bombarded the fort on April 12, 1861. After those first shots were fired the pro-Union press branded Southern secession an "armed rebellion" and called for Lincoln to suppress it.

Congress was adjourned at the time and for the next three months, ignoring his constitutional duty to call this legislative branch of government back in session during a time of emergency, Lincoln assumed dictatorial powers and did things, like raise an army, that only Congress is supposed to do. He shut down newspapers that disagreed with his war policy, more than 300 of them. He ordered his military officers to lock up political opponents, thousands of them. Although the exact number is not known, Lincoln may well have arrested and imprisoned more than 20,000 political opponents, southern sympathizers, and people suspected of being disloyal to the Union, creating what one researcher has termed a 19th century "American gulag," a forerunner of the 20th century's political prison and labor camps in the former Soviet Union. Lincoln denied these nonviolent dissenters their right of free speech and suspended the privilege of Habeas Corpus, something only Congress in a time of war has the power to do. Lincoln's soldiers arrested civilians, often arbitrarily, without any charges being filed; and, if held at all, military commissions conducted trials. He permitted Union troops to arrest the Mayor of Baltimore (then the third largest city in the Union), its Chief of Police and a Maryland congressman, along with 31 state legislators. When Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote an opinion that said these actions were unlawful and violated the Constitution, Lincoln ignored the ruling.[45]

Lincoln called up an army of 75,000 men to invade the seven southern states that had seceded and force them back into the Union. By unilaterally recruiting troops to invade these states, without first calling Congress into session to consider the matter and give its consent, Lincoln made an error in judgment that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. At the time, only seven states had seceded. But when Lincoln announced his intention to bring these states back into the Union by force, four additional states Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas seceded and joined the Confederacy. Slavery was not the issue. The issue was the very nature of the American union. If the President of the United States intended to hold the Union together by force, they wanted out. When these four states seceded and joined the Confederacy rather than send troops to support Lincoln's unconstitutional actions, the Confederacy became much more viable and the war much more horrible.

From the time Lincoln entered politics as a candidate for state legislature in 1832, he championed a political agenda known as the "American System." First advocated by his idol and mentor, Henry Clay, it was a three-part program of protective tariffs, internal improvements, and centralized banking. This program "tied economic development to strong centralized national authority," as Robert Johannsen puts it in Lincoln, the South, And Slavery. Lincoln believed that import tariffs were necessary, at the expense of consumers. He believed that American industries needed to be shielded from foreign competition and cheap imported goods. The "internal improvements" he advocated were simply subsidies for industry, i.e., corporate welfare. "My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance," he declared: "I am in favor of a national bank . . . the internal improvements system, and a high protective tariff."[46] Abraham Lincoln was the first president to give us centralized banking, with paper money not backed by gold.

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America forbid protectionist tariffs, outlawed government subsidies to private businesses, and made congressional appropriations subject to approval by a two-thirds majority vote. It enjoined Congress from initiating constitutional amendments, leaving that power to the constituent states; and limited its president to a single six-year term.[47] When the South lost, instead of a Jeffersonian republic of free trade and limited constitutional government, the stage was set for the United States to become an American Empire ruled by a central authority. In starting his war against the Confederate States, Lincoln was not seeking the "preservation of the Union" in its traditional sense. He sought the preservation of the Northern economy by means of transforming the federal government into a centralized welfare-warfare-police state.

The Founding Fathers system of divided sovereignty, championed by James Madison, was destroyed in1865. As John Hopkins University political theorist Gottfried Dietze wrote in America’s Political Dilemmas: “Before the Civil War…the nature of American federalism was still a subject of debate. The outcome of the Civil War ended that. The Nationalists emerged as victors.”[48]

In The Greatest Nation of the Earth historian Heather Cox Richardson quotes Senator John Sherman (R-Ohio) as saying that the Republican Party’s objective was “to nationalize as much as possible, even the currency, so as to make men love their country before their States. All private interests, all public interests, all banking interests, the interests of individuals, everything, should be subordinate now to the interest of the Government.”[49] This statement could not be any further away from Jefferson’s “that government governs best which governs least” philosophy. The Republicans, including Lincoln, clearly saw the nationalization of “everything” as an essential weapon in their crusade to abolish Jeffersonianism, centralize power in Washington, and finally implement the Hamiltonian system of protectionism, national debt, nationalized banking, and corporate welfare.

Lincoln’s dictatorial methods, and his creation of a consolidated, militaristic state, have long been the model for the America Right. William F. Buckley, Jr. believed that America needed a “totalitarian bureaucracy” to fight the cold war, and that the Lincoln administration served as an ideal model.[50] When the cold war was ended and there was no longer any need for a “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” the conservative movement, which now calls itself the “neoconservative” movement, declared that its new goal would be perpetual global warfare in the name of spreading democracy around the globe. Naturally, they constantly make use of the Lincoln legend in speeches and articles to attempt to “justify” this quintessentially un-American policy.

Right-wing totalitarians are not the only ones who invoke the Lincoln legend when justifying monopolistic or dictatorial government. There are many prominent academic leftists who idolize Lincoln because they, too, favor “totalitarian bureaucracy,” as long as they, and not and not people like William F. Buckley, Jr. are running it.

It is remarkable how Lincoln cultists simply take everything Lincoln said as the Gospel Truth, never to be questioned, even if the idea seems absolutely outrageous. Lincoln is routinely described as “the greatest of all Americans” and “redeemer of the nation.” Such rhetoric, however, is rarely beneficial to anyone interested in learning true history. The deification of Lincoln has always been part of a not-so-hidden agenda to expand the size and scope of the American state. With the death of states’ rights in 1865 came the death of citizen sovereignty in America. The Lincoln cult desperately seeks to keep these dark thoughts out of the minds of the American public by creating falsehoods and deceptions about American history.[51]

But don’t take my word for it, see for yourself. For example, you might want to look into the Hampton Roads Peace Conference which occurred in February of 1865, “because it brings into question most of the mythology promoted today which states that Lincoln and the North fought the war for the purpose of abolishing slavery and the South fought for the purpose of protecting it, and therefore, it was a great and noble war.”[52]

Hundreds of books have been written about Lincoln the humanitarian, a soft and gentle man. But from the very beginning of his administration he intentionally waged a cruel and unbelievably bloody war on civilians as well as soldiers. As early as 1861, Federal soldiers looted, pillaged, raped and plundered their way through Virginia and other Southern states, completely burning to the ground the towns of Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi, Randolph, Tennessee, and others. Historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel estimates that some 50,000 Southern civilians were killed during the war, and this number, even if it is exaggerated by a multiple of two, most likely includes thousands of slaves. In his March to the Sea, General William Tecumseh Sherman boasted of having destroyed $100 million in private property and that his "soldiers" carried home another $20 million worth.

In his memoirs Sherman wrote that when he met with Lincoln after his March to the Sea was completed, Lincoln was eager to hear the stories of how thousands of Southern civilians, mostly women, children, and old men, were plundered, sometimes murdered, and rendered homeless. Lincoln, according to Sherman, laughed almost uncontrollably at the stories.[53] Even Sherman biographer Lee Kennett, who writes very favorably of the general, concluded that had the Confederates won the war, they would have been "justified in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants."[54]

As H.L. Mencken said of the Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln absurdly claimed that Northern soldiers were fighting for the cause of self determination ("that government of the people . . . should not perish . . .": "It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. The Confederates went into the battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision of the rest of the country."[55]

The Lincoln myths form the ideological cornerstone of the bloated American state, which will never be restored to its proper role until these myths are challenged and overthrown.

---

[1] Cracks in the Constitution Ferdinand Lundberg (Lyle Stuart, Book Sales; 1st edition April 1982)

[2] The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution: Kevin R. C. Gutzman, J.D., Ph.D.

[3] Slavery, Secession, and Civil War: Views from the UK and Europe, 1856-1865: :  Charles Adams (The Scarecrow Press, Inc. December 28, 2006)

[4] For a perfect example, see James G. Randall, Lincoln the Liberal Statesman (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1947), 175–206.

[5] See Joel H. Silbey, " 'Always a Whig in Politics': The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln," Papers of the Abraham Lincoln Association 8 (1986): 21–42.

[6] See Sheldon H. Harris, "Abraham Lincoln Stumps a Yankee Audience," New England Quarterly 38 (1965): 227–33.

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_System_(economic_plan)

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_improvements

[9] Why Abraham Lincoln Was a Whig by Daniel Walker Howe

[10] The Republican Charade: Lincoln and His Party by Clyde Wilson

[11] Lincoln’s Melancholy: by Josheu Shenk (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt September 27, 2005), p. 11

[12] Ibid, p. 19

[13] For the political and economic mechanics behind the internal imorovements scheme and the debt crisis that followed, see Paul Simon, Lincoln’s Preparation for Greatness: The Illinois Legislative Years (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 48-54, 151-56, 173-78, 182-88, 225-27, 232-36.

[14] Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV (Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994,342.

[15] Norbert Hirschhorn, Robert G. Feldman, And Ian A. Greaves, “Abraham Lincoln’s Blue Pills: Did Our Sixteenth President Suffer From Mercury Poisoning?” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44, no.3 (Summer 2001): 315-22.

[16] Ward Hill Lamon, interview with WHH, 1865-66, Herndon’s Informants,466.

[17] Lincoln’s Melancholy: by Josheu Shenk (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt September 27, 2005), p. 113

[18] John Charles Bucknill and Daniel H. Tuke, A Manual of Psychological Medicine (New York: Hafner, 1968; orig. 1858), 155.

[19] Lincoln’s Melancholy: by Josheu Shenk (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt September 27, 2005), p. 117

[20] Lincoln Unmasked by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2006), p.28

[21] Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.228

[22] Richard Timberlake, Monetary History of the United States: An Intellectual and Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.70

[23] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Treasury_System

[24] Lincoln Unmasked by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2006), p.134

[25] Murray Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar (Auburn AL: Mises Institute, 2005 reprint), p.78

[26] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_Tender_Cases

[27] Murray Rothbard, A History of Money and Banking in the United States (Auburn AL: Mises Institute, 2002), p.122

[28] Lincoln Unmasked by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2006), p.138

[29] Lee Kenneth, Marching Through Georgia: The Story of Soldiers and Civilians During Sherman’s Campaign (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 286

[30] The Hard Hand of War: Mark Grimsley, (Cambridge University Press, August 21, 2008)

[31] John Bennett Walters, Merchant of Terror: General Sherman and Total War, (Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. January 1, 1973) p. 137

[32] Roy Morris, Jr., Sheridan: The Life and Wars of General Phil Sheridan, (Vintage, July 27, 1993) p. 184.

[33] "Reminiscences Of The Civil War", (Chapter I) By John B. Gordon, Maj. Gen. CSA

[34] Lincoln Unmasked by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2006), p.113-127

[35] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence

[36] http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/paris.html

[37] The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War: Thomas J. DiLorenzo (Forum/Random House 2002)

[38] Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (Signet Classics, September 5, 2001)

[39] Patrick Henry: Corrections of Biographical Mistakes and Popular Errors in Regard to is Character. Anecdotes and New Facts Illustrating His Religious and Political Opinions, and the Style and Power of His Eloquence. A Brief Account of His Last Illness and Death, Edward Fontaine, 1872, (Accession 22470. The University of Virginia)

[40] The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution  by Kevin R. C. Gutzman (Regnery Publishing, Inc. June 11, 2007)

[41] General Lee: A Biography of Robert E. Lee: Fitzhugh Lee (Published by Da Capo Press, 1994)

[42] All The Year Round: Charles Dickens (December 28, 1861)

[43] Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists: Walter D Kennedy (iUniverse, Inc. August 17, 2007)

[44] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Tariff

[45] Lincoln Reconsidered: David Donald (Vintage; 3 Sub edition, February 13, 2001)

[46] Constitutional Dictatorship: Clinton Rossiter (Greenwood Press, July 1979)

[47] A Tariff History of the United States: Frank Taussig (Johnson Reprint Corp; 8th edition, January 1973)

[48] Gottfried Dietze, America’s Political Dilemma: From Limited to Unlimited Democracy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1968), p.67

[49] Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997), p.148

[50] William F. Buckley, Jr., "A Young Republican View," The Commonweal, January 25, 1952

[51] Lincoln Unmasked by Thomas J. DiLorenzo (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2006), p.182

[52] The Hampton Roads Peace Conference During the War Between the States by John V. Denson

[53] Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman: William Tecumseh Sherman (Library of America, October 1, 1990)

[54] Sherman: A Soldier's Life: Lee B. Kennett (Harper Perennial, July 23, 2002)

[55] From "Five Men at Random," Prejudices: Third Series: H. L. Mencken. (First printed, in part, in the Smart Set, May, 1920), p. 141