- Emison, John Avery.
Lincoln über Alles.
Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2009.
ISBN 978-1-58980-692-4.
-
Recent books, such as
Liberal Fascism (January 2008),
have explored the roots and deep interconnections between
the Progressive movement in the United States and the
philosophy and policies of its leaders such as Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and collectivist movements
in twentieth century Europe, including Soviet communism,
Italian fascism, and Nazism in Germany. The resurgence of
collectivism in the United States, often now once again
calling itself “progressive”, has made this
examination not just a historical footnote but rather an
important clue in understanding the intellectual foundations
of the current governing philosophy in Washington.
A candid look at progressivism and its consequences for
liberty and prosperity has led, among those willing to
set aside accounts of history written by collectivists,
whether they style themselves progressives or “liberals”,
and look instead at contemporary sources and analyses by genuine
classical liberals, to a dramatic reassessment of the
place in history of Wilson and the two Roosevelts. While,
in an academy and educational establishment still overwhelmingly
dominated by collectivists, this is still a minority view, at
least serious research into this dissenting view of history
is available to anybody interested in searching it out.
Far more difficult to find is a critical examination of
the U.S. president who was, according to this account,
the first and most consequential of all American progressives,
Abraham Lincoln.
Some years ago,
L. Neil Smith, in
his essay
“The American
Lenin”, said that if you wanted to distinguish a
libertarian from a conservative, just ask them about Abraham
Lincoln. This observation has been amply demonstrated by
the recent critics of progressivism, almost all conservatives
of one stripe or another, who have either remained silent on
the topic of Lincoln or jumped on the bandwagon and
praised him.
This book is a frontal assault on the hagiography of Sainted
Abe. Present day accounts of Lincoln's career and the
Civil War contain so many omissions and gross misrepresentations
of what actually happened that it takes a book of
300 pages like this one, based in large part on contemporary
sources, to provide the context for a contrary argument.
Topics many readers well-versed in the conventional wisdom view
of American history may encounter for the first time here include:
- No constitutional provision prohibited states from
seceding, and the common law doctrine prohibiting
legislative entrenchment (one legislature binding the
freedom of a successor to act) granted sovereignty
conventions the same authority to secede as to join
the union in the first place.
- None of the five living former presidents at the time
Lincoln took office (only one a Southerner) supported
military action against the South.
- Lincoln's
Emancipation
Proclamation freed only slaves in states of the Confederacy;
slaves in slave states which did not secede, including
Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri remained in bondage.
In fact, in 1861, Lincoln had written to the governors of
all the states urging them to ratify the
Corwin Amendment,
already passed by the House and Senate, which would have written
protection for slavery and indentured servitude into the
Constitution.
Further, Lincoln supported the secession of West Virginia
from Virgina, and its admittance to the Union as a slave
state. Slavery was not abolished throughout the United States
until the adoption of the
Thirteenth
Amendment in December 1865, after Lincoln's death.
- Despite subsequent arguments that secession was illegal,
Lincoln mounted no legal challenge to the declarations of
secession prior to calling for troops and initiating hostilities.
Congress voted no declaration of war authorising Lincoln
to employ federal troops.
- The prosecution of total war against noncombatants in the
South by Sherman and others, with the approval of Grant
and Lincoln, not only constituted war crimes by modern standards,
but were prohibited by the
Lieber Code
governing the conduct of the Union armies, signed by President
Lincoln in April 1863.
- Like the progressives of the early 20th century who looked
to Bismarck's Germany as the model, and present-day
U.S. progressives who want to remodel their country along
the lines of the European social democracies, the
philosophical underpinnings of Lincoln's Republicans and
a number of its political and military figures as well as
the voters who put it over the top in the states of the
“old northwest” were Made in Germany. The
“Forty-Eighters”,
supporters of the failed 1848 revolutions in Europe,
emigrated in subsequent years to the U.S. and, members
of the European élite, established themselves as leaders
in their new communities. They were supporters of a
strong national government, progressive income taxation,
direct election of Senators, nationalisation of railroads
and other national infrastructure, an imperialistic
foreign policy, and secularisation of the society—all
part of the subsequent progressive agenda, and all achieved
or almost so today. An estimation of the impact of
Forty-Eighters on the 1860 election (at the time,
in many states immigrants who were not yet
citizens could vote if they simply declared their intention
to become naturalised) shows that they provided Lincoln's
margin of victory in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan,
Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin (although some of these were
close and may have gone the other way.)
Many of these points will be fiercely disputed by Lincoln scholars and
defenders; see the arguments here, follow up their source citations,
and make up your own mind. What is not in dispute is that the Civil War
and the policies advocated by Lincoln and implemented in his
administration and its Republican successors, fundamentally changed
the relationship between the Federal government and the states.
While before the Federal government was the creation of the states,
to which they voluntarily delegated limited and enumerated powers,
which they retained the right to reclaim by leaving
the union, afterward Washington became not a federal government but
a national government in the 19th century European sense, with the
states increasingly becoming administrative districts charged with
carrying out its policies and with no recourse when their original
sovereignty was violated. A “national greatness” policy
was aggressively pursued by the central government, including subsidies
and land grants for building infrastructure, expansion into the
Western territories (with repeatedly broken treaties and genocidal
wars against their native populations), and high tariffs to protect
industrial supporters in the North. It was Lincoln who first brought
European-style governance to America, and in so doing became the first
progressive president.
Now, anybody who says anything against Lincoln will immediately be
accused of being a racist who wishes to perpetuate slavery. Chapter 2,
a full 40 pages of this book, is devoted to race in America, before,
during, and after the Civil War. Once again, you will learn that
the situation is far more complicated than you believed it to be.
There is plenty of blame to go around on all sides; after reviewing
the four page list of Jim Crow laws passed by Northern states
between 1777 and 1868, it is hard to regard them as champions of
racial tolerance on a crusade to liberate blacks in the South.
The greatest issue regarding the Civil War, discussed only rarely now,
is why it happened at all. If the war was about slavery (as most
people believe today), then why, among all the many countries and
colonies around the world which abolished slavery in the nineteenth
century, was it only in the United States that abolition required a
war? If, however, the war is regarded not as a civil war (which it
wasn't, since the southern states did not wish to conquer Washington
and impose their will upon the union), nor as a “war between the
states” (because it wasn't the states of the North fighting
against the states of the South, but rather the federal government
seeking to impose its will upon states which no longer wished to
belong to the union), but rather an imperial conquest waged as a war
of annihilation if necessary, by a central government over a
recalcitrant territory which refused to cede its sovereignty,
then the war makes perfect sense, and is entirely consistent with the
subsequent wars waged by Republican administrations to assert
sovereignty over Indian nations.
Powerful central government, elimination of state and limitation
of individual autonomy, imposition of uniform policies at a
national level, endowing the state with a monopoly on the use
of force and the tools to impose its will, grandiose public works
projects funded by taxation of the productive sector, and
sanguinary conflicts embarked upon in the interest of moralistic
purity or national glory: these are all hallmarks of
progressives, and this book makes a persuasive case that Lincoln
was the first of their kind to gain power in the United States.
Should liberty blossom again there, and the
consequences of progressivism be candidly reassessed, there will be two
faces to come down from Mount Rushmore, not just one.
March 2010 