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Thursday, March 25, 2010
Reading List: Lincoln über Alles
- Emison, John Avery. Lincoln über Alles. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2009. ISBN 978-1-58980-692-4.
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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.)
Posted at March 25, 2010 21:20