The Dark Side of Abraham Lincoln

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The Dark Side of Abraham Lincoln

By Thomas Landess on

 

Dec 10, 2015

 

By way of prologue, let me say that all of us like the Lincoln whose face appears on the penny. He is the Lincoln of myth: kindly, hum­ble, a man of sorrows who believes in malice toward none and char­ity toward all, who simply wants to preserve the Union so that we can all live together as one people. The Lincoln on the penny, had he lived, would have spared the South the ravages of Reconstruction and ushered in the Era of Good Feeling in 1865. The fact that this mythic Lincoln was killed is surely the ultimate tragedy in a tragic era. Indeed the most that any Southerner could say in behalf of the slayer of that Lincoln was what Sheldon Vanauken reported hearing from an old-fashioned Virginian: “Young Booth, sir, acting out of the best of motives, made a tragic blunder.” But the Lincoln on the penny, the mythic Lincoln, did not exist. Instead a very real man, a political absolutist with enormous human weaknesses, for a time held the destiny of the nation in his oversized palm. So why do we dislike this Lincoln so much? There are many reasons, and here, just for starters, are three good ones:

 

I. Lincoln was the inventor of a new concept of “Union,” one that im­plied a strong centralized government and an “imperial presiden­cy.” a Union that now dominates virtually every important aspect of our corporate life as Americans.

 

 http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/the-dark-side-of-abraham-lincoln/

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War was Lincoln’s Choice

 

 A wonderful book in my library and see the hardback is $550 now.

Circa 1865

President James Buchanan disagreed with secession as the prerogative of a State, but admitted that he as president held no authority to levy war to stop it — and his attorney general concurred. Both were well-aware of Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying was against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Buchanan could not use military force against a State without committing treason.

“The States of the deep South dissolved their connection with the voluntary union of the United States with marked legality at the beginning of 1861. For a quarter of a year no one knew that there was to be a war. Then Lincoln (unauthorized by the Constitution) called for troops; and the upper South, led by Virginia, seceded.

The point is, Lincoln could have chosen to let the South go in peace on the grounds that a just government depends on the consent of the governed, and the Southern States had withdrawn that consent.

But, said the North, the majority do consent, since there are more people in the North. Even if most of the people in the South do not consent, we in the North are the majority of the whole nation. Thus, the rights of a minority, although a minority of millions, mean nothing.

This is precisely what [Alexis] de Tocqueville warned against: the tyranny of the majority. And Lord Acton was deeply convinced that the principle of States’ rights was the best limitation upon the tyranny of the majority that had ever been devised.

Thus Lee did represent the cause of freedom, and Lord Acton broke his heart over Lee’s surrender because the principle of States’ rights was finally and forever denied.

The America of today is the America that won that immense triumph in the war – the triumph of unlimited, equalitarian democracy. And its leaders have blurred the distinction between freedom and equality to the point where many people use those words as virtually interchangeable terms.”

(The Glittering Illusion: English Sympathy for the Southern Confederacy, Sheldon Vanauken, Regnery Gateway, 1989, excerpt pg. 142)

 

Posted by Brock Townsend at Friday, June 11, 2021 2 comments:  

 

 

 

 

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Through European Eyes

 

By Paul Gottfried on Jul 6, 2016

 

This essay was originally published in Southern Partisan Magazine, 1985.

 

Historians have long misinterpreted the responses of Europeans to the events of the American War Between the States. One of the earli­est cases in point was Karl Marx, who considered himself a scientific historian and a knowledgeable commentator on the great American Crisis. Writing on December 12, 1862, about the Emancipation Proclamation, Marx praised Lincoln’s capacity to “accomplish the most significant things in the least conspicuous way possible.” Marx was convinced that Lincoln would win the hearts and minds of the European working class by making a morally compelling case for the Union. However snidely English newspapers treated Lincoln’s rustic manners, Marx was convinced that European workers and progres­sives would rally to support the Great Emancipator.

 

Marx’s view of Lincoln is puzzling for at least two reasons. One, Marx claimed to be an historical materialist who saw ideas as deriv­ative from economic circumstances. Yet, in the matter of refounding the American regime, he had faith in the power of Lincoln’s hidden moral vision to touch everywhere proletariat souls. This would oc­cur, or so Marx believed,   http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/through-european-eyes/

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Secession Without Civil War

 

By Philip Leigh on

 

Sep 2, 2016

 

Since most modern historians agree that the South seceded to protect slavery they often conclude that the Civil War was “all about” slavery. The inference, however, overlooks the possibility that the Southern states could have been allowed to depart in peace. Within the lifetimes of most readers, for example, the Soviet Union peacefully disintegrated into its constituent countries as did Czechoslovakia.

 

Even though it was partly motivated to defend slavery, one secession example from American history demonstrates that secession need not have led to war. Moreover, it questions the underlying assumption that the immorality of slavery alone was sufficiently repellant to Northerners to prompt them into fighting secessionists for trying to maintain slavery.

 

In 1846 about one third of the District of Columbia seceded. Originally the District was a ten-mile-by-ten-mile square.  

http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/secession-without-civil-war/

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The Lincoln War Crimes Trial: A History Lesson

By Clyde Wilson on Sep 17, 2014

 

This essay originally appeared in Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture.

 

In the previous chapter we discussed the early stages of the North American War of Secession of 1861-63 as the minority Lincoln government attempted to suppress the legal secession of the Southern United States by military invasion. In this chapter we will discuss the conclusion of the war and some of its consequences.

 

In the spring of 1863 General R.E. Lee’s Confederate army crossed the Potomac for the second time in the hope of relieving devastated areas of the Confederacy and bringing the war to a successful conclusion.

 

For several weeks he maneuvered freely in Pennsylvania without encountering United States forces, which were under strict orders to protect the Lincoln government in Washington. The Confederates observed the rules of civilized warfare, despite the systematic atrocities that had already been visited upon civilians in the South by the Lincoln forces. Pennsylvanians worked peacefully in their fields as the ragged but confident Confederates marched by.

 

About the first of July, Lee found the US forces entrenched at Gettysburg, a town in Southern Pennsylvania.

 

 http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/clyde-wilson-library/the-lincoln-war-crimes-trial-a-history-lesson/

 

 

 

[Draggingtree]

Lincoln arrested everybody without charge because he had to save the country and the National Anthem and Pledge of Allegiance and all that American stuff,

 

 

http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/no-confederacy-no-republicans-but-a-pale-horse/

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Snap out of it, America!

The Terrible Truth About Abraham Lincoln and the Confederate War

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Michael Hutcheson

 

President Lincoln has been all but deified in America, with a god-like giant statue at a Parthenon-like memorial in Washington. Generations of school children have been indoctrinated with the story that “Honest Abe” Lincoln is a national hero who saved the Union and fought a noble war to end slavery, and that the “evil” Southern states seceded from the Union to protect slavery. This is the Yankee myth of history, written and promulgated by Northerners, and it is a complete falsity. It was produced and entrenched in the culture in large part to gloss over the terrible war crimes committed by Union soldiers in the War Between the States, as well as Lincoln’s violations of the law, his shredding of the Constitution, and other reprehensible acts. It has been very effective in keeping the average American ignorant of the real causes of the war, and the real nature, character and record of Lincoln. Let us look at some unpleasant facts.

In his first four months, he  https://snapoutofitamerica.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/the-terrible-truth-about-abraham-lincoln-and-the-confederate-war/

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Chicago's forgotten Civil War prison Camp Douglas

 80 Acres of Hell

 

 

 

 

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Shredding the Constitution to Save the Union

By Kevin R.C. Gutzman on Oct 24, 2017

A review of Liberty & Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalismby Timothy S. Huebner (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016).

Timothy S. Huebner’s new synthetic account of the Civil War and Reconstruction melds military history, political history, constitutional history, and black history in telling the tale of the most popular subject in American history. Published by one of the leading academic presses, it likely will serve as the go-to account for a generation.

What distinguishes this synthesis from previous summaries of the state of the field is the incorporation of the notion of black agency into the account from top to bottom. So, for example, runaways become “self-emancipated,” slaves are “enslaved people,” and the tendentious approach to the US Constitution culminating in Frederick Douglass’s urging on of the Union cause is an alternative “constitutionalism.   

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/shredding-the-constitution-to-save-the-union/

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The Health Wyze Report

The Whitewashed Tyranny of Abraham Lincoln

Written by Tara Dodrill

Abraham Lincoln was the best U.S. President, motivated by a patriotic and Christian desire to preserve the union of states and free the slaves. At least that is what modern textbooks suggest. There is a bigger story to the 16th President of the United States than the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. A whitewashed version of the man is all that we learned about him in school. It is what our children and grandchildren are still being taught. Public school districts and universities have been dutifully parroting that the Southern states of Lincoln's era had a perverse culture, while Northern society was superior. This became the politically-correct mantra when 'teaching' about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War for generations after the Civil Rights Movement. The identity politics is only getting worse, and more blatant.

The narrative is not only infused heavily with a liberal bias, but moreover, it is entirely wrong. Far too many Americans, both current students and adults, believe that the Civil War was a war about slavery. This liberalized version of history does not chronicle the political shenanigans that were undertaken by groups to harden their centralized (federal) grasp on power,   https://healthwyze.org/politics/838-the-whitewashed-tyranny-of-abraham-lincoln

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http://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2017/11/lincolns-war.html

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Friday, November 17, 2017

Lincoln’s War

If we are true to the English language and its usage, what is referred to as the American Revolution was in reality a civil war as opposing sides fought for control of the governance of the American Colonies.  The 1861-1865 war was not a civil war as several Southern States had withdrawn from their voluntary political compact with other States, and formed their own voluntary Union.  The South, then, had no interest in governing the North and truly fought in self-defense; the North, then, truly fought the war for conquest.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Lincoln’s War

“Matthew Forney Steele in his 1951 American Campaigns points out that the American Civil War was unusual for a civil war in having a purely sectional bias. Allegiance in this civil war was decided by one’s geographic location rather than class, religion, political allegiance, ethnicity or other factors that usually set the battling factions in a civil war apart from each other.  This meant, in practical terms, that in the American Civil War the sides fought not among themselves but arrayed against each other.   http://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2017/11/lincolns-war.html

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Sunday, December 17, 2017

Mobilizing the Hate of the People

 

 

The Lincoln administration utilized both censorship and propaganda in its effort to conceal the immense carnage and early defeats from the Northern public, as well as portray the South as murderers of noble Union soldiers who were defending the Founders’ republic. After Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, the campaign of hatred toward the South intensified to ensure that the South would remain a subject colony and economic wasteland — plus a source of freedmen votes to ensure Republican political hegemony.  That mobilization of hate toward the South continues unabated to this day.

[Draggingtree]

The Lincoln administration utilized both censorship and propaganda in its effort to conceal the immense carnage and early defeats from the Northern public, as well as portray the South as murderers of noble Union soldiers who were defending the Founders’ republic. After Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, the campaign of hatred toward the South intensified to ensure that the South would remain a subject colony and economic wasteland — plus a source oThe Lincoln administration utilized both censorship and propaganda in its effort to conceal the immense carnage and early defeats from the Northern public, as well as portray the South as murderers of noble Union soldiers who were defending the Founders’ republic. After Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, the campaign of hatred toward the South intensified to ensure that the South would remain a subject colony and economic wasteland — plus a source of freedmen votes to ensure Republican political hegemony.  That mobilization of hate toward the South continues unabated to this day.

It is true that Northern men hated the draft and did not flock to the colors; generous bounties were required to attract recruits and most often these were foreigners. Many posed the question the North was reluctant to ask: “If the cause of the Union was such a noble one, why was there so much violent opposition to the idea of fighting for it.” It was British propaganda that helped bring America into the First World War, despite a president being elected on a pledge of no American boys dying on European battlefields.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Mobilizing the Hate of the Peoplef freedmen votes to ensure Republican political hegemony.  That mobilization of hate toward the South continues unabated to this day.

It is true that Northern men hated the draft and did not flock to the colors; generous bounties were required to attract recruits and most often these were foreigners. Many posed the question the North was reluctant to ask: “If the cause of the Union was such a noble one, why was there so much violent opposition to the idea of fighting for it.” It was British propaganda that helped bring America into the First World War, despite a president being elected on a pledge of no American boys dying on European battlefields.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com   The Great American Political Divide

Mobilizing the Hate of the People  https://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2017/12/mobilizing-hate-of-people.html

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Frederick Douglass on Self-Reliance

Jon Gabriel, Ed / .March 9, 2018 / 11 COMMENTS

I’m reading The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, his comprehensive autobiography covering his life as a slave, a freedman, and his many years after full emancipation. Buried in the appendix is a speech he gave in 1880 that concludes with a lengthy but prophetic passage about the path forward. (This is far longer than most “Quote of the Day” entries, but after reading it, I scuttled the original quote I was going to use.) While he spoke to an African-American audience, I think it applies to all:     

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The Crisis at Fort Sumter

1 COMMENT

TAGS U.S. History

05/16/2018Chris Calton

With Lincoln in office and the Confederate government formally in place, the decision about how to handle Fort Sumter changed hands. Even before taking office, Lincoln had resolved to maintain the Fort, or retake it in the event that Buchanan had the fort evacuated. Once in office, the new president was faced with military leaders and a cabinet that were almost unanimously in favor of evacuating the fort. Lincoln decided to ignore their advice. In this episode, Chris Calton analyzes Lincoln’s momentous—and historically controversial—decision.

Chris Calton recounts the controversial history of the Civil War. This is the fifth episode in the third season of Historical Controversies.   

https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Historical Controversies Episode 41.mp3?file=1&type=audio       

https://mises.org/library/crisis-fort-sumter

 

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LEST WE FORGET … Fort Sumter Spring of 1861 — Where Dixie began — They thought it would be easy, but quickly learned — We were going to fight for our Southland!

LEST WE FORGET … First and Second Manassas — Where the Yanks knew they were in for a war — We were not going away.

LEST WE FORGET … Shiloh, Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville and Vicksburg — Where so many paid the ultimate price — When all they wanted was to live a free and sovereign life!

LEST WE FORGET … Gettysburg, where so many good men fell — Lasting out three days of pure Northern hell!

LEST WE FORGET … That terrorist named Sherman, and his infamous March to the Sea — killing, robbing, stealing, and burning — Not adhering to not one Southern plea!

LEST WE FORGET … That tyrant named Lincoln — Such a power hungry, tall and ugly man — Who had nothing better to do than invade our Blessed Dixieland!

LEST WE FORGET … Our President, Jefferson Davis — His ideas, beliefs and goals — Always to be remembered as one of Dixie’s finest souls!

LEST WE FORGET … Lee and Jackson, Stuart and Longstreet, Johnston and Cleburne, and Forrest and Wheeler, and all our Heroes who wore the Gray. Let us honor them on this special day during the month of May — For it is their spirit —

 Lest We Forget — Which makes us who we are today.

Lest We Forget Lt. Commander Donnie Hatley is a member of the James-Younger Camp 2065, Locust, North Carolina.

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Lincoln As He Really Was

By Michael Potts on Oct 23, 2018

A review of Lincoln: As He Really Was by Charles T. Pace (Shotwell Publishing, 2018).

Abraham Lincoln was American’s Robespierre, but his crimes only reflected the character flaws he had while in office. Dr. Charles T. Pace, a medical doctor from Greenville, North Carolina, has written a masterful political biography of Lincoln. He portrays Lincoln as a “politician’s politician, a political animal, ambitious, domineering, and ruthless, with a Machiavellian love of power without principle. His biography does not, however, demonize Mr. Lincoln but affirms that he was a deeply flawed man of great rhetorical talent, a man whose character flaws led him to wage war against the Confederacy and destroy the old republic of loosely organized states, replacing it with a centralized state.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo writes a masterful Foreword, connecting the cult of Lincoln with the sense of “false virtue” in the United States that was used to justify needless, brutal wars such as the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine War, and the many U.S. interventions and invasions of sovereign states. He mentions the extent of the hatred of Lincoln during his lifetime, and the role of New Englanders in deifying him after his assassination and notes the results of Lincoln’s tenure as President: a “Soviet-style state” in which the union of states is forced at the threat of the sword. His excellent summary is a fine segue into Dr. Pace’s biography.    

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/lincoln-as-he-really-was/

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A Return to Barbarism

By Norman Black on Nov 12, 2018

Prehistoric warfare was total war in which victors normally killed all enemy women, children, and adult males, according to groundbreaking research published by Lawrence H. Keeley, in his book War Before Civilization¹.    

Turchin’s troops, many drunk, attacked the town’s 1,200 residents, and stole from stores and private homes, and burned private buildings. They sexually attacked both black and white women, and civilians that resisted were taken away at bayonet point.  One pregnant white woman miscarried and died after she was gang raped.  In the weeks after the Athens atrocities, Turchin continued to openly disobey orders to protect all private property and ordered his men to burn the nearest farm house when they were fired at from an ambush.

When Turchin’s commanding officer learned about the atrocities in Athens, he ordered Turchin court-martialed. During a 10-day-long court martial, Turchin refused to refute the atrocity charges, and was found guilty and dishonorably discharged on August 6, 1862. His atrocities and dishonorable discharge were called to Lincoln’s attention, but Lincoln still arranged for him to be appointed a brigadier general. By mid-1862, Turchin’s methods were in widespread use by the U.S. Army.   

As a result, Lincoln introduced total war against Confederate society, with war crimes against civilians and POWs,     https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/a-return-to-barbarism/

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Area 45: The (Second) American Civil War? With Victor Davis Hanson

interview with Victor Davis Hanson

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Like(1) ShareDownload(8206)

On the 210^th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, some have suggested that United States faces a second “civil war” – a conflict over culture, economics, and world view. Victor Davis Hanson, the Hoover Institution’s Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow, contrasts the hands dealt to Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump. 

Did you like the show? You can rate, review, subscribe, and download the podcast on the following platforms:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | RadioPu

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A Party of Disunion and Thievery

 

“Fallon’s book examines 10 volumes of collected writings and speeches of Lincoln’s, which include passages on slavery, secession, equality of blacks and emancipation. We don’t have to rely upon anyone’s interpretation. Just read his words to see what you make of them.” 
— Walter Williams

 

Fielding their very first presidential candidate in 1856, the new Republican party was responsible for breaking up the 1789 federation of States only four years later – it was indeed the party of disunion. With conservative Southerners gone from Congress in 1861, the Republicans began dismantling the Founders’ republic and ushered in America’s “Gilded Age” and pursuit of empire. This new America would be “despotic at home and aggressive abroad” as Robert E. Lee famously remarked to Lord Acton shortly after the war ended.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org   The Great American Political Divide

A Party of Disunion and Thievery

“In the Plundering Generation, Ludwell H. Johnson summarized the real reasons for Lincoln’s violent opposition to the South’s independence: “Manufacturers feared the loss of American markets to a flood of cheap British goods pouring through a free-trade Confederacy; Northern shippers feared the loss of their monopoly of the coasting trade and their share of the transatlantic carrying trade; merchants feared the loss of the profits they garnered as middlemen between the South and Europe; creditors feared the loss of Southern debts; the Old Northwest feared the loss or curtailment of the Mississippi trade; the Republicans feared the disintegration of their party should it let the South go and bring upon the North all the consequences just mentioned.”    https://freenorthcarolina.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-party-of-disunion-and-thievery.html

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Big Lies About Abraham Lincoln, The Slaves and The War

by Chris Leithner

          The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know. Almost everything that Americans in general and Republicans in particular think they know about Lincoln is a toxic mixture of myths, distortions and wicked lies.

    Founded in 1854, the Republican Party rose to prominence and power when its nominee, Abraham Lincoln, won the presidential election of 1860. To this day, many people regard it as the “Party of Lincoln” and historians and the general public have long considered Lincoln, next only to Washington, as America’s greatest president (see also "Rating the Presidents" by Pat Buchanan and "Down With the Presidency" by Lew Rockwell). 

          The first big lie, which is universally believed, is that Lincoln, dubbed the “Great Emancipator” by his cult of worshippers, went to war in order to free slaves. The abhorrence of racial injustice and the desire to abolish slavery played no role in the Union’s determination to strangle the Confederacy in its cradle. What did? One factor was Lincoln’s determination to preserve the Union at any cost – including the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. In 1862, Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley (the leading Northern newspaperman of the day): “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”

  Similarly, in 1861 Congress resolved that the purpose of the war was not “[to interfere] with the rights or established institutions of those states,” but to preserve the Union    

https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2019/07/six-big-lies-about-lincoln-slavery-and.html

[Valin]

@Draggingtree

 

A question. Do you buy this....well Crap?

[Draggingtree]

12 hours ago, Valin said:

@Draggingtree

 

A question. Do you buy this....well Crap?

No 

[Valin]

26 minutes ago, Draggingtree said:

No 

 

Very Glad To Hear That. The reason I asked is this is such utter nonsense. This is proof that rewriting history is not the exclusive domain of progressives.