The Latest New York Times Nonsense About Lincoln By Thomas J. DiLorenzo
| December 16, 2010
At the outset of the War to Prevent Southern Independence
both Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. Congress declared publicly
that the sole purpose of the war was to save the union and
not to interfere with Southern slavery. Lincoln himself
stated this very clearly in his first inaugural address
and in many other places. This fact bothers the court historians
of the Lincoln cult who have in the past forty years rewritten
American history to suggest that slavery was the sole cause
of the war. (A generation ago, if one took a college course
on "the Civil War" it was likely that one would
have read The Causes of the Civil War by Kenneth Stampp,
a former president of the American Historical Association.)
The latest attempt to rewrite or whitewash history comes
from one Richard Striner in a December 13 New York Times
article entitled "How Lincoln Undid the Union."
The gist of Striner’s argument is that: 1) a compromise
to save the union was in the works in Washington in December
of 1860; but 2) Lincoln persuaded key members of the Republican
Party to oppose it because it might not have prohibited
the extension of slavery into the new territories, a key
feature of the 1860 Republican Party platform. Lincoln wanted
to save the union, says Striner, but he wanted a union that
would put slavery "on the path to extinction."
What rubbish. The notion that prohibiting the extension
of slavery would somehow magically cause the end of Southern
slavery has always been totally nonsensical. As University
of Virginia Historian Michael Holt wrote in his book, Fate
of Their Country (p. 27), "Modern economic historians
have demonstrated that this assumption was false."
It is every bit as nonsensical as Lincoln’s crazy
assertion that the extension of slavery into the Territories
would have somehow led to the re-introduction of slavery
into Maine, Massachusetts, and other states that had legally
abolished slavery! (He ludicrously said that a nation "could
not exist" half slave and half free). It is hard to
believe that rational human beings ever believed such things.
It is unlikely that many Americans of Lincoln’s time
did.
Striner pretends to be able to read Lincoln’s mind
when he speculates that his motivation was to put slavery
"on the road to extinction." He does not quote
Lincoln himself as saying that this was his motivation;
he merely speculates and fabricates a story. But Lincoln
and other prominent Republicans did in fact state very clearly
what their motivation was. There is no need to speculate.
As Professor Holt, the history profession’s preeminent
expert on the politics of the antebellum era wrote: "Many
northern whites also wanted to keep slaves out of the West
in order to keep blacks out. The North was a pervasively
racist society where free blacks suffered social, economic,
and political discrimination . . . . Bigots, they sought
to bar African-American slaves from the West." Lincoln
himself clearly stated that "we" want the Territories
"for free white labor."
Thus, part of Lincoln’s motivation for opposing the
extension of slavery – but making an ironclad defense
of Southern slavery in his first inaugural address –
was pandering to northern white supremacist voters (like
himself) who did not want any blacks – free or slave
– living among them. There was also a protectionist
motivation, as the Republican Party wanted to prohibit competition
for jobs from all blacks, free or slave. Illinois –
Land of Lincoln – even amended its Constitution in
1848 to prohibit the emigration of black people into the
state, a position that was endorsed by Lincoln. (Lincoln
was also a "manager" of the Illinois Colonization
Society, which sought to use state tax funds to deport the
small number of free blacks who resided in the state.)
A third motivation for Lincoln’s opposition to slavery
extension was purely political. If slaves entered the Territories,
they would inflate the congressional representation of the
Democratic Party when the Territories became states because
of the Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution. That in
turn – and most importantly – would block the
Republican Party’s economic agenda. Professor Holt
quotes Ohio Congressman Joshua R. Giddings (p. 28) on this
point: "To give the south the preponderance of political
power would be itself a surrender of our tariff, our internal
improvements, our distribution of proceeds of public lands
. . . . It is the most abominable proposition with which
a free people were ever insulted." It would destroy
everything the Republican Party claimed to stand for, in
other words, i.e., mercantilist economics. This is the real
reason why Lincoln was so adamant about opposing the extension
of slavery into the territories.
Besides his demonstrably false, speculative fantasies
about Lincoln’s supposedly saintly motivations, Striner
presents a very distorted and misleading account of the
events of late 1860–early 1861. He quotes a private
letter from Lincoln expressing his opposition to the particular
compromise to save the union that was being sponsored by
Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky at the time, but
makes no mention of Lincoln’s own "compromise"
that was also in the works. The high priestess of the Lincoln
Cult, Doris Kearns-Goodwin, describes Lincoln’s compromise
on page 296 of her book, Team of Rivals. As soon as he was
elected, Lincoln "instructed [William] Seward to introduce
[the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution] in the Senate
Committee of Thirteen without indicating they issued from
Springfield." The Corwin Amendment, which did pass
the House and Senate, would have prohibited the federal
government from ever interfering with Southern slavery.
As Goodwin writes, Lincoln instructed Seward to make sure
that the amendment said that "the Constitution should
never be altered so as to authorize Congress to abolish
or interfere with slavery in the states" where it existed.
In addition, writes Goodwin, Lincoln instructed Seward,
who would become his Secretary of State, to get a federal
law introduced that would have made various personal liberty
laws that existed in some Northern states illegal. These
state laws were meant to nullify the federal Fugitive Slave
Act, an act that Lincoln very strongly supported. Far from
putting slavery "on the path to extinction," these
actions of Lincoln’s would have granted it more powerful
government support than ever. Thus, Lincoln’s actions
in late 1860–early 1861 were exactly the opposite
of how Professor Striner portrays them as being with regard
to the issue of slavery.
The white supremacists of the North were very pleased indeed
with Lincoln’s assurances that he would do all that
he could to prohibit black people from ever living among
them, first by keeping them out of the Territories, and
second by enshrining Southern slavery explicitly in the
Constitution. He effectively promised to keep black people
far away from such places as Boston, Massachusetts. Goodwin
writes that when Seward went public and announced these
actions to a Boston audience he was met with "thunderous
applause."
On March 4, 1861, Lincoln praised the Corwin Amendment
in his first inaugural address, offered his support of it,
and said that while he believed slavery to already be constitutional,
he had no reservations about making it "express and
irrevocable" in the text of the U.S. Constitution.
These actual historical facts paint a very different picture
of Lincoln’s machinations from the one based on Professor
Striner’s baseless speculations and historical distortions.
More disturbingly, Professor Striner, like all other Lincoln
cultists, makes no mention at all of the fact that Lincoln’s
actions led to the mass murder of some 350,000 fellow American
citizens, including more than 50,000 Southern civilians,
along with an equivalent number of Northern war deaths.
While virtually all the rest of the world had ended –
or was in the process of ending – slavery peacefully,
Lincoln cultists actually praise Lincoln for eschewing that
well-charted peaceful route to emancipation while plunging
his country into the bloodiest war in human history up to
that point to supposedly "save the union." There
is something awfully sick (and sickening) about this.