Ward H. Lamon was a close friend of Lincoln. He knew Lincoln in the days of his poverty and insignificance through the days of his power and presidency. In the biography he wrote about the 16th president, he shared Lincoln’s views on the Bible and Christianity. The following is what Lincoln’s close friend had to say:

Mr. Lincoln was never a member of any church, nor did he believe in the divinity of Christ, or the inspiration of the Scriptures in the sense understood by evangelical Christians… When a boy, he showed no sign of that piety which his many biographers ascribe to his manhood. His stepmother—herself a Christian, and longing for the least sign of faith in him—could remember no circumstance that supported her hope. On the contrary, she recollected very well that he never went off into a corner, as has been said, to ponder the sacred writings, and to wet the page with his tears of penitence…. When he went to church at all, he went to mock, and came away to mimic. Indeed, it is more than probable that the sort of “religion” which prevailed among the associates of his boyhood impressed him with a very poor opinion of the value of the article. On the whole, he thought, perhaps, a person had better be without it.

When he came to New Salem, he consorted with freethinkers, joined with them in deriding the gospel history of Jesus, read Volney and Paine, and then wrote a deliberate and labored essay, wherein he reached conclusions similar to theirs. The essay was burnt, but he never denied or regretted its composition. On the contrary, he made it the subject of free and frequent conversations with his friends at Springfield, and stated, with much particularity and precision, the origin, arguments, and objects of the work. It was not until after Mr. Lincoln’s death that his alleged orthodoxy became the principal topic of his eulogists; but since then the effort on the part of some political writers and speakers to impress the public mind erroneously seems to have been general and systematic. It is important that the question should be finally determined; and, in order to do so, the names of some of his nearest friends are given below, followed by clear and decisive statements, for which they are separately responsible. Some of them are gentlemen of distinction, and all of them men of high character, who enjoyed the best opportunities to form correct opinions.

James H. Matheny says in a letter to Mr. Herndon: “I knew Mr. Lincoln as early as 1834-7; know he was an infidel. He and W. D. Herndon used to talk infidelity in the clerk’s office in this city, about the years 1837-40. Lincoln attacked the Bible and the New Testament on two grounds: first, from the inherent or apparent contradictions under its lids; second, from the grounds of reason. Sometimes he ridiculed the Bible and New Testament, sometimes seemed to scoff it, though I shall not use that word in its full and literal sense. I never heard that Lincoln changed his views, though his personal and political friend from 1834 to 1860. Sometimes Lincoln bordered on atheism. He went far that way, and often shocked me…

From Hon. John T. Stuart: “I knew Mr. Lincoln when he first came here, and for years afterwards. He was an avowed and open infidel, sometimes bordered on atheism. I have often and often heard Lincoln and one W. D. Herndon, who was a freethinker, talk over this subject. Lincoln went further against Christian beliefs and doctrines and principles than any man I ever heard: he shocked me…The Rev. Dr. Smith, who wrote a letter, tried to convert Lincoln from infidelity so late as 1858, and couldn’t do it.”

William H. Herndon, Esq.: “As to Mr. Lincoln’s religious views, he was, in short, an infidel,… atheist. He did not believe that Jesus was God, nor the Son of God,—was a fatalist, denied the freedom of the will. Mr. Lincoln told me a thousand times, that he did not believe the Bible was the revelation of God, as the Christian world contends.

Source: THE LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN: FROM HIS BIRTH TO HIS INAUGURATION AS PRESIDENT, By Ward H. Lamon, 1872. Link to book: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40977/40977-h/40977-h.htm

Conventional wisdom of the moment tells us that the great war of 1861—1865 was “about” slavery or was “caused by” slavery. I submit that this is not a historical judgment but a political slogan. What a war is about has many answers according to the varied perspectives of different participants and of those who come after. To limit so vast an event as that war to one cause is to show contempt for the complexities of history as a quest for the understanding of human action.

Two generations ago, the most perceptive historians, much more learned than the current crop, said that the war was “about” economics and was “caused by” economic rivalry. The war has not changed one bit since then. The perspective has changed. It can change again as long as people have the freedom to think about the past. History is not a mathematical calculation or scientific experiment but a vast drama of which there is always more to be learned.

I was much struck by Barbara Marthal’s insistence in her Stone Mountain talk on the importance of stories in understanding history. I entirely concur. History is the experience of human beings. History is a story and a story is somebody’s story. It tells us about who people are. History is not a political ideological slogan like “about slavery.” Ideological slogans are accusations and instruments of conflict and domination. Stories are instruments of understanding and peace.

Let’s consider the war and slavery. Again and again I encounter people who say that the South Carolina secession ordinance mentions the defense of slavery and that one fact proves beyond argument that the war was caused by slavery. The first States to secede did mention a threat to slavery as a motive for secession. They also mentioned decades of economic exploitation and the seizure of the common government for the first time ever by a sectional party declaredly hostile to the Southern States. Were they to be a permanently exploited minority, they asked? This was significant to people who knew that their fathers and grandfathers had founded the Union for the protection and benefit of ALL the States.

It is no surprise that they mentioned potential interference with slavery as a threat to their everyday life and their social structure. Only a few months before, John Brown and his followers had attempted just that. They murdered a number of people including a free black man who was a respected member of the Harpers Ferry community and a grand-nephew of George Washington because Brown wanted Washington’s sword as a talisman. In Brown’s baggage was a constitution making him dictator of a new black nation and a supply of pikes to be used to stab to death the slave-owner and his wife and children.

It is significant that not one single slave joined Brown’s attempted blow against slavery. It was entirely an affair of outsiders. Significant also is that six Northern rich men financed Brown and that some elements of the North celebrated him as a saint, an agent of God, ringing the church bells at his execution. Even more significantly, Brown was merely acting out the venomous hatred of Southerners that had characterized some parts of Northern society for many years previously.

Could this relentless barrage of hatred directed by Northerners against their Southern fellow citizens have perhaps had something to do with the secession impulse? That was the opinion of Horatio Seymour, Democratic governor of New York. In a public address he pointed to the enormity of making war on Southern fellow citizens who had always been exceptionally loyal Americans, but who had been driven to secession by New England fanaticism.

Secessionists were well aware that slavery was under no immediate threat within the Union. Indeed, some anti-secessionists, especially those with the largest investment in slave property, argued that slavery was safer under the Union than in a new experiment in government.

Advocates of the “slavery and nothing but slavery” interpretation also like to mention a speech in which Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens is supposed to have said that white supremacy was the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy. The speech was ad hoc and badly reported, but so what? White supremacy was also the cornerstone of the United States. A law of the first Congress established that only white people could be naturalized as citizens. Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois forbade black people to enter the State and deprived those who were there of citizenship rights.

Instead of quoting two cherry-picked quotations, serious historians will look into more of the vast documentation of the time. For instance, in determining what the war was “about,” why not consider Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address, the resolutions of the Confederate Congress, numerous speeches by Southern spokesmen of the time as they explained their departure from the U.S. Congress and spoke to their constituents about the necessity of secession. Or for that matter look at the entire texts of the secession documents.

Our advocates of slavery causation practice the same superficial and deceitful tactics in viewing their side of the fight. They rely mostly on a few pretty phrases from a few of Lincoln’s prettier speeches to account for the winning side in the Great Civil War. But what were Northerners really saying?

I am going to do something radical. I am going to review what Northerners had to say about the war. Not a single Southern source, Southern opinion, or Southern accusation will I present. Just the words of Northerners (and a few foreign observers) on what the war was “about.”

Abraham Lincoln was at pains to assure the South that he intended no threat to slavery. He said he understood Southerners and that Northerners would be exactly like them living in the same circumstances. He said that while slavery was not a good thing (which most Southerners agreed with) he had no power to interfere with slavery and would not know what to do if he had the power. He acquiesced in a proposed 13th Amendment that would have guaranteed slavery into the 20th century. Later, he famously told Horace Greeley that his purpose was to save the Union, for which he would free all the slaves, some of the slaves, or none of the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation itself promised a continuance of slavery to States that would lay down their arms.

All Lincoln wanted was to prevent slavery in any territories, future States, which then might become Southern and vote against Northern control of the Treasury and federal legislation. From the anti-slavery perspective this is a highly immoral position. At the time of the Missouri Compromise, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison said that restricting the spread of slavery was a false, politically motivated position. The best thing for the welfare of African Americans and their eventual emancipation was to allow them to spread as thinly as possible.

Delegation after delegation came to Lincoln in early days to beg him to do something to avoid war. Remember that 61% of the American people had voted against this great hero of democracy, which ought to have led him to a conciliatory frame of mind. He invariably replied that he could not do without “his revenue.” He said nary a word about slavery. Most of “his revenue” was collected at the Southern ports because of the tariff to protect Northern industry and most of it was spent in the North. Lincoln could not do without that revenue and vowed his determination to collect it without interruption by secession. He knew that his political backing rested largely on New England/New York money men and the rising power of the new industrialists of Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago who were aggressively demanding that the federal government sponsor and support them. The revenue also provided the patronage of offices and contracts for his hungry supporters, without which his party would dwindle away.

Discussing the reaction to secession, the New York Times editorialized: “The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North. We were divided and confused until our pockets were touched.” A Manchester, N.H., paper was one of hundreds of others that agreed, saying: “It is very clear that the South gains by this process and we lose. No, we must not let the South go.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress officially declared that the war WAS NOT AGAINST SLAVERY but to preserve the Union. (By preserving the Union, of course, they actually meant not preserving the real Union but ensuring their control of the federal machinery.)

At the Hampton Roads peace conference a few months before Appomattox, Lincoln suggested to the Confederate representatives that if they ceased fighting then the Emancipation Proclamation could be left to the courts to survive or fall. Alexander Stephens, unlike Lincoln, really cared about the fate of the black people and asked Lincoln what was to become of them if freed in their present unlettered and propertyless condition. Lincoln’s reply: “Root, hog, or die.” A line from a minstrel song suggesting that they should survive as best they could. Lincoln routinely used the N-word all his life, as did most Northerners.

A statement in which Lincoln is said to favour voting rights for black men who were educated or had been soldiers has been shown to be fraudulent. Within a few days of his death he was still speaking of colonization outside the U.S.

The South, supposedly fighting for slavery, did not respond to any of these offers for the continuance of slavery. In fact, wise Southerners like Jefferson Davis realized that if war came it would likely disrupt slavery as it had during the first war of independence. That did not in the least alter his desire for the independence and self-government that was the birthright of Americans. Late in the war he sent a special emissary to offer emancipation if European powers would break the illegal blockade.

To say that the war was “caused” by the South’s defense of slavery is logically comparable to the assertion that World War II was caused by Poland resisting attack by Germany.

Saying that the South was fighting only to defend the evils of slavery is a deceitful back-handed way to suggest that, therefore the North was fighting to rid America of the evils of slavery. Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, secession did not necessarily require war against the South. That was a choice. Slavery had existed for over two hundred years and there was no Northern majority in favour of emancipation. Emancipation was not the result of a moral crusade against evil but a byproduct of a ruthless war of invasion and conquest. Not one single act of Lincoln and the North in the war was motivated by moral considerations in regard to slavery.

Even if slavery was a reason for secession, it does not explain why the North made a war of invasion and conquest on a people who only wanted to be let alone to live as they had always lived. The question of why the North made war is not even asked by our current historians. They assume without examination that the North is always right and the South is always evil. They do not look at the abundant Northern evidence that might shed light on the matter.

When we speak about the causes of war should we not pay some attention to the motives of the attacker and not blame everything on the people who were attacked and conquered? To say that the war was “caused” by the South’s defense of slavery is logically comparable to the assertion that World War II was caused by Poland resisting attack by Germany. People who think this way harbor an unacknowledged assumption: Southerners are not fellow citizens deserving of tolerance but bad people and deserve to be conquered. The South and its people are the property of the North to do with as they wish. Therefore no other justification is needed. That Leninist attitude is very much still alive judging by the abuse I receive in print and by e-mail. The abuse never discusses evidence, only denounces what is called “Neo-Confederate” and “Lost Cause” mythology. These are both political terms of abuse that have no real meaning and are designed to silence your enemy unheard.

Let us look at the U.S. Senate in February 1863. Senator John Sherman of Ohio, one of the most prominent of the Republican supporters of war against the South, has the floor. He is arguing in favour of a bill to establish a system of national banks and national bank currency. He declared that this bill was the most important business pending before the country. It was so important, he said, that he would see all the slaves remain slaves if it could be passed. Let me repeat this. He would rather leave all the slaves in bondage rather than lose the national bank bill. This was a few weeks after the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

What about this bill? Don’t be deceived by the terminology. So-called National Banks were to be the property of favoured groups of private capitalists. They were to have as capital interest-bearing government bonds at a 50% discount. The bank notes that they were to issue were to be the national currency. The banks, not the government, had control of this currency. That is, these favoured capitalists had the immense power and profit of controlling the money and credit of the country. Crony capitalism that has been the main feature of the American regime up to this very moment.

Senator Sherman’s brother, General Sherman, had recently been working his way across Mississippi, not fighting armed enemies but destroying the infrastructure and the food and housing of white women and children and black people. When the houses are burned, the livestock taken away or killed, the barns with tools and seed crops destroyed, fences torn down, stored food and standing crops destroyed, the black people will starve as well as the whites. General Sherman was heard to say: “Damn the niggers! I wish they were anywhere but here and could be kept at work.”

Why not let the South go? O that the South would go! But then they must leave us their lands. – Henry Ward Beecher

General Sherman was not fighting for the emancipation of black people. He was a proto-fascist who wanted to crush citizens who had the gall to disobey the government.

The gracious Mrs. General Sherman agreed. She wrote her husband thus:

“I hope this may not be a war of emancipation but of extermination, & that all under the influence of the foul fiend may be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing.”

Not a word about the slaves.

As the war began, the famous abolitionist Theodore Weld declared that the South had to be wiped out because it is “the foe to Northern industry—to our mines, our manufactures, our commerce.” Nothing said about benefit to the slaves. The famous abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher enjoyed a European tour while the rivers of blood were flowing in America. Asked by a British audience why the North did not simply let the South go, Beecher replied, “Why not let the South go? O that the South would go! But then they must leave us their lands.”

Then there is the Massachusetts Colonel who wrote his governor from the South in January 1862:

“The thing we seek is permanent dominion. . . . They think we mean to take their slaves? Bah! We must take their ports, their mines, their water power, the very soil they plow . . . .”

Charles Dickens, who had spent much time in the U.S. a few years before the war, told readers of his monthly magazine in 1862: “The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.” Another British observer, John Stuart Mill, hoped the war would be against slavery and was disappointed. “The North, it seems,” Mill wrote, “have no more objections to slavery than the South have.”

Another European thinker to comment was Karl Marx. Like many later Lincoln worshippers,
Marx believed that the French Revolution was a continuation of the American Revolution and
Lincoln’s revolution in America a continuation of the French. He thought, wrongly, that Lincoln
was defending the “labour of the emigrant against the aggressions of the slave driver.” The war, DICKENS then, is in behalf of the German immigrants who had flooded the Midwest after the 1848
revolutions. Not a word about the slaves themselves. Indeed, it was the numbers and ardent support of these German immigrants that turned the Midwest from Democrat to Republican and elected Lincoln. It would seem that Marx, like Lincoln, wanted the land for WHITE workers.

Governor Joel Parker of New Jersey, a reluctant Democratic supporter of the war, knew what it was all about: “Slavery is no more the cause of this war than gold is the cause of robbery,” he said. Like all Northern opponents and reluctant supporters of Lincoln, he knew the war was about economic domination. As one “Copperhead” editor put it: the war was simply “a murderous crusade for plunder and party power.” “Dealing in confiscated cotton seems to be the prime activity of the army,” he added.

Wall Street agreed and approved. Here is a private circular passed among bankers and brokers in late 1861:

“Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power and this I and my friends are all in favor of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan, led on by England, is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages. The great debt that capitalists will see to it is made out of the war must be used as a means to control the volume of money.”

It is not clear whether this is authentic or a satire, but it tells the truth whichever.

The libertarian Lysander Spooner, an abolitionist, called the Lincoln rule “usurpation and tyranny” that had nothing to do with a moral opposition to slavery. “It has cost this country a million of lives, and the loss of everything that resembles political liberty.”

Here is Frederick Douglass, the most prominent African American of the 19th century:

“It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit . . . Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time . . . to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of his country.”

What better testimony is needed that emancipation was a by-product, not a goal, of a war of conquest. Let me repeat: emancipation was a by-product of the war, never a goal.

How about these curiosities from the greatest of Northern intellectuals, Emerson. He records in his journals: “But the secret, the esoteric of abolition—a secret, too, from the abolitionist—is, that the negro and the negro-holder are really of one party.” And again, “The abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery, but because he wishes to abolish the black man.” Emerson had previously predicted that African Americans were like the Dodo, incapable of surviving without care and doomed to disappear. Another abolitionist, James G. Birney, says: “The negroes are part of the enemy.”

Indeed a staple of Northern discourse was that black people would and should disappear, leaving the field to righteous New England Anglo-Saxons. My friend Howard White remarks: “Whatever his faults regarding slavery, the Southerner never found the existence of Africans in his world per se a scandal. That particular foolishness had its roots in the regions further North.”
Whatever his faults regarding slavery, the Southerner never found the existence of Africans in his world per se a scandal. That particular foolishness had its roots in the regions further North.

In 1866, Boston had a meeting of abolitionists and strong Unionists. The speaker, a clergymen, compared the South to a sewer. It was to be drained of its present inhabitants and “to be filled up with Yankee immigration . . . and upon that foundation would be constructed a new order of things. To be reconstructed, the South must be Northernized, and until that was done, the work of reconstruction could not be accomplished.” Not a word about a role for African Americans in this program.

One of the most important aspects of the elimination of slavery is seldom mentioned. The absence of any care or planning for the future of black Americans. The Russian Czar pointed this out to an American visitor as a flaw that invalidated the fruits of emancipation. We could fill ten books with evidence of Northern mistreatment of black people during and after the war. Emancipation as it occurred was not a happy experience. To borrow Kirkpatrick Sale’s term, it was a Hell. I recommend Kirk’s book Emancipation Hell and Paul Graham’s work When the Yankees Come, which are available here.

I suspect many Americans imagine emancipation as soldiers in blue and freed people rushing into one another’s arms to celebrate the day of Jubilee. As may be proved from thousands of Northern sources, the Union solders’ encounter with the black people of the South was overwhelmingly hate-filled, abusive, and exploitive. This subject is just beginning to be explored seriously. Wrote one Northerner of Sherman’s men, they “are impatient of darkies, and annoyed to see them pampered, petted and spoiled.”

Ambrose Bierce, a hard-fighting Union soldier for the entire war, said that the black people he saw were virtual slaves as the concubines and servants of Union officers.

Many black people took to the roads not because of an intangible emancipation but because their homes and living had been destroyed. They collected in camps which had catastrophic rates of mortality. The army asked some Northern governors to take some of these people, at least temporarily. The governors of Massachusetts and Illinois, Lincoln’s most fervid supporters, went ballistic. This was unacceptable. The black people would be uncomfortable in the North and much happier in the South, said the longtime abolitionist Governor Andrew of Massachusetts. Happier in the South than in Massachusetts?

What about those black soldiers in the Northern army, used mainly for labour and forlorn hopes like the Crater? A historian quotes a Northern observer of U.S. Army activities in occupied coastal Carolina in 1864. Generals declared their intention to recruit “every able-bodied male in the department.” Writes the Northern observer: “The atrocious impressments of boys of fourteen and responsible men with large dependent families, and the shooting down of negroes who resisted, were common occurrences.”

The greater number of Southern black people remained at home. They received official notice of freedom not from the U.S. Army but from the master who, when he got home from the Confederate army, gathered the people, told them they were free, and that they must work out a new way of surviving together. Advocates of the war was “caused by slavery” say that the question has been settled and that any disagreement is from evil and misguided Neo-Confederates deceived by a “Lost Cause” myth.

In fact, no great historical question can ever be closed off by a slogan as long as we are free to think. Howard White and I recently put out a book about the war. Careful, well-supported essays, by 16 serious people. Immediately it appeared on amazon, someone wrote in: “I’m so tired of the Lost Cause writing. Don’t believe the bullshit in this useless pamphlet.” He could not have had time to actually read the book. It can be dismissed unread because he has the righteous cause and we do not. This is not historical debate. It is the propaganda trick of labeling something you do not like in order to control and suppress it. Such are those who want the war to be all about slavery—hateful, disdainful, ignorant, and unwilling to engage in honest discussion.

But if you insist on a short answer solution as to what caused the war I will venture one. The cause of the greatest bloodletting in American history was Yankee greed and hatred. This is infinitely documented before, during, and after the war.

Glory, Glory, Halleluhah

ABOUT CLYDE WILSON
Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews.

This article is a reprint from The Abbeville Institute

http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/clyde-wilson-library/why-the-war-was-not-about-slavery/

In the September 26, 1909 edition of the San Antonio, (TX) Daily Express Newspaper, Quarter Master Sergeant J. B. Polley, a soldier in the Fourth Texas Infantry Regiment and after the war the historian of Hood’s Texas Brigade, tells an amusing story of some solders of the First Texas Infantry, who were so bored at camp in Virginia, they decided to “invade the North” on a moonlit night during the fall of 1861. Here is a part of Sergeant Polley’s story of the First Texas Infantry’s invasion:

“In the fall of 1861, prior to the arrival in Virginia of the Fourth and Fifth Texas Regiments, the First Texas was stationed near Cockpit Point on the Potomac. Its duties, monotonous in the extreme, two of its companies decided to secure diversion, and, without notice to their officers, went in a body to the Potomac one cold moonlit night, and there seeing upon and embarking in such row-boats as could be found, crossed over into Maryland. There, under leaders chosen for the occasion, and the darkness concealing the smallness of their force, they surprised and drove in the Federal picket lines and made demonstrations so warlike and alarming to General Sickles, the Union commander, that, thinking the North was being invaded, he wired for reinforcements and thereby created the greatest consternation in Washington City.

All along the north shore of the Potomac the long roll was sounded and bugles blew; cavalry commands galloped hither and thither, infantry regiments lined up in battle array at threatened strategic points, batteries of artillery moved at a gallop for commanding positions, and heavy siege guns boomed a warning to Federals and a defiance to Confederates. Hearing the racket across the river, and believing the Federals were beginning the passage of the river on to Southern soil, Wigfall and other doughty commanders of Confederate regiments and brigades call their men to arms and into lines of battle and impatiently and apprehensively awaited the coming of daylight to tell them which way to march. In short for ten hours or more pandemonium reigned on both sides of the Potomac. Then, having killed and frightened a dozen or more Federals and frightened twice as many out of their wits, the First Texas contingent returned to the Virginia side of the river, and stealing quietly into their quarters, played innocents so perfectly that for a long time they remained unsuspected of having, “out of pure cussedness,” the boys said, created an alarm that kept both armies awake all night. “

This piece originally appeared in Southern Partisan Magazine in 1984.

The Thirteen Colonies in their War of Independence had fought for freedom. But the French Revolution (a true revolution of an underclass) proclaimed not only liberty but equality: and that idea was loosened on the world. But liberty (freedom) and equality are natural allies only up to a point, and then enemies. They were opposed to a degree imperfectly understood by either side in the War for Southern Independence. Which principle was henceforth to limit the other? That question was at issue.

The North, fighting for a compelled union, won; but what also won was ever broadening equality, limiting freedom. More immediately what won was—America. Henceforth Virginians and Carolinians were to be Americans and even, with a grim irony, Yankees. The “United States” ceased to be a plural term: a nation supplanted the united nations. Even the word “Union” disappeared, for the ghost of the old, dead, voluntary union of states clung about it and made it un-American. The Negro also won the war, almost incidentally, for the North did not fight for him but against his master: it was not a crusade, except for a few; and emancipation, limited to the Confederacy, was an act of war, not humanity. But the great, hidden victory was that of equality: the very words “freedom” and “equality” became confused and virtually synonymous. Now, said Karl Marx in 1866, the United States are “entering the revolutionary phase.”

What won the war everywhere was “the people”: equality not quality. Instead of two voices in balance, aristocracy and democracy, only one. Nothing henceforth was to be safe that did not have the sanction of the majority of the people, even nominally in Russia. Now the duke and the university don were to be admitted to equality with the docker; three dockers were superior to the duke and the don. Minorities ceased to have rights, despite constitutions, but only privilege sanctioned by the majority. The withdrawal of the Southern states was not sanctioned, though Virginia had entered the Union with the proviso that she could withdraw. The Mormons who trekked to remote Utah because of their religious belief in polygamy did not have that sanction, despite the Constitution. And from the majority there is no appeal.

Once it had been possible to appeal from lord to king and from king to Church. Perhaps such balance can exist only in the moment of transition from one unlimited power to another. In the United States there was no such balance in reality, for President and even Supreme Court spoke in the name of the people (the Court “interpreting” the Constitution in that name). It was in the name of the majority of the people (more people in the North) that Lincoln conquered the Confederacy. And it is quite immaterial whether the majority, in fact, want what is done in their name: they cannot resist themselves or appeal from themselves.

Lord Acton, lover of freedom and hater of the corruption of power, prophesied rightly that this sort of “spurious liberty” must affect the rest of the world, and went on to say: “By exhibiting the spectacle of a people claiming to be free, but whose love of freedom means hatred of inequality…and reliance on the State as an instrument to mould as well as control society, [the North] calls on its admirers to hate aristocracy and teaches its adversaries to fear the people.”
Who could deny that America relies on the State as an instrument to mould society? In the early days of the Republic men criticized by their fellows were given to saying, “It’s a free country, isn’t it?” Who says it today? The states of the South were adversaries of the Northern majority: four years later they had learnt to fear the people. This is what won the war: the principle that three pawns take two castles and five pawns take the knights as well.

It is not enough to say that the South fought for slavery—although it is said. It is not enough to say that the South fought for free trade—although it was said. It is not even enough to say that the South fought for state rights. All three are true in a sense, but none tells us why the South fought and died. The South fought because it was invaded; indeed Virginia withdrew from the Union only because Lincoln intended invasion of the earlier seceded states. Then there were alien feet upon the soil of old Virginia—and in due course upon Georgia—and Southerners fought to defend what men hold dear, their homes and their land, not for conquest.

But the simple truth is that the South fought for freedom, the freedom to go their own way, the freedom to govern themselves. They had exercised this freedom, but the North denied it and invaded. Two societies, two ways of life, clashed: at issue was the compelled conformity of the smaller to the larger. The difference between the two societies, which in colonial days had been between the dominance of “God’s elect” in Puritan New England and that of great landowners in Virginia and Carolina, was deepened by climate and distance, by immigration in the North and by slave-based squirearchy in the South, and became irreconcilable, except by war or separation, when the North began in the half-born age of steam its mutation into an industrial democracy and the South remained an agrarian aristocracy.

The Southern states were in form a democracy—a slave-based “Greek democracy”—but democracy in the South was in retreat to the hills: where the Planter came (wherever the great staples would grow) he brought the ideal of the landed estate and the chivalrous gentleman. To describe both Northerners and Southerners of that time as “Americans” in today’s usage is to do violence to the truth: they were alien as well as alienated. Slavery was the economic basis of Southern society, free trade was its interest, and state rights was its defence. It fought for a way of life based upon slavery, not for slavery—an essential distinction, for squirearchy could have been based upon serfdom or tenantry and have been fought for—and against— all the same. To say that the South’s cause—freedom—was stained by slavery is to say that the cause of the Greeks at Marathon was stained by slavery. Both fought for freedom against invaders. Both would have given up their slaves for freedom, as the South offered to do for English help. The South had not yielded to the new condemnation of slavery; in time it undoubtedly would have; but time was not permitted; and the alien morality of an alien majority was imposed by conquest.

The South rightly saw a menace to its way of life in the control of the federal government by the Northern majority, and withdrew from the Union. The remaining United States could have let the Confederate States go in peace, as England was to let Canada and India go. But implicit in American democracy was the dogma that minorities—Southern or Mormon—must not be permitted to go their own way but must be compelled to conform to the will of the majority: the “king” can do no wrong. For that reason, and no other, it was “the irrepressible conflict.” “If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed,” said Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, “that event may be attributed to the unlimited authority of the majority, which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation, and oblige them to have recourse to physical force….[l]t will have been brought about by despotism [of the majority].”

The Southerners were, precisely, such a minority fighting that “unlimited authority.” In Lord Acton’s words, the Southerners “denied the justice of the doctrine that the minority possesses nothing which is exempt from the control of the majority,” and the very invoking of the right of secession was “a distinct repudiation of the doctrine that the minority can enforce no rights, and the majority can commit no wrong.” Secession, arguably implicit in the constitutional compact, was the counter to the absolutism of the (distant) majority. When the North refused to allow it, the appeal was to the sword, and the right of secession perished. Lord Acton wrote later: “I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”

The South fought for the principles of 1776—the Declaration of Independence. The North, in flat denial of those principles, invaded a country whose nationhood was proved by a way of life men willingly defended and died to save. It was a way of life that was aristocratic and based (though not necessarily) upon slavery and that was (necessarily) opposed to conformity with Northern democracy. By the very nature of that democracy perhaps, it could not suffer its will to be spurned by letting the South go in peace. The South had no choice but to conform or fight for freedom. Like the Greeks confronted by the might of Persia, the South chose to fight against odds for freedom, loving freedom—again like the Greeks—not less because they held slaves. And that was the splendour they died for—the great name of freedom. But what came on, huge and very vindictive, armed with steam and endless guns, bearing the compulsive mandate of the majority of the “whole people” (i.e., the North), was not to be withstood. The South had only its heartbreaking valour and General Lee. Four years it stood with desperate fortitude, praying for help from England, and then went down and was drowned.

ABOUT SHELDON VANAUKEN
Sheldon Vanauken (1914-1996) was an author and friend of C.S. Lewis. His popular work, A Severe Mercy, is being worked for a major motion picture.

Able-Bodied/Able-Minded compatriots
Call to Rockwall Cavalry Camp Duty!

Well, almost. Or maybe to use the Naval lingo… All Hands On Deck! This next Saturday (May 16) is the Rockwall Founder’s Day Festival, and we will be up front and center (so to speak). Compatriot Doug Garnett from the Capt. Bob Lee Camp in Bonham will be joining with us to exhibit his field hospital display for all interested casualties… ummm, I mean the public. Right next to him we will have our display table setup for camp recruiting. I have an ample supply of recruiting brochures and such. Commander Bass and I have committed to being there, but we could benefit from one to three more campatriots to assist us in this effort which is so important to our camp. Please consider coming to help out. If you can, please say so in the meeting and/or let me personally know. I will supply a cooler with drinks, and there are ample eating opportunities available at the Festival.

Also, on the weekend of May 16, North Texas SCV camps will have a recruiting table at the Big Town Gun Show, Mesquite. If you would like to be there for a spell to help recruit, contact Daryl Coleman (214.725.3330) and I will put you in touch with the coordinator.

In a January 31, 1864 letter to Major R.M. Sawyer, Sherman explained the reason why he hated the South in general, and South Carolina in particular, so much. The war, he said “was the result of a false political doctrine that any and every people have a right to self-government.” In the same letter Sherman referred to states’ rights, freedom of conscience, and freedom of the press as “trash” that had “deluded the Southern people into war.”

Sherman’s subordinates expressed similar opinions. In 1865 Major George W. Nichols published a book about his exploits during Sherman’s “march” in which he describing South Carolinians as “the scum, the lower dregs of civilization” who are “not Americans; they are merely South Carolinians.” General Carl Schurz is quoted by Stokes as remarking that “South Carolina – the state which was looked upon by the Northern soldier as the principal instigator” of the war was “deserving of special punishment.”

All of this is so telling because it reveals that neither Sherman, nor his subordinate officers, nor the average “soldier” in his army, were motivated by anything having to do with slavery. South Carolina suffered more than any other state at the hands of Sherman’s raping, looting, plundering, murdering, and house-burning army because that is where the secession movement started. It was NOT because there were more slaves there than in other states, or because of anything else related to slavery. It was because South Carolinians, even more than other Southerners, did not believe in uncompromising obedience to the central state.

Shortly after the war ended some prominent Northerners began to pour into South Carolina to revel in the scenes of destruction (and to steal whatever they could). The goofy Brooklyn, New York, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher went on one such excursion and gave a speech while standing under a giant U.S. flag in Charleston in which he declared:

“Let no man misread the meaning of this unfolding flag! It says, ‘GOVERNMENT hath returned hither.’ It proclaims in the name of vindicated government, peace and protection to loyalty; humiliations and pains to traitors. This is the flag of sovereignty. The nation, not the States, is sovereign. Restored to authority, this flag commands, not supplicates . . . . There may be pardon [for former Confederates], but no concession . . . . The only condition of submission is to submit!”

In other words, the purpose of the war was to “prove” once and for all the false nationalist theory that the states were never sovereign; they did not ratify the Constitution, as explained in Article 7; the constitution created them; that the states never delegated certain powers to the central government in the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8); and that the central government is to have unlimited “supremacy” over all individuals and institutions.

This was the nationalist superstition about the American founding, first fabricated by Alexander Hamilton and repeated by successive generations of nationalist/consolodationist/mercantilist despots such as John Marshall, Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln.

—Valerie Protopapas

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Mises.org

After writing two books and dozens of articles, and giving hundreds of radio and television interviews and public presentations on the subject of Lincoln and the political economy of the American “Civil War”over the past fifteen years, I have realized that the only thing the average American knows about the subject is a few slogans that we are all subjected to in elementary school. I was taught in public elementary school in Pennsylvania that Abe was so honest that he once walked six miles to return a penny to a merchant who undercharged him (and six miles back home). He was supposedly so tendered hearted that he cried after witnessing the death of a turkey. He suffered in silence his entire life after witnessing slavery as a teenager (While everyone else in the country was screaming over the issue). And of course he was “a champion of democracy, an apostle of racial equality, and a paragon of social justice,” Joseph Fallon writes in his important new, must-read book, Lincoln Uncensored.

This view of Lincoln, writes Fallon, is only true “in official histories or in Hollywood movies” but not in reality. The reason for this historical disconnect is that “this myth of Lincoln, not the Constitution . . . now confers legitimacy on the political system of the United States.” Despite being mostly a bundle of lies, it is nevertheless the ideological cornerstone of statism in America and has been for nearly 150 years.

The real Lincoln was a dictator and a tyrant who shredded the Constitution, fiendishly orchestrated the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens, and did it all for the economic benefit of the special interests who funded the Republican Party (and his own political career). But don’t take Joseph Fallon’s or Thomas DiLorenzo’s word for it. Read the words of Abe Lincoln himself. That is what Fallon allows everyone to do in his great work of scholarship, Lincoln Uncensored. No longer do Americans need to rely on politically-correct, heavily state-censored textbooks or movies made by communistic-minded Hollywood hedonists to learn about this part of their own country’s history.

Each of the twenty-three chaptes of Lincoln Uncensored explains the real Lincoln in Lincoln’s own words by quoting him directly from The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (CW), complete with specific citations for every single quotation. The following is an abbreviated sampling of what you will learn upon reading Lincoln Uncensored.

LINCOLN WAS AN OBSESSIVE WHITE SUPREMACIST

“Free them [blacks] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this . . . . We can not then make them equals.” (CW, Vol. II, p. 256).

“There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races” (CW, Vol. II, p. 405).

“What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races” (CW, Vol. II, p. 521).”I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races . . . . I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary.” (CW, Vol. III, p. 16).

“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races . . . . 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 . . .” (CW, Vol, III, pp. 145-146).

“I will to the very last stand by the law of this state, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes.” (CW, Vol. III, p. 146).

“Senator Douglas remarked . . that . . . this government was made for the white people and not for negroes. Why, in point of mere fact, I think so too.” (CW, Vol. II, p. 281).

Until His Dying Day, Lincoln Plotted to Deport all the Black People Out of America
“I have said that the separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation . . . . Such separation . . . must be effected by colonization” [to Liberia, Central America, anywhere]. (CW, Vol. II, p. 409).
“Let us be brought to believe it is morally right , and . . . favorable to . . . our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime . . .” (CW, Vol. II, p. 409).

“The place I am thinking about having for a colony [for the deportation of all American blacks] is in Central America. It is nearer to us than Liberia.” (CW, Vol. V, pp. 373, 374).

LINCOLN ONLY RHETORICALLY OPPOSED SOUTHERN SLAVERY. IN PRACTICE, HE STRENGTHENED IT

” I think no wise man has perceived, how it [slavery] could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty himself.” (CW, Vol. II, p. 130).

“I meant not to ask for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.” (CW, Vol., II, p. 260).
“I believe there is no right, and ought to be no inclination I the people of the free states to enter into the slave states and interfere with the question of slavery at all.” (CW, Vol. II, p. 492).
“I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” (CW, Vol. III, p. 16).

“I say that we must not interfere with the institution of slavery . . . because the constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so.” (CW, Vol. III, p. 460).

LINCOLN CHAMPIONED THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT

“I do not now, nor ever did, stand in favor of the unconditional repeal of the fugitive slave law.” (CW, Vol., III., p. 40).

“[T]he people of the Southern states are entitled to a Congressional Fugitive Slave Law.” (CW, Vol. III, p. 41).

Lincoln Advocated Secession When it Could Advance His Political Career

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.” (CW, Vol. 1, p. 438).

LINCOLN VIEWED FORT SUMTER AS AN IMPORTANT TAX COLLECTION POINT AND WENT TO WAR OVER IT

“I think we should hold the forts, or retake them, as the case may be, and collect the revenue.” (CW, Vol. IV, p. 164).

LINCOLN BELIEVED THE CONSTITUTION WAS WHATEVER HE ALONE SAID IT WAS

“The dogmas of the quite past [referring to the U.S. Constitution], are inadequate to the stormy present . . . so we must think anew and act anew.” (CW, Vol. V, p. 537).

“The resolutions quote from the constitution, the definition of treason; and also the . . . safeguards and guarantees therein provided for the citizen . . . against the pretensions of arbitrary power . . . . But these provisions of the constitution have no application to the case we have in hand.” (CW, Vol. VI, p. 262.

“[T]he theory of the general government being only an agency, whose principles are the states [i.e. the true history of the American founding] was new to me and, as I think, is one of the best arguments for the national supremacy.” (CW, Vol. VII, p. 24.

“I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful . . .” (CW, Vol. VII, p. 281).

“You [General John Dix] are therefore hereby commanded forth with to arrest and imprison in any fort or military prison in your command the editors, proprietors and publishers of the aforesaid newspapers [New York World and New York Journal of Commerce].” CW, Vol. VII, p. 348.

“It was decided [by Lincoln alone] that we have a case of rebellion, and that the public safety does require the qualified suspension of the writ [of Habeas Corpus].” CW, Vol. IV, pp. 430-431.

LINCOLN WAS ECONOMICALLY IGNORANT OF THE BIG ECONOMIC ISSUE OF HIS DAY: PROTECTIONIST TARIFFS

“[A] tariff of duties on imported goods . . . is indispensably necessary to the prosperity of the American people.” (CW, Vol. I, p. 307.

“[B]y the tariff system . . . the man who contents himself to live upon the products of his own country , pays nothing at all.” (CW, Vol. I, p. 311).

“All carrying . . . of articles from the place of their production to a distant place for their consumption . . . is useless labor.” (CW, Vol. I, p. 409).

“I was an old Henry Clay tariff whig. In old times I made more speeches on that subject, than on any other. I have not changed my views.” (CW, Vol, III, p. 487).

“The tariff is to the government what a meal is to a family . . .” (CW, Vol., IV, p. 211).

“I must confess that I do not understand the subject [the economics of tariffs].” (CW, Vol. IV, p. 211).

“The power confided to me, will be used . . . to collect the duties and imposes; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion . . .” (CW, Vol. IV, p. 266).

“Accumulations of the public revenue, lying within [Fort Sumter] had been seized [and denied to the U.S. government] . . . . [The administration] sought only to hold the public places and property [i.e., the forts] . . . to collect the revenue.” (CW, Vol. IV, pp. 422-423).

ALTHOUGH HE NEVER BECAME A CHRISTIAN, LINCOLN CLAIMED TO KNOW WHAT WAS IN THE MIND OF GOD AND BLAMED THE WAR ON HIM, ABSOLVING HIMSELF OF ALL RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT, IN ORDER TO BAMBOOZLE THE RELIGIOUS POPULATION OF THE NORTH

“[I]t is peculiarly fit for us to recognize the hand of God in this terrible visitation [i.e. the war].” CW, Vol. IV, p. 482.

“You all may recollect that in taking up the sword thus forced into my hands this Government . . . placed its whole dependence upon the favor of God.” (CW, Vol. V., p. 212).

“God wills this contest [the war].” CW, Vol. V, p. 404.

“If I had my way, this war would never have been commenced . . . but . . . we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious and unknown to us . . .” (CW, Vol. V, p. 478).

“[I]t has not pleased the Almighty to bless us with a return to peace . . .” (CW, Vol. V, p. 518).

“[R]ender the homage due to the Divine Majesty . . . to lead the whole nation, through the paths of repentance and submission to the Divine Will, back to the perfect enjoyment of Union . . .” (CW, Vol. VI, p. 332).

“It has pleased Almighty God . . . to vouchsafe to the army and the navy of the United States victories on land and sea.” (CW, Vol. VI, p. 332).

“I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me . . . . God alone can claim it.” (CW, Vol. VII, p. 282).

“He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make . . .” (CW, Vol. VII, p. 535).

Joseph Fallon concludes that “Lincoln was not America’s Messiah. He was America’s Lenin, complete with a party dictatorship, centralized economy, and total war.” These are undeniable historical facts. His own words reveal him to be “a demagogue not a democrat, an opportunist not an idealist, and enemy and not a champion of civil rights.” This of course is why he has been so deified by totalitarian-minded politicians of all parties, from Thaddeus Stevens to Barack Obama.

June 5, 2013

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How Capitalism Saved America, and Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Postscript by Newsletter Editor

This article is particularly useful for printing and carrying with you for those conversations you might have with a friend who denies that Lincoln said what he said. Fact is, most people just have no idea Lincoln actually said and believed these things. The article can be found at:

http://archive.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo257.html

December 12, 2014

S. Waite Rawls III
Co-Chief Executive Officer
The American Civil War Museum
490 Tredegar Street
Richmond, Virginia 23219

Dear Mr. Rawls:

Thank you for your letter of December 5, 2014. As a twenty year Army officer I will get straight to the heart of the matter.

First, I have been a member of the Museum of the Confederacy (MOC) for as long as I can recall. Like all true Southerners, I was attracted to the MOC because it reflected the point of view of the Southern Confederacy for which my direct ancestors fought to establish. Indeed, over the years, I have encouraged many family members and friends to either join the MOC or to support the MOC. I can name four people that joined as a result of my efforts.

In the vast ocean of political correctness associated with the causes and meaning of the War, the MOC alone stood tall and erect as a beacon of historical truth and Southern pride. Because the MOC was not afraid to tell our story or to buckle to critics of the Southern perspective, it made me very proud to be a Southerner. The MOC told about our Southern story and our Southern story alone. It was more than a collection of our relics, it was sacred ground. That is why the MOC was founded (yes I do realize that the name MOC was not the original name). Indeed, it is a fact that the founders did not intend to tell the Union side or preserve the Union relics!

Second, as an informed member of the MOC (and the Sons of Confederate Veterans) I heard many rumors about what might be in store for the MOC (from the first scares about changing the name). Nevertheless, I remained objective and continued my membership even in the face of the shocking news delivered last year that by 2015, the Museum of the Confederacy would be no more.

Third, fearing for the worst – that the MOC would be drowned in the aforementioned ocean of political correctness – this past summer I took my two boys to the MOC to instill in them the same sense of pride for our Southern heritage that the founders of the MOC intended. Of course, I also wanted them to experience the MOC before it was swept away.

I was also curious to see for myself what would become of our Southern relics and our perspective of the War. Thus, we also went to the museum on Tredegar Street. What a contrast! In the best light, the so-called “new” civil war museum is like all the other “civil war” museums in the nation – a false brief for the “evil Southerner” and the “righteous Northerner.” This message is not only overt but subliminal. Indeed, the so-called new logo says it all. The silhouette of the Southern soldier (red is the general color for the conservative South) is superimposed by a black civilian that is then superimposed by a Northern female civilian (blue is the general color for the North)! This is not a museum about the Confederacy.

Fourth, your letter misses the point. While, the SCV may have gotten some of the timing, location, and terminology issues wrong, they hit the nail on the head. You are in fact presiding over the dismantling of the MOC and the replacement will not be dedicated to the Confederacy. Thus, I view your complaints that you are being misrepresented by the SCV as akin to arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Finally, I note that my membership card reads: “The Museum of the Confederacy” expiration 6/3/2015. With the singular determination of the Confederate blood that runs in my veins, I will do all I can to restore the MOC (yes I contributed to the SCV legal fund and recruited others as well) or if that is not possible, to help build another Confederate history museum that remains true to its mandate. Thus, when the MOC is gone, I will obviously no longer be a member. In addition, I will encourage all those that I know that were members of the MOC to do the same.

Without reservation, I strongly urge you to restore our Confederate museum and to turn back from the edge.

Signed

Jeffrey F. Addicott
Lt. Colonel (US Army, ret)
Distinguished Professor of Law
Director, Center for Terrorism Law
Saint Mary’s University
San Antonio, Texas

By John Zakrzewski, Litchfield Camp 132, Conway, SC

Most will answer, to remember their Confederate ancestor and that is a reasonable reply. I submit there are a number of other equally good reasons, which are not normally considered, but are just as important. These include:

• Our Confederate ancestor gave us an indelible place on his family tree.
• Our Confederate ancestor gave us a rich heritage, which is steeped in honor and strong family values.
• Our Confederate ancestor gave us a noble birthright, that only his ancestors can possess.
• Our Confederate ancestor let us inherit his honor, perseverance and loyalty to the cause for Southern Independence, for which he so nobly fought.
• These traits cannot be bought like titles of nobility; they cannot be bestowed by any government and they cannot be sold. They are representative of his life and determination, so that you will remember his time on this earth.
• This legacy is yours to do with as you please. You can honor him and those brave men who fought for the Confederate states or “you can do nothing”.

If you DO NOT recognize his connection to you or know about his life and accomplishments, you cannot understand the family connection that helped to put you on this earth. If you choose not honor him and his family, then you have shut the door on history and we will all lose a valuable link to the past.

In this age of instant electronic communications and journalists who embrace political correctness rather than truth, the Sons of Confederate Veterans has plenty of foes with a basic dislike for all things Confederate. Always remember, there are people in this country who would gladly erase this chapter in our nation’s history, if they could and revert it to a museum display.

Preventing misinformation and attacks are the keys to future generations being able to understand exactly what Confederate heritage is. These negative efforts can be minimized by our knowledge of the facts and our determination to protect the honor of our veterans and by keeping vigilant, we can make the right decisions. Consider these basic requirements for our long term success:

KNOWLEDGE means that we will always come together to honor and protect these men who fought for the Confederate cause, because we understand why they made their initial decision to fight and that decision is not something that we question.

DETERMINATION means, that we will never let our Confederate ancestor and his heritage, become just another picture in a book or an artifact resting on some dusty shelf at a museum. We will embrace the education of every new generation, so that others can hear the facts that we call “The True History of the South”.

VIGILANCE means, that we will forever stand and protect his memory from those who mean to do it harm and we will always be ready to say NO to these efforts, effectively blocking their way, when those negative actions occur.
In closing, my challenge to you is a simple, yet monumental task and our call for your help has never been more important, than it is today.

Therefore, I ask you this question:

Will each of you continue to serve as a dedicated family member, working to set the stage for the next 150 years, to guard this important historic legacy and assure that the sacred memory of our Confederate ancestors, will never be forgotten?

By Thomas DiLorenzo
August 9, 2014

The tall tales told by the Lincoln cult get funnier and funnier as more and more Americans learn the truth about their own history (as opposed to the version fed to them by the Lincoln cult). This time the source of their knee-slapping whoppers is a hilarious attempt to cover up the fact that their hero apparently read and studied a white supremacist screed.

A recent article that appeared in the Huffington Post, FOX news online, the Daily Mail, and elsewhere described how Lincoln’s handwriting had been verified by handwriting experts in an 1854 book entitled Types of Mankind. According to these news articles, the book argued that the different races developed at different times, and were therefore not susceptible to co-existing or amalgamation. “The book was used by nineteenth-century white supremacists!,” screamed the articles.

What on earth was Abraham Lincoln, “Father Abraham,” the eternal friend and savior of the black race, doing with such a book?! The Lincoln cult quickly swung into action creating an alibi. The news articles all reported that “Illinois state historians” all “took great pains to offer reassurance that the former president who ended slavery didn’t subscribe to the theories at hand” in the book. No facts were offered, only painful “reassurances” by these state-funded “historians.” I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling especially reassured.

Even one or two of the Lincoln cult’s Big Guns were un-cobwebbed to participate in broadcasting the alibi. James Cornelius, the curator of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, “reassured” the media that Lincoln “could foresee the whole country coming apart over the issue that different people could be barred from different things” because of their race. He therefore would never have believed the things in that book, said the curator.

James Cornelius and the Illinois state historians are full of it and they know it. These are people who have spent their entire careers reading and cataloguing Abe Lincoln’s political speeches. They surely must know that Lincoln’s views and, more importantly, his actions as a state legislator, a one-term congressman, a political candidate, and as president, are totally consistent with this and any other white supremacist book of that era. Consider the following public statements of Lincoln himself from his own Collected Works (CW):

“Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of them” (CW, Vol. II, p. 256). This statement alone refutes all that the James Cornelius and the Illinois state historians “reassured” the media.
“What I would most desire,” Abraham Lincoln also declared, “would be the separation of the white and black races” (CW, Vol. II, p. 521). And, “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races . . . . I am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position” (CW, Vol. III, p. 16).

“I am not, nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold [political] office, nor to intermarry with white people,” said the political idol of the Marc Levins, Harry Jaffas, Rich Lowrys, Rush Limbaughs, and all other Lincoln-worshipping neocons (not to mention the Leftist/Marxist Lincoln worshippers like Eric Foner and 99% of the academic history profession).

“Senator Douglas remarked . . . that . . . this government was made for white people and not for negroes. Why, in point of mere fact, I think so too,” said Abe (CW, Vol. II, p. 281).

As Philip Magness and Sabastian Page showed in their excellent book, Colonization After Emancipation, Lincoln worked diligently all his life, up to his dying days, on the project of deporting all the black people out of America. As a young man he was a “manager” of the Illinois Colonization Society, which used tax dollars to deport the small number of free blacks who resided in Illinois. As president, he allocated millions of dollars to a project that would “colonize” American blacks in Liberia. In 1862 he held a meeting with several dozen free black men in the White House at which he explained to them that, because of the inherent differences between the white and black races, they could never live together, and so he urged them to lead by example and colonize themselves in Liberia. In what sounds like it could have been taken directly from the pages of Types of Mankind, Lincoln informed the black men that “You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races . . . . This physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both,” and “affords a reason at least why we should be separated . . . . It is better for us both, therefore, to be separate” (Abraham Lincoln, “Address on Colonization to a Committee of Colored Men,” August 14, 1862, in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, Vol. 2, 1859-1866 (New York: Library of America, 1989), p. 354.

Lincoln supported the Illinois Constitution that prohibited the emigration of black people into the state, and also supported the Illinois Black Codes that stripped the small number of free blacks in the state of any semblance of citizenship. Once again, his actions were consistent with his words on the subject of race.

It is impossible to believe that James Cornelius and the Illinois state historians are unaware of all these plain historical facts. Not to mention Lincoln’s statements like these: “I have said that the separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation [of the races]. Such separation . . . must be effected by colonization” (CW, Vol. II, p. 409). Or, “It is morally right, and favorable to our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime” (CW Vol. II, p. 409).
What all of this proves is that, contrary to the Lincoln cult’s “reassurances,” Lincoln’s views and actions on the subject of race were perfectly consistent with the 1854 white supremacist book, Types of Mankind. It was not just a book that he read to prepare for court on behalf of one of his legal clients, as the Lincoln cult ludicrously and without any evidence or argument, asserts.

Like all presidential museums, the Lincoln museum in Springfield, Illinois should be thought of as the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Cover-Up Library and Museum. It may well provide accurate information about Abe’s childhood, his family history, his eating habits, shoe size, hats that he wore, etc., etc., but when it comes to the big, important issues, it is devoted to spreading untruths about American history while sweeping much of real history under the rug.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln; ;Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How Capitalism Saved America, Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution – And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.