Rewriting
History,
American Style
by
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
In
his book, Lincoln
Reconsidered, Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer
David Donald remarked that, after Lincoln’s death and "reincarnation"
as a secular political saint, politicians of all stripes began attaching
themselves to his legacy. Men who were his bitterest political enemies
during his lifetime all of a sudden claimed to have been his closest
friends and associates. The Communist Party U.S.A. adorned its New
York City headquarters, writes Donald, with huge portraits of Lincoln
and held annual Lincoln-Lenin Day parades.
No
one, of course, has taken the worshipping of Abraham Lincoln to
greater extremes than the Republican Party and some of its affiliated
foundations and think tanks. The Republican Party has long sought
to give its political agenda moral authority by reminding us all
that it is, after all, "The Party of Lincoln." That is
certainly true but, unfortunately, the Republican Party and some
of its associated think tanks have apparently found it necessary
to do what they once accused the Soviet Union of doing: rewriting
history in order to enhance its prestige and power.
Take,
for instance, a Washington, DC, outfit known as the "Declaration
Foundation" that is purportedly devoted to the principles embodied
in the Declaration of Independence. It does so by lionizing Lincoln
(as though he still needs more lionizing) and constantly reminding
Republican politicians to do this or that because "Lincoln
would have done it." One of its slogans is the Lincolnian phrase,
"Liberty and Union Forever" (emphasis added).
The
Declaration Foundation does some good work, judging by its Web site,
but its very name is somewhat Orwellian. Consider the one principle
of the Declaration of Independence that Thomas Jefferson is most
noted for, the idea that governments derive their just powers from
the consent of the governed, and that whenever governments become
destructive of liberty it is the duty of citizens to abolish
that government and replace it with a new one.
The
Declaration, after all, was a Declaration of Secession from
England. The American Revolution was a war of secession, just as
the War for Southern Independence was. Massachusetts Senator Timothy
Pickering, who served as George Washington’s adjutant general, Secretary
of War, and Secretary of State, once said that secession was "the"
principle of the American Revolution – the very right that the
revolutionaries fought for. The Declaration Foundation, on the other
hand, preaches exactly the opposite with its "Union Forever"
philosophy.
Lincoln’s
political triumph was, if anything, a repudiation of the
Jeffersonian philosophy of government and a victory for his political
adversaries, the Hamiltonians, who by 1861 had morphed into the
Republican Party. Like all the founding fathers Jefferson wanted
the Union to thrive, but he also agreed with his colleague Timothy
Pickering that secession was a fundamental right. In his First Inaugural
Address he declared, "If there be any among us who would wish
to dissolve this union . . . let them stand undisturbed as monuments
of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where
reason is left free to combat it." He was championing the right
of free speech here, but also the right of secession.
In
a letter to James Madison in 1816 Jefferson reiterated his support
of the right of secession by saying, "If any state in the Union
will declare that it prefers separation . . . to a continuance in
union . . . I have no hesitation in saying, let us separate."
Alexis
de Tocqueville, whom everyone regards as a brilliant observer and
chronicler of the American system of government, wrote in Democracy
in America that "The Union was formed by the voluntary
agreement of the States; and in uniting together they have not forfeited
their nationality . . . . If one of the states chooses to withdraw
from the compact . . . the Federal Government would have no means
of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right."
(Tocqueville could never have imagined that barely thirty years
later an American president would commit the barbaric act of having
his armies murder 300,000 fellow citizens and destroy their economy
to deny them the right of secession).
Even
Abraham Lincoln voiced support for the right of secession when it
served his political purposes. He enthusiastically embraced (and
orchestrated) the secession of western Virginia (a slave state)
when it joined the Union. And on January 12, 1848, he announced
that "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. . . . Nor is this right
confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government
may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can,
may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory
as they inhabit." Don’t look for this quote, though, in any
of the materials produced by the Declaration Foundation.
As
of 1860 most Northerners and Southerners believed in the
Jeffersonian right of secession as enshrined in the Declaration
of Independence. In Northern
Editorials on Secession Howard Cecil Perkins surveyed about
1,000 Northern newspapers and found that the majority of them agreed
basically with what the Bangor Daily Union wrote on November
13, 1860: "The Union depends for its continuance on the free
consent and will of the sovereign people of each state, and when
that consent and will is withdrawn on either part, their Union is
gone." A state that is coerced to remain in the Union becomes
a "subject province" and can never be "a co-equal
member of the American Union."
New
York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, a prominent Republican,
editorialized on December 17, 1860, that if tyranny and despotism
justified the Revolution of 1776, then "we do not see why it
would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from
the Federal Union in 1861." On February 5, 1861, Greeley continued
on that "The Great Principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration
is . . . that governments derive their just power from the consent
of the governed." Therefore, if he Southern states want to
secede, "they have a clear right to do so." At this time,
Northerners knew that if there was to be a war it was not a war
"to free the slaves," but to deny Southerners the right
of secession. In an 1862 letter to Horace Greeley Lincoln himself
declared that his "paramount objective" in the war was
to destroy the right of secession or, as he rephrased it, to "save
the Union," and that if he could do that without freeing a
single slave he would gladly do so.
The
Declaration Foundation, the Claremont Institute, and other self-proclaimed
beacons of the Lincolnian philosophy, preach exactly the opposite.
They perpetuate the preposterous myth that there was never any such
thing as a right of secession – in a country that was formed by
a war of secession. In doing so they rewrite history to legitimize
the highly centralized welfare/warfare state that Lincoln, more
than anyone else, helped bring about in America. The Declaration
Foundation, in other words, repudiates the principles of
the Declaration of Independence while trying to convince the public
that it is actually championing them.
The
second most notable principle of the Declaration is the notion that
"all men are created equal." The Declaration Foundation
and the Claremont Institute portray Lincoln as an almost Christ-like
figure because of his supposed embrace of this principle, but this
is hard to square with many of Lincoln’s own lifelong beliefs and
clear, unambiguous statements. In his 1858 Ottawa, Illinois debate
with Stephen Douglas, for example, he stated that "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. I have never said anything
to the contrary."
Lincoln
went on to declare that he had never been in favor "of
making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold
office, nor to intermarry with white people." He literally
mocked the Jeffersonian dictum that "all men are created
equal" by claiming that, with the possible exception of Siamese
twins, "I am sorry to say that I have never seen two men of
whom it is true."
On
the topic of emancipation Lincoln said, "Free them, and make
them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not
admit of this . . . . We cannot, then make them equals."
It
doesn’t get any clearer than that. Lincoln unequivocally denounced
the principle of the Declaration of Independence that all men are
created equal, especially when it comes to men of the white and
black races. Ever the slick politician, he rhetorically defended
the "natural rights" of all people, but blacks could never
enjoy such rights if they were denied all the rights that Lincoln
would deny them. In his 1852 eulogy to Henry Clay Lincoln stated
that he agreed with Clay that slavery was regrettable, but ending
it would produce "a greater evil, even to the cause of human
liberty itself." Don’t look for this line, either, in any of
the Declaration Foundation’s publications.
Lincoln’s
career-long goal, which he clung to until the day he died, was colonization
– to send every last black person in the U.S. to Africa, Central
America, Haiti – anywhere but the U.S. This, said Lincoln,
would be a "glorious consummation." They could be "equal"
all right, but not here. This led America’s most prominent abolitionist,
William Lloyd Garrison, to denounce Lincoln as "the President
of African Colonization" and to declare that he "had not
a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins." Again, don’t look
for this in any Declaration Foundation or Claremont Institute publications.
Although
the Declaration Foundation and the Claremont Institute are "conservative"
organizations, they join hands with prominent hard-core leftists
in distorting the real meaning of the Declaration of Independence.
In Lincoln at Gettysburg the far-left journalist Garry Wills
celebrates this "open air sleight of hand" and Lincoln’s
use of military force to "remake America" in a way that
made egalitarianism, rather than liberty, the prevailing political
philosophy.
Left-of-Center
Columbia University law professor George P. Fletcher concurs with
Wills in Our
Secret Constitution, where he praises Lincoln for "reinventing
the United States" government from one whose main goal was
the defense of liberty to "nationalism, egalitarianism, and
democracy."
Over
the past century nationalism has been the chief source of the wars
that have killed millions of civilians; egalitarianism has helped
create socialist and welfare states that have destroyed economy
after economy; and unbridled democracy has decimated liberty. The
Republican and Democratic parties have championed all of these things
over the past century, and they use what Joseph Sobran has called
the "Fantasy Lincoln" to help prop up their corrupt regimes.
March
1, 2002
Thomas
J. DiLorenzo [send him mail]
is
the author of The
Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an
Unnecessary War
(Forum/Random House 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College
in Maryland.
Copyright
2002 LewRockwell.com
Thomas
DiLorenzo Archives
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