The Weirdest Defense of Lincoln Yet

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

The financial newsletter writer Jude Wanniski apparently believes that he has mystical powers. In a recent article on Supply Side Investor ("Defending Abraham Lincoln,’ June 25 he criticized my book, The Real Lincoln, while admitting that "I figured I did not need to read the DiLorenzo book." At least he’s more intellectually honest than some of my other critics.

His weird article was a response to an article on LewRockwell.com by Clyde Wilson ("DiLorenzo and His Critics"), who addressed the anti-intellectual penchant of some of my critics to argue that all historical understanding is settled, at least when it comes to Lincoln and the War between the States, and that there is no need for further research. Wanniski apparently didn’t even read Wilson’s article, for he refers to it as a book review, which it definitely is not.

Abraham Best and Greatest: Lincoln as a Roman god

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. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right – a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.

Ignoring all of American history, including the long history of the belief in the right of secession that I document in The Real Lincoln, Wanniski argues in fine Clintonian fashion that Lincoln only said that a people can "TRY" to secede "IF THEY HAVE THE POWER." But of course, Lincoln’s army murdered 300,000 fellow citizens, including one out of every four white males between the ages of 20 and 40, roughly the equivalent of almost 3 million men if we standardize for today’s population. His army also pillaged, plundered, raped, and burned its way through the South for four years, as I also discuss in my chapter on "Waging War on Civilians" (which of course, Wanniski has not read).

Might makes right is Wanniski’s argument – if it can be called an argument. "This is why Lincoln is admired," he says. Well, if that’s true, then the former Soviet Union must be every bit as "admirable" in Wanniski’s world for it, too, kept together a vast Union by violence and murder. He probably also applauds the mass murder of the Chechens by the Russian government, which has also used its military power to keep Chechnya from seceding. It is telling that Vladimir Putin invoked the legacy of Lincoln as part of his "justification" for mass murdering the Chechens, who were trying to secede from the Russian Union.

If might makes right, as Wanniski argues, then there is no sense studying, learning, and debating history, philosophy, law, politics, religion, economics, or any other subject. Arguments can always be "won" at gunpoint, according to Wanniski.

Wanniski must not know that many Northern newspapers – and, indeed, a large portion of the American population, North and South, in 1860 and 1861 – believed that using military force to prevent a state from seceding would destroy the Union in a philosophical sense because it would no longer be a voluntary compact. In my book I cite dozens of Northern newspaper editorials that bemoaned the fact that doing so would destroy the Jeffersonian principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed (see Howard Cecil Perkins, Northern Editorials on Secession).

Despite his admission of not having read my book, Wanniski nevertheless denounces it as "trivial and sophomoric" because he apparently believes that it does not jibe with his viewpoint on the subject.

Wanniski claims that I "do not know" that almost all whites were racists in the mid 19th century, including Abraham Lincoln. Yet I comment on precisely that point in my book by discussing how Lincoln’s persistent denunciations of racial equality, and his lifelong desire to deport all the black people in America to Africa, Haiti, or Central America, were in keeping with what nearly everyone in the North believed at the time. I bring it up in the book because the Lincoln Cult adamantly denies that Lincoln held such views, contrary to the words he spoke and the actions he took over his entire lifetime. But Wanniski would know nothing of this, since he didn’t read the book.

June 27, 2002

Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller, 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

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