Since The Real Lincoln is still selling well after six years in print, I still receive emails from new readers asking what the main criticisms of the book have been. In an attempt to reduce the size of my “in-box,” I thought I’d blog the following succinct summary of the main criticism:

“Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate, Neo-Confederate.”

So there you have it. Of course, I do not defend the actions of the Confederate government any more than my friend Jim Powell, author of FDR’s Folly, defends the actions of Nazi Germany in his book. I devote one-half page to the Confederate government by comparing its Constitution to the U.S. Constitution. The book is about Lincoln, after all.

My critics all know this. Most of them have read the book very carefully. One particularly silly egghead at Loyola Universty in New Orleans who teaches the “Civil War” course there even gloated over the fact that he found a typo in the index. The purpose of all the “Neo-Confederate” language is to say to your average layperson who might consider reading the book: “Don’t do it, the author is a racist and a slavery defender.” That of course is what the average American thinks when he hears the term “Neo-Confederate.” And of course there is no defense of slavery or racism anywhere in the book. Just the opposite, in fact. Censorship is the intent of those who use such language, not intellectual debate. They play the same game with Tom Woods and now, more recently, his co-author Kevin Gutzman. Perhaps the reason for this is that our books outsell theirs by orders of magnitude.

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