The Problem With Lincoln, by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Regnery History, 2020, viii + 248 pages, hardcover.
Not only have more biographies and books been written about our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, than any other president of the United States, I think it is safe to say that few men have had as much written about them as Abraham Lincoln. The problem with most of these works about Lincoln is that they are more hagiographical than historical. Thank God that Thomas J. DiLorenzo has devoted a good part of his life to rectifying this historical injustice.
Although DiLorenzo is an economist by education and training, he is also quite the historian of American history. DiLorenzo is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and former professor of economics at Loyola University Maryland, where he is now professor emeritus. DiLorenzo is also a prolific writer. Not only has he written many scholarly articles for academic journals, he is also widely published in more popular outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Barron’s, and other national media outlets. He is the author or coauthor of 17 books, including Hamilton’s Curse and How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present. Most notably, however, he has written three books on Lincoln.
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In The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (2002), DiLorenzo portrayed Lincoln “as a man who devoted his political career to revolutionizing the American form of government from one that was very limited in scope and highly decentralized — as the Founding Fathers intended — to a highly centralized, activist state.” In Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe (2006), DiLorenzo presented “a litany of stunning new revelations” to explode the most enduring myths about Lincoln and offered “an alarming portrait of a political manipulator and opportunist who bears little resemblance to the heroic, stoic, and principled figure of mainstream history.” Now, in his newest book The Problem With Lincoln, DiLorenzo shows how Lincoln “overturned our original constitutional order, violated the rights of Americans both North and South, massively inflated the federal government, and plunged the nation into a wholly unnecessary war.”
The Trouble With Lincoln contains 10 chapters and is supplemented by 10 valuable appendixes. The book has no preface or introduction, but the first chapter, “Un-Founding Father,” serves as the book’s introduction since it contains brief synopses of chapters two through 10. Every chapter destroys numerous widely held myths about Lincoln as it presents the unvarnished truth about “honest Abe.” The appendixes are all documents from the Lincoln era that relate to Lincoln, slavery, or the ratification of the Constitution. The book concludes with endnotes, the sources of the appendixes, and an index.
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This book, says the author, is “intended to challenge the designation of Abraham Lincoln as America’s greatest president.” Although the truth about Lincoln “can be found in myriad scholarly publications and documents,” the problem “for the average citizen is that these facts are squirreled away in university libraries, the National Archives, and other such places, and they rarely make their way into the public school textbooks from which most Americans learn whatever they know — or think they know — about Abraham Lincoln.” DiLorenzo remedies this glaring deficiency by pointing out, among many other things, how Lincoln did not invade the South to free the slaves, how he promised to protect slavery forever, how he was a virulent racist, how he destroyed the Constitution, how his emancipation proclamation did not free a single slave, how he was a masterful lying politician, and how he was hated and reviled during his lifetime.
In chapter two, “The Racial Saint,” we learn that Lincoln “was not just pandering to Northern racist voters with his racist rhetoric.” Lincoln believed that “black people were inferior to whites.” He was not “in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.” According to Lincoln, negroes should never be voters, jurors, office holders, or the spouse of a white person. Lincoln thought it “morally right” to send all blacks — including free blacks — back to Africa or to a colony in Central America. Lincoln, points out DiLorenzo, “never opposed Southern slavery, only the extension of slavery into the territories” “so that the territories could be preserved for ‘free white labor.’”
