Thursday is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln. I would be perplexed by the Lincoln cult if I thought the prime Lincoln idolizers gave a damn about individual liberty. Lincoln is lionized not because he saved self-government, but primarily because he sanctified and vastly extended Leviathan.<\/p>\n
Here is a riff I did on Lincoln for a National Review Online <\/a>symposium on Lincoln 8 years ago, and a snippet on Abe from Attention Deficit Democracy<\/a> <\/p>\n James Bovard, February 2001:<\/p>\n How can the same people who vigorously support indicting Serbian leaders for war crimes also claim that Lincoln was a great American president? <\/p>\n Lincoln bears ultimate responsibility for how the North chose to fight the Civil War. The attitude of some of the Northern commanders paralleled those of Bosnian Serb commanders more than many contemporary Americans would like to admit.<\/p>\n In a September 17, 1863, letter to the War Department, Gen. William Sherman wrote: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The United States has the right, and \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 the \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 power, to penetrate to every part of the national domain. We will remove and destroy every obstacle \u00e2\u20ac\u201d if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d President Lincoln liked Sherman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s letter so much that he declared that it should be published. <\/p>\n On June 21, 1864, before his bloody March to the Sea, Sherman wrote to the secretary of war: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There is a class of people [in the South] \u00e2\u20ac\u201d men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d How would U.N. war crimes investigators react if Slobodan Milosevic had made this comment about ethnic Albanians? <\/p>\n On October 9, 1864, Sherman wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses, and people will cripple their military resources.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Sherman lived up to his boast \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and left a swath of devastation and misery that helped plunge the South into decades of poverty. <\/p>\n General Grant used similar tactics in Virginia, ordering his troops \u00e2\u20ac\u0153make all the valleys south of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad a desert as high up as possible.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/p>\n The Scorched Earth tactics the North used made life far more difficult for both white and black survivors of the Civil War. <\/p>\n Lincoln was blinded by his belief in the righteousness of federal supremacy. The abuses and tyranny that he authorized set legions of precedents that subverted the vision of government the Founding Fathers bequeathed to America. <\/p>\n ****From Attention Deficit Democracy (Palgrave, 2006):<\/p>\n The more vehemently a president equates democracy with freedom, the greater the danger he likely poses to Americans\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 rights. President Abraham Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth century presidents\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Lincoln swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom or self-rule. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly shut down hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Lysander Spooner, a Massachusetts abolitionist, ridiculed President Lincoln\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s claim that the Civil War was fought to preserve a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153government by consent.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Spooner observed, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The only idea . . . ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthat it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thursday is the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln. I would be perplexed by the Lincoln cult if I thought the prime Lincoln idolizers gave a damn about individual liberty. Lincoln is lionized not because he saved self-government, but primarily because he sanctified and vastly extended Leviathan. Here is a riff I did on Lincoln for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-5305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5305"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5309,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5305\/revisions\/5309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5305"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}