Using My Liberty
Mary Diane Goin
“The War between the States established … this principle, that the federal government is, through its courts, the final judge of its own powers.”
~Woodrow Wilson~
Most Americans do not know the real history of their country. That’s because federalist educators have systematically employed revisionists to depict its people and events from a statist worldview, ensuring generations of patriotic nationalists who never question the decisions of their government.
This carefully crafted propaganda is especially disconcerting when it comes to Abraham Lincoln, our sixteenth President. Esteemed by most Americans as the greatest man to ever hold the office, he is also known as “The Great Emancipator” and “Honest Abe.”
Lincoln is admired by leaders all over the world, and our schoolchildren are encouraged to emulate his greatness as a model statesman. Even many Christians hold up Lincoln as an example of piety and godliness in the midst of trying times.
But history outside the classroom tell a disturbingly different story. These facts cannot be successfully airbrushed or explained away to discerning freedom lovers. As seen through the eyes of individual liberties and one’s oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, Lincoln’s shameful legacy is revealed.
Thomas DiLorenzo is a formidable Lincolnologist and author of the book Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe.
With DiLorenzo’s help and contributions from other researchers, let’s delve into history and separate the myth from the man:
Myth: Lincoln invaded the South to free the slaves.
Ending slavery and racial injustice is not why the North invaded. As Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley on Aug. 22, 1862:
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it.”
Congress announced to the world on July 22, 1861, that the purpose of the war was not “interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states” (i.e., slavery), but to preserve the Union “with the rights of the several states unimpaired.” At the time of Fort Sumter (April 12, 1861), only the seven states of the Deep South had seceded.[1]
There were more slaves in the Union than out of it, and Lincoln had no plans to free any of them.
Myth: Lincoln championed equality and natural rights.
His words and, more important, his actions, repudiate this myth. “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races,” he announced in his Aug. 21, 1858, debate with Stephen Douglas. “I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.” And, “Free them [slaves] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this. We cannot, then, make them equals.”
Lincoln was also a lifelong advocate of “colonization” or shipping all black people to Africa, Central America, Haiti–anywhere but here. “I cannot make it better known than it already is,” he stated in a Dec. 1, 1862, Message to Congress, “that I strongly favor colonization.”[1]
William Lloyd Garrison, the most prominent of all abolitionists, concluded that Lincoln “had not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins.”
Garrison and other abolitionists were keenly aware that the January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed no one since it specifically exempted all the areas that at the time were occupied by federal armies. That is, all areas where slaves could actually have been freed.[2]
Secretary of State William Seward acknowledged that the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in states in rebellion against the United States and not to slaves in states not in rebellion.
Lincoln admitted in a letter to Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase: “The original emancipation proclamation has no legal justification, except as a military measure.“
In his book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett, Jr. writes, “On at least fourteen occasions between 1854 and 1860 Lincoln said unambiguously that he believed the Negro race was inferior to the White race.
In Galesburg, he referred to ‘the inferior races.’ Who were ‘the inferior races’? African Americans, he said, Mexicans, who he called mongrels …”
For his entire adult life, Lincoln was a member of the American Colonization Society. “There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children,” he said in his 1852 eulogy to Henry Clay.. He held these views until the day he died. As Joe Sobran has remarked, Lincoln’s position was that black people could be “equal” all right, but not here in the U.S.[3]
Myth: Lincoln was a defender of the Constitution.
Lincoln destroyed the most important principle of the Declaration — the principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Southerners no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C. in 1860, and Lincoln put an end to that idea by having his armies slaughter 300,000 of them, including one out of every four white males between 20 and 40.
Standardizing for today’s population, that would be the equivalent of around 3 million American deaths–roughly 60 times the number of Americans who died in Vietnam.
Myth: War was necessary to end slavery
“During the 19th century, dozens of countries, including the British and Spanish empires, ended slavery peacefully through compensated emancipation. Among such countries were Argentina, Colombia, Chile, all of Central America, Mexico, Bolivia, Uruguay, the French and Danish colonies, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela.
Lincoln did propose compensated emancipation for the border states, but coupled his proposal with deportation of any freed slaves. He failed to see it through, however.[1]
It’s time to face the truth and teach it to our children: Lincoln was neither honorable nor honest!
In “Beheading the Great Messiah”, libertarian Karen De Coster writes:
“Abraham Lincoln, as most of us were told in Mr. Smith’s 9th-grade history class, was a God-sent savior, a brilliant, articulate, and diversity-loving individual, and the Messiah of the great “Union.” Most of us were brainwashed on enchanting quotations from the “great man from the little log cabin.”
Lincoln was a ruthless dictator of the most contemptible sort. A conniving and manipulative man, and a scoundrel at heart, he was nowhere near what old guard historians would have us believe.
Lincoln has been transformed into the indomitable icon of the American Union. But yet, this beast ruled the country by presidential decree, exercised dictatorial powers over a free people, and proceeded to wage war without a declaration from Congress.
Lincoln blocked Southern shipping ports, justifying his actions by saying “he would enforce all laws and collect all revenues due the North.” The blockades were an act of war.
He set his Northern Army upon the South at Fort Sumter, and set in motion one of the most brutal attacks ever upon freedom by maneuvering the South into firing the first shot at their Northern aggressors.
Lincoln was the darling candidate of the moneyed industrialists of the North. At the core of his political tenets was a government of high import taxes, and his Republican party, whom he lead, passed the Morrill tariff into law soon after taking office…Lincoln even promised in his First Inaugural Address to “launch an invasion of any state that failed to collect its share of tariffs.”
He was committing himself to collecting customs in the South, even if that meant they would secede. The free-market economics of the South were up for assault.
Lincoln signed ten more tariff-raising bills throughout his agonizing administration. He manipulated the American public into the first income tax, he handed out huge land grants and monetary subsidies to transcontinental railroads (corporate welfare), and he took the nation off the gold standard, allowing the government to have absolute control over the monetary system.
Then, he virtually nationalized the banking system under the National Currency Acts in order to establish a machine for printing new money at will and to provide cheap credit for the business elite. This mercantilist tyrant ushered in central banking, our greatest economic curse to this day.
Furthermore, his “New Army” and the slaughter effort on the South put into motion an unprecedented profusion of federal coercion against free citizens, both North and South. By way of conscription, he assembled a vast army by presidential decree, an act of flagrant misconduct, which drafted individuals into slavery to the federal government.
Additionally, any war dissenters or advocates of a peaceful settlement with the South were jailed, and, as even Mr. Smith knows, Habeas Corpus was abolished for the duration of the war. He then tossed into the slammer as many as 30,000 civilians WITHOUT due process of law for reasons of criticizing the Lincoln administration, and suppressed HUNDREDS of newspapers that did not support his war effort.
After his Army stopped secession in its tracks, Lincoln created provisional courts sympathetic to Northern aggression, invented the office of Military Governor, and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which became a propaganda tool for historians in later years, though it did not free the slaves in Northern-controlled areas.”[5] The dishonorable conduct of Lincoln’s generals during the Civil War is well documented. The most famous example was General William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March to the Sea.”
Sherman wrote a letter to one of Lincoln’s cabinet members, claiming that all Southerners—soldiers and civilians alike—were enemies of the Union and recommending that they be driven from their homes and treated as “denizens (inhabitants) of the land. Their holdings, he suggested, could be forcibly repopulated as the British had done in Northern Ireland.
The city of Atlanta, after its surrender, was burned to the ground. An eyewitness wrote, “The city’s infrastructure was completely destroyed—railroads, foundries, shops, mills, schools, hotels and business offices—and “from four to five thousand houses” burned. A mere 400 homes were left standing. Sherman had watched the scene from horseback as he rode out of town and later remarked, “Behind us lay Atlanta, smoldering and in ruins.”[6]
Historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel estimates that some 50,000 Southern civilians were killed during the war, and this number, even if it is exaggerated by a multiple of two, most likely includes thousands of slaves. In his March to the Sea, General William Tecumseh Sherman boasted of having destroyed $100 million in private property and that his “soldiers” carried home another $20 million worth.
In his memoirs, Sherman wrote that when he met with Lincoln after his March to the Sea was completed, Lincoln was eager to hear the stories of how thousands of Southern civilians, mostly women, children, and old men, were plundered, sometimes murdered, and rendered homeless. Lincoln, according to Sherman, laughed almost uncontrollably at the stories.
Even Sherman biographer Lee Kennett, who writes very favorably of the general, concluded that had the Confederates won the war, they would have been “justified in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.”[2]
Sherman used Southern prisoners of war to clear minefields by marching them back and forth across land outside Savannah where mines were suspected. In his own memoirs, Sherman remembers trying not to laugh as the men stepped gingerly through the fields.[7]
Southern prisoners were also herded in front of Northern troops under Confederate artillery fire in order to force Southerners to fire on their own men.[8]
Alexandria, Virginia was occupied by Union troops immediately following the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the town remained subject to military occupation for the duration of the war.
Because the Episcopal prayer book service made distinct mention of both the executive and the legislative departments of the government, clergy who were loyal to the Confederacy were persecuted when they refused to pray for God to bless President Lincoln.
A notorious incident was the arrest of St. Paul’s interim minister, the Rev. Dr. K. J. Stewart, in the sanctuary in Alexandria, Virginia, on February 9, 1862. Union troops attended with the stated purpose of provoking an incident.
During the Litany, Dr. Stewart was ordered by an attending Union officer to say the Prayer for the President of the United States that Dr. Stewart had omitted.
Dr. Stewart proceeded without paying any attention to the interruption; but a captain and six of his soldiers drew their swords and pistols, strode into the chancel, seized the clergyman while he was still kneeling, held pistols to his head, and forced him out of the church and into the streets–in his surplice and stole–and committed him to the guard-house of the 8th Illinois Cavalry.
Dr. Stewart was soon released, but was not allowed to continue to officiate at services. Immediately thereafter, the St. Paul’s sanctuary was closed.[9]
Benjamin Butler was another notoriously wicked Northern general. During his occupation of New Orleans, he was outraged when a Southern lady spit at a Northern soldier who kept making advances toward her. In retaliation, Butler issued his Order Number 28:
As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women calling themselves “ladies” of New Orleans in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture or movement insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.[10]
This order was a “right to rape”!
According to John K. McNeill, Southern Historian, women could also be violated for the following reasons:
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