real lincoln

The Real Lincoln - Book Review

By Walter Williams


Though Abraham Lincoln will forever be remembered for freeing the slaves, that was never one of his chief political aims. What was? According to Thomas DiLorenzo, Lincoln devoted his entire political career to revolutionizing the American form of government from one that was very limited in scope and highly decentralized (as the Founders intended) to a highly centralized, activist state. This was all achieved during his administration, and the Civil War -- which was not necessary to end slavery, DiLorenzo contends -- was the means by it was accomplished.

In The Real Lincoln, Prof. DiLorenzo addresses questions and reveals facts that many readers may find surprising or even shocking, such as:
  • Lincoln's career-long devotion to Henry Clay's "American System" -- a centralizing economic agenda involving protectionist tariffs, government subsidies for railroads and corporations, and government control of the money supply
  • Voluminous evidence that Lincoln never believed in racial equality, and strongly opposed equal rights for blacks. His cherished plan to send all American blacks to Africa, Haiti, Central America -- anywhere but the U.S.
  • Demolished: the myth that the North fought to end slavery
  • Why didn't Lincoln try to end slavery peacefully, through compensated emancipation -- as dozens of countries, including the entire British Empire, did between 1800 and 1860?
  • How Lincoln turned American history on its head by defining secession as treason
  • Proof that secession was believed to be a fundamental liberty by most Americans -- north and south -- right up to 1861

  • Lincoln's "spectacular lie": How he invented the idea that the federal Union created the states -- which were therefore not sovereign -- and waged war to "prove" himself right
  • Why Lord Acton, the great British historian of liberty, considered the destruction of the right of secession to have eliminated the most vital check on government expansionism
  • How Lincoln broke with long-established rules of warfare by intentionally waging war on unarmed civilians -- establishing the precedent for the extermination of the Plains Indians beginning just a few months after Lee's surrender
  • The Emancipation Proclamation as political gimmick  
  • How generations of historians helped perpetuate the notion that Lincoln was only "defending the Constitution" with his illegal and unconstitutional acts
  • Why "Reconstruction" was really a process of organized plunder of the South, to which it reacted with harsh measures against ex-slaves that stain race relations to this day
  • Why the notorious corruption of the Grant administrations was the inevitable consequence of Lincoln's economic legacy
  • How Lincoln's war created the "military-industrial complex" some 90 years before Eisenhower coined the phrase
  • How Lincoln, far from "saving the Union," destroyed the Founders' vision of it as a voluntary confederation of states
  • How Lincoln transformed America from a constitutional republic to a consolidated empire, more and more despotic at home and adventurous abroad


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