Authors Forum: "Lincoln Unmasked"

0:00There's a book by Joseph Martino called Science Funding, and I would recommend on that question. It's a public choice approach to R&D and what happens when you use politics to determine R&D spending, and it's not a pretty picture. I tell my students, I ask them, if the government were funding R&D in the computer industry in 1980, and here are your choices. IBM, the company that's in the district of the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, or a Harvard dropout tinkering with computers in his dad's garage in Palo Alto. Who's going to get the money? And of course Bill Gates was the third one. He would never have gotten the money by the government bureaucrats.

0:47But I'm going to talk a little bit about my book, Lincoln Unmasked. My publisher chose the title. I wanted something like that, Stinkin' Lincoln, but they chose Lincoln Unmasked, What You're Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe. And after my first book came out and created sort of a national debate over the legacy of Lincoln and the Civil War and many other things, I kept at it. I found that I had researchers all over the world sending me all sorts of really good stuff. I have a PhD student for years who's been in the National Archives digging around like a gopher, just sending me some great research material for free.

1:36I haven't even bought him a cup of coffee or anything like that. And so between my own efforts and then all this information that people have been sending me, I decided to keep on researching and writing on the same topic and so I had enough to put together a new book which I did was published in October and I broke it down into three sections and the first is what you're not supposed to know about Lincoln and his war is section one and section two is economic issues you're supposed to ignore and section three is the politics of the Lincoln Cult. And so one of the things I learned from this whole episode of the publication of The Real Lincoln, my first book, was that there really is a Lincoln cult, really a sort of a cult-like behavior on the part of a lot of academics who write about Lincoln. It's sort of a religious thing to some people. Harry Jaffa and his friends at the Claremont Institute persistently

2:38We refer to him as Father Abraham, for example, and I run across the literature that always seems to remind us that he did die on Good Friday, and he died for America's sins, just like Christ died for the sins of the war. They say these things, and there's a book published a couple years ago called Redeemer President. The implication is if you want redemption for your sins, well, you know who to embrace as your savior. And so it just is a cult. And so I have several chapters on the politics of the Lincoln cult. And so what I thought I'd do today is, and when I was writing this, I had an eye toward not repeating anything that was in The Real Lincoln. Now there's one short chapter at the beginning that's a brief summary of some of the main points of that book for readers who had not read that book and picked this one up and would sort of, I was hoping to pique their interest so they could buy that book too.

3:33My publisher is interested in making money, unlike Randy Holcomb's publisher, so the random house has been added for a longer time, I guess, in the route ledge. And so that's what I did. I had an eye toward not repeating things that were in The Real Lincoln, except very, very briefly. And so I'll give you an idea of some of the things that I did in this book. And of course, the argument I made in the first book was that I consider Lincoln to to be the founding father of big government in America. And then the Civil War was a breaking point. And some of my old friends in the room are familiar with the fact that some years ago, I think it was probably at least seven or eight years ago, I was giving a short talk at a conference in DC.

4:19And the topic was the growth of government. And I was asked to comment on a paper by Richard Vetter, where Vetter said that government growth didn't really crowd out the private economy much until the 1960s. And I was the discussant, I was given ten minutes to be the discussant, and I made the case that he was off by about a hundred years, because I thought that I made the case that the Civil War was an important breaking point with the National Currency Acts, the first income tax ever, tariff rates went up to about 50% and stayed there for 60 years, and Jack Kemp happened to be in the audience, the politician Jack Kemp, And every time I would say something, I would say like the first federal conscription law was passed. He would boo and hiss very loudly, and it got to the point that I couldn't concentrate on what I was saying.

5:07So I had to stop and ask if someone else was scheduled to speak at the same time. And Kemp went storming out of the room. He got up, he pulled his chair back, and this went all around the world in about a minute. I had emails from people I hadn't heard from in 20 years. They heard about the story of my chasing Jack Kemp out of an auditorium. And I didn't even mention the word Lincoln. This was before I wrote anything about Abe Lincoln. It was all I mentioned was, you know, the National Currency Act was a bad idea. And he was booing and hissing when I would say that because in the even funnier, my wife was waiting, was outside this banquet room at a Sheraton Hotel in DC. And she said afterwards, she said, boy, I'm sitting there and I see Jack Kemp come storming out the door and swearing and cussing and she's thinking, boy somebody in there really made him angry.

6:07So this is sort of a quite of a weird experience. There really is a religious thing for people like Jack Kemp and quite a few others. And so some of the things I ran across is There's a whole slew of fake quotes. I found that most Americans know little or nothing about it, about the topic, other than a few slogans they learned in junior high school. And that much of what they learned is not true anyway. And so I have a whole chapter called fake Lincoln quotes. It's based mostly on, there's a book published by Oxford University Press. Press. There was a team of researchers that looked through some of the more famous quotes and tried and asked the question is there any documentation for this and there's a whole bunch of them that there's no documentation that they ever said these things and the book is called they never said it a book of fake quotes misquotes and misleading attributions and it's not all about

6:58Lincoln it's about a number of areas but and so to give you an idea and I've had fun with this because in my debates with these so-called Lincoln scholars they often pull these quotes out and you know as part of their argument and then I have this reference guide of mine and I can say well it's a fake quote, it's never here's one of them there was the American Enterprise magazine devoted a whole issue a couple years ago after my book came out pretty much to criticizing me was the motivation by the whole Civil War issue and they and they criticized The author is Lew Rockwell too in there, although they didn't quote him saying anything, since he published some of my work on his website, they stuck him in there, but they didn't say anything that he said on the topic.

7:45But one of the authors, Jay Winnick, wrote one of the articles, and it was great fun because he quoted Lincoln as saying this about slavery, If I ever get a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard, and it's a fake, he never said that, so I was able to point out that it was a fake quote, he never said that. He supposedly said this, I've never known a worthwhile man who became too big for his boots or his Bible, another fake quote according to these people. And Lincoln, of course, was not a believer, he never joined a church, but he was good at quoting the Bible, but he didn't say that. He supposedly became a Christian at Gettysburg after seeing all the mass graves and there are quite a few preachers in America who tell this story. He supposedly said this, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ. Yes, I do love Jesus. Fake. Never said that.

8:36And this is for generations people have been taught. Somebody sent me an email saying that James Dobson, the Reverend James Dobson, tells this story all the time and uses this fake quote. He never said that. He supposedly said, God must have loved the common people. He made so many of them. Didn't say it. He supposedly said, if this nation is to be destroyed, it will be destroyed from within. Didn't say that either. He supposedly said, the restoration of the rebel states to the Union must rest upon the principle of civil and political equality of both races. That's a real howler, he never said that, in fact, you can easily find him saying exactly the opposite in many, many instances. He never even said you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time, he never said that.

9:25I think everybody in this room who grew up in the U.S. was probably taught that in elementary school, but never even said that. And so that's one thing that's different from my earlier book, that it wasn't there. Another thing I did was, I have a chapter about, entitled An Abolitionist Who Despised Lincoln, about Lysander Spooner. I thought it would be appealing to a lot of libertarians. Spooner was filled with hate for the Lincoln regime. All of his collected papers are on the internet, and you can read his letters to Senator Charles Sumner and Secretary of State William Seward. and that if you print them out and pull them out, be careful you don't burn your fingers because it's really incendiary writing on Spooner's part and what was he saying?

10:17He's already said to, I'll pick one for, what he said to Sumner, he said, had all those men at the North who believed these ideas about, that is about the unconstitutionality To be true, I promulgated them as was their plain and obvious duty to do. It is reasonable to suppose that we should long since have had freedom without shedding one drop of blood. The South could consistently with honor and probably would long before this time, and without a conflict, have surrendered their slavery to the demand of the Constitution and to the moral sentiment of the world. You and others like you have done more according to your abilities to prevent the peaceful abolition of slavery than any other men in the nation.

11:04And so he was, Expluner wrote a book called The Unconstitutionality of Slavery in the 1840s, and he was always pushing for the peaceful abolition of slavery like all other nations on the earth that ended slavery in the 19th century did. And he thought that the war was unnecessary in terms of getting rid of slavery because no one other than the British, the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, they didn't have a war involved in the way they ended slavery. And he said this, Spooner said, In your pretended zeal for liberty, you have been urging the nation to the most frightful destruction of human life, and through a series of years betrayed the very citadel of liberty which you were under oath to defend. There has been no other treason at all comparable with this. So he's accusing Lincoln, Seward, Sumner, and the rest of the treason there.

11:54So that's what I meant when I said this is really hot stuff, incendiary writing. And so that's something else that's new. Another thing I did was I had a chapter on the Northern States' rights tradition. Most Americans who know anything about this topic don't seem to understand that the whole The whole business about states' rights or dual sovereignty, as James Madison called it, that was a northern tradition as well as a southern tradition. When Andrew Jackson had his big confrontation with the Bank of the United States, he had a lot of help from politicians at the state level, like the state of Ohio. When the Bank of the United States opened up a branch in Ohio, they taxed it, like Maryland did. They put a $50,000 per branch tax, this is in the 1830s, around the early 1830s, to try to tax it out of existence.

12:48And the bank refused to pay, and so the state government of Ohio sent armed police into the bank for the money. They went there with a big chest, the big chest to fill it up with the money, and they literally jumped over the counter, went into the vault and took $100,000 out of the Bank of the United States as a tax. They didn't want this bank to exist, neither did quite a few other northern states. And so this was a way in which states' rights was able to fend off federal tyranny, which is one simple example. And so I write about these things in this book because most Americans, I think, don't understand that this was a northern as well as a southern tradition. and it was always aimed at providing a vehicle for the people to protect themselves against federal tyranny.

13:37It's not about this nonsense that states don't have rights and only individuals have rights. No one ever made that argument. The argument is that the way in which individuals can conceivably defend themselves against the central government is to form political communities at the state and local level and defend themselves against the federal government. The Federal Government. There's never a matter of something called a state having rights. That's just the language that was used for it. So I get into that. Other things, one thing I didn't mention at all on the real Lincoln, because I thought it would be, I didn't think I could back it up with enough references, was the idea that after Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and began mass arresting northern civilians who opposed the war, that Judge Taney, Chief Justice, issued an opinion that this was unconstitutional for the president alone to suspend habeas corpus.

14:35Judge Roger B. Taney was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, I think he was the longest-sitting Chief Justice, and Lincoln responded not with a legal argument, but by issuing an arrest warrant. And when I wrote The Real Lincoln, I had one reference on this, and I didn't think that was enough. But since then I've got several, Charles Adams dug up several and I dug up one or two more also and so now we have Benjamin Robbins Curtis who wrote the dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case and who defended Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial in his autobiography saying that the arrest warrant that Lincoln issued for Tawny was a great crime, called it a great crime. The mayor of Baltimore at the time, Mayor Brown, in his memoirs referred to the arrest warrant The Arrest Warrant. He was a friend of Tawny's, so he knew about the arrest warrant. There's a history of the federal marshal service published by the federal government that mentions the arrest warrant.

15:34So this happened. And so this was a big blow to separation of powers, if you can intimidate the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by threatening to throw him in prison for merely issuing a legal opinion as a circuit court judge, no less, rather than going to court. And I also, one of my, this PhD student I mentioned, who digs up great stuff for me, went down to the National Archives and found a group of letters from federal judges explaining why they didn't show up on court that day to issue a writ of habeas corpus to someone who had been imprisoned by the Lincoln regime. And pretty much, here's what one of them says. This is a federal judge in Washington D.C. After dinner, I visited my brother judges in Georgetown, and returning home between half past seven and eight o'clock, found an armed sentinel stationed at my door by order of the provost marshal.

16:26I learned that this guard had been placed at my door as early as five o'clock. Armed sentries from that time continuously until now have been stationed in front of my house. and so the federal soldiers were sent to the homes of judges so that they couldn't go to court to issue writs of habeas corpus and have due process occur in the northern states and so it wasn't only Tawny it was federal judges all around who were treated like this and I write about that also. The way the Lincoln cult as I call it responded to this originally is to say the one reference that was the first reference was by Ward Layman who was one of Lincoln's Law Partners, and they said, well, Layman was a drunk, can't believe what he says, he's a drunk, and of course Ulysses S. Grant was a famous drunk too, but they never questioned what he says, but I have all these other references, so in the part on economics, economic issues you're supposed to ignore, one thing that's different is, I go into a lot more detail about Lincoln's relationship to the railroad industry, he was a wealthy railroad lawyer, he represented the Illinois Central,

17:32He once got $5,000 for a single case, and back in the 1850s, that was a good piece of change for a single case. The governor of Illinois at the time was paid about $3,000 a year, and he got $5,000 in one case. In this particular case, I tell the story that is out there in a book called Lincoln and the Railroads, of where he presented his bill, $5,000 bill, to the Illinois Central, and the vice president of the Illinois Central at the time was a man named George B. McClellan and it's the same George B. McClellan who would be the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac a few years later, Lincoln's top general, he was the vice president of the Illinois Central and McClellan told him my board of directors in New York City will never pay a lawyer from Illinois $5,000 so Lincoln sued, he sued for his fee and when he went to court unbelievably, unbelievably He got a bunch of lawyers from Illinois to testify that $5,000 seemed perfectly acceptable to them as a fee.

18:35Could you imagine that? So they all go into court saying, yeah, that sounds okay, it's not too high. But the Illinois Central lawyers did not show up. And so by default, he got his $5,000. And so John W. Starr, the author of this book, Lincoln in the Railroad, very strongly hints that this was some sort of corrupt deal between McClellan and Lincoln and to get in his $5,000 dollar fee. And so I write about some personal corruption of a chapter called The Great Protectionist. That chapter was called The Great Railroad Lobbyist. And another thing he did was he invested in real estate in Council Bluffs, Iowa in 1857. And because his friend Grenville Dodge, who ended up being the chief engineer for the Transcontinental Railroads, told him that would be a good place for the eastern terminus of the Transcontinental Railroads.

19:24and so when he was president as soon as the war started he called a special session of Congress to deal with the railroad bill not the war but the railroad bill to start building railroads out California and so it took about a year the railroad bill was passed and it gave the president of the United States the ability to choose the eastern terminus where they were going to start building the railroad and anybody would like to venture a wild guess of what where he chose to start building the Transcontinental Railroad of Council The Great Railroad Lobbyist, The Great Protectionist

20:21Pennsylvania, the steel industry, they wanted a protectionist. He sent his personal friend David Davis, who would later be appointed by him as a Supreme Court Justice, to Pennsylvania with the original copies of all his pro-protectionism speeches to show the Pennsylvania steel industry that this is your man. You know, for 20-some years he's been making speeches in favor of high tariffs. And the reason this was sort of so secretive is that the farmers of the in the country were dead set against high tariffs. They knew that they were always disproportionately harmed, the Midwest farmers and the southern farmers. And so they didn't want the word to get out to the farmers that he was such a big protectionist. This was before the internet, by the way, so it wasn't easy. And so that's why they were so secretive, and he pulled it off, so I make the case that he owed everything politically.

21:10And then, of course, in his first inaugural address, if you read it the right way, I think, you read it, he literally threatened an invasion of any state have failed to collect the newly increased tariff rate. And I also have a chapter called The Great Inflationist that explains Lincoln's role in ushering in central banking finally. I sort of try to make it a terse chapter that tells the story of the struggle for central banking, Andrew Jackson's fight with the Bank of the United States, and then where Lincoln and his party came in and finally prevailed in getting centralized banking back after Andrew Jackson had defeated the Bank of the United States in the 1830s. In the final chapter, the final section, The Politics of Lincoln Cult, I have one chapter called Making Cannon Fodder.

22:02There's a book called Making Patriots by Walter Burns, and I sort of changed it around a little bit. It's called Making Cannon Fodder. It's a little play on words. He's an American Enterprise Institute scholar and he's very troubled in his book that America's youth are not willing enough to join the military to go on global crusades for democracy or something, some nebulous idea, not to defend their country. The voluntary army works pretty well as far as that goes, but he means these neocon crusades to save the world and to make the world safe for for ExxonMobil and Halliburton and whoever. And so that's a real problem. And so one of the themes is, well, how can we solve this dilemma of America's youth not wanting to fight the American Enterprise Institute's wars around the world?

22:52Well, we need to indoctrinate them in the words of a national poet. We need a national poet that will mesmerize them in patriotism and get them to join the army. And fortunately, he says, we have one already. We don't need to invent one. We have one. Abe Lincoln, who he calls, quote, the martyred Christ of democracy's passion play. And so I have a whole chapter about this book. There's that Jesus Christ analogy again with Abe Lincoln. That's a direct quote. That's what he calls him. And he goes on and on in this chapter saying things like, even though he micromanaged the war for four long years and thousands of civilians died as well, not to mention 300,000 fellow for all the citizens who were soldiers, he did this because he loved the people of the South.

23:39He says things like this, and it's surreal to read these things, but this is what Lincoln's scholarship is like. I have a chapter called Lincolnite Totalitarians. I write about people such as Eric Foner. If you ever watch anything on television about the Civil War, you're probably going to be lectured to by Eric Foner from Columbia University, who will tell you what to think about the episode on the History Channel or whatever it is. And I cite an article of his from the Nation Magazine in 1991 where he opposed the breakup of the Soviet Union and the title of the article was Lincoln's Lesson. He said Gorbachev doesn't have the fortitude that Lincoln did. Lincoln would never have allowed the Soviet republics to secede peacefully like Gorbachev did.

24:28He was saying that Lincoln was much more brutal than the last dictator of the Soviet Union, which of course is true, absolutely true, and he excoriated him for that. And all throughout this section, I point to a lot of conservatives and left-wingers like Foner who make the case for abolishing civil liberties or invading countries that have not harmed us or the breakup of the Soviet Union and invoking the Lincoln legend to make their case. Michelle Malkin wrote a book advocating that we round up all the Muslims in America and throw them in concentration camps. It's called In Defense of Internment is the name of the book and of course there are Lincoln quotes sprinkled throughout to make the case if he did it it must be okay to do it. So she makes the case too and the final final chapter that I have is called Contra the Lincoln Cult. And what I found in several years after the Real Lincoln came out is if you want to have a career as a historian and you

25:35write on this area there's an official viewpoint and you cannot deviate from that official viewpoint if you want a career as a historian. I'm not a historian so I don't care. I don't care about an official viewpoint. And so but but you have to you know you won't have a career. But if you if you toe the line In 2009, you can have a very good career. There seems to be an unlimited supply of money for awards for the Lincoln Book of the Year. There's $35,000, $50,000 a crack for all these books that are written. But I ran across five or six books by people who are not historians, Lincoln scholars anyway, a couple of them are professional historians, But they don't have, they're not in this game of where my career depends on being a Lincoln scholar and having the acceptance of all the other Lincoln scholars of James, Father James McPherson, you know, I need his permission to have my career, and things like that.

26:31And one of the persons was Stephen Weissman, an editorial writer for the New York Times, wrote a book on the history of the income tax, and I quote him pretty extensively. I'm pretty much agreeing with my whole interpretation of Lincoln and the role of economics in Lincoln. Senator James Webb, who is now a senator, he wrote a book on the history of the Scots-Irish in America, and I quote him as pretty much agreeing with much of what I said about the war. And again, what does James Webb care about James McPherson's opinion of him or these other scholars? Michael Holt, the professor of history at Virginia, he's a scholar, he's a historian, but the antebellum era is his area. He's not a Lincoln scholar, but he wrote a little skinny book about three years ago on sort of his view of the war, and it pretty much is almost identical to my view of what I wrote about.

27:26And so I cite him too, John Steele Gordon, the writer on business history. I quote him in support, Michael Lind, the liberal writer, Michael Lind. He wrote a book called What Lincoln Believed. And it's kind of funny because Lind thinks mercantilism is a wonderful thing and we need to bring it back. And so he writes his books about how Lincoln was a hardcore mercantilist. And the whole theme of the book is wasn't that great. that he was high tariffs, corporate welfare, central banking, inflationism, all this. That's good stuff, as Michael Lin says. So he says he uses the same facts I did, but as an economist I say, well, this was bad, this was not a good thing. And for that I'm excoriated by the history profession.

28:13Michael Lin, I think he won an award too, pretty much says the same thing I did. He's even harsher. He really goes after Lincoln as being a hypocrite with his Bible-quoting business of his. And then there's a historian named Dahlstrom, whose his last book was a history of the John Deere Tractor Company, so he's not a Lincoln scholar either, but he wrote a book on Lincoln's suppression of the press, of the media, with a co-author named Manberg, Jeffrey Manberg, and they pretty much tell the same story that I do in The Real Lincoln on the suspension of habeas corpus and the shutting down of 300 opposition newspapers in the northern states and so forth. So you can't be, if you're outside of this Lincoln Scholarship Circle, you have free speech, you can write these things. If not, you don't, if you want a career there.

29:04And that's the last chapter. That's what I'll say about this for now. And the sticker price is $22.95. It's cheaper on Amazon. And they are for sale out front, I believe. I'll be glad to autograph any. Time for questions, Joe, or if anybody has any? Probably not. Okay, they're sick of hearing me talk about this subject anyway. Okay. Well, there are probably a lot of reasons. The case I make in the book is that, and it's not original with me, David Donald wrote about this 40 years ago, Ever since Lincoln became a martyr with his death, politicians of all parties have tried to attach the moral authority of Abraham Lincoln to their cause, whatever their cause was.

30:07Donald mentioned that even the Communist Party USA used to hold Lincoln-Lennon day rallies in New York City. He says in his book of his, Lincoln reconsidered that he once actually went into the headquarters in New York City of the Communist Party, and there were gigantic pictures of Lincoln and Lenin side by side in there. and so that's why I mentioned like Eric Foner or the right-wingers at the American Enterprise Institute on September 7th 2006 one of my articles on Lew Rockwell's website was on an article Newt Gingrich had in the Wall Street Journal online making the case for invading Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and North Korea and it started with a big Lincoln quote at the top of the article and then there were more Lincoln quotes in the middle so I'm not sure it's so So psychological than just crass politics of why so many people who have an agenda, whether it's more socialism or more military adventurism, the whole purpose for existence

31:06I've discovered of the Claremont Institute in California is to train congressional staffers and executive branch employees who write speeches for Republican politicians and enable them to know the right Lincoln quotes to stick in there so that Newt Gingrich can write articles for the Wall Street Journal and invoke the authority of who they call Father Abraham. They want to tell us that the Republican Party is the will of God. If it's not the will of God, it's at least the will of Father Abraham. Anyway, that's what they call Lincoln. That's my take on this. Of course, it's the ideological underpinning of the American state. That's why there's so much money put into it. I saw your, it seemed like you were editing a program on the History Channel when they had a glorified LinkedIn thing, and you just said, yeah, he was really motivated, and I was wondering, if there had to be something else there, I read you were linking that to something else that you wanted to add to it.

32:20I interviewed me for an hour and a half on tape. I went down to a studio in D.C. on a good 90 minutes, and the woman who interviewed me had really good questions. She was a really smart person and had done her homework. But they put no more than about 10 seconds in three different segments of me on the show. It was almost one of those subliminal messages. You know, flash Coca-Cola on the screen like that. And they actually managed to make me sound like I was saying exactly the opposite of what I actually did say. They managed to do that with their editing. And so I knew there would be some kind of hatchet job, but I thought there was some probability that they would at least mention the title of my book and it would sell books.

33:06So my benefit cost calculation was it would probably sell enough books to be worth two hours of my time to go down and do this. So I did it. I knew there would be a hatchet job, but that's what they did. You wouldn't have had any possibility of knowing what I said in that interview by watching that segment on the History Channel. And I learned later that James McPherson was the advisor on that show, so I'm sure he had something to do with that. But Eric Foner, they had about two hours of him. They just went on and on and on and on. Endless discussion by Foner on the same show. Time is up.