Lincoln as Progenitor

0:00Jeffrey Hummel, an economic historian, remarked that in 1861, the only contact the average citizen ever had with the federal government was the post office. And think about that. But that drastically and radically changed. Essentially, the South's defeat in his war for independence was an overthrowing of the government that was founded by Jefferson, Madison, Washington, and the other founders. And that's why I'm going to make the case that Lincoln was the progenitor of the 20th century welfare-warfare state. First of all, though, anybody in this country who ever criticizes Lincoln, anything he's ever done, however mildly, is inevitably accused by someone of secretly being in favor of slavery. So, for the record, I'm against slavery, as I'm against all forms of government-enforced racial categorization, including affirmative action, racial hiring quotas, forced segregation and forced integration against all of it.

0:58And so, for the record, now I can proceed with the talk. What I want to do in making my case is first talk a little bit about what Lincoln did not stand for and then talk about what he did stand for. What he did not stand for was freedom and constitutional government, not even freedom for the slaves. And if you look at his own words, Lincoln was obviously was a white supremacist. And I'll show you from the horse's mouth here. In one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln said, I will say then that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way in a way, the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. And I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe

1:55will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And then as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there There must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. That's Abraham Lincoln in one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. When he was asked what would happen if the slaves were freed, he said, quote, send them to Liberia, to their own native land, but free them and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit this. He did send about 500 freed slaves to Liberia but without any sustenance and so they all starved to death, apparently. Lincoln adopted the position politically on slavery of his mentor Henry Clay. He worshipped Henry Clay. He even dumped his fiance as a young man to pursue Mary Todd whose family had close links with the Clays of Kentucky. That's how much

2:53he worshipped Henry Clay as his idol. Clay, of course, was the leader of the Whig party in the Early 19th Century. And Lincoln's position and Clay's position was to opposition to slavery in principle, toleration of it in practice, and a vigorous hostility toward the abolition movement. The very word abolitionist, Lincoln once said, was quote, an odious epithet to him. One of his admirers, there's a book of essays on Lincoln by his admirers that was published in the late 19th Century, and one of his friends, a General Don Pyatt, said of him. He said, Lincoln expressed no sympathy for the slave and laughed at the abolitionists. Descended from poor whites of a slave state through many generations, he inherited the contempt held by that class for the negro. In fact, in Lincoln's first inaugural, those of you who are history students, students of history, you know that he stated unequivocally that he had no purpose and no intent to disturb slavery. In his own words, I have no purpose

3:54to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so and I have no inclination to do so. He also required each member of his cabinet to sign an oath saying that they would support strengthening the Fugitive Slave Clause. And of course, had they not strengthened it, had they not enforced the Fugitive Slave Clause, slavery would have fallen apart quicker than it did. Lincoln's actions are consistent with his words with regard to slavery. He never had any intention of freeing slaves in the South. Early in the war, General John Fremont was the military governor of Missouri when the Federal Army took over and occupied Missouri.

4:41He divided the state into northern and southern sections and he issued an order that said that anyone in the southern section and where the confederate sympathizers were who was supporting the confederate cause would have their slaves emancipated. That didn't go in the north. There were slaves in northern Missouri but under no circumstances did he threaten to emancipate those slaves. And so he issued this order saying if we catch anybody supporting the southern cause in southern Missouri we will free your slaves. Lincoln did not permit this. Lincoln not only rebuffed General Fremont, who sent his wife, as his personal envoy, to Washington to urge Lincoln to go along with this. Lincoln not only did that, but he stripped Fremont of his command. He fired him.

5:28The last thing Lincoln wanted was to free any slaves in Missouri because he wanted West Virginia and Kentucky and the other border states to remain in the Union. And interestingly, General Fremont was given what they thought was a do-nothing command. And they sent him in his command to the Shenandoah Valley to keep an eye on some crazy physics professor from VMI, who of course was Stonewall Jackson in the Fremont Army. It was one of the many armies that Stonewall Jackson obliterated in the Shenandoah Valley. Fremont's order would have freed some slaves. It would have freed some slaves, although Lincoln rescinded it. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation however freed no slaves. It only applied to rebel territory and in my paper, by the way I have copies of my paper out at the front registration desk if anyone wants one later, I list specifically, I quote from the Emancipation Proclamation, the Federal Army occupied large parts of Louisiana. The proclamation specifically exempted all the parishes of Louisiana that the Union Army controlled and it could have therefore emancipated

6:38There are several kinds of slaves in those places. There's a big one, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension Parish, Assumption Parish. These are all exempt, as was West Virginia and large parts of Virginia that were also occupied by the Federal Army at that time. And so it didn't free anybody. The London Spectator magazine ridiculed Lincoln's action by pointing out that, quote, Quote, the principle here is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States government. Which I think is absolutely true about it. Now, to consider the context in which the Emancipation Proclamation occurred, a quick history of some of the major battles of the war up to late 1962.

7:28And just to give you some context, the first major battle, the Battle of 1st Manassas was a smashing Confederate victory. Lincoln rode out in his carriage that afternoon expecting to revel in the glory, but instead he received a telegram from the War Department that said, and I'll quote it, General McDowell is retreating through Centerville, all is lost, try to save Washington and the remnants of this army. And that was quite a shocker. At the end of this battle, there was a wild melee of thousands of Union Army troops and civilians rushing back to Washington while the Confederates fired potshots with cannons at them. When Jefferson Davis arrived on the battlefield late in the day, Stonewall Jackson went up to him and said, give me 10,000 men and I will take Washington tomorrow.

8:16and for the rest of their lives Jefferson Davis, General Beauregard and General Joseph Johnston blamed each other for decades for not following up on that day and ending it all once and for all right there and so that was the first battle, Battle of Shiloh, the historians call it a union victory but the Federal suffered 22% more casualties still they didn't make any progress in subduing the rebels, Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign Stonewall Jackson had about 17,000 men, 16,000 men against 175,000 federal troops and won a number of smashing victories that completely eliminated the Federal Army from the Shenandoah Valley.

9:07The historian G.R. Henderson said, quote, only Napoleon's campaign of 1814 affords a is a parallel to this extraordinary spectacle, where he absolutely paralyzed 175,000 Federal troops, he was outnumbered 11 to 1. Battle of Seven Pines, another stalemate, seven days battle in June of 1862. Once again the Federal Army like in Manassas was sent packing back to Washington. The battle of Second Manassas in August of 1862, another Confederate route to the Federal Army, The Federal Army, just like the First Manassas Battle, where they all went fleeing back to Washington. The Battle of Sharpsburg ran teetum. No one had a clear victory, but the Federal Army suffered twice the casualties of the Confederates.

9:53And the Battle of Fredericksburg came next in December of 1862, where 85,000 Federal troops made 13 charges against the Confederate position, and no one made it within 100 yards of their position. General James Longstreet told Robert E. Lee, if you give me enough ammunition, I will kill every one of them. Lee gave him the ammunition, and he did, pretty much. It was a horrible thing to think of, a horrible sight, if you ever visited that battlefield. This is the context in which Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The Confederates were winning the war. Many of them were positioned with their cannons just across the Potomac from Washington in sight of the White House. And so what Lincoln said about it is this, at this time, he says in his words, Things have gone from bad to worse, until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the military plan of operation, that we had been pursuing, that we had about played out our last card and must change our tactics or lose the game.

10:59I now determine upon the adoption of the emancipation policy. So it was a public relations effort to get England, primarily, behind the federal cause, but most British opinion makers considered it to be a ruse and a fraud because it didn't free anybody. They understood they didn't free anybody. Most northerners were shocked at this. There were draft riots in New York City where the federal army killed 500 civilians. There was a desertion crisis in the Union Army because they weren't aware that slavery or emancipation was the cause they were fighting for. The eminent historian James McPherson of Princeton says this, quote, plenty of soldiers believed that the proclamation had changed the purpose of the war.

11:45They professed to feel betrayed. They were willing to risk their lives for the Union, they said, but not for black freedom. Desertion rates rose alarmingly. Many soldiers blamed the Emancipation Proclamation. The truth is, race relations were rotten in the North, and I grew up in Pennsylvania and I was taught, like just about everybody was taught, that racially enlightened northerners marched south and died in violent deaths by the hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands, for the benefit of black strangers in Alabama, Mississippi, and then they happily marched back home singing the battle hymn of the republic. That in a nutshell is what I was taught in school, the purpose of it. But consider these Let's face things, facts about the North. The revised code of Indiana in 1861 stated this, Negroes and mulattoes are not allowed to come into the state. All contracts with Negroes and mulattoes are void.

12:38Any person encouraging them to come and giving them employment is fined up to $500. Negroes and mulattoes are not allowed to vote. Connecticut passed a law declaring that blacks could not attend public schools. New Jersey legally forbade free blacks from settling in the state. Massachusetts passed a law permitting the flogging of blacks who came into the state and remained there for more than two months. In 1853, Illinois, Lincoln's state enacted a law, quote, to prevent the immigration of the free Negroes into this state. Then in 1862, Illinois amended its constitution to read that, quote, no Negro or mulatto shall immigrate or settle in this state. Hard to believe that these people were fighting to to Free the Slaves. Senator John Sherman, who authored the Sherman Antitrust Act 30 years later in 1862, said this, from Ohio, the brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman, we do not like the Negroes.

13:32We do not disguise our dislike. As my friend from Indiana, Congressman Wright, said yesterday, the whole people of the Northwestern states are opposed to having many Negroes among them, and that the principle of prejudice has been engraved in the legislation for nearly all the Northwestern states. Whenever Lincoln did criticize slavery, it was not in the South, it was in the New Territories. In my view, the reason why he only criticized slavery in the New Territories was that at the time, the North dominated Congress because the population was lopsided. If slavery was extended to the New Territories, the Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution would have increased congressional representation of the southern states and that would have interfered with Lincoln's political agenda and the political agenda of the Whigs or the of the Republicans, and I think, in my view, that is the main reason that he only criticized slavery in those states. Lincoln showed little concern over the plight of the freedmen near the end of the war. When asked by Alexander Stevens what would come of them, he mentioned

14:36the words of a popular minstrel song, Root Hog or Die, and then in a memo to the War Department, he said, quote, they had better be set to digging their subsistence out of The Homestead Act gave away about 80% of the land that it gave away went to mining companies and railroads and none of it went to the freed blacks. What Lincoln did stand for, I'm arguing Lincoln didn't stand for freedom, not even freedom for the blacks. What did he stand for? Historian Robert Johansson has written that quote, and that quote, from the moment Lincoln first entered political life as a candidate for the state legislature during the 1832 presidential election, he had demonstrated an unswerving fidelity to the party of Henry Clay and to Henry Clay's American system, so called, the program of internal improvements, that is corporate welfare, internal improvements, protective tariff and centralized banking. That's what Lincoln stood for, mercantilism, interventionism, central banking, fiat money, and military adventurism in the quest for empire.

15:38That's what the Whig Party stood for and Lincoln absolutely idolized Henry Clay and the Whig Party. In his debates with Stephen Douglas, Johansson says, the two men reflected divergent points of view in the political culture of 19th century America. Lincoln, the latitudinarian concepts of national centralization and authority, Douglas, the strict constructionist emphasis on local self-government and states' rights. That's what the war was about, in my view. Lincoln idolized Henry Clay. He called him the bow-ideal of a statesman at his funeral. And the author of The Great Parent of Whig Principles, Lincoln said, During my whole political life, I have loved and revered Clay as a teacher and a leader. But what was Henry Clay's system?

16:24What exactly was it that Lincoln revered so much?

16:35I just repeated these. The quest for an American empire, possibly including Canada and Mexico and stretching all the way to China. You can find this in any book about Henry Clay. Massive, federally funded corporate welfare, high tariffs and protectionist trade policy, and central banking and fiat money. That's what he believed in. And oh, by the way, on the slavery issue, there are two other handouts here I wanted to show you. From 1800 to 1861, there were a number of countries that ended slavery peacefully. What they usually did was to just pass a law saying that the sons and daughters of existing slaves would be free when they reached age 18. That was a way of indirectly buying off the slave owners. And it was in all these countries, Argentina, Chile, Honduras, Bolivia, French colonies, that provided a model for how to end slavery.

17:27These were all the countries in the world. And I took this from the book by Nobel laureate Robert Fogel called Time on the Cross. Also in his book, he has a list of countries that resorted to war from 1800 to 1861 to end slavery. And here's this list right there. So at the time, to the extent that slavery was ended in many countries around the world, and there was a clear model for how to do it. The model wasn't violent war that kills off one sixth of the population, of one sixth of the white males in the South. Henry Clay entered politics in 1811. First thing he did was to urge Congress to invade Canada. He was one of the first politicians to pervert the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.

18:16He was the fiercest proponent of protectionism from the War of 1812 until his death in 1852. He was the author of the Tariff of Abominations in 1828, which almost led to a secession crisis when the South Carolina legislature nullified the tariff. And after Clay lost this battle and they did nullify the tariff, he threw a fit in the House of Representatives and he promised that he would, quote, someday defy the South, the President, and the devil himself to get his way. He was so excited about the tariff. He was a long time promoter of central banking when he left Congress between being a member of Congress and took a few years off to work as a legal counsel of the Bank of the United States.

19:04He had accumulated $40,000 in personal debt. This is in the 1820s and he made it all up by working for the central bank as a legal counsel. Henry Clay also was in favor of a policy of genocide Toward the Indians. As Secretary of State at a cabinet meeting, he announced, quote, there never was a full-blooded Indian who took the civilization. It's not in their nature. I do not think of them as a race worth preserving. They're inferior to Anglo-Saxons, and their breed cannot be improved. Their disappearance from the human family will be no great loss to the world. This is the American Secretary of State saying this about a whole race of people. And of course, in 1838, the federal government He came to North Georgia and forced the Cherokees to walk all the way to Oklahoma.

19:50100,000 of them left and about three-fourths of them made it. This was so that was the quest for empire. He was compulsive about the quest for empire financed by high tariffs in a central bank. This is the man Lincoln idolized. In office, Lincoln bent over backwards to promise he would not disturb slavery, but he was not compromising one inch on the tariff. He would compromise on slavery everywhere, but he would compromise on a tariff nowhere. In his first inaugural address, he said, The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and, and I have this part underlined, to collect the duties and imposes, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion.

20:40So he promised that I will invade if you don't collect the tariffs. At this time, of course, The tariff was the primary source of federal revenue. Southerners knew what was coming. When Lincoln was elected, before he was inaugurated, the House introduced the Moral Tariff Bill, and then after he was inaugurated, the Senate went along with it. It doubled the tariff rates of 1857 to 47%, which is higher than the tariff of abominations of 1828. And tariffs, by the way, were made unconstitutional in the Confederate Constitution. The Confederate Constitution was identical to the U.S. Constitution except tariffs were unconstitutional, corporate welfare was unconstitutional, congressional appropriations required a two-thirds vote, president had a line item veto, states could initiate constitutional amendments but Congress could not, central government officials could be impeached by the state legislatures and there was no general welfare clause in the Confederate Constitution.

21:38Other than that it was identical to the U.S. Constitution. Northern newspapers knew that the tariff was the heart of the issue here. The tariff was the heart of the Republican platform, and it was how they wanted to finance their centralized super state. Let me give you an example. The Chicago Times, and newspapers in these days were affiliated with political parties, said, On December 10th, 1860, the South has furnished nearly three-fourths of the entire exports of the country. Last year, she furnished 72% of the whole. We have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from 30 to 50% and enables us to consume large quantities of southern cotton and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe. This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor of millions of dollars annually. Let the South adopt the free trade system and the North's commerce must be reduced to less than one half of what it now is. Our labor could not compete. Newark, New Jersey Daily Advertiser, a Republican paper

22:37warned on April 2nd 1861 that the Southerners had quote, apparently taken to their bosoms the liberal and popular doctrine of free trade and they might be willing to go toward free trade with the European powers which must operate to the serious disadvantage of the north as commerce will be largely diverted to the southern cities. You can imagine free trade in the south, high tariffs in the north, commerce will be diverted to southern cities. The New Jersey Advertiser said, we apprehend that the chief instigator of the present troubles, South Carolina, have all along for years been preparing the way for the adoption of free trade and must be stopped by the closing of the ports in the south by the US military. This is what the newspapers were saying. We cannot allow free trade. We have to bring the army down there and close those ports. And they did. Fort Sumter was a customs house.

23:27Lincoln's decision to wage war in the south was just what was needed to break the log and the dogjam behind which the Whig political agenda, Henry Clay's agenda, had languished for decades. Another aspect of Lincoln in office is the demolition of civil liberties. There are several big books written about this where he ruled by decree for months without the advice of the consent of Congress, assumed war powers, he declared martial law, confiscated private property, suspended habeas corpus, Congress, conscripted railroads, censored telegraph lines, imprisoned 30,000 Northern citizens without trial, deported a member of Congress, Clement Volandegam of Ohio, for merely disagreeing with Lincoln's war policies at a Democratic Party rally back at home, shut down hundreds of newspapers, created three new states, Kansas, West Virginia and Nevada, in order to rig the 1864 elections to the benefit of the wildly unpopular Republicans, and had army thugs brutally beat judges who questioned his Authority.

24:28This is all in any history books that you can dig out of any good university library. The federal government became massively centralized. We introduced occupational licensing taxes, stamp taxes, inheritance taxes, manufacturing taxes, the income tax, and the internal revenue bureaucracy was created and it has never gone away during this time. Historian Leonard Curry says this, remember I started by saying that in 1860 the only The only contact the average citizen had with the government was the post office. Historian Leonard Currie says this about the end of this war. Every citizen now had direct contact with and felt the direct influence of the federal government. A great centralizing force had been set into motion. The needs of the government had resulted in a drastic redrawing of the federal tax base.

25:13Never again would it be contracted to a pre-war scope. The National Currency Act created central banking. Corporate welfare was run amuck. You remember at the time of the Emancipation, the Confederate Army in 1862 was winning the war. Lincoln and the Republicans decided to spend millions of dollars building railroads in Nevada at that time, which indicates to me that the real purpose really was corporate welfare for the railroads, centralized government financed by high tariffs. They were just so eager to do this that even in the onslaught of the war, they had to build of Railroads in Utah and Nevada. War crimes, for centuries, the rules of war had evolved to a consensus, more or less, that only the combatants should be targeted.

26:04But this all changed when the Union Army intentionally targeted civilians in war. In the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, after the Confederate Army had been defeated and left the Shenandoah Valley, the entire place was destroyed and burned down as a Colonel Sheridan reported back to Ulysses Grant. We had destroyed over 2,000 barns filled with hay and farming implements, over 70 mills filled with flour and wheat. We have driven in front of the Army over 4,000 head of stock, have killed an issue to the troops, not less than 3,000 sheep. Tomorrow I will continue the destruction of wheat, forage, et cetera, down to Fishers Hill. When this is completed, the valley will have but little in it for man nor beast. Nobody was left but women and and Old Men and Children. This is in the valley. I know there's no army there. Sherman was the most barbaric of all the Union generals in 1862, long before his march to the sea.

27:01His policy was in response to Confederate army soldiers firing on Union gunboats in the Mississippi River in Memphis, he would arbitrarily break into a home and kill the residents. This is He says in a biography of Sherman, that in one case, they broke into the house of a white family, the name was White, and they beat to death the 23-year-old boy there. Then in Sherman's, in the collected works of Sherman, there's a letter from him to Ulysses Grant saying, Please act with, quote, magnanimity toward the white family, because they were unionists after all. He was a pyromaniac. He set to fire at Jackson, Mississippi, after the Confederate Army had evacuated, after they were gone. He reserved special energy for burning down the houses of old friends and acquaintances he had known when he lived and worked in Mississippi and Louisiana before the war.

27:53Sherman was a harsh racist and anti-Semite, not a nice guy. His biographer Michael Fellman said, quote, Sherman was apoplectic about black recruitment and wholeheartedly loathing in his characterization of blacks. Sherman, in his memoir, he warned, quote, the country will soon swarm with dishonest Jews. It's well known that Grant expelled all Jews from his command. I'm not exaggerating when I said he was a vicious racist and anti-Semite. Sherman's chief engineer, Colonel Poe, was deeply bothered at the sight of dead babies and women in Atlanta during the shelling, and Sherman called this, quote, a beautiful sight because it would end the war quicker. During the march through Georgia, right here, Sherman boasted of having destroyed $100 million worth of property with his troops carrying off another $20 million.

28:42One Illinois officer wrote home and said that they would quote, run people from their houses, sometimes kill them at their own doors and then take everything of value and burn the rest. Shelby Foote in his Civil War trilogy said this about, Sherman said that his men were crazy to get into South Carolina, his word crazy. By the way, he once thanked Ulysses S. Grant for helping me when I was crazy. He apparently lost his mind at one point, and Grant was his friend. And Grant wrote back and thanked him for helping me when I was an alcoholic. A very charming collection of letters. But what he says about this, ladies were hustled from their chambers in Columbia, South Carolina.

29:27Their ornaments plucked from their persons. Men and women bearing off their trunks were seized and in a moment the trunk burst asunder with the stroke of an axe or a gun butt. The contents laid bare, rifled, and the residues sacrificed to the fire. The soldiers plundered and drank. There were no reports of raped white women, but the black women of the city suffered terribly. Three months after the end of the war, three months after Sherman, or after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Sherman was sent out west and put in charge of the Indian Wars. Now think about that. The war is over and what do they do? They go out and start killing off Indians, and the policy was to kill as many Indians, including women and children as possible, and herd the rest to, quote, where they can be watched, according to Sherman. Sherman, I swear this is true, this comes from his collected works, the phrase he used to describe this was, quote, the final solution to the Indian problem, end quote.

30:21Of course, that's a phrase that Hitler adopted 70 years later. And why, and Sherman instructed Sheridan to go out and carry this out, to kill him, typically they would go into a village with cannon and machine guns and all the weaponry they had and just kill everybody. Sherman promised that he would handle the Eastern press if there was any talk of atrocities. Leave it up to me, as he says in his collected works. And here's why Sherman, how Sherman rationalized killing off the Indians. In his words, quote, We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress of the railroads. A work of national and worldwide importance, I regard the railroad as the most important element now in progress to facilitate the military interests of our frontier. Sherman's biographer John Marzelak said he viewed the Indians as he viewed the recalcitrant Southerners during the war and the newly freed people after the war as resistors to the legitimate forces of an ordered society.

31:21Sherman's final solution came about by the 1880s and all I'll say is most Americans what they know about the Indian War seems to be Custer's last stand where Custer and 263 of his men lost their lives. I think it's a great tragedy that Grant, Sherman, Sheridan and the others were not with Custer on that day. These people were genocidal maniacs. In conclusion, Lincoln was the progenitor of the 20th century welfare-warfare state. The great principle of the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the government, was destroyed. The philosophy of the country was changed from federalism to nationalism.

32:09And the acquisition of the Louisiana territory in the early part of the century, the 1846 invasion of Mexico and the annexation of Texas, the ruthless dispossession of the Indians, threats against Canada, pervasive talk of the nation's manifest destiny reaching all the way to China, and the war for southern independence were all component parts of the American century of empire and that's what the war for southern independence was about, in my opinion. Thank you. Thank you very much.