A survey of 58 historians "from across the political spectrum" released by C-Span Feb. 21 ranked the "leadership qualities" of American presidents, placing Lincoln first, followed by Franklin Roosevelt.
Needless to say, presidents who avoided warfare, obeyed their oath of office, and concentrated on preserving American liberties did not fare well: Among them, Jefferson ranked highest at seventh.
In "America's Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861" (in which the author argues that the just cause in 1861 was that of Southern independence), Murray Rothbard, intellectual heir to Ludwig von Mises and late of the UNLV Department of Economics, describes the onset of Republicanism under Lincoln:
"Lincoln signed no less than 10 tariff-raising bills during his administration. Heavy 'sin' taxes were levied on alcohol and tobacco, the income tax was levied for the first time in American history, huge land grants and monetary suibdsidies were handed out to transcontinental railroads (accompanied by a vast amount of attendant corruption), and the government went off the gold standard and virtually nationalized the banking system to establish a machine for printing new money and to provide cheap credit for the business elite. ... A huge army was conscripted, dissenters and advocates of a negotiated peace with the South were jailed, and the precious Anglo-Saxon right of (start ital)habeas corpus(end ital) was abolished for the duration."
Slavery? "In every other part of the New World, slavery was peacefully bought out by agreement with the slaveholders," Rothbard asserted in the 1994 talk on which this essay is based. (Actually, Haiti was the other violent exception.) "But in these other countries ... there were no Puritan millennialists to do their bloody work, armed with a gun in one hand and a hymn book in the other. ... The Yankee fanatics were the Bolsheviks of their era."
Lincoln's "character"? Rothbard notes that Lincoln was the perfect model of the modern " 'reform liberal' ... whose heart bleeds for and yearns to 'uplift' remote mankind, while he lies to and treats abominably actual people whom he knew."
Lincoln declared that the Union was "a family, bound indissolubly together by the most intimate organic bonds," Rothbard points out, while meantime acting "viciously toward his own humble frontier family. He abandoned his fiancee in order to marry the wealthier Mary Todd ... he repudiated his brother, and he refused to attend his dying father or his father's funeral, monstrously declaring that such an experience 'would be more painful than pleasant.' "
The most thoroughly researched fresh look at Mr. Lincoln's War is Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's 1996 "Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men" (Laissez Faire Books; 800-326-0996.)
Hummel notes: "The Lincoln Administration imprisoned at least 14,000 civilians throughout the course of the war. ... The federal government simultaneously monitored and censored both the mails and telegraphs. ... It also suppressed newspapers. Over three hundred, including the Chicago Times, the New York World, and the Philadelphia Evening Journal, had to cease publication for varying periods."
Former Democratic Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, running for governor, "delivered a speech in May 1863 that accused the President of unnecessarily prolonging the conflict. The Union commander in Ohio rousted Vallandigham from his home at night and jailed him. A military court handed down a sentence of confinement for the war's duration, but public indignation forced Lincoln to commute the sentence to exile behind Confederate lines."
Slavery? Hummel concludes "Slavery was doomed politically even if Lincoln had permitted the small Gulf Coast Confederacy" -- the states that had seceded by the time of his inauguration -- "to depart in peace. The Republican-controlled Congress would have been able to work toward emancipation within the border states, where slavery was already declining. In due course the Radicals could have repealed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. With chattels fleeing across the border and raising slavery's enforcement costs, the peculiar institution's final destruction within an independent cotton South was inevitable."
So the war wasn't even necessary to end slavery -- while the "great emancipator" never tired of offering to let the southerners keep their slaves, if only they'd rejoin his precious union.
What Lincoln and his party achieved was to convert this land from a Jeffersonian republic of limited government to a monstrous and ever-growing welfare/police state, taxing and regulating everything in sight, dreaming up monopoly government licensing schemes for everything from the practice of law and medicine to peaceful travel of the highways, and most insidiously of all creating a vast tax-supported bureaucratic cadre to propagandize the nation's youth -- education being an arena in which no role for government had previously been contemplated -- teaching them precisely that their heroes should be none other than those most successful betrayers of the American Revolution, Lincoln the First and Roosevelt the Second!
The messianic "reform" movement which began with the Whig-Republican coalition of the 1860s has never really gone into eclipse. This is the gang who still seek to use the usurped powers of the central state to ban outright such previously well-accepted forms of commerce as prostitution, gambling, and the traffic in alcohol, medicines, and pain-relieving drugs, with the result that America today has the highest rate of incarceration -- slaves to the state, a whopping plurality of those rotting behind bars being black men who have never committed a violent crime -- ever seen in the history of mankind.
Yet we are assured, in the ironic words of Broadway librettists Ragni and Rado: "We's free now, thank to yo Massa Lincoln, emancipator of the slaves!"
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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