Vanishing American

I just began reading Thomas DiLorenzo's "The Real Lincoln" today.
http://www.amazon.com/Real-Lincoln-Abra ... 544&sr=1-1

Once I've finished I'll give some more thoughts but the book does an excellent job of tracing a lot of our present woes to Lincoln and his legacy. Here's an early paragraph:

"In the eyes of many Americans, Lincoln remains the most important American political figure in history because the War between the States so fundamentally transformed the nature of American government. Before the war, government in America was the highly decentralized, limited government established by the founding fathers. The war created the highly centralized state that Americans labor under today. The purpose of American government was transformed from the defense of individual liberty to the quest for empire. As historian Richard Bensel has observed, any study of the origins of the American state should begin no earlier than 1865."

As (William T) Sherman biographer Lee Kennett found, in Sherman's army 'the New York regiments were... filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World.' Just as Fidel Castro did in the 1980s, European governments in the early 1860s gladly emptied their jails so that the most hardened criminals could emigrate to the United States. It is unlikely that many of Castro's criminals ended up in the US Military, but such characters were heavily recruited by the Lincoln administration, which promised them -and other European immigrants -land grants in return for their military service. Thousands of these immigrants perished in General Grant's numerous frontal assaults on a well-entrenched Army of Northern Virginia under the command of General Robert E Lee.

At another point DiLorenzo notes that there was a nearly 70% increase in population in the 13 largest Northern states by 1875 in part due to the massive amounts of immigration. Initially Lincoln had opened the floodgates to keep the ranks of the Union Army full but as time went on the Republicans found that the immigrants, many of which owed their presence in America to the Republicans, would vote solidly for the party and ensure their stronghold in the North despite growing anti-war sentiments from the native New Englanders and such. Blacks were used in much the same way in the South during Reconstruction to prop up the Republican Party despite a little more than 10% support from whites, many of whom had been disenfranchised.

Another well-known left-of-center historian, Garry Wills, wrote in Lincoln at Gettysburg that Lincoln's rhetorical gimmickry (an "open air sleight of hand) and willingness to use military force to achieve his political ends were so successful that they "remade America". Wills is obviously thrilled by this arbitrary reinvention of the purpose of American government since he believes that Lincoln's emphasis on the word "equality" in the Gettysburg Address redefined the primary purpose of American government as the pursuit of egalitarianism, which always requires a large, activist, centralized state.
The word "equality" does not appear in the Constitution, so Lincoln's insistence that this was the principal feature of the federal government really was revolutionary. Wills refers not merely to equality of treatment for the ex-slaves, but also the whole twentieth-century socialist enterprise of using the powers of centralized government to attempt to force all types of "equality" on the population. Wills apparently hopes that the failed twentieth-century collectivist ideology can somehow be revived if Lincoln can be associated with it.

Of course Lincoln the Great Equalizer was also a carefully crafted image and one that varied depending upon the audience Abe happened to be addressing. In an 1858 Ottawa, Illinois debate against Stephen Douglas, Lincoln stated, "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary."

Shortly before the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln noted in an 1862 public letter to the New York Tribune, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union."

And the thing about the Emancipation Proclamation is that it didn't actually free any slaves:

At the same time, it is important to note that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave. As described by James G Randall and David Donald in their epic, The Civil War and Reconstruction, "The stereotyped picture of the emancipator suddenly striking the shackles from millions of slaves by a stroke of the presidential pen is altogether inaccurate."
The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to rebel territory, even though at the time Federal armies occupied large parts of the South, including Tennessee and Virginia, where it would have been possible to emancipate thousands of slaves. Specifically exempted by name in the Proclamation were the federally occupied states of Maryland and Kentucky, as well as West Virginia and many counties of Virginia. The Federal army also occupied much of Louisiana at the time, and those areas were exempted as well. Exempted were the parishes of "St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrobonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin and Orleans." Lincoln, one of the nation's preeminent lawyers, was careful to craft the proclamation in a way that would guarantee that it would not emancipate any slaves.

Lincoln's two objectives with the proclamation were to use the freed slaves as enlistees in the Union army and to attempt to incite a slave rebellion on the plantations behind Southern lines. And had he lived, what were his ultimate plans for the freed slaves after war's end?

According to Roy Basler, the editor of Lincoln's Collected Works, as of 1857 Lincoln had no solution to the problem of slavery "except the colonization idea which he inherited from Henry Clay" When, before the war, he was asked what should be done with the slaves were they ever to be freed, he said, "Send them to Liberia, to their native land." As president, Lincoln held a White House meeting with freed black leaders and implored them to lead a colonization movement back to Africa. He developed plans to send every last black person to Africa, Haiti, Central America -anywhere but the United States.

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Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right -a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.
-Abraham Lincoln, 1848

The above mentioned view was a common one amongst many Northerners in 1860 and had been for some time. Indeed, the first time secession became a topic of debate amongst US citizens occurred after Jefferson won the 1801 election, spurring New England Federalists to begin the discussion. These talks became very serious during the War of 1812, a conflict that was devastating to the New England economy and lead by a Southern president. DiLorenzo notes:

More than a half century before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, three serious secession attempts were orchestrated by the New England Federalists, who believed that the policies of the Jefferson and Madison administrations (1801-1817), especially the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the national trade embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812, were so disproportionally harmful to New England that they justified disunion. The New England Federalists, and the New England public, debated the wisdom of secession for fourteen years, but never was the inherent right of secession questioned.

The New England secessionists were convinced that, with the election of Jefferson, the federal government "had fallen into the hands of infidel, anti-commercial, anti-New England Southerners," and they believed that there was a conspiracy among the "Virginia faction" to "govern and depress New England," in the words of Stephen Higgenson.

The War of 1812 also outraged the New Englanders and added more fuel to the secessionist fire. They feared that another war with England would annihilate their commerce and also feared being taxed into poverty. Massachusetts refused to send troops to the war, effectively seceding from the Union temporarily. On August 24, 1813, the British captured Washington, DC and New England was in rebellion. The governor of Massachusetts announced that the federal government had failed to live up to the terms of the Constitution. The state legislature agreed and issued a decree that the Constitution "must be supplanted."

Indeed, prior to Fort Sumter than was talk amongst several Northern states of possibly seceding from the Union with the Southern states, or forming a third nation:

Prior to Fort Sumter there was widespread sentiment in the North in favor of allowing the Southern states to peacefully secede. This sentiment was so pervasive, in fact, that there were called the "middle states" -New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. These states, which accounted for more than 40 percent of the country's gross national product, contained three types of secessionists: those who wanted to join the Southern Confederacy, those who wished to form their own "Central Confederacy", and those who simply preferred to allow the South to go in peace rather than essentially destroying the Union by holding it together by military force. One or the other of these secession movements had the support of the Democratic Party in every one of these states, and the cities of Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia were hotbeds of secessionism. New Jersey had the largest secession movement, followed by New York City and New York State's Hudson Valley region.

Secessionist sentiments was strong not only in border states like Maryland in 1860 but also in New York, Delaware, parts of Pennsylvania, and especially New Jersey. Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York City, wanted the city to secede from both the state of New York and the United States and become a free-trade zone. The state Democratic Party held a convention on January 31, 1861, to address the secession crisis and issued several resolutions condemning the use of military force to keep the Southern states in the Union...

Horatio Seymour, a former governor who would be elected to that office again during the war, supported the idea of a Central Confederacy. "The middle states would be amply justified," he said, "before the world to posterity in casting their lot with their more southern brethren." Like most other Democrats, Seymour believed that using force to hold the Union together perverted the very idea of a Union designed to preserve liberty. "Consent" at the barrel of a gun was viewed by these men as sheer absurdity.

Of all the mistakes the South made their greatest may well have been firing the first shot at Fort Sumter. Lincoln was quick to use the incident to turn public opinion against the South. As the war waged on and it became increasingly unpopular Lincoln would nationalize the telegraphs, shutdown nearly 200 newspapers and jail nearly 20,000 political prisoners in the North alone. At times anarchy would completely carry the day as the New York Draft Riots show.

So what does the loss of secession mean in practical terms? DiLorenzo makes a compelling observation:

The federal government will never check it's own power. That is the whole reason for federalism and the reason the founding fathers adopted a federal system of government. There is no check at all on the federal government unless state sovereignty exists, and state sovereignty is itself meaningless without the right of secession. Thus Lincoln's war, by destroying the right of secession, also destroyed the last check on the potentially tyrannical powers of the central state.