A 64-year-old woman with deep family roots in Alabama recently said to me that she was taught in Alabama public school that Abraham Lincoln was “the best president ever.” That would be a good example of the consequences of what the New England Yankee conquerors labeled “reconstruction.” The truth is that Lincoln was by far the worst president in American history. He was certainly the most “reviled” (by the people of the North during his lifetime), as Larry Tagg documented in his book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: America’s Most Reviled President.” Thanks to the Republican party propaganda machine, which essentially monopolized American politics for the half century after the war, Lincoln was transformed from the most hated and reviled of all American politicians during his lifetime to a saint. (See The Deification of Lincoln by Ira D. Cardiff).
Here is what the state tells you to celebrate today, Lincon’s birthday: Lincon destroyed the voluntary union of the Founding Fathers and replaced it with a union held together by war and the mass murder of Southern civilians (at least fifty thousand according to Princeton historian James McPherson), turning it into something resembling the old Soviet Union more than the original American union.
The uniquely American system of federalism was destroyed along with the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution and the states’ rights of nullification and secession, and Americans became the servants rather than the masters of their own government. Government’s “just powers” no longer came from the consent of the governed, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, but from the barrel of a gun. Are you beginning to get why the state celebrates Lincoln’s birthday?
Lincoln waged war on Southern civilians for four long years, ordering the bombing and burning of American cities to the ground and rewarding the commanding generals who committed these war crimes of plundering, raping, murder, and arson with promotions and glory. The population of the South was about 9 million at the beginning of the war. Scaling the death toll for today’s US population, McPherson’s estimate of 50,000 civilian deaths would be the equivalent of 1.9 million civilians being killed by the US government in just four years. Coming from Lincoln cultist James McPherson, the 50,000 figure is bound to be an underestimate.
Reading books like War Crimes against Southern Civilians by Walter Brian Cisco, which is based on the US government’s publication The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, one learns how more than twenty-two thousand artillery shells exploded in a six-month period in civilian-occupied Charleston, and that unexploded shells are still being discovered today. Then there is Sherman’s four-day bombardment of civilian-occupied Atlanta after the Confederate Army had left the city with as many as five thousand artillery shells exploding in a single day. Thousands of survivors were rendered homeless at the onset of winter. Lincoln’s favorite general called the site of corpses of women and children in the streets of Atlanta “a beautiful sight” because he thought it would cause the war to end sooner.
Lincoln’s first inaugural address should be known as his “Slavery Forever” speech. He started out announcing that he had no intention of disturbing Southern slavery (at a time when there were also slaves in Union states); that he never had any intention of doing so; that this was clearly stated in the Republican Party platform of 1860; and that it would be unconstitutional to do so. He then expressed his strongest support for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which compelled Northerners to capture runaway slaves (and which was enforced in Washington, D.C. during the Lincoln presidency).
Near the end of his first inaugural address Lincoln declared his support for the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution which would prohibit the government from ever interfering with Southern slavery and which had just passed the Republican-controlled House and Senate. He said he considered slavery to be constitutional and had no objection to it being made “express and irrevocable” in the text of the Constitution. Irrevocable.
The amendment was named after Ohio Congressman Thomas Corwin but in fact came from Lincoln himself. Doris Kearns-Goodwin showed in her book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, that before the inauguration Lincoln had instructed William Seward to get the amendment through the senate, which he did. In his inaugural address he lied about never actually having seen the amendment. This was a constitutional amendment to enshrine slavery in the Constitution, passed by his own party of which he was the leader, and ratified by his home state of Illinois along with Rhode Island, Ohio, and the “border states” of Kentucky and Maryland which were under US Army occupation at the time. How dumb and gullible did Lincoln think the American public was to tell them such a blatant lie?
In the same speech Lincoln used the words “invasion” and “bloodshed” as promises of what would occur in any state that refused to collect the tariff tax on imports which had just been more than doubled two days earlier. At the time more than 90 percent of federal tax revenue came from tariff taxes and there was no central bank to legally counterfeit money. The South did not intend to send tariff tax revenues to D.C. any more than it would send them to London or Paris, so Lincoln followed through with his threat and commenced the waging of total war on his own country over tax collection.
For over a hundred years the death toll of the “Civil War” was said to be 620,000 but recent forensic research has revised the number to as much as 850,000 with more than double that number wounded. In terms of today’s population that is almost 9 million deaths in less than four years, all over tax collection according to Lincoln himself. Are you still wondering why the state celebrates Lincoln’s birthday?
In April of 1861 Lincoln illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus and ordered the military to arrest and imprison without due process tens of thousands of Northern civilians for merely criticizing him and his war policies. Treason is defined in Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution as “only . . . levying war upon the United States” or “Giving Aid and Comfort to their enemies” (emphasis added). The word “their” is all important here, as it refers to “United States” in the plural, as in all the founding documents. It means the individual states, not something called “the United States government in Washington, D.C.”
Lincoln levied war upon the Southern states and he and his entire high command were therefore guilty of treason. He took it upon himself to redefine treason as any criticism of himself. He also ordered the shutting down of more than 300 opposition newspapers, imprisoned many of the editors and owners of the papers, and deported his chief congressional critic, Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio.
The slaves were used as political pawns (as their descendants still are today) in a war that had nothing to do with them according to Lincoln himself. The War Aims Resolution of the Republican-controlled US Congress (the Crittendon-Johnson Resolution) also declared to the world that the purpose of the war was not to disturb “the domestic institutions of the states,” by which they meant slavery, but to supposedly save the union (geographically but not philosophically).
Lincoln and the Republican party ignored the fact that all other nations that ended slavery in the nineteenth century did so peacefully, as did New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and all the other Northern states (See Greatest Emancipations by Jim Powell). The last slave state to enter the union was West Virginia whose secession during the war was orchestrated by the Lincoln administration which gave the Republican party two more senators.
Lincon was a lifelong advocate of “colonization,” a euphemism for deporting all the black people out of the country. Whenever he talked about emancipation it was always coupled with “colonization.’ As Phil Magness and Sebastion Page document in their book, Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln, Seward, and others were hard at work literally until Lincoln’s dying day trying to make land purchase deals with other governments and counting how many ships it would take to deport all the black people out of America.
Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation was phony. It specifically exempted the Republican party-controlled slave state of West Virginia along with all the parishes of Louisiana that were under control of the Union Army at the time, and stated that it would become null and void if the slave states re-entered the union and continued with payment of the federal tariff tax. It emancipated no one, nor could it have constitutionally.
Lincoln was a corrupt crony capitalist mercantilist on economic policy, advocating protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for railroad corporations, and a government-run central bank to pay for it all. He signed ten tariff-increasing bills, commenced the massively corrupt subsidization of the transcontinental railroads, monopolized the money supply with his Legal Tender and National Currency Acts, and created a gigantic military-industrial complex during the war.
The “great emancipator” enslaved Americans with the first federal conscription law after hundreds of thousands had deserted the Union Army, even on the eve of great historic battles. Lincoln ordered the execution by firing squad of deserters and when there were draft riots in New York City in 1863 he sent 15,000 troops from the recently-concluded Battle of Gettysburg who fired into the crowds, killing hundreds in the streets of New York City.
To advance his political career Lincoln broke up with Joshua Speed, with whom he had shared a bed for four years, and married Mary Todd, the daughter of a wealthy Kentucky slave plantation owning family that had close ties to Henry Clay, the leader of the Whig Party. Lincoln was a Whig for more than twenty years before becoming a Republican when the Whig party dissolved.
When Lincoln’s wife inherited the slaves from her family’s slave plantation they became her husband’s property by law. Lincoln sold the slaves instead of emancipating them as proven by the bill of sale published in Kevin Orlin Johnson’s book, The Lincolns in the White House.
Robert E. Lee’s wife, a descendant of Martha Washington, also inherited slaves. General Lee freed them during the war in accordance with his father-in-law’s will. How many government school students from Alabama – and everywhere else in the South — have been taught this – or anything else mentioned in this article for that matter?
