Book Review:

Rob Williams on Thomas J. DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War

“The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of all the States; in uniting together they have not forfeited their nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. . . . If one of the states chooses to withdraw from the compact, it would be difficult to disapprove its right of doing so, and the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly either by force or right.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

For any Vermonter (or American) considering the “secession question,” the mythology surrounding Abraham Lincoln is mighty indeed. From grade school, we are taught to remember Lincoln with monikers that capture his alleged virtues: Honest Abe. The Great Emancipator. The Rail Splitter. The Man Who Saved the Union. “O Captain, my Captain,” wrote Walt Whitman in his famous tribute to a martyred Lincoln. In colleges and bookstores, meanwhile, the hagiographic halo encircling Lincoln's memory is blinding, coming, as it does, from all sides of the political spectrum. (Consider left-of-center author Garry Wills's popular book Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America or the praise heaped on Lincoln by Patrick Buchanan, to name but two strange bedfellows.) How could anyone but the disgruntled great-grandnephews of slave-loving Southerners possibly challenge Lincoln's political legacy or his hold on our popular imagination?

Yet Loyola College professor of economics Thomas DiLorenzo does just this, in his provocative book The Real Lincoln. DiLorenzo argues that, throughout his decades-long political career, Lincoln's primary political goal was the creation of a more mercantilist centralized American state through the enactment of a series of three policy initiatives popularized as “the American System” by Kentucky politician and slaveholder Henry Clay. “I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by my friends to become a candidate for the legislature,” Lincoln stated in 1832. “My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national bank . . . in favor of internal improvements system and a high protective tariff.”

Students of U.S. history will rightly recognize this as the core of the Whig Party mercantilist philosophy in the years before the Civil War, and Clay and Lincoln were its two biggest champions. Economist Murray Rothbard defined “mercantilism” as “a system of statism which employed economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to individuals or groups favored by the state,” in their time and in ours. Consider:

1. Higher tariffs legally protect U.S.-based manufacturers and corporations from foreign competition (and gouge U.S. consumers because U.S. corporations can then inflate prices for goods).

2. National banking disguises corporate subsidies as inflationary spending (printing more money to finance the building of canals, railroads, or highways) rather than imposing unpopular (but more honest) higher taxes on citizens up front.

3. Internal improvements, called “corporate welfare” today, allow governments to grant special subsidies and favors to private corporations in exchange for their financial and political support.

As DiLorenzo shows, Lincoln and Clay's “American System” proved demonstrably anti-capitalist, generated stupendous corruption, and further cemented the alliance between an emerging corporate class and national political leaders. Sound familiar?

But Lincoln's great genius in his own time was using the Civil War as bloody vehicle for solidifying the American System as the United States' dominant economic model. Lincoln and Congressional Republicans made all three planks—tariff, national bank, and “internal improvements”—an integral part of national economic life by 1863 (with half the nation in rebellion). The rest of Lincoln's shrewd brilliance came with his powerful rhetoric, ultimately backed up by the entire Union army, in which he invented an entirely novel (and inaccurate) Constitutional framework to squash the legitimacy of “secession” and the very notion of state sovereignty and the “compact theory” (unquestioned by both Northerners and Southerners until after the Civil War) to secede if they so chose, by waging an unrelenting and bloody four-year struggle to “preserve the Union.” Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation to “free the slaves,” meanwhile, was admitted by Lincoln himself to be little more than a political ploy designed to halt European aid to the South and curry favor with “radical” abolitionists. DiLorenzo also looks closely at Lincoln's dictatorial political and military policies during war time, and considers what might have happened to southern slaves over time if the Civil War and subsequent bitterness of the “Reconstruction” period had never happened.

John Calhoun, perhaps South Carolina's most articulate antebellum political philosopher, framed the federal dilemma best in 1831. “Stripped of all its covering, the naked question is, whether ours is a federal or consolidated government; a constitutional or absolute one; a government resting solidly on the basis of the sovereignty of the States, or on the unrestrained will of a majority; a form of government, as in all other unlimited ones, in which injustice, violence, and force must ultimately prevail.”

As the Great Centralizer, Lincoln prosecuted the “War Between the States” from 1861–1865 to reinvent America in his own image. DiLorenzo's book raises important questions about one of America's most powerful political leaders, questions that take on a new urgency in an age which Lincoln himself set in motion, one of unbridled corporate power, militarism, violence, and Empire-building. And it is little wonder that DiLorenzo's book has been most savagely attacked by today's neoconservatives, themselves disciples and practitioners of Lincoln's own brand of imperialist and mercantilist politics.

The United States was founded on the twin principles of “secession” and “state sovereignty.” De Tocqueville's epigraph still rings true. Will we have the courage to challenge Lincoln's reckless economic policies and misguided constitutional ambitions in our own time?