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Kevin Orlin Johnson

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Getting Right With Abe

This piece was originally published at Reckonin.com America will never come right until it gets right with Lincoln. He was not a saint who saved the Union and freed the slaves. He was a pathologically ambitious man who stumbled into the bloodiest war in American history, freed the slaves in the most destructive possible way, and cost the lives of…
Clyde Wilson
April 7, 2025
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When Lincoln Changed the War’s Pretext from “A Question Upon Slavery”

State Dept. Documents Prove Abolition Neither the Aim Nor the Cause of the Conflict On April 1, 1861, Secretary of State William H. Seward sent President Abraham Lincoln a memorandum entitled “Some thoughts for the President’s consideration.” “My system is built upon this idea as a ruling one,” Seward wrote, “namely that we must Change the question before the Public…
Kevin Orlin Johnson
June 10, 2024
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The Lincolns in the White House

A review of The Lincolns in the White House (Pangaeus Press, 2023) by Kevin Orlin Johnson Kevin Orlin Johnson is a brilliant researcher who has doggedly pursued original source material for the truth about Abraham Lincoln. And it doesn’t matter how many libraries he has to visit and how many un-indexed collections of papers written with quill pens he has…
John Avery Emison
May 24, 2024
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Republic or Democracy

Back in 1966, the conservative activist and F.B.I. operative Dan Smoot produced a short film, A Constitutional Republic, Not a Democracy.  Anybody who calls the United States a democracy, he said, is trying to subvert the Constitution of the United States — we’re not a democracy; we’re a republic. Probably because there are supposed to be two political parties here,…
Kevin Orlin Johnson
April 10, 2024
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Lincoln Studies and a Stacked Deck

Back in 1949, two researchers, J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman, wanted to sort out the relationship between what we see and how we interpret what we see. They did a proper study of it — “On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm”, Journal of Personality, 18:206 ff. (1949), if you want to look it up. Bruner and Postman asked…
Kevin Orlin Johnson
March 26, 2024
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What If Secession Happens Now?

Recently a private polling company called YouGov conducted a survey asking Americans if they advocated the secession of their home state from the United States.  North and South, Democrat and Republican, the distribution was fairly consistent, averaging out to 23 percent in favor of their state’s secession. The survey, as reported on March 6 in the London Daily Mail, didn’t…
Kevin Orlin Johnson
March 11, 2024
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The Closed Book of Southern Literature

Until the publication of Jay B. Hubbell’s great The South in American Literature 1607-1900 (Duke University 1954), nobody remembered many of the South’s great writers, apart from Edgar Allan Poe and, if only by deprecation, maybe Joel Chandler Harris.  Now nobody remembers Jay B. Hubbell. Hubbell’s work extends beyond scholarship through antiquarianism practically to archaeology.  The chief reason why modern…
Kevin Orlin Johnson
February 19, 2024
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Lincoln Sells His Slaves

“The literature on Abraham Lincoln is vast, but it isn’t very good.”  You have to love a book with a first sentence like that!  The book is Kevin Orlin Johnson’s The Lincolns in the White House. While he has some interesting history of the Executive Mansion (the White House) the author is not limited to that one place and  short…
Clyde Wilson
February 14, 2024
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The Preacher Who Stole Lincoln’s Past–By the Carload

On July 17, 1849, Robert Smith Todd of Lexington, Kentucky, died suddenly of cholera. He was among thousands who'd die in the world-wide epidemic that had already killed former president James K. Polk a month before and would be blamed for the death of Edgar Allan Poe a bit later. Todd's hasty death-bed will was endorsed by only one witness;…
Kevin Orlin Johnson
March 7, 2022