I am not a “Lincoln Scholar.” And I will fight any man who accuses me of being one. Not that being a Lincoln Scholar isn’t good business. Thanks to these folks, who recycle the Lincoln myths like a perpetual motion machine, Lincoln is surpassed by only Jesus Christ in our national pantheon of deities.
Challenging the Lincoln myth is viewed as unpatriotic at best and heretical by those who make a living praising his name. The irrational behavior by Lincoln Scholars was commented upon as far back as 1931 by writer H.L. Mencken, who wrote;
“Lincoln has become one of our national deities and a realistic examination of him is no longer possible.”
The deification of Lincoln in turn elevated the Gettysburg Address to a level on par with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Mencken’s questioning of the logic of the Gettysburg Address shocked readers with his blunt and accurate assessment:
“It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it in the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—that government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves.”
In analyzing the wording of Lincoln’s immortal address, many errors were noted at the time that it was delivered. The New York World noted that the Union was not created “four score and seven years ago,” since that would have been 1776. The World wrote, “This United States [was not created by the Declaration of Independence, but rather] was the result of the ratification of a compact known as the Constitution.” Surely Lincoln realized his mistake, unless he was once again willfully ignoring the Constitution that he was sworn to uphold.
When Lincoln stated, “Our Fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,” he was also incorrect. As Professor Carl M. Degler has written, “The Civil War, in short, was not a struggle to save a failed union, but to create a nation that until then had not come into being. Lincoln created his ‘new nation’ through armed conflict, subjugating an entire section of the country.”
The Articles of Confederation, which predated the Constitution, created a compact between thirteen “sovereign states” in 1781. This was not a nation per se, but a confederation of sovereign states. Lincoln and Daniel Webster, among others, tried to show without success that the nation existed prior to the states. But this is simply not true and is at odds with the intent and writings of the Founding Fathers.
Scholar Charles Adams concludes, “Lincoln’s new nation had no constitutional basis—no peaceful legal process. It was created by war, by ‘blood and iron,’ like Bismarck’s Germany, and has survived to this day. In a sense, Lincoln did more to create
America than did the Founding Fathers . . . . Lincoln’s Gettysburg reference to the Founders creating a new nation was not true . . . . Lincoln created a nation out of a compact among states.”
Lincoln next referred to the Declaration of Independence being “conceived in liberty” and “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” With over a million Negroes in bondage in 1776, liberty and equality for “all” was clearly false.
Lincoln’s calling the conflict “a great civil war” was a misnomer. A civil war exists when two rival factions fight for the control of the state. This was not the case at all when the South sought to peacefully withdraw from a union that it had voluntarily entered. Nowhere in the Constitution did it state that the Union was perpetual or that states could not leave the Union.
Rather than a civil war, the conflict can best be described as a war for Southern independence; similar to the war the thirteen colonies had fought to achieve their independence from the British Empire. Or, as Adams writes, “It was a war of conquest by the North to destroy the Confederacy and to establish a new political leadership over the conquered territories.
Lincoln also alluded to the fact that the nation was imperiled, with comments about the War “testing whether nations can long endure,” and Gettysburg being “a final resting place for those who gave their lives that that nation might live.” The United States would have continued along, albeit smaller, by not contesting secession or even losing the War. There was never any question about the U.S. Government not enduring.
The Confederacy was not out to conquer the North; it was the other way around.
And then in a huge stretch, Lincoln justified his War in order “that the government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” This assertion makes no sense at all, since it was Lincoln who was determined to destroy the legitimate governments of the Southern states.
Adams writes, “Ordinances of secession had been adopted in the Southern states, often with huge majorities. Their right to govern by consent was not acceptable to Lincoln’s thinking yet it was Lincoln who ended up destroying the Union as it was and substituting an all-powerful national government . . . . there emerged the imperial presidency that is with us to this day
Adams strikes at the true heart of the Gettysburg Address when he concludes, “Lincoln’s logic at Gettysburg, as elsewhere, reveals a trial lawyer with a tool of his craft—using the best logic he can muster to support his client’s [the Northl case, however bad the case may be. It is also, of course, the craft of a politician, which may explain why so many politicians are lawyers.”
The greatest tragedy in American history need never have occurred. There were many alternatives to war, such as compensated emancipation to end slavery or a temporary division of the country into two or more nations. Reunification would have most certainly occurred by the time of WW I or WW II, without the loss over 620,000 American lives. Mr. Lincoln would truly deserve the adulation he receives today if he had averted this fratricidal war. That would have been the mark of a great statesman.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.
The 620,000 dead were the military casualties, not to mentioned the thousands of civilians including slaves who died from starvation and disease.
The key to destroying the Lincoln myth, lies in proving his error of claiming national union over the states.
Otherwise he will always have the presidential immunity of “suppressing revolution” against this “national union.”
However Lincoln hardly acted alone; indeed, Andrew Jackson’s was the first administration to officially claim national union over the states, and to set precedent for thus authorizing federal military force against individual states on this basis; and Lincoln was simply his successor in this regard, with their both being puppet-dictators, for lobbyists who were seeking to seize oligarchic power over the democratically sovereign peoples of every state.
And to date, they have succeeded in doing so; because nobody has has presented accurate legal proof of each state’s national sovereignty, and that they never formed a national union.
And I attempt to do this at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/state-sovereignty/
“I am not a ‘Lincoln Scholar.’”
Count your blessings. If you were, you would be associated with some of the most despicable scum to imagine themselves in stovepipe hats!
To be fair, no one has yet presented accurate legal proof of Lincoln’s false claims for national union over the states; so they have plausible deniability.
And thus, I attempt to prove this at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/state-sovereignty/
…followed by a petition for redress of this grievance at http://TakeBackSovereignty.com .
Joe Haines has written an excellent article. He succinctly and effectively sizes up the Gettysburg Address. Thank you for this well written, valuable article!
“…Lincoln is surpassed by only Jesus Christ in our national pantheon of deities.”
I don’t see that as a compliment to the Lord Jesus Christ. A friend here said it was a “back handed compliment.” But if anyone wants to be dismissive of Him, that’s on them. Dismissers of Him might want to realize, however, what the Bible says about that “lowly man,” the so-called “refugee”:
John 1:3 “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.”
Colossians 1:16-17 “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible…”
“And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.”
Colossians 2:9 “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.”
Acts 10:42 “…it is he which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and dead.”
The Lord Jesus is not a part of a “group” of “deities.” He is not one among “all the gods.”
Isaiah 44:8 “…Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any.”
Matt,
I wonder if you did not miss the point. The article was not a dismissing of Christ, but of Lincoln. Many, many of those political flesh peddlers ( namely Yankees) have for over 150 years promoted Lincoln as a deity. JMO
My father told me about the two men he admired most, Jesus and Lincoln. As I was embracing my Southern heritage, for the first time, I told my Dad “it’s tough being Southern”.
He said “that’s easy, you’re not Southern”.
He also maintained the antiques, letters and stories from my mother’s families in Virginia and passed them all to me.
Obviously the Lincoln myth, had been grafted on to him.
You sound like a Southerner, to me. You ARE a Virginian with your first and middle names.
You clearly *are* Southern. I am sorry about your father. He was fed a pack of lies.
Many thanks for the Mencken reference; I had missed that one. And it was right on target. Unfortunately, it apparently did little or nothing to let the gas out of the LINCOLN SCHOLARS of the country or even slow them down. They are about as gassy as one can get.
My grandmother’s maternal grandfather was a Yankee soldier critically wounded at Resaca, Ga., who moved South after the war to live among the people who had saved his life after being found alive among the dead when that battle ended. I learned from my grandmother that he hated Lincoln.
The yankees changed their military officers’ oath of office in 1862. The previous oath required pledging to defend the United States and protect THEM from THEIR enemies. The Ironclad Oath of 1862 required swearing to defend the Constitution of the US.
It was civil war…and the States lost to the Federal Government. The yankees lost in 1862…the Confederates lost in 1865.
It was not civil war, since the Union was never a sovereign nation.
On the contrary, each state was always a separate sovereign nation unto itself, at least since 1783; and they only formed an international union, like the UN or the EU— which thus held NO national sovereignty of its own, as I prove at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/state-sovereignty/
So the states lost nothing but the truth, which is always war’s first casualty– but in which lies their continued sovereignty as separate sovereign nations, which they can lawfully reclaim at will by simple proof of this historical status.
And to quote John Adams, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
So the US government’s false claim of national union over the states, legally folds up on proof of error by any state… as I present at http://TakeBackSovereignty.com .
Debunking Lincoln’s claim of national union over the states, is easily done, through his claim that the states were never 13 sovereign nations:
‘What is a “sovereignty” in the political sense of the term? Would it be far wrong to define it “a political community without a political superior”? Tested by this, no one of our States, except Texas, ever was a sovereignty; and even Texas gave up the character on coming into the Union, by which act she acknowledged the Constitution of the United States and the laws and treaties of the United States made in pursuance of the Constitution to be for her the supreme law of the land. The States have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status. If they break from this, they can only do so against law and by revolution.’
–Lincoln’s July 4, 1861: July 4th Message to Congress
Meanwhile in reality, the American Revolution established the states as 13 separate “sovereignties” in 1783, where each state was a fully sovereign nation that had no political superior to its respective legislature (as I prove in my article at https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/state-sovereignty/ ).
And this wholly invalidates Lincoln’s legal claim of national union over any state; which only formed an international union, like the UN or the EU.
“Reunification would have most certainly occurred by the time of WW I or WW II”.
Of course if Wilson had kept the U.S. out of WW I there may not have been a WW II or at least not on the scale that WW II turned to be, but following the example of Lincoln he sent troops where they didn’t belong.