Author: Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Professor of Economics, Loyola College, Maryland

Publisher: Forum

Book Reviewed By: Alan Knight, Communications Manager, New York Farm Bureau

I can't stop thinking about this book. It changes everything I thought I knew about Abraham Lincoln and about U.S. history.

If one is to believe author and Loyola (of Maryland) College professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Abraham Lincoln-from the day he entered the political arena in 1832-was unhappy with the U.S. Constitution and campaigned for a highly centralized and powerful "American system," as Lincoln called it, that would effectively ignore the Constiution or bypass it. And to install this American System that derived from the political lineage of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, Lincoln would intentionally goad the South to secede and, relying the new congressional majority created by the South's absence, launch a brutal, merciless war he mistakenly thought would be a quickie lesson in power politics.

It was, notes DiLorenzo, a miscalculation of unspeakable dimension, the bloodiest, most costly war of our national life, and even so was not enough for Lincoln. Upon conclusion of the Civil War he immediately unleashed an even more ruthless war of extermination against native Americans to make way for that massive "American system" project-the railroads.

Wow. This is not your father's old history book.

How is it, DiLorenzo asks, that every other nation of the western world-Argentina, Colombia, Chile, indeed all of South America, and the entire British Empire-emancipated slaves and ended slavery without war? Clearly, the Civil War was not about ending slavery, as DiLorenzo makes abundantly clear by quoting Lincoln, himself: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so [Lincoln's first inaugural address]." Nor was he the least interested in integrating emancipated slaves-few that there were who qualified for emancipation-into mainstream American life. Far from it. He is on record an advocate for resettling Africans to the Caribbean so as not to compete with "free white labor."

What, then, drove this man to preside over slaughter of thousands of his countrymen? What idea was so overwhelmingly compelling? The answer? "Internal improvements," says DiLorenzo. Yes, internal improvements, a 19th century buzzword for "infrastructure" or "public works."

Perhaps like the generation that grew up during the Great Depression, Lincoln may have been molded by the times and inspired by the heroes of his day. Early in his career, says DiLorenzo, Lincoln aspired to be the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois, a tribute to the New York governor who introduced to America both the Erie Canal and the political spoils system.

As a young attorney in Illinois, Lincoln pocketed many of his first fees from a railroad client. A centerpiece of Lincoln's political apprenticeship was advocating for the interests of major corporations that sought-and got-major subsidies for track development, canal construction, and all manner of "internal improvements," something the Confederate Constitution later would prohibit spending tax dollars on. These subsidized infrastructural developments-the essence of Alexander Hamilton's anti-Jeffersonian Whig Party some two generations earlier and Henry Clay's thereafter-became the heart of the Republican Party as its successor.

The South clung to the Jeffersonian ideal of state sovereignty, limited federal government deriving its powers from states free to secede, and free trade-free of tariffs on goods arriving from Europe. This-as much as any southern behavior-Lincoln and his Republican industrial cronies from the North could not tolerate, for goods entering Southern ports tariff-free would surely bankrupt the North. Indeed, there were pre-war calls for bombardment of Southern ports on these grounds alone.

DiLorenzo doesn't like Lincoln. Sometimes I found myself wishing DiLorzenzo would dial-back his rhetoric and his running arguments with scholars of contrary view. His argument might be the more palatable for that. Yet the thoroughness of his scholarship and power of his citations carry him through.

In a section entitled, "What if the South had been allowed to leave in peace?" (a question I had asked myself a few times quite before I had ever heard of DiLorenzo or this book), the author lets his imagination run. "…the act of secession would have had exactly the effect the founding fathers expected it to have; it would have tempered the imperialistic proclivities of the central state… After a number of years, the same reasons that led the colonists to form a Union in the first place would likely have become more appealing to both sections, and the Union would probably have been reunited.

"After that, knowing that secession was a real threat, the federal government would have stuck closer to its constitutional bearings."

DiLorenzo suggests that, as a result, empire building like the Spanish American War and concomitant tax burdens might never have happened. We might have kept out of World War I, the inadequate settlement of which festered into World War II, he notes. Even if one grants DiLorenzo total accuracy and validity on his major premise-that Lincoln intentionally overthrew the Constitution in a hideously bloody coup-one is tempted to ask, Could the America of Jefferson, Jackson, Calhoun, Tyler, and Grover Cleveland (the last President to mount any substantial defense of limited federal power) have stood up to Hitler? To Hirohito? To Khrushchev?

Even if this isn't any longer the federation of states born in secession from England, is this new nation consecrated at Gettysburg by an ugly, cruel, and dictatorial Abraham Lincoln, better suited to survive in a world of ugly, cruel realities?

Maybe it is.

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Alan Knight is the Communications Manager for the New York Farm Bureau.

06/24/2002