- The political left in America has apparently decided
that American history must be rewritten so that it can be used in the political
campaign for reparations for slavery. Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., of
Chicago inserted language in a Department of Interior appropriations bill
for 2000 that instructed the National Park Service to propagandize about
slavery as the sole cause of the war at all Civil War park sites. The Marxist
historian Eric Foner has joined forces with Jackson and will assist the
National Park Service in its efforts at rewriting history so that it better
serves the political agenda of the far left. Congressman Jackson has candidly
described this whole effort as "a down payment on reparations."
(Foner ought to be quite familiar with the "art" of rewriting
politically-correct history. He was the chairman of the committee at Columbia
University that awarded the "prestigious" Bancroft Prize in history
to Emory Universityís Michael A. Bellesiles, author of the anti-Second
Amendment book, "Arming America," that turned out to be fraudulent.
Bellesiles was forced to resign from Emory and his publisher has ceased
publishing the book.)
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- In order to accommodate the political agenda of the far
left, the National Park Service will be required in effect to teach visitors
to the national parks that Abraham Lincoln was a liar. Neither Lincoln
nor the US Congress at the time ever said that slavery was a cause ñ
let alone the sole cause ñ of their invasion of the Southern states
in 1861. Both Lincoln and the Congress made it perfectly clear to the whole
world that they would do all they could to protect Southern slavery as
long as the secession movement could be defeated.
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- On March 2, 1861, the U.S. Senate passed a proposed Thirteenth
Amendment to the US Constitution (which passed the House of Representatives
on February 28) that would have prohibited the federal government from
ever interfering with slavery in the Southern states. (See U.S. House of
Representatives, 106th Congress, 2nd Session, The Constitution of the United
States of America: Unratified Amendments, Document No. 106-214, presented
by Congressman Henry Hyde (Washington, D.C. U.S. Government Printing Office,
January 31, 2000). The proposed amendment read as follows:
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- ARTICLE THIRTEEN
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- No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which
will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within
any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons
held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
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- Two days later, in his First Inaugural Address, Abraham
Lincoln promised to support the amendment even though he believed that
the Constitution already prohibited the federal government from interfering
with Southern slavery. As he stated:
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- I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution
. . . has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall
never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including
that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have
said, I depart from my purpose, not to speak of particular amendments,
so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional
law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable (emphasis
added).
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- This of course was consistent with one of the opening
statements of the First Inaugural, where Lincoln quoted himself as saying:
"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."
-
- Thatís what Lincoln said his invasion of the Southern
states was not about. In an August 22, 1862, letter to New York Tribune
editor Horace Greeley he explained to the world what the war was about:
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- My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union,
and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union
without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing
some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery,
and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.
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- Of course, many Americans at the time, North and South,
believed that a military invasion of the Southern states would destroy
the union by destroying its voluntary nature. To Lincoln, "saving
the Union" meant destroying the secession movement and with it the
Jeffersonian political tradition of statesí rights as a check on
the tyrannical proclivities of the central government. His war might have
"saved" the union geographically, but it destroyed it philosophically
as the country became a consolidated empire as opposed to a constitutional
republic of sovereign states.
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- On July 22, 1861, the US Congress issued a "Joint
Resolution on the War" that echoed Lincolnís reasons for the
invasion of the Southern states:
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- Resolved: . . . That this war is not being prosecuted
upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest
or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights
or established institutions of those states, but to defend and maintain
the supremacy of the Constitution and all laws made in pursuance thereof
and to preserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality and rights of
the several states unimpaired; and that as soon as these objects are accomplished
the war ought to cease.
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-
- By "the established institutions of those states"
the Congress was referring to slavery. As with Lincoln, destroying the
secession movement took precedence over doing anything about slavery.
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- On March 2, 1861 ñ the same day the "first
Thirteenth Amendment" passed the U.S. Senate ñ another constitutional
amendment was proposed that would have outlawed secession (See H. Newcomb
Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," Stetson Law
Review, vol. 15, 1986, pp. 419ñ36). This is very telling, for it
proves that Congress believed that secession was in fact constitutional
under the Tenth Amendment. It would not have proposed an amendment outlawing
secession if the Constitution already prohibited it.
-
- Nor would the Republican Party, which enjoyed a political
monopoly after the war, have insisted that the Southern states rewrite
their state constitutions to outlaw secession as a condition of being readmitted
to the Union. If secession was really unconstitutional there would have
been no need to do so.
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- These facts will never be presented by the National Park
Service or by the Lincoln cultists at the Claremont Institute, the Declaration
Foundation, and elsewhere. This latter group consists of people who have
spent their careers spreading lies about Lincoln and his war in order to
support the political agenda of the Republican Party. They are not about
to let the truth stand in their way and are hard at work producing "educational"
materials that are filled with false but politically correct history.
-
- For a very different discussion of Lincoln and his legacy
that is based on fact rather than fantasy, attend the LewRockwell.com "Lincoln
Reconsidered" conference at the John Marshall Hotel in Richmond, Virginia
on March 22.
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-
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- Thomas J. DiLorenzo is the author of the LRC #1 bestseller,
The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary
War (Forum/Random House, 2002) and professor of economics at Loyola College
in Maryland.
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- Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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- http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo37.html
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