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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:10
The Truth About Abraham Lincoln
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Hi everybody, my name is Stephan Molyneux and I'm the host of Free Domain Radio, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
I hope you're doing well.
So this is the truth about Abraham Lincoln.
I've done a series of these recently on Martin Luther King, on Gandhi, on Marx, and so on.
And there is a purpose, there is a reason why I'm doing all of these.
It is a tragedy how often our heroes are found to have feet of clay.
But in my experience, having spent a lot of my life looking for heroes, looking for heroism is a great way of avoiding one's own capacity for heroism.
And so I hope that this series is of use to you.
I certainly know that it's been important to me throughout my intellectual development to come to a clear historical, moral, and empirical assessment of the people that our culture and our government calls heroes.
Also, that our intellectuals call heroes.
And I think it's worth examining this to some degree.
This is not a history of the Civil War.
This is not a history even of the Lincoln presidency.
These are very specific and salient facts.
Shocking facts, doubtless, about Abraham Lincoln and his goals in life as far as can be ascertained.
So we're going to start with his childhood.
The child is the father of the man, as the poem says, and so it's well worth examining his childhood to see if we can understand how he came to be, who he was as an adult, and how that may have influenced his motives.
So his paternal grandfather, and his namesake, Abraham, originally had moved his family from Virginia to Kentucky.
Where tragically he was ambushed and killed by an Indian raid in 1786 as Abraham Lincoln's father Thomas looked on.
So seeing your own father murdered by the Indians was probably fairly formative in Lincoln's father's life.
He spent his... Thomas Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's father, spent his childhood and teen years living with various relatives and as an adult he worked for a time as a slave catcher and given Abraham Lincoln's subsequent relationship with his father this may not be entirely unimportant.
He was not a brilliant man but he had a kind of dogged persistence to him and he actually accumulated two farms of a couple hundred acres each before people found out that he hadn't filled out the proper paperwork and therefore his farm was taken away from him after a legal battle and he went out into the wilderness to start again.
Thomas Lincoln Abraham's father was, even by the standards of the time, a brutal father.
He was reported to have beaten Abraham repeatedly and mercilessly.
This was a pretty brutal.
Abraham Lincoln grew up in the of course in the log cabin with very little education and a school opened up nearby and his mother said you know you gotta go to school but it was so far away it took between two and a half and three hours to walk each way and the school did not last very long.
Later on Abraham Lincoln pointed out that his education as a child had not exceeded 12 months the entire time.
Sort of reminds me of Shakespeare, who went to school for 12 weeks a year and still managed to polish off a few decent iambic pentameter couplets.
When Abraham Lincoln was nine, his mother died of milk sickness This happens when a cow eats a poisonous plant.
The poison then goes through the cow, and if some people who ingest the milk get sick and die, his mother died, I would assume in significant pain and perhaps lingering.
This was pretty horrendous.
Now, when Abraham Lincoln's mother died, his father left Abraham and his sister Nancy.
Abraham was 9 and his sister was 11 in the log cabin with some supplies, mostly dried berries that Nancy had picked.
And he went to go and find a new wife.
And this was just horrendous.
The children had very little to eat after their father left, just some dried berries that I mentioned had been stored away by Nancy.
A neighbor who stopped by reported that the children were filthy, half-starved, and that the house was in a terrible condition.
And this abandonment by their father lasted for six months.
And of course, the children didn't know it was going to be six months.
They simply knew that their father had gone away.
And imagine, I mean, this is really out in the wilderness.
And you're frightened to go out.
There are coyotes, there are bears, and wolves, and no neighbors for miles and miles around.
No help, of course, of any kind, and you don't know if your father is coming back.
This went on for half a year.
I can't conceive of how terrifying.
Frustrating, this must have been for the children.
This is a truly terrifying amount of childhood trauma that he went through.
This is long before things like talk therapy and so on, so this had significant effects, I would argue, on his adult state of mind and on his subsequent permanent separation from his father.
So, he never quite seemed to get along hugely well with his new stepmother, Sarah.
His father did come back with a wife.
He provided for her after his father died.
Lincoln did.
But he never introduced his stepmother to his wife and children.
And when he married Mary Todd, his wife, neither Thomas, his father, nor Sarah, his stepmother, were invited to the wedding.
So we can assume things were somewhat frosty.
And this is, I think, important.
So he left home as a young man, and now he was farmed out by his father to go and work on other people's farms, and he had to remit all of his income that he got from working on other people's farms to his father, which was an accepted and legal practice at the time, but probably did not endear him to his father much, if at all.
So he had very little to no contact with his father after Abraham left home.
Sometimes he would send him small sums of money.
But he never invited his father to visit him or his family.
And in the winter of 1850 to 1851, Lincoln's father Thomas became seriously ill.
And as so often happens with people, the moral horror of history catches up with us in a fist of ash, and we regret the wrongs that we have done in the past when we face our own mortality.
Thomas wrote many letters to Abraham Lincoln, but Abraham Lincoln did not answer them.
And finally, He wrote to a third party in a January 12, 1851 letter.
He wrote, Say to him, my father, that if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant, but that if it is to be his lot to go now, he will soon have a joyous meeting with many loved ones gone before.
Now, Lincoln Had some serious mental health issues, to put it as mildly as possible.
This really translated into his marriage.
There is a story by those who knew Lincoln and his wife Mary when they lived in Illinois.
It says the Lincolns were at home one night.
Mary asked her husband to add logs to the fire.
He was reading and didn't do what she asked.
Maybe didn't hear her fast enough.
She reported became angry enough to toss a piece of firewood at him, smashing him in the face, which led to him appearing in public the next day with a bandage.
So, uh, She had a temper, I suppose.
And we will get to the politics and the war in a moment, but Mary's instability was fairly well known.
The Lincolns had four children, only one of whom made it to adulthood, which was Robert Todd Lincoln.
And to fast forward, hopefully not too disconcertingly, Ten years after Lincoln was assassinated, Roberts was very upset with his mother for her embarrassing or eccentric behavior, so he charged, he arranged to have his mother put on trial and charged with being insane.
So there was a very strange trial that happened in Chicago on May 19, 1875, just a little after 10 years after her husband's murder.
So she was surprised at her home in the morning by two detectives and was yanked off to court.
She didn't have time to prepare any kind of defense for what was coming up.
And following testimony about her behavior from various witnesses, the jury concluded, quote, Mary Lincoln is insane and is a fit person to be in a hospital.
For the insane.
Now, of course, 19th century hospitals for the insane, not very great places to be.
Now, I mean, to be fair, a few months afterwards, she was in for three months and sometime afterwards she got the verdict overturned.
But I think this tells you something about the dynamics within the family.
That this is the lack of bond that Abraham Lincoln had with his father, translated, I would say, to the lack of bond that Robert Todd Lincoln had with his own mother, to the point where this kind of Savage infighting was occurring.
So the effects of these intense childhood terrorism privations did give, I think would argue, had significant impact on Abraham Lincoln's mental state as an adult.
He maintained suicidal thoughts, he had nervous breakdowns, was gripped in staggering levels of depression.
A neighbor related that, Lincoln told me that he felt like committing suicide often.
Neighbors and friends were compelled to keep watch and ward over him.
They were concerned that he was going to kill himself.
When Lincoln's first love became ill and died in August of 1835, they actually had to keep knives and sharp implements away from him.
Everybody was so concerned about his desperate state of mind.
And he suffered a first bout of major depression, had another one in 1841, and people kept guns and knives away from him.
According to one biographer, letters left by the president's friends referred to him as the most depressed person they've ever seen.
In 1846, Lincoln wrote, and look, when you have a childhood that is so random, where your mother dies, your father abandons you for a month after month to starve in the wilderness, you don't get a very strong sense of control over your own life.
And in 1846, Lincoln wrote, what I understand is called the doctrine of necessity.
That is, that the human mind is impelled to action or held in rest by some power over which the mind itself has no control and this lack of sense of control that the mind is moved by impulses.
Of course, if you suffer from depression and suicidality, nervous breakdowns, which you don't understand because self-knowledge was not a major, has not really been a major focus of Western philosophy.
Aristotle know thyself, Socrates know thyself, but until the post-Freudian revolution of the late 19th century, really wasn't much of a focus in the Western world.
Drilling into and dwelling in the past is a way of unraveling the Gordian knots.
The future of unleashing one's potential into the future was not really well understood at the time.
So let's turn a little bit towards a spotlight on some of the events leading up to and including the Civil War so that we can get a sense more of what was going on and why the decisions were made as best we can unravel.
Of course, the American Revolution was fundamentally a secessionist revolution.
They seceded from the British Empire, and the Constitution was a pact between the sovereign states with which the ultimate power lay.
And these states devolved to the central government its limited powers.
The central government was supposed to be very limited.
With this confederation of sovereign states, the founders intended to curb the overreach of a central government.
My argument has been that America was an experiment in the very smallest government known to man.
It has now grown into the very largest government with the most devastating military and political power that the world has ever seen.
And it did not take very long for the United States federal government to overreach the bounds of the Constitution and turn into what has now become just another desperate and predatory center of empire.
I mean, if you think of George Washington riding down with his troops to collect the whiskey tax from the Pennsylvania farmers, You can get a sense of how little respect there has been for the necessary restraint of political power.
Whether it's even possible is a question I've been asking myself for years.
So, how did Lincoln become president?
Obviously a very intelligent man, a very witty man, a good storyteller, and a great debater.
But his political career really had him firmly in the hands, or I guess rather the pockets, to northern protectionists, especially the ones in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
So a northern protectionist is an industrialist who wants to shield his products from foreign or even domestic competition.
So a protectionist is someone who wants to build a tariff wall around their area of trade to keep foreign goods out or other goods out of the marketplace, which gives them the chance to raise Their prices.
So if you're a sweater manufacturer and the Chinese are sending sweaters over at 10 bucks a sweater and you can only manufacture yours for 12 bucks, then you want to sort of a 50% tariff on the Chinese sweater so that they're 15 bucks and therefore you can compete rather than trying to figure out how to compete with them.
In a free market scenario, you go to the government and ask for protection from foreign trade.
So, one of the triggers for the significant conflict between the North and the South that many people have argued was really the catalyst for the Civil War was something called the Moral Tariff.
So, Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, promised a military invasion of the South if the new moral tariff was not collected.
And this was a tariff that disproportionately fell upon the South and disproportionately benefited the North.
And we'll get into some of the numbers in a second.
So the U.S.
House of Representatives passed the moral tariff in the 1859-60 session, and then the Senate passed it in 1861, two days before Lincoln's inauguration.
And Pennsylvania, sorry, President James Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian who owed much of his own political success to the Pennsylvania protectionists, signed it into law.
The bill immediately raised the average tariff rate from about 15% to 37.5%.
And with a greatly expanded list of covered items, the tax burden would almost triple.
And soon thereafter, a second tariff increase increased the average rate to just over 47% tax on goods.
This was catastrophic.
And just to sort of mention, the union between business and the state is so inevitable.
Once the government has the power to benefit certain economic sectors at the expense almost always of the general consumer and through debt of the unborn, it's going to happen.
The government's power to meddle in the economy is like chemicals or drugs power to enhance Athletic performance.
Once you allow this to happen in sports, then anybody who doesn't take those performance enhancing drugs in sports is just going to lose.
Just going to lose.
And you can look at the government's role in benefiting certain economic sectors at the expense of others.
You can look at that as a performance-enhancing drug for the business world.
If it's legal, it's going to be pursued.
If it's legal and it allows you to win, it's going to be pursued.
Once that power is available, once you can donate to politicians and get them to provide you economic favors and protectionism in return, it's simply going to happen.
There's simply no way to stop it.
Again, if you made performance-enhancing drugs legal and then said, well, it'd be nice if people didn't use them, you're dreaming, right?
So this is what happens.
I mean, the argument is that we need a separation of state and economy in the same way we needed a separation of church and state, sort of for the same reasons.
So the federal government, of course, 75% of its income came from the southern ports, which is where they could collect the tariff.
Abraham Lincoln's relationship to secession was kind of what you'd expect from a politician.
He actually coaxed West Virginia into seceding from Virginia in order to gain two senators who were going to vote his way.
His relationship to slavery was quite complex.
His wife's family in Kentucky were large plantation owners and kept many slaves, which of course was the foundation of her wealth.
Lincoln had the typical corruptions of politicians as a whole.
He signed the Rail Act after ensuring that his property in Iowa would be the hub of the rail system, thus massively increasing its value.
But to return to the tariffs, so the northern states were very densely populated relative to the south, which had, you know, these big sprawling plantations and farms.
So the north had more seats in the legislative branch and the power, therefore, to tax the southern states unfairly.
So the import-dependent South was paying as much as 80% of the tariff.
And the South, of course, was complaining bitterly that most of the revenues were being spent in the North, because they were doing all these works projects and railroads for the transportation of their goods and so on.
So the South felt that it was being plundered by this tax system and wanted no more of it.
Why would we want to pay this massive amount of money, which then gets shipped off to the North and spent on political cronyism?
And so even before the tariff was tripled, the South was already complaining.
And of course, once it became tripled, or once it was tripled, everybody said, well, what's the point of this?
And of course, remember, America has seceded over a tiny tax, a tiny tax, a few percentage points.
And this was a massive tax, 47% on most things that were imported.
And of course, the South imported a lot of stuff because they didn't have a manufacturing base.
So what Lincoln said in his inaugural, what did he say?
He said, the power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts.
But beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using force against or among the people anywhere.
So basically saying, I'm going to invade and use force to collect this tax, this tariff.
So, as mentioned, the South paid the bulk of the taxes, the North enjoyed the benefits of pork barrel spending.
The North outnumbered the South in Congress and could actually pass whatever measures it wanted without a single Southern vote.
So the North could unilaterally impose its will on the South without a single Southern vote.
Lincoln himself was elected without a single Southern vote, so it's not like they felt any particular loyalty towards Lincoln.
And given that there were still people alive who'd been alive during the revolution, it was kind of hard to argue that you should never secede because taxes are being raised unjustly, which really was the foundation of the entire American experiment.
And, well, we'll get to the Declaration of Proclamation in a moment.
So, to fast forward, and we'll get into more of the details of the war, but I just want to go to the end.
So we're looking at sort of the events that led up to it.
In 1866, slavery was ended with the 13th Amendment, but at the cost of 620,000 lives, and some people have argued that the cost of life goes actually north of 800,000, and hundreds of thousands more of those people were crippled for life, and the Civil War destroyed almost half of the entire wealth of America.
Just astounding.
These wars are so staggering in cost.
I mean, the First World War, with 10 million dead, destroyed almost all of the economic gains of the Industrial Revolution.
Almost down to the penny.
It's astonishing.
And was it necessary?
Well, as I argued in a recent video that I did, the truth about slavery, I mean, dozens of other countries, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, all of Central America, Mexico, Bolivia, Uruguay, the French and Danish colonies, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela, they all ended slavery peacefully during the first 60 years of the 19th century.
Why not?
The United States.
Well, if the war was not about slavery, then that would explain why not.
If you really wanted to end slavery in America, you could have had the federal government pay the slave owners, as what happened in England and throughout the Empire.
You would pay the slave owners for their slaves and set them free.
Certainly would have been a lot cheaper than the war.
So, what was the North's attitude towards race?
Well, many northern states adopted laws like Indiana's, which prohibited Blacks and mulattoes from entering the state.
They did not recognize contracts with blacks.
They fined employees who encouraged black employees to enter the state.
They prohibited blacks from voting or marrying white persons, which was punishable by imprisonment, or testifying in court against white persons.
So you could accuse a black and he would not even, or she would not even be allowed his or her day in court.
Illinois, the land of Lincoln, prohibited the immigration of black persons into the state.
And Lincoln, in his long career, never expressed any opposition to this, and even supported a state program to colonize or deport free blacks out of Illinois.
So his solution was to ship the blacks off-country.
There is a strong argument, whether it's conclusive I will leave to your judgment, there is a strong argument that Slavery was actually more secure in the Union than out of it.
In other words, if the South had seceded, slavery would have ended very quickly.
And both Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens and the preeminent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison believed this, believed that slavery was, quote, more secure in the Union than out of it.
This is partly because of something called the Fugitive Slave Act, which Lincoln wholeheartedly supported.
This act compelled the northern states to capture runaway slaves.
Now, they were provided due process, but local magistrates were paid $10 for returning a slave to his owner, and only $5 for granting him freedom.
Hmm, let me stroke my beard and wonder which way these courts would vote.
So this basically was a massive federal subsidy to prop up the institution of slavery, and would have become defunct with secession.
In other words, if the South had seceded, Then there would be no financial incentive, no laws compelling the return of slaves to the South.
As soon as they made it across the border, they would have been free.
And this is why Garrison and other northern abolitionists, they wanted the South to secede from the northern states, to get rid of these kinds of subsidies, thus bringing about the economic, therefore peaceful, end to slavery.
Now, Lincoln and his political views.
So people, of course, argue that Lincoln was very pro-freedom, pro-individualism, which is why he didn't like slavery.
Really not the case at all.
Running on protectionism is running to benefit very significant and powerful economic interests, large corporations, mining companies, railroad companies, and so on, at the expense of the general population.
And he first ran for the Illinois legislature in 1832, and he said, My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance.
I don't know what that means.
I am in favor of a national bank.
Ooh!
In favor of the internal improvements system and a high protective tariff.
Probably what got him the interest of the protectionists.
So these three things, protectionism, government subsidies to railroad and canal building companies, and central banking, were called the American system by Henry Clay.
Economists kind of have another word for it, mercantilism, which is where the central bank gets to make up money out of thin air, Basically the 19th century equivalent of typing whatever they want into their own bank accounts and shielding domestic industries from foreign competition and basically buying political donations by returning voters' money.
Two very concentrated economic concerns.
Not a free trader, not an individualist, certainly had nothing in common with the Founding Fathers as far as all of that stuff went.
Now, the war starts, and again, the argument that's being made by many people, including me recently, Remember, I'm just funneling information forward.
I have my opinions, but I'm trying to keep them, at least to some degree, to myself.
So what happened during the war?
Well, you know, there were six to eight hundred thousand deaths, hundreds of thousands of maimings, the destruction of half the U.S.
economy, and Lincoln unconstitutionally conducted a war without the consent of Congress.
I mean, there's been very few wars that Congress has actually approved of in the hundred-plus wars of the American Empire.
This would be one of them.
He suspended habeas corpus for the duration of the war.
He conscripted railroads and censored telegraph lines, I guess a very early NSA.
He, that is Lincoln, imprisoned without trial.
Some 30,000 northern citizens for merely voicing opposition to the war.
At least, that's the cover story.
Of course, if you don't give them a trial, you don't know if they're innocent or guilty of voicing opposition to the war.
But he imprisoned without trial 30,000 northern citizens, of course, in a much smaller population than America has today.
He actually... Lincoln deported a member of Congress, Clement L. Valindigum of Ohio, For opposing Lincoln's income tax proposal at a Democratic Party political rally.
Had the man deported?
Lincoln closed down hundreds of northern newspapers and imprisoned their editors for questioning his war policies.
Really shocking stuff.
I mean, this is pure fascism.
Naked blade state power.
He ordered federal troops to intimidate voters into voting Republican and intentionally waged war.
against civilians.
And even by the rules of war at the time, this was not even remotely good.
According to Mark Neely, author of Fate and Liberty, there were more than 13,000 arrests of northern civilians after Lincoln had unconstitutionally suspended the writ of habeas corpus, including dozens, if not hundreds, of newspaper editors and owners who were critical of the Lincoln administration.
Neely gives an account in his book of how Lincoln's military became quite proficient at torturing northern civilians who'd been arbitrarily arrested without a warrant.
On page 110 of Fate and Liberty, he writes, quote, handcuffs and hanging by the wrists were rare, but in that summer of 1863, the army had developed a water torture that came to be used routinely.
Upon learning of the use of torture, not one member of the Lincoln administration, including Lincoln himself, expressed any personal outrage or personal feeling at all over it, including Lincoln's Secretary of State, William Seward.
Now, habeas corpus may be suspended in times of emergency, but the Constitution is silent on who may suspend the writ.
Sort of an important thing to try and figure out.
Lincoln simply took that power on himself without constitutional authority.
He imprisoned members of the Maryland legislature who opposed his war in the South.
He used military tribunals to try civilians for disloyalty, even in the North, where the civil courts were open and functioning.
The reason, of course, was that a guilty verdict was assured.
Enemies of the war were then effectively silenced.
The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that this use of military tribunals was unconstitutional, and yet Lincoln did it.
Justice Lincoln threatened to imprison the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for disagreeing with him on the legality of secession.
So imagine this.
George W. Bush imprisoned the California legislature until they ceased their opposition to a free market in electricity.
George W. Bush would have shut down the Wall Street Journal and lock up its editors because the Journal has at times been critical of Bush.
This is pretty shocking stuff, even by the standards of the time.
So he did, of course, impose the protectionist tariffs.
The second part of mercantilist, the mercantilist platform, centralized banking, was achieved with the National Currency Act of 1863 and 1864.
And of course, when the government gets the power to create its own currency, there's a virtual explosion of government subsidies to railroads and other businesses that bankrolled the Republican Party.
The inevitable consequence was the notorious corruption of the Grant administration.
Imagine, you can just print whatever money you want, you're going to go on a spending binge, particularly if those you spend money on can help you get into or stay in power.
This, of course, continues to the current time.
Now, the Emancipation Proclamation was supposed to have freed the slaves, but the reality is that it really should be more realistically viewed as A destabilizing tactic to disrupt the opposing states in the Civil War, the Southern states.
The Emancipation Proclamation guaranteed that slaves were freed only in the parts of the Confederacy inaccessible to the Union army.
So he freed the slaves he had no control over and did not free the slaves he had control over.
Union soldiers were permitted to confiscate slaves in rebel territory and put them to work for the Union Army.
I don't know about you, I'd rather be a slave than conscripted into the American Civil War.
So in areas loyal to the Union, slaves were not emancipated.
And that was not a principle.
It was a military tactic to disrupt the southern states.
Of course, after the war, Lincoln offered little land to the freedmen, the freed slaves.
Most of the land was parceled off to his constituent power bases, the railroad and mining companies.
It's just the same corruption that goes on and on.
Another little mention of Lincoln's nature, which is often not talked about in history books.
In 1862, there was a small, I guess you could call it, quote, war between federal soldiers and the Santee Sioux Indians of Minnesota.
At the end of the hostilities, over 300 Indians who were just around, not necessarily part of the fighting, were arrested.
They were imprisoned and they were scheduled to be executed after military, quote, trials that lasted about 10 minutes each.
Lincoln was fearful that the European powers might be encouraged to be more supportive of the Confederacy if they learned of the mass execution of over 300 men whose guilt had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
So he pared the number down to just 39.
Lied about it.
Now, this was the largest mass execution in American history.
Have you ever heard about it?
Well, no.
It happened under Lincoln's watch, and Lincoln deliberately deflated the figures in order to avoid any condemnation from the European powers.
I think that that stands for itself.
So, since secession, or the right of secession, was at the root of the Civil War, what did Lincoln think about the right of secession?
So, this is what he said, which was pro-Declaration of Independence.
He said, the expression of that principle, political freedom, in our Declaration of Independence was most happy and fortunate.
Without this, as well as with it, we could have declared our independence of Great Britain But without it, we could not, I think, have secured our free government and consequent prosperity.
So, it's a good thing.
You know, once he gets into power, it's a little bit different.
In 1864, he issued the following order.
You will take possession by military force of the printing establishments of the New York World and Journal of Commerce and prohibit any further publication thereof.
You are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison the editors, proprietors, and publishers of the aforementioned newspapers.
So, free government, independence, liberty from the arbitrary power of the state?
No.
He said, arrest and imprison.
Not try, not charge.
Arrest and imprison.
This is pure fascism.
Lincoln's belief in the Union went against the Declaration's view about when people have the right to dissolve their government.
In January 1848, he said, any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better.
Well, unless they're in the South and aren't paying the kind of tariffs that the North can use to buy off special interest groups in the economy in return for their support of political power.
So again, I mean, this is just what people say.
What they actually do is very, very different, particularly in politics.
In Lincoln's 1860 inaugural address, he said, "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." 1860.
Two years later, President Lincoln wrote, "My paramount objective That was what he wrote in a letter.
In 1858, Lincoln had written, "'I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.
I am not, nor have ever been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.
There is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.
So America had to destroy half the economy and between 600,000 and 800,000 people Well, what did Britain do?
Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.
It gave all the slaves in the British Empire their freedom.
The British government paid compensation to the slave owners.
And the amount that the plantation owners received depended on the number of slaves they had.
For example, the Bishop of Exeter had 665 slaves that were freed, so he got 12,700 pounds.
So, of course, whoever wins the war writes the history and turns themselves into heroes.
I mean, if Hitler had won the Second World War, what would have been spoken of in the Battle of Britain?
Well, Churchill would be the new Hitler.
So, Lincoln ruled the country by presidential decree, exercised dictatorial powers over a free people, and waged war without a declaration from Congress.
He blockaded southern shipping ports, justifying his actions by saying he would enforce all laws and collect all revenues due the north.
The blockades were an act of war.
He set his northern army upon the south at Sumpter, Assumper, and set in motion one of the most brutal attacks ever upon freedom by maneuvering the South into firing the first shot at their northern aggressors.
Lincoln signed more than 10 tariff-raising bills throughout his administration, and he He manipulated the American public into the first income tax.
He handed out huge land grants and monetary subsidies to transcontinental railroads, just another example of the corporate welfare of mercantilism.
He took the nation off the gold standard, turning the dollar into toilet paper, allowing the government to have absolute control over the monetary system.
And then he virtually nationalized the banking system under the National Currency Acts in order to establish a machine for printing new money at will.
and to provide cheap credit for the business elite.
Oh, it's a good thing that practice has stopped, isn't it?
This mercantilist tyrant, really could be called, ushered in central banking, which has really been the greatest economic curse to this day.
The total wars of the 20th century would have been virtually impossible without countries going off the gold standard, without central banking and so on.
By way of conscription, he assembled a vast army of presidential decree, an act of flagrant misconduct, which drafted individuals into slavery to the federal government.
How on earth do you oppose slavery using the draft?
It's like opposing gangrene by blowing up a city.
And he started the acceleration of federal powers significantly.
Northern newspapers ran editorials calling for the death of every man, woman, and child in the South and the colonization of a then-empty Southern state by Northerners.
And as mentioned before, he wanted the slaves deported back to Africa and thought that the white race was superior and that blacks and whites could not live together at all peacefully.
As an attorney, prior to becoming president, as an attorney, Lincoln represented two masters in seeking the return of their runaway slaves.
So Lincoln actually sent runaway slaves back to their masters.
Is that the story of Abraham Lincoln that you've heard in government-run schools?
So, while the Union army was struggling in the first few years of the war, the Lincoln administration doled out millions of dollars of railroads to run rails to the West during a time of war.
Never let the deaths of hundreds of thousands interfere with pork-barrel spending.
And you should read Tom DiLorenzo on this.
We'll put links to the book in the notes.
As the economist Tom DiLorenzo has contended, Lincoln's goal in waging the war was to benefit northern manufacturing interests and protect his own political career by preserving the Union.
It would have been far cheaper and far less destructive for Lincoln simply to buy the slaves and free them.
I mean, of all the nations that abolished slavery in the 1800s, Only two required a civil war.
America and Haiti.
Absolutely unnecessary.
Of course, it must be remembered that Lincoln did not free any slaves.
The Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the border states that Lincoln needed to keep in the Union.
Maryland and Kentucky, for example.
Slave labor was used to build the U.S.
Capitol building while the war went on.
These are just matters of fact.
And of course there was nothing new about the South wanting to secede.
This had come up many times before.
At the Hartford Convention in 1814, several northern states, among them Massachusetts, vowed to secede because of their opposition to the War of 1812.
48 years later, Massachusetts would not allow the South to secede.
They wanted to secede, and then the South was not allowed to do so.
This obsession with the Union is a bit confusing.
What does it matter if a union disintegrates?
What does it matter if the South secedes?
Since the North wasn't ending slavery anyway, and I'm sure the slaves would rather not die by being drafted involuntarily into the army.
I mean, let's say that the European Union fragments tomorrow.
Is that worth waging war that killed millions of Europeans over?
Of course not.
I mean, the very formation of the European Union represented a change in the relationships between the member states.
Is that worth waging a war over?
No.
Political configurations come and go all the time.
Nine out of ten of the people of the North were opposed to forcing South Carolina to remain in the Union, which is why you had to have a draft.
They didn't care if the South seceded, not to the point where they're willing to go and die for that.
I mean, this is literally forcing people into human shredding machines at bayonet point, and it's of course referred to as some sort of heroism.
As of 1857, writes Roy Bassler, the editor of Lincoln's Collected Works, Lincoln had rarely ever mentioned the issue of slavery.
And even then, quote, when he spoke of respecting the Negro as a human being, his words lacked effectiveness.
What did preoccupy Lincoln's mind throughout his 28-year political career, prior to becoming president, was the political agenda of the Whig Party and of the man he revered most in life, the Kentucky slave owner, Henry Clay.
Whom Lincoln eulogized in 1852 as, quote, the great parent of Whig principles and, quote, the fount from which my own political views flowed.
His great hero was a Kentucky slave owner.
So, it is important to understand that the great moral crusades of history are usually the icing thrown over the dead bodies of economic self-interest.
Human beings rarely fight for principles.
They fight because they're forced to.
Go fight or die.
Or be imprisoned in a place where you'll catch typhus and die.
The cattle prodding of individuals over the landscape of human history is really just psychopathic shepherds.
It's cockfighting.
It really is all it is.
With the intent, of course, of making massive amounts of fake money, massive amounts of blood money, through taxation.
This is the history of the species.
I will argue very strongly, which is why I'm doing this whole series, I will argue very strongly that there is no such thing as a love of abstractions without a corresponding love of individuals.
There's no love of mankind and hatred of the most of the people in it.
When we look to someone who proclaims himself as a moral savior, we look to that person's personal relationships first and foremost.
The fact that the man defended slaves is significant.
The fact that he was an unrepentant racist is significant.
The fact that he funneled money desperately needed for a war to his political, economic cronies and friends is significant.
The fact that his family life was a complete disaster, that his wife was abusive and his son attempted to get his wife 10 years after his death and succeeded in getting her thrown into an asylum, which was pure torture at the time, is significant.
We cannot continue to live in the cloud fog of bloody and victorious propaganda.
We look at the people, we look at the facts, we understand the economic drivers between the mass slaughters of mankind.
And then we will no longer respond to the trumpet calls of war, because we know they are merely the funeral dirges of our future hopes.
Thank you.
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