| Page 2: |
(First edition)
"The [Civil War] created the highly centralized state that Americans
labor under today." (The second edition uses the same language.) Those
of us familiar with the New Deal and the Great Society might take issue
with this unsupported assertion, inasmuch as those periods of history
saw much more (and more permanent) growth of the Federal government
than did the Civil War era. Ditto for the Progressive Era. |
| Page 3: |
(First edition)
"Lincoln thought of himself as the heir to the Hamiltonian political
tradition" (The second edition uses the same language.) This is another
unsupported assertion (no footnote is given), and I conducted a brief
experiment to see if Lincoln's own words would back it up. I went to
the Lincoln
Papers online site and did a simple search on
the word "Hamilton." If DiLorenzo's assertion were valid, it seems
clear to me that I ought to get a lot of hits; I got a grand total of
26 hits, the first three of which were not to Alexander Hamilton! In
fact, looking through the citations, only five of them referred to
Alexander Hamilton; the rest were to locations named Hamilton or to
Union officers named Hamilton. It seems to me that this is a sparse
degree of citation for someone who thought of himself as Hamilton's
"heir." It is true that there is an element of political lineage from
Hamilton the Federalist through Clay the Whig to Lincoln the Whig and
Republican, and there is no doubt that Lincoln thought highly of Clay
--- Lincoln probably did see himself somewhat as Clay's heir --- but if
Lincoln saw himself as Hamilton's political heir I think he would
invoke Hamilton's name more often. |
| Page 4: |
(First edition)
"It is very likely that most Americans, if they had been given the
opportunity, would have gladly supported compensated emancipation as a
means of ending slavery " (The second edition uses the same language.)
While this might well be true (although I personally doubt it),
DiLorenzo provides no evidence that any of the slaveholding states
would have accepted an offer of compensated emancipation. In 1862,
Lincoln proposed compensated emancipation to the Congressional
delegations from the (loyal) Border States; they rejected it. Why does
DiLorenzo assume that the Deep South states would have accepted a
similar offer? The extensive writings from leading Southerners in
defense of slavery (see this website for a sampling) argues that they would not have voluntarily
given it up.
For example,
Stephen Hale, Alabama's commissioner to the state of Kentucky, writing
to Governor Beriah Magoffin of that state, writes
"African Slavery has not only
become one of the fixed domestic institutions of the Southern States,
but forms an important element of their political power, and
constitutes the most valuable species of their property-- worth,
according to recent estimates, not less than four thousand millions of
dollars; forming, in fact, the basis upon which rests the prosperity
and wealth of most of these States, and supplying the commerce of the
world with its richest freights, and furnishing the manufactories of
two continents with the raw material, and their operatives with bread."
Later in the same letter Hale
writes
"What Southern man, be he
slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror
contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and
daughters, in the not distant future, associating with free negroes
upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man
stripped, by the Heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to
superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed?"
Similarly, William Harris,
commissioner to the state of Georgia from Mississippi, said in a speech
to the Georgia General Assembly
"She [Mississippi] had rather see
the last of her race, men, women and children, immolated in one common
funeral pile [pyre], than see them subjected to the degradation of
civil, political and social equality with the negro race."
Neither of these
sounds like someone interested in emancipation of any kind, and there
are many more similar expressions to be found. Finally, it should be
pointed out, if any slave-owning state had wanted to offer a
compensated emancipation plan on their own, they had all the authority
they needed. I am unaware of any state offering such a plan. So where
is the evidence that any slave state would have accepted such
a plan? It seems to me that DiLorenzo is indulging in a rhetorical
flourish to distract the reader from the uncomfortable fact that the
Deep South states were very committed to slavery.
|
| Page 5: |
(First edition)
"This doctrine [secession] was even taught to the cadets at West Point,
including almost all of the top military commanders on both sides of
the conflict" (The second edition uses the same language.) This is
almost surely a reference to William Rawle's treatise on the
Constitution (A View of the Constitution of the United States,
1825), which was used as a text at West Point for one or two years in
the mid-1820's, and then replaced by a different book which did not, in
fact, advocate the legality of secession. The claim that DiLorenzo
makes was made often in the postwar era in publications such as the Southern Historical Society Papers,
and was soundly refuted in an article published in The Century,
vol. 78, no. 4, (Aug. 1909), pp. 629-635, written by Col. Edgar S.
Dudley. Jefferson Davis furnishes some of the supporting evidence to
refute the claim that Rawle was a text of long standing at the Academy
(see the Southern Historical Society Papers [SHSP], vol. 22,
p. 83). An extended discussion of this issue is in Douglas Southall
Freeman's biography of Lee, RE Lee, vol. 1, pp. 78-79,
and Thomas Fleming's West Point: The Men and Times of the United States
Military Academy, p. 59. Were some future Confederate
leaders at West Point when this book was used? Absolutely; a partial
list would include Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Joseph Johnston, and
Leonidas K. Polk. But to say it was used by "almost all of the top
military commanders on both sides" is to do violence to the truth. It
wasn't used when Grant or Sherman or Jackson or Stuart were at the
Academy. Further, it needs to be pointed out that we do not even know
if the material on secession was ever used. In Lee's case, we
know from his own correspondence that he did not accept Rawle's views,
for in January, 1861, he wrote to his son "Rooney" that "secession is
nothing but revolution." Besides, the fact that Rawle was replaced by Kent's Commentaries (which does not
support secession) undermines the implied claim that there is some
endorsement of secession here. Finally, it needs to be said that there
are no known instances of a secessionist claiming Rawle's authority for
their action in 1860-61 (some did claim it, many years after the fact;
no one, that I'm aware of, made such a claim during the Secession
Winter). A serious scholar would have discussed all of this. DiLorenzo,
of course, does not, because he is more interested in furthering the
impression that West Point somehow endorsed the idea of secession than
he is in honest historical inquiry. |
| Page 6: |
(First edition)
"Chapter 7 details how Lincoln abandoned the generally accepted rules
of war, which had just been codified by the Geneva Convention of 1863."
(The second edition uses the same language.) While quibbling about
dates is perhaps unbecoming, there was no Geneva Convention of 1863.
There was a Geneva Convention of 1864, but according to the Avalon Project website at Yale this
involved only the treatment of wounded enemy soldiers (some broader
protection is given to those who help the wounded). In other words, it
wasn't a complete codification of the "accepted rules of war," which in
fact were first formulated in the Union's General Orders 100, known
informally as the Lieber
Code. For more detail the reader is referred
to the article "The United States and the Development of the Laws of
Land Warfare" by Capt. Grant R. Doty (U.S. Military Academy) in the
journal Military Law Review, vol. 156, pp. 224-255, 1998.
Also, this book might be of interest. While the Union
war effort was oftentimes harsh and did step over the bounds on a few
occasions (usually due to the excesses of an individual commander, as
opposed to established policy), DiLorenzo's accusation cries out for
some substantiating details, which are, of course, not given. The
claims of the website also cry out for some substantiation, which is not given.
Another good book on the severity of the Federal war effort is The Hard Hand of War. |
| Page 7: |
(First edition)
"Chapter 9 describes Lincoln's economic legacy: the realization of
Henry Clay's American System. Many (primarily) Southern statesmen had
opposed this system for decades." (The second edition uses the same
language.) DiLorenzo conveniently ignores the many prominent Southern
Whigs who favored Clay's ideas (such as Alec Stephens, future
Vice-President of the Confederacy) and the many Northern Democrats who
did not. The point is that the debate over the American System did not
split perfectly along North-South lines. By the time of the Civil War
the divide was more North-South than it had been, but this was largely
due to the importance of the slavery issue. |
| Page 8: |
(First edition)
"Lincoln's war created the 'military-industrial complex' some ninety
years before President Eisenhower coined the phrase." (The second
edition uses the same language.) While this appears to me to be an
outlandish assertion which cries out for some kind of substantiation,
DiLorenzo provides no footnote to support his claim. I, for one, find
any comparison of the 1870's era United States military-industrial
"complex" with what existed beginning in the 1950's to be
unsupportable, although I confess it is the kind of negative assertion
which it is difficult to prove. It is worth pointing out that
Eisenhower was warning against a permanent establishment, which was not
the case in the post-Civil War period, when the United States military
shrank from a force of several million to something like 25,000. I'll
concede that DiLorenzo is perhaps indulging a rhetorical flourish here,
but it is an outlandish and unsubstantiated one, in my opinion. |
| Pages 10-32 |
DiLorenzo's
entire point in Chapter 2 is "Lincoln's Opposition to Racial Equality."
Let's hear what others had to say about Lincoln's ideas along this
line. During the senatorial debates in 1858, Stephen Douglas charged
that Lincoln "objects to the Dred Scott
decision because it
does not put the Negro in the possession of the rights of citizenship
on an equality with the white man." Now it could well and truly be said
that this was asserted in the midst of a political campaign, and it is
the nature of politicians to frame their assertions so as to place
their opponents in the worst possible light. Fair enough. But why does
DiLorenzo then insist that each and every one of Lincoln's
statements---made to racially prejudiced Illinois audiences---be taken
literally? Why is Lincoln not allowed to be a politician trying to walk
the tightrope between what he believes and what the electorate believes?
It might be instructive to hear
what Frederick Douglass thought of Lincoln's racial views: "In all my
interviews with Mr. Lincoln, I was impressed with his entire freedom
from popular prejudice against the colored race."
The fundamental point, which
DiLorenzo ignores, is that Lincoln grew. During the 1850's,
he was as possessed of racist tendencies as any man in the United
States. However, he still believed slavery was morally wrong, and by
the end of the war his attitudes towards blacks had changed
substantially. His very last public speech, just a few days before his
death, contained language suggesting that some free blacks should be
given the vote. Does DiLorenzo acknowledge this? Of course not.
|
| Page 15: |
"In twenty-three
years of litigation [Lincoln] never defended a runaway slave, but he
did defend a slaveowner." The reference to defending a slaveowner is to
the notorious Matson case, in which Lincoln represented (as an
assistant) a Kentuckian who owned land in Illinois which he worked with
the help of some slaves he brought over from Kentucky for part of the
year. There is no denying that this case causes some embarassment to
those who hold Lincoln in high esteem, but the fact is that Lincoln did
defend a black woman, Nance, who was accused of being a slave (Bailey
v. Cromwell, 4 Ill. 71 [1841]); strictly speaking, Lincoln did not
represent Nance, he simply demonstrated that her alleged owner could
not establish that she had ever been a slave, thus legally establishing
her as a free person under Illinois law. While DiLorenzo's assertion,
"he never defended a runaway slave," may be, strictly
speaking, true, to omit the Nance case in this discussion is shoddy
scholarship. Perhaps the best comment on this comes from Lincoln
scholar David Herbert Donald: "Neither the Matson case nor the Cromwell
case should be taken as an indication of Lincoln's views on slavery;
his business was law, not morality." |
| Page 17: |
(First edition)
"Some ten years later, December 1, 1862, in a message to Congress,
Lincoln reiterated his earlier assertions: 'I cannot make it better
known than it already is, that I strongly favor colonization.'" (The
second edition uses the same language.)
In a document
dedicated to highlighting the flaws and inaccuracies of another's work,
it behooves me to own up to my own mistakes. Quite simply, my original
comments on this point were inaccurate. Because of this, and because
the anonymous website devotes so much
space to its criticism of this point, I'll make my correction in some
detail.
Lincoln apparently
was still interested in colonization the summer after he
wrote the above comments, for he discussed it with a delegation of free
black pastors who visited the White House in 1863. However, by July
1st, 1864, his secretary, John Hay, was writing in his diary that
Lincoln had "sloughed off" colonization, indicating that it was fading
in its interest. In the meantime, a pilot effort had been launched in
the Chiriqui region of Central America and another one on the island of
Hispanola, in what is now Haiti. A detailed discussion of either of
these ventures is simply not appropriate in this setting.
The criticizing
website refers to an account by Union general
Benjamin Butler which suggests that, as late as April, 1865, Lincoln
was still interested in colonization. Unfortunately for the anonymous
website author, Mark Neely has demolished Butler's credibility in an
article in Civil War History ("Abraham Lincoln and black
colonization: Ben Butler's spurious testimony," Civil War History,
vol. 25, no. 1 (1979), pp. 77-83.). The short version is that Butler
was making things up when he wrote his memoirs. Phillip Magness
has suggested
that Neely's argument is not as ironclad as it might be.
DiLorenzo makes a
big issue of Lincoln's support for colonization, but he overlooks its
disappearance from his agenda. A true scholar would not do that, but a
political polemicist might. DiLorenzo (and many others) also ignores
the fact that Lincoln was not the least bit interested in forcibly
deporting people, but in allowing for voluntary emigration,
not because he didn't want blacks in the country, but because he feared
for how the two groups (blacks and whites) would get along.
A list of good
scholarly articles on Lincoln and colonization follows:
Paul Scheips,
"Lincoln and the Chiriqui Colonization Project," Journal of Negro
History, vol. 37, no. 4 (1952), pp. 418-453.
Gabor S. Boritt,
"The Voyage to the Colony of Lincolnia," Historian, vol. 37,
no. 4 (1975), pp. 619-631.
N. Andrew N.
Cleven, "Some Plans for Colonizing Liberated Negro Slaves in Hispanic
America," Journal of Negro History, vol. 11, no. 1 (1926),
pp. 35-49.
An interesting
site on Lincoln and colonization is here.
|
| Page 20: |
"Lincoln had no
intention of doing anything about Southern slavery in 1860."
This is true as far as it goes, but it misses the point. Lincoln had
spent the six years since his re-entry into politics in 1854 denouncing
slavery as morally wrong. This is the theme of literally
every speech he gave from 1854 to his election as president, and it was
the theme of much of his private correspondence as well. In December of
1860, he would write to his old friend and fellow former Whig, Alec
Stephens of Georgia, "You think slavery is right and should be
extended; while we think slavery is wrong and ought to be restricted.
That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial
difference between us." DiLorenzo also appears not to understand that,
in the absence of a civil war, President Lincoln would have no
authority to do very much about slavery in the South. It was only
because of the rebellion that he could issue the Emancipation
Proclamation. |
| Page 24: |
(First edition)
"The more or less 'official' interpretation of the cause of the War
between the States, as described in The
Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, by historian William A.
Degregorio, asserts that the slavery issue 'pitted abolitionists in the
North who viewed it as a moral evil to be eradicated everywhere as soon
as practiable against southern extremists who fostered the spread of
slavery into the territories.'" (The second edition uses the same
language.) I, for one, had never heard of William A. Degregorio nor The
Complete Book of U.S. Presidents, and I would think that many
better sources would exist for an "official" interpretation of the
cause of the Civil War. This is nothing more than a strawman, and a
weak one at that. No serious scholar takes this view of the Civil War,
and while I do grant that many ordinary citizens might, that is an
indictment of history education, not of Lincoln's record. |
| Page 25: |
(First edition)
"No abolitionist was ever elected to any major political office in any
Northern state." Thaddeus Stevens (Congressman from Pennsylvania,
1848-1868), Salmon Chase (Governor [1856-1861] and Senator [1849-1855]
from Ohio), and Charles Sumner (Senator from Massachusetts, 1851-1874)
would be surprised to read this. While the definition of "abolitionist"
might be a point of contention here, these three men --- along with Ben
Wade, Senator from Ohio --- certainly held to extreme antislavery
views. DiLorenzo's second edition completely omits this claim, and
wisely so. |
| Page 26: |
(First edition)
"[Lincoln] was thus the North's candidate in the election..." (The
second edition uses the same language.) Stephen A. Douglas would have
been surprised to read this. Although Douglas did not do well in the
Electoral vote, he is considered by many students of the 1860 campaign
as the only candidate who could have won enough votes nationwide to
defeat Lincoln. |
| Page 32: |
DiLorenzo ends
this chapter by saying, "The foregoing discussion calls into question
the standard account that Northerners elected Lincoln in a fit of moral
outrage spawned by their deep-seated concern for the welfare of black
slaves in the deep South." The problem is that this assertion is based
on a false premise. I don't think there is a "standard account that
Northerners elected Lincoln in a fit of moral outrage..." This language
is identical in both editions, and simply betrays DiLorenzo's shallow
knowledge of history. Allen Nevins makes a cogent point in this regard,
however. "The nation had taken a mighty decision---the decision that
slavery must be circumscribed and contained. Lincoln's 1,866,000
followers wished to contain the institution by a flat Congressional
refusal to recognize it outside; the 1,375,000 adherents of Douglas
wished to contain it by local-option type of popular sovereignty." Prologue to Civil War, pp. 316-317. |
| Page 35: |
(First edition)
"At the same time, it is important to note that Lincoln's Emancipation
Proclamation did not free a single slave." (The second edition uses the
same language.) This is simply absurd on its face, for the Emancipation
Proclamation was the legal authority for the freeing of most of the
slaves in the South. For example, all of the slaves in
Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, were freed under the
authority of the Emancipation Proclamation; freedom perhaps did not
come until the Union Army arrived, but once this happened the slaves in
that area were
free. Moreover, any slaves from these areas
who had escaped to Union lines---and there were many in this
category---would have been freed from bondage the instant the
Proclamation
went into effect. The fact is, while some Union-occupied parts of the
Confederacy were exempted from the Proclamation (notably Tennessee,
southeastern Louisiana, the new state of West Virginia, and eastern
Virginia) some were not. Northern Virginia was not exempted, nor were
northern Mississippi and Alabama, nor coastal North and South Carolina.
Any slaves in these regions would have been freed as soon as the
Proclamation was issued. A good article (with a nice map) is "After the
Emancipation Proclamation," by William C. Harris, North
& South, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 42-53.
The efforts of the
anonymous website to defend
DiLorenzo's error seem tortured, to me.
|
| Page 37: |
(First
edition)
"The British writer Earl Russell noted ..." (The second edition uses
the same language.) Is this a mangled citation for the British Foreign
Secretary Earl (as in a title of nobility) Russell? It's a minor point,
but for the author not to know this---and the way the passage is
constructed he clearly does not seem to know this---is an unfortunate
reflection on his knowledge of the period. The point is not that
DiLorenzo identifies Russell as a writer---apparently he was one
(something I did not know)---but that he does not appear to know that
Russell was the British
Foreign Secretary during the Civil War years. Again, this is a minor
point, but an accumulation of many such minor points makes for a major
defect in the book. |
| pp. 38-43: |
A large portion
of Chapter 3 is devoted to a summary of the military history of the
Civil War prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. This summary is
extremely shallow and one-sided. The account of the Battle of
Fredericksburg is particularly poor. The summary almost entirely
emphasizes the so-called "eastern theatre" of the war, and almost
completely ignores the "western theatre." The reason for this is fairly
obvious: DiLorenzo's purpose here is to show that Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation out of desperation in the midst of losing the
war. But DiLorenzo's construction of the military history conveniently
ignores almost all Federal successes, and minimizes those it does not
ignore. Federal victories at Pea Ridge, Roanoke Island, Port Royal, New
Orleans, and Corinth are ignored. The extent of the victories at Forts
Henry and Donelson (12,000 Confederates prisoner, Nashville captured,
most of Western Tennessee occupied) are minimized as "smaller battles."
Something DiLorenzo fails to notice, apparently, is that by the time
the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, the western Confederacy was
shattered. Much of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana had been lost.
The cities of New Orleans, Nashville, and Memphis had been lost. In the
east, the Confederate capital of Richmond was constantly (if
inexpertly) threatened, and a series of significant lodgements had been
made along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The importance to the
Emancipation Proclamation of the battle at Antietam or Sharpsburg in
September, 1862, is completely ignored. DiLorenzo did not make any
changes in this section of the second edition that I noticed. |
| Page 38: |
(First edition)
DiLorenzo puts the First Battle of Bull Run as occurring on July 16,
1861, instead of July 21. (The second edition uses the same language.)
Again, this is a minor point, but it highlights DiLorenzo's sparse
knowledge of the historical context. The anonymous
website's effort to suggest that this date
is not, in fact, an error, seems ridiculous. |
| Page 44: |
(First edition)
"An eyewitness to the [New York draft] riots was Colonel Arthur
Fremantle, the British emissary to the Confederacy." (The second
edition uses the same language.) This creates the impression that
Fremantle had some kind of official status, which he did not have. See
Jay Luvaas's book on the European view of the Civil War (The Military Legacy of the Civil War,
University Press of Kansas, 1988 [orig. University of Chicago Press,
1959] p. 21). Again, this is a minor slip, but it should be apparent by
now that the book has all too many such minor slips. At some point the
"slips" become evidence of "sloppiness." The point is not---as some
claim---that Fremantle was or was not a colonel (he most certainly
was), but that he was not (as DiLorenzo implied) any kind of official
emissary from Great Britain. DiLorenzo should have known
better than to suggest he was. The anonymous website again appears to miss the point. |
| Page 45: |
(First edition)
DiLorenzo states that the emancipation proclamation "caused a desertion
crisis in the U.S. Army. At least 200,000 Federal soldiers deserted;
another 120,000 evaded conscription; and at least 90,000 Northern men
fled to Canada while thousands more hid out in the mountains of central
Pennsylvania to place themselves beyond the reach of enrollment
officers." This statement is referenced to p. 67 of The Confederate War by Gary
Gallagher. However, this is wrong in two ways. First, no such
statements are to be found in Gallagher's book, either on the page
noted or anywhere else. (Gallagher's book tends to focus only on the
Confederate side of the war, as its title kind of implies.) Second, DiLorenzo is blaming all desertions
on the U.S. side of the Civil War on the Emancipation
Proclamation---200,000 is the consensus estimate for the total number
of deserters
throughout the war, according to Mark Weitz's article on desertion in
the Encyclopedia
of the American Civil War (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO,
2000). Needless to say, some Federals deserted before the proclamation
was passed, so not all the desertions can be ascribed to it, and it
seems unlikely that every U.S. soldier who deserted after September
1862 did so because of the proclamation. In the second edition the
language in the text is the same, but the citation is changed to page
63 of James McPherson's What
They Fought For. That page does discuss the morale crisis
which swept through the Federal armies in the winter of 1862-63, but it
does not support DiLorenzo's numbers. In addition, turning the page
would bring the reader to the statement, "In any case, the decline in
morale proved short-lived," along with some discussion showing that the
entire issue is much more complex than DiLorenzo wants you to believe.
Finally, the standard source on desertions in the Civil War is Ella
Lonn's book, Desertion
during the Civil War,
which DiLorenzo does not cite. If he had, he might have learned
that Lonn lists nine major causes of desertion, including things like:
sympathy for the South, simple hardships of service, lack of pay, etc.
The issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation is not one of
them. (This discussion is spread out over pages 127--142 in
Lonn's book.) There is no doubt that there was a substantial
morale crisis in the Union Army during the winter of 1862-63,
desertions did spike in this period, and it is entirely possible that
some of these desertions were tied to the EP. (The publisher is
aware of a lurid account of Illinois troops running home and having to
be rousted out by cavalry to be returned to the ranks. A couple
of
Illinois regiments did more or less collapse due to desertions in early
1863. Whether this was due to the EP or the incompetance of the
officers is impossible to tell.) However, this morale crisis was
short-lived. |
| Pages 54-84: |
DiLorenzo writes as if Lincoln's
embrace of tariffs were a greater betrayal of liberty than the
Confederacy's attempt to nullify the results of a free election and
embrace of the "positive good" theory of slavery. Why does DiLorenzo
concentrate his moral indignation on the man who emancipated slaves
rather than on the Confederate leaders who fought to keep them on the
plantation? There is a natural right of revolution but no legal or
constitutional right of secession. If any state can leave the Union any
time it wants, without first obtaining the consent of all the other
parties to the compact, then there is no Union, only a temporary
alliance of convenience. This, however, was not what the founders
envisioned when they framed the Articles of Confederation ("perpetual
union between the states") and, later, the Constitution ("a more
perfect union"). |
| Page 68: |
(First edition) "In virtually
every one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln made it a point to
champion the nationalization of money and to demonize Jackson and the
Democrats for their opposition to it." According to James McPherson
writing in his book Battle
Cry of Freedom (page 182), "Tariffs, banks, internal
improvements, corruption, and other staples of American politics
received not a word in these debates---the sole topic was slavery."
While a careful examination of the text of the debates---available online
here---shows that Prof. McPherson is exaggerating a bit, the
essential truth of his assessment holds up under scrutiny. By a large
margin, race and slavery were the dominant topics of the debates; the
issues of the bank and tariffs and monetary policy were marginal at
best. In his second edition, DiLorenzo omits the direct reference to
the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and instead says, "Lincoln frequently made
it a point to champion the nationalization of money and to demonize
Jackson and the Democrats for their opposition to it." No footnote is
given to point to any examples of this, of course. |
| Pages 87-88: |
(First edition) DiLorenzo cites
John Quincy Adams as supporting a right to secession in his 1839
Discourse, "The
Jubilee of the Constitution," pp 66-69. (The second edition makes
the same point.) On page 68 of the Discourse, Adams writes, "In the
calm hours of self-possession, the right of a state to nullify an act
of Congress, is too absurd for argument, and too odious for
discussion.. The right of a state to secede from the union is equally
disowned by the principles of the Declaration of Independence."
Adams's subsequent reference to a
right of the people in the states to dissolve the political bands that
had held them in union is explicitly compared by him to the revolution
of 1776. But that makes it, not a legal right, but a natural,
extra-legal right. In short, it is the right of revolution as found in
Locke and acknowledged by nearly every American statesman from
Jefferson to Lincoln, and measured, as Adams says, by "[t]he tie of
conscience, binding them to the retributive justice of Heaven." Since
DiLorenzo apparently does not understand the distinction between legal
and natural right, he completely misreads the whole speech. (The second edition uses the same language.)
|
| Pages 125-126: |
"Since they were
so dependent on trade, by 1860 the Southern states were paying in
excess of 80 percent of all tariffs..." (The second edition uses the
same language.) There is no question that some prominent Southerners
believed this, but it is difficult to reconcile that belief with the
data. Stephen Wise's book on blockade running (Lifeline
of the Confederacy, University of South Carolina Press,
1988) gives a table of tariff amounts collected at some ports (page
228); according to these figures, the Northern ports of New York,
Boston, and Philadelphia took in more than $40 million in tariff
duties, while the Southern ports of New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile,
Savannah, Norfolk, and Richmond took in less than $3 million, total.
While some of the import duties paid in the North would no doubt be on
goods sold to Southerners, it is difficult to accept that enough of
this happened to result in 80% of the tariff being paid by Southerners,
given the customs house figures. Even if DiLorenzo's intent was to
characterize the effect on Southerners of paying higher prices for
tariff-protected domestic goods, it is difficult to justify his claim.
The burden of the tariff would have fallen almost completely on the
consumers, and the North had many more consumers than did the South.
Several good online discussions of the tariff exist, including
this one and this one. |
| Page 128: |
"To a very large
extent, the secession of the Southern states in late 1860 and early
1861 was a culmination of the decades-long feud, beginning with the
1828 Tariff of Abominations, over the proper economic role of the
central government." (The second edition uses the same language.) The
documentary record of the Secession Winter, and the arguments put
forward by the secessionists themselves, argues against this claim.
See, for example, the documents archived here.
The anonymous website
does not like my pointing to my own website
of secession documents, and suggests that
there is something fraudulent about my selection of material. Those
familiar with the site know that I have never refused to include a
document which reasonably bore on the causes of secession. As for the
documents my critic suggested needed to be included:
- The J.L.M. Curry speech is on my site here. I will leave it to the reader
to decide if Curry supports secession because of tariffs or concerns
about slavery and "Black Republicans."
- The Wigfall
speech is not about tariffs as a reason for
secession.
- The Clingman speech is not about
secession at all, except that the absence of the Gulf states will lead
to a revenue crisis.
- The Hunter speech is clearly
anti-tariff, but I found nothing in it which connected his tariff
opposition to any support for secession. My impression is he was simply
speaking out against the Morrill Tariff bill. Caveat: This is an
extremely long speech, and I confess to only skimming it; I may have
missed something, and would appreciate being informed of that if it is
true.
|
| Page 131: |
(First edition)
"Even though the large majority of Americans, North and South, believed
in a right of secession as of 1861..." (The second edition uses the
same language.) DiLorenzo provides no basis for this statement, which
is refuted by the fact that Lincoln had wide-spread support for the war
effort. The several resolutions by Northern state legislatures
condemning secession as treason or rebellion would also argue against
this assertion. See the resolutions of New
York, Maine, Minnesota,
New
Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
These legislative resolutions, which
ought to reflect some degree of popular sentiment, would by themselves
contradict DiLorenzo's assertion about "a large majority" believing in
a right of secession.
One can also look at what might be called "more
informed" opinions on the matter of secession.
- Washington: "To the efficacy and permanency of
your Union, a government for the whole is indispensable. No alliance,
however strict, between the parts can be an adequate substitute; they
must inevitably experience the infractions and interruptions which all
alliances in all times have experienced." This is taken from his
Farewell Address; emphasis added.
- In 1799, a citizen of Westmoreland County, Virginia,
published a pamphlet entitled Plain Truth, about some of the
political issues of the day. Among many other things, this author
wrote, "In point of right, no state can withdraw itself from the Union.
In point of policy, no state ought to be permitted to do so." While the
authorship of this pamphlet is uncertain, it has been traditionally
ascribed by experts in American antiquaria to Henry Lee, father of
Robert E. Lee.
- Madison: "It is high time that the claim to secede at will
should be put down by the public opinion; and I shall be glad to see
the task commenced by someone who understands the subject." Letter
to N.P. Trist, Dec. 23, 1832; The Writings of James Madison, New
York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1910, v. 9, pp. 490-91.
- Andrew Jackson: "To say that any State may at pleasure
secede from the Union, is to say that the United States are not a
nation." [Andrew Jackson, Proclamation
on Nullification, 10 Dec 1832].
- Buchanan: "In order to justify a resort to revolutionary
resistance, the Federal Government must be guilty of 'a deliberate,
palpable, and dangerous exercise' of powers not granted by the
Constitution. The late Presidential election, however, has been held in
strict conformity with its express provisions. How, then, can the
result justify a revolution to destroy this very Constitution? Reason,
justice, a regard for the Constitution, all require that we shall wait
for some overt and dangerous act on the part of the President elect
before resorting to such a remedy." (Taken from Buchanan's Fourth
Annual Message to Congress, December, 1860.)
|
| Page 144: |
"'Under the
protection of Federal bayonets,' wrote David Donald, 'New York went
Republican by seven thousand votes' in the 1864 presidential election."
DiLorenzo cites this passage to page 81 of David Donald's collection of
essays, Lincoln
Reconsidered. In the third edition, the correct citation is
to page 180, but this is yet another minor matter. It is clear from his
context that DiLorenzo is suggesting that somehow these Federal troops
influenced the outcome of the election in New York. Now perhaps they
did, but is there a larger context which Prof. DiLorenzo has failed to
mention? In fact, there is. During the fall of 1864, the Confederacy
was active in fomenting and aiding numerous attempts to disrupt the
election. Some of these efforts centered on New York City, whose mayor
(Fernando Wood) was suspected of being sympathetic to the Southern
cause. In fact, a team of saboteurs would attempt to set fires in
several New York hotels some weeks after the election, an effort which
was supposed to have been timed to coincide with and therefore disrupt
the election. It was to prevent this kind of disruption that Federal
troops were sent to New York around election day, and they had the
desired effect, according to the postwar memoir of one of the arsonists
(Confederate
Operations in Canada and New York, by John W. Headley, pp.
268-270). But readers of DiLorenzo's book would never learn any of this. |
| Page 148: |
"Lincoln was not
opposed to secession if it served his political purposes." DiLorenzo
then begins to discuss the formation of West Virginia, which is
admittedly a controversial topic. Alas, he appears to be unfamiliar
with the extensive literature on the subject. While there were some
irregularities in the process by which West Virginia came into being,
for the most part the Federal government followed established
constitutional procedures and standards. The Constitution requires only
the permission of the parent state government for a state to be
partitioned (Article IV, Section 3). As it happened, the recognized
government of Virginia, the so-called loyalist Pierpont government,
agreed to the partition (the fact that the Pierpont government was
mostly from the western Virginia counties would explain this). By what
authority did the Federal government recognize the Pierpont government
as the legitimate government of Virginia? By Supreme Court decision, as
written by no less a figure than Chief Justice Roger Taney (Luther
v. Borden [1842], which held that the determination of
legitimacy of competing state governments was a task for the
"political" branches of the government, i.e., Congress and the
President). It should also be pointed out that Congress, with perfectly
clear Constitutional authority, implicitly recognized the Pierpont
government by seating its Senators and Representatives. Without
question, there were some irregularities in the process, but most of
these centered on the issue of which counties to include in the new
state. See the article in North & South ("Montani
Semper Liberi," by Ed Steers, Jr., vol. 3, no. 2, January 2000) for a
good overview, as well as the extensive discussion in James Randall's Constitutional
Problems Under Lincoln. It is instructive to note, as DiLorenzo
does not, that Virginia did not contest the partition in court after
the war, but only the inclusion of some specific counties (Virginia v.
West Virginia, 78 US 39). See also the recent book, Seceding from Secession.
|
| Page 158: |
(First edition:
Regarding the 1862 Santee Sioux uprising in Minnesota) "Three hundred
and three Indians were sentenced to death, and Minnesota political
authorities wanted to execute every one of them, something Lincoln
feared might incite one or more of the European powers to offer
assistance to the Confederacy, as they were hinting they might do."
(The second edition uses the same language.) I would really
like to know what evidence there is that the Europeans threatened to
aid the CSA because of US Indian policy. Certainly DiLorenzo points the
reader to none. The fact that the executions happened months after the
preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was issued also weighs against
the story. The conventional story is that Lincoln intervened to prevent
the execution of all but the most culpable offenders among the Indians.
Supposedly (David Donald's
Lincoln, page 394) he insisted on executing only
those who had actually committed murder or rape, and he insisted that
the telegraph operator be especially careful in transmitting the 38
Sioux names over the wire, since an error in tapping out the
imperfectly anglicized names of the Indians in Morse Code could send
the wrong man to the gallows. DiLorenzo, who cites Donald's book when
it suits him, omits the comment on pp. 394-395 that Minnesota Senator
Alexander Ramsey, who had been Governor of the state at the time of the
uprising, told Lincoln in 1864 that if he had hanged more Indians he
would have carried the state by a larger majority. Lincoln's response
was, "I could not afford to hang men for votes." |
| Page 174: |
(First edition) "In
1863 an international convention met in Geneva, Switzerland, to codify
rules of warfare that had been in existence for more than a century."
(The second edition uses the same language.) This is inaccurate on
several levels. As noted earlier, there was no Geneva convention issued
in 1863, not one that codified rules of warfare (except as they applied
to wounded soldiers; this chapter of DiLorenzo's book is titled "Waging
War on Civilians"); of equal importance is that the entire concept of
"the law of war" was very fluid at this time. The generally regarded
authority was the work of the Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel, The
Law of Nations, published in 1758; a 19th century edition is available online. |
| Page 175: |
(First edition) DiLorenzo
correctly mentions Union Major-General Henry Halleck as the author of a
book
on international law, but characterizes this book as having
"informed virtually all the top commanders in the Union army (and the
Confederate army as well)." (The second edition uses the same
language.) It appears to have escaped DiLorenzo's radar screen that
Halleck's book was not published until 1861, and so could not have
informed any of the "top commanders" in either army except as a
reference work after the war started. DiLorenzo provides no evidence to
support this possibility. The anonymous
website's suggestion that DiLorenzo was
referring to wartime circulation in his initial statement seems weak. |
| Page 184: |
(First edition)
"Upon entering Jackson, Mississippi, in the spring of 1863, Sherman
ordered a systematic bombardment of the town every five minutes, day
and night." (The second edition uses the same language.) Does DiLorenzo
really mean to say that after he occupied the town, Sherman
ordered it bombarded? This makes no sense at all. Checking through the Official
Records, one finds that this bombardment occurred during
Sherman's expedition to Jackson after the fall of Vicksburg, and was in
response to the fact that the Confederates were defending the town,
i.e., it happened as part of the effort to take the town. See Sherman to Grant, OR, Ser. 1, vol. XXIV, pt. 2, pp. 524-525.
(What I have done here is taken the relevant page images and merged
them into a single PDF; this protects me from the all-too-frequent URL
changes at the source.) In other words, the bombardment that so
disturbs DiLorenzo was an ordinary act of war. (And, again, as a minor
matter, this occurred in July; most folks would not call July
part of spring, certainly not in Mississippi.) |
| Page 201: |
"Shortly before
his death in 1870, General Robert E. Lee told former Texas Governor
Fletcher Stockdale that, in light of how the Republican Party was
treating the people of the South, he never would have surrendered at
Appomattox, but would have died there with his men in one final battle.
'Governor, if I had foreseen the use these people designed to make of
their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox
Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of
subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave
men, my sword in my right hand.'" (The second edition uses the same
language.) This story is weak on several levels. Douglas Southall
Freeman, the premier biographer of General Lee, does not accept it.
DiLorenzo cites a book by Thomas Nelson Page as his source, but Freeman
notes that the evidence for the incident is second-hand (to DiLorenzo's
source it might be third-hand) and says, "There is nothing in Lee's own
writings and nothing in direct quotation by first-hand witness that
accords with such an expression on his part." (R.E. Lee,
vol. IV, p. 374). |
| Page 203: |
DiLorenzo states
that revisionist historians of Reconstruction "have been dominated by
'Marxists of various degrees of orthodoxy'" and cites p. 9 of Kenneth
Stampp's book The
Era of Reconstruction: 1865-1877 as support. Let's see what
Stampp really says (the first sentence actually starts on page 8): "The
revisionists are a curious lot who sometimes quarrel with each other as
much as they quarrel with the disciples of Dunning. At various times
they have counted in their ranks Marxists of various degrees of
orthodoxy, Negroes seeking historical vindication, skeptical white
Southerners, and latter-day northern abolitionists. But among them are
numerous scholars who have the wisdom to know that the history of an
age is seldom simple and clear-cut, seldom without its tragic aspects,
seldom without its redeeming virtues." I will leave it to the reader to
decide if DiLorenzo's comment accurately reflects the meaning of
Stampp's words. (The second edition uses significantly different
language, and the anonymous website ignores this
point entirely.) Stampp does in fact use the words "Marxists of various
degrees of orthodoxy", but he does not say that they have
dominated the school; he lists them merely as one of several groups
that have been lumped together as revisionists and points out that the
revisionists have frequently disagreed with each other. |
| Pages 200-232: |
It is fair to
ask, in my opinion, why DiLorenzo spends an entire chapter (33 pages)
of a book on Lincoln on the subject of Reconstruction, which occurred
after Lincoln was dead. Apparently, DiLorenzo's point (see page 211) is
that Lincoln's agenda and policies led to Reconstruction and so it is
proper to consider it part of his legacy. This thesis founders on the
very real fact---which DiLorenzo conveniently ignores---that
Lincoln and the radical wing of the Republican Party disagreed about
Reconstruction policy, to the extent that Lincoln's "pocket veto" of
the Wade-Davis bill was a serious issue in the 1864 election campaign.
DiLorenzo, of course, does not mention the Wade-Davis bill at all. |
|
Crossroads series on
DiLorenzo's C-SPAN interview: On May 25, 2008, DiLorenzo was
interviewed by C-SPAN's Brian Lamb about his book, The
Real Lincoln. In February and March, 2012, Prof.
Brooks Simpson's outstanding blog, Crossroads,
featured a series of analyses based on a transcript of this interview.
Here are links to the individual posts.
|
|
An Equally
Mis-informed Book by a Different Author
2013: Al Mackey is doing a similar analysis of
Charles Adams' book, When in the Course of Human
Events, on his blog, A Student of
the American Civil War. Here are the links to
the individual entries:
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