O' Be Joyful
ohio hillbilly
- Joined
- May 12, 2019
- Messages
- 3,491
- Reaction score
- 3,136
With malice towards all and charity towards none of Abraham Lincoln's principles and actions, The Real Lincoln is the latest attempt to finish the job so ignobly begun by John Wilkes Booth in April 1865. Although Lincoln breathed no more after that, his character and reputation lived on, to be sniped at ever since. The Lincoln haters are an increasingly diverse lot, with strange and not always compatible purposes. The alleged purpose of Thomas DiLorenzo's invective is to defend constitutionalism and free market economics. He claims to demonstrate that Lincoln was an enemy of both, as well as a hypocrite on the subject of "racial equality." What he mainly demonstrates, however, is that his aim is not nearly as good as Booth's.
As the title suggests, The Real Lincoln purports to go beyond the mountains of revisionist historiography to reveal Lincoln's genuine principles and purposes. According to DiLorenzo, these had nothing to do with the perpetuation of free government and the problem of slavery: The "real" Lincoln did not care a whit about the "peculiar institution." At the core of the "real" Lincoln's ambition was an unqualified and unwavering commitment to mercantilism, or socialism as DiLorenzo sometimes intimates. Lincoln would stop at nothing to impose the "Whig economic system" upon America, and any opinion he voiced regarding slavery was merely instrumental in advancing this end. Lincoln's "cause," in the words of DiLorenzo, was "centralized government and the pursuit of empire." According to DiLorenzo, Lincoln said this "over and over again," although DiLorenzo does not trouble himself to produce a shred of evidence for this assertion.
Dishonest About Abe - Claremont Review of Books
claremontreviewofbooks.com