Thomas DiLorenzo: Author of The Real Lincoln

O' Be Joyful

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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.
 

O' Be Joyful

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(snip) My bold and paragraph break.

Despite its provocative insights and obvious rhetorical skill, however, The Real Lincoln is seriously compromised by careless errors of fact, misuse of sources, and faulty documentation. Although individually these flaws may seem trivial and inconsequential, taken together they constitute a near-fatal threat to DiLorenzo’s credibility as a historian. A few examples indicate the scope of the problem: DiLorenzo’s own article on Lincoln as “The Great Centralizer” appeared in the The Independent Review in 1998, not in 1988 (p. vii); Lincoln advised sending freed slaves to Liberia in a speech in 1854, not “during the war” (pp. 16–17); Lincoln was not a member of the Illinois state legislature in 1857 (p. 18); the commerce clause was not an “amendment,” and Thomas Jefferson was not among the framers of the Constitution (pp. 69–70); Thaddeus Stevens was a Pennsylvania representative, not a senator (p. 140); and Fort Sumter was not a customs house (p. 242).
Unfortunately, these lapses are more than matched by a clumsy mishandling of sources that violates the presumed trust between author and reader. DiLorenzo claims, for example, that in the four years “between 1860 and 1864, population in the thirteen largest Northern cities rose by 70 percent” (p. 225). On the face of it, this statistic is absurd and defies common sense, and sure enough, the source DiLorenzo cites says that the growth occurred “in fifteen years.” Page 11 says that Lincoln’s law partner and biographer William Herndon was quoting his own recollections of Lincoln, but he really was quoting another biographer. A few pages later (p. 14), DiLorenzo claims that Lincoln, in his eulogy for Henry Clay, “mustered his best rhetorical talents to praise Clay,” but all of the examples that follow come from the “beautiful language” of a newspaper that Lincoln was quoting at length. Moreover, Lincoln’s supposed comment about the “deportation” of blacks in his Cooper Union speech was in fact a quotation from Thomas Jefferson, as Lincoln himself says (p. 18).
In chapter 3, DiLorenzo claims that in a letter to Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln “admitted that the original [Emancipation] proclamation had no legal justification, except as a war measure” (p. 37). His source, however, is the recollections of a conversation (not a letter) that portrait artist Francis B. Carpenter (not Chase) had with Lincoln, and at no point do these recollections sustain DiLorenzo’s summary of them. Moreover, in the reference for this section, DiLorenzo misidentifies the title of his source as Paul Angle’s The American Reader, when in fact the jumbled material comes from Angle’s The Lincoln Reader. Other errors include misplaced quotation marks, missing ellipses, and quotations with incorrect punctuation, capitalization, and wrong or missing words.
(snip)
As it stands, The Real Lincoln is a travesty of historical method and documentation. Exasperating, maddening, and deeply disappointing, The Real Lincoln ought to have been a book to confound Lincoln’s apologists and to help rebuild the American historical consciousness. Ironically, it is essentially correct in every charge it makes against Lincoln, making it all the more frustrating to the sympathetic reader. DiLorenzo’s love of the chase needs to be tempered by scrupulous attention to detail. Without it, his good work collapses. He is an author of evident courage and ability, but his sloppiness has earned him the abuse and ridicule of his critics. A book such as The Real Lincoln needed to be written, but until it is revised and corrected in a new edition, this is not that book. In the meantime, there is still hope for skeptical cynics.
 

jgoodguy

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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.

They understood, as DiLorenzo does not, that all economics is political economics, and that in a world dominated by monarchs it made sense to encourage the expansion of American manufacturing power through tariffs. According to DiLorenzo's libertarian-public choice analysis, Alexander Hamilton and his Whig followers — Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Lincoln above all — were arch-villain "statists" for supporting tariffs, while Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John C. Calhoun were defenders of "free trade." DiLorenzo seems not to know that the first protective tariff in American history (1816) was introduced by Calhoun and supported by Madison and Jefferson, and opposed by Webster. DiLorenzo is so blinded by his commitment to purely theoretical free trade that he is oblivious to the real growing division between pro-slavery and pro-freedom forces in America in the 1850s. He cannot see that tariffs were in the service of free trade because they were in the service of freedom: tariffs advantaged free labor and put the squeeze on slave-labor economies.
 

jgoodguy

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From above
DiLorenzo’s second rant chides Lincoln for not ending slavery on his own. He’s wonderfully oblivious to the fact that Lincoln understood that he was constrained by the Constitution in his efforts to end slavery, and that only the actions of the Confederates (who showed no interest in cooperating with emancipation) opened up the opportunity to Lincoln to act. Once more he revives Donald, only to distort what Donald said; once more he accepts Bennett at his word as an excuse to avoid doing any research on his own. My undergraduates know that they have to do better than that, but then DiLorenzo’s trained in economics, not history. DiLorenzo declares that in acting to end slavery Lincoln did “something he refused to do for fifty-four of his fifty-six years”; one wonders why Lincoln as an infant, child, or teenager didn’t act sooner, since DiLorenzo thinks he should have acted from the cradle.
 

jgoodguy

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Moreover, Lincoln’s supposed comment about the “deportation” of blacks in his Cooper Union speech was in fact a quotation from Thomas Jefferson, as Lincoln himself says (p. 18).
Not the saint Jefferson?
 

rittmeister

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just saying
 

TJD

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@TJD Love see you defend DiLorenzo
I really don't care about DiLorenzo perse. I care about the CW era, and issues around it. DiLorenzo is just one of many references to investigate. For example, DiL's criticism of the "Lincoln" movie doesn't interest me at all - fore or against.
 

General Lee

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You know just because I have certain views doesn't mean I identify or will defend some author that y'all think is some hero to us, I never heard of the guy till now but I have heard of the book but I haven't read it yet.
 

jgoodguy

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You know just because I have certain views doesn't mean I identify or will defend some author that y'all think is some hero to us, I never heard of the guy till now but I have heard of the book but I haven't read it yet.
You thought all of what you posted up without any references?
 
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