Thomas Lucente: More to Lincoln than pretty words

Tuesday marked the 150th anniversary of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and Wednesday marked the 150th anniversary of his death.

And, of course, we were inundated last week with glowing assessments of his life and career and we had to endure the continual repeating of all the Lincoln myths ad nauseam.

Indeed, in all of world history, no one’s reputation ever benefited more by an assassin’s bullet, not even President John F. Kennedy, the most overrated president in U.S. history.

I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I am, at heart (and by education) a historian. History, when retold properly, is ugly.

Let’s face it. Lincoln entangled the United States in an illegal, immoral and unjust war. He tore the nation apart with his bloody and unnecessary war that killed as many as 850,000 of the 31.44 million Americans of the time. Rather than seek a political solution with the Southern states, he decided to use the might of the U.S. Army, bloated with conscripts, to attack and kill his fellow Americans.

In the process, he authorized the deployment of deadly new weaponry such as mines, ironclad warships and niter (a 19th-century version of napalm). He burned whole cities. He illegally spent war funds before congressional appropriation and ignored rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court.

He did this to prevent the Southern states, which joined the Union voluntarily, from choosing to exercise their natural, God-given right to self-governance, a right explicitly stated in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. A right, also, by the way, for which Lincoln himself advocated before he was president.

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.”

And if you found yourself on the wrong side of Lincoln, you likely found yourself imprisoned. He ran roughshod over the Constitution while pursing his single-minded goal of preventing the Southern states from leaving the union.

Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus — a right that Thomas Jefferson urged to be in the Constitution in its strongest form — and ordered the military to arrest thousands of people who spoke out against his illegal war, including an Ohio congressman who gave anti-war speeches. He imprisoned political enemies in the name of preserving the Union and held them indefinitely without charges.

He formed military tribunals to try civilians, an act the Supreme Court said was unconstitutional. On Dec. 26, 1862, 38 alleged Indian raiders were hanged by his order in Mankato, Minnesota, in what is still the largest mass execution on U.S. soil.

Lincoln shut down newspapers that editorialized against his war. On May 18, 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.”

Lincoln blatantly ignored the Constitution and ruthlessly expanded the power of government.

Perhaps the biggest myth is the cloak of abolition in which the revisionists have wrapped him.

Lincoln was a racist who cared not whether slavery ended. He made this very clear in speeches and letters. To him, abolition was nothing more than political and war strategies that he pulled out when convenient to advance his single-minded cause of crippling the Confederacy.

In an 1862 letter to Horace Greeley, Lincoln wrote, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

Even his Emancipation Proclamation, a bribe to beg the Southern states to rejoin the Union, was a hollow gesture that freed no slaves. And as a lawyer, he defended slave owners.

Even if one believes that in his heart he wanted the undeniably evil institution of slavery ended, he had no love of blacks.

In his 1858 debates against Stephen Douglas, Lincoln stressed that whites were superior to blacks and that they should never be allowed to vote, serve on juries, marry whites or hold public office. He also wanted to return blacks to Africa and as president supported programs to do so.

In 1862, Frederick Douglass, the greatest civil rights leader in U.S. history, described him as a “miserable tool of traitors and rebels” and “quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred.”

On Aug. 14, 1862, Lincoln invited a group of black ministers to the White House, not for a discussion but for a lecture. He told them, “You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. … It affords a reason at least why we should be separated. … The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.”

Yet, Lincoln apologists will claim his public statements were not his true feelings and were only said out of political expediency.

How convenient.

Still, Lincoln could certainly turn a pretty phrase. His speeches were filled with sentiment that even a libertarian could love.

Unfortunately, while he knew the language of liberty, he would give his speech, leave the podium, and wipe his feet on the Constitution.

In other words, the first modern American politician.