In history class, we were taught that Abraham Lincoln fought to end slavery on American soil. He was lauded as the great emancipator, and we were led to believe that the Civil War was solely for the purpose that "all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."
But something just doesn't add up.
In virtually every other country of the world, slavery ended through either manumission or some form of compensated emancipation. Abolition of slavery throughout the world occurred for religious, philosophical, and economic reasons. The advent of the industrial revolution and capital-intensive agriculture and industry began to render labor-intensive production uncompetitive, and this sealed its doom in the market economy.
Slavery, as an institution in America, was propped up by the Fugitive Slave Law, which Abraham Lincoln supported. It legalized returning runaway slaves to their owners with no judicial safeguards, such as a trial or a hearing. A federal slave commissioner was paid if he ordered return of an escaped slave.
Slavery was already in sharp decline in the upper South, and there was growing political support for a peaceful emancipation that could have ended slavery. Lincoln could have put in motion a process to end slavery, but instead he chose to wage a long, devastating war.
Less than one fourth of Southern adults owned slaves, most existed on large plantations. The average Southerner was not a slave owner, which I'm sure isn't taught in American History! In fact, if you listen to any of the modern media stations you would think every white person alive today was once a slave owner and every black person was born into slavery.
The war cost 620,000 military lives (about 3% of the population), and that number doesn't include the thousands of civilian deaths, and hundreds of thousands of men crippled for life! The financial and economic toll on the Southern states was so devastating that it took decades to recover!
Lincoln was not supportive of emancipation, he viewed it as a tool to be used in achieving the consolidation of federalized governmental power. He repeatedly referred to it as "saving the Union", but he knew it could only be saved by destroying the voluntary coalition of states that the constitutional convention had established. He wanted an imperial Federal government, not a merging of sovereign states. Lincoln's agenda was as follows:
1) protectionist tariffs (legal protection from international and domestic competition through trade tariffs and quotas, i.e. favors for well-connected special interest groups which would provide financial support for the politicians dispensing the favors),
2) government control of money through a nationalized banking system, and
3) government subsidies for businesses (tax-funded subsidies to politically connected businesses and industries, i.e. corporate welfare).
Politicians like to blame greedy corporations who are supposedly raising their prices too much for inflation, rather than acknowledging that it's because they are printing money to finance subsidies which come at an economic cost caused by the government itself! Obviously, this has the potential for generating a great deal of political corruption since they can finance their special-interest groups rather than being restricted to spending money only on things that benefit the public as a whole.
Sound familiar? It was Lincoln that started the decline of the American Government into the agenda pushing, inflation causing, self-serving group of politicians that we have in our legislation today.
“Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set.” Proverbs 22:28
There was a reason that the founding fathers didn't want any one person or party to have ultimate authority in America. They set up safeguards that would ensure all legislation had checks and balances. That's why we have three branches of government- the legislative, the judicial, and the executive.
Lincoln barely mentioned slavery before 1854. When the Whig Party, of which he was a member, imploded in the mid-1850's, Lincoln switched to the Republican Party.
Ebony magazine editor Lerone Bennett, Jr wrote "On at least fourteen occasions between 1854 and 1860, Lincon said unambiguously that he believed the Negro race was inferior to the white race." He also strongly defended the right of slaveowners to own their property saying that "when they remind us of their constitutional rights, I acknowledge them." Lincoln would deny blacks the right to vote, become jurors, and so on.
Lincoln was a lawyer who tried literally thousands of cases and was frequently employed by other lawyers as a consultant. In twenty-three years of litigation, he never defended a runaway slave, but he did defend slaveowner Robert Matson before the chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court. Isn't it odd that Lincoln, who is professed to be so bothered by the existence of slavery, attempted to condemn several dozen men and women into a lifetime of forced servitude for a modest legal fee?
When before the war, Lincoln was asked what should be done with the enslaved he said, "Send them to Liberia, to their own native land". Lincon also said, "There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, since they will carry back to their native soil the rich fruits of religion, civilization, law and liberty." Sounds idyllic, doesn't it. Let's translate- we don't want them in America, so we'll send them back to Africa.
Lincoln idolized a man named Henry Clay, a member of the Whig's Party and a Secretary of the state, who said of the Native Americans, "there was never a full-blooded Indian who took to civilization, it was not in their nature. Their disappearance from the human family will be no great loss to the world". He thought they were not worth preserving as a race, and since they were inferior to white-skinned people, their breed could not be improved. Such language proves that the Whig's Party was a group of white supremacists! Despite this, Lincoln claimed that Clay was a champion of liberty, equality, and a great humanitarian. Lincoln even based his campaign on many of Clay's ideologies.
From the very beginning, the right of secession was a last check on the potential abuse of power by a central government. The United States were founded by secessionists and began with a Declaration that justified the secession of the American states from the British government. Secession was the principle of the American Revolution. The original idea was that the states were sovereign and the federal government was created to serve their purposes. The constitution says that whenever a government becomes destructive of the rights of life, liberty, and property, citizens have a right to secede from that government and form a new one. In 1816, Jefferson said, "If any state in the Union will declare that it prefers separation... I have no hesitation in saying, let us separate."
This sentiment was so pervasive, in fact, that there were individual secession movements in what were at that time called the middle states- New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. These states contained three types of secessionists: those who wanted to join the Southern Confederacy, those who wished to form their own Central Confederacy, and those who simply preferred to allow the South to go in peace rather than essentially destroying the Union by holding it together by military force.
The idea that an American President would send an invading army to kill its own citizens in order to destroy the right of secession was an incomprehensible treachery. Consent at the barrel of a gun was viewed by these men as a sheer absurdity.
When Norway seceded from Sweden in 1905, it was done peacefully without war and in no way hurt either of the countries nor any of the rest of Europe.
Northern abolitionists had been arguing since the 1830's that the Northern states should secede from the Union and not be associated with slave owning states. The secession would no longer have to obey the Fugitive Slave Law, and assist in returning runaway slaves. Consequently, this could have potentially broken the back of slavery before the war even began. But this wouldn't have fit into Lincoln's plans for national domination.
In 1861, Lincoln arrested the Maryland political leaders in favor of peaceful succession and didn't permit them to assemble in the state legislature to debate the issue of secession. Delaware also had a great deal of support for a Central Confederacy, but Lincoln ordered the Federal army to occupy the state and prevented legislature from discussing the issue, which forced the state to "support" the cause under threat of bombardment.
His administration imprisoned, without trial, literally thousands of war opponents and shut down or destroyed dozens of newspapers that opposed his war policies.
Lincoln denied the right of secession only when it served his political purposes. He orchestrated the secession of western Virginia from the rest of the state; Although Virginia joined the Confederacy, West Virginia was allowed to be created because its population remained loyal to the Union and was admitted as a new state in 1863.
The Declaration of Independence listed a train of abuses by King George III that the founding fathers believed justified the colonies' secession from England. Many of these abuses were also perpetrated by Lincoln himself. Lincoln imposed military rule, trumped the judiciary and made judges dependent on his will, he created new bureaucracies to run the occupied states, allowed his federal soldiers to pillage and plunder supported by his own confiscation bills, subjected Americans to a jurisdiction foreign to the constitution, cut off trade with other parts of the nation and the world, imposed taxes without legislative consent, refused people the right of due process, and declared anyone who voiced an opinion opposite of his narrative a "traitor" and did everything to shut them down and silence them.
In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln claimed that the war was being fought in defense of the union, however it was the confederates who came out with their freedom subject to martial law until they accepted permanent federal supremacy.
Lincoln was determined to start a war, which he thought would only last a short time. His four years of attempted forced compliance through total war, followed by twelve more years of violence and lawlessness under military rule during "Reconstruction", is the worst episode of anarchy ever witnessed on American soil.
Ohio Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham stated that the purpose of all these dictatorial acts was not to "free the slaves" or even to "save the Union", but to dissolve state rights and governments and create a consolidated monarchy of vast centralized military despotism in which Lincoln and the Republican Party of the time could lord over the country- it was the Whig's economic agenda commonly referred to today as the "American System".
All during the New England secession crisis were arguments (from 1804 through 1814) that ended with a proposition for constitutional amendments, there was no interference from the federal government.
Even though a large majority of Americans, North and South, believed in a right of secession, Lincoln implemented a series of unconstitutional acts, including invasion without congressional consultation. He censored all telegraph communications, interfered with elections in the North by intimidation, confiscated private property and firearms, and many other things. Historian Clinton Rossiter said, "This amazing disregard for... the Constitution was considered by nobody as legal."
It was Lincoln's willingness to use brute military force, not his legal reasoning or his rhetorical talents that allowed him to get away with such a radical assault on constitutional liberties. Most historians don't even deny that Lincoln was a dictator, they just twist it to say that he was a "good" or "benevolent" dictator or label his tyranny as a "political achievement". How? You cannot destroy personal constitutional liberties in order to "preserve" the constitution! The ends don't justify the means.
I Thessalonians 5:15- See that none render evil for evil unto any man; but ever follow that which is good, both among yourselves, and to all men.
A crusade against slavery would have offered a compelling case for Lincoln's war, but he never made that case. Until the day he died, he insisted that the war was being fought to deny Southerners the right of secession. The war was to suppress a rebellion, not free slaves.
Many Southerners believed that the federal government had been acting in an unconstitutional manner for many years, particularly with regard to its fiscal and trade policies. Northerners knew this. On March 18, 1861, the Boston Transcript newspaper wrote "the mask has been thrown off, and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding States are now for commercial independence."
The Southern states feared that the government's economic policy would be one of massive plunder at the South's expense. The secession was a culmination of the decades-long feud, beginning with the 1828 Tariff of Abominations.
There's a myth which is currently taught as "history" that after the war federal policy was aimed at "binding the nation's wounds" in the conquered South. The intent was to centralize and consolidate power in Washington, D.C. The fact that the Republican Party believed that it was necessary to alter the Southern constitutions in order to denounce secession shows that they were lying when they claimed that right never existed.
The bodies that fell because of Lincoln's war are a direct contradiction to that line of thinking. The people of the Southern United States found themselves living under a government where their life, liberty, and property was at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district they happened to be found. The most shocking statement that Lincoln never reprimanded General Benjamin Butler for, was issuing an order that any woman who did not display proper respect for occupying Federal soldiers would be considered a prostitute and treated accordingly. The military was given broad discretion in determining what constituted disloyalty, and thousands of citizens were arrested and imprisoned, sometimes on mere rumors, without any investigations or trial. This continued in both the North and the South for the duration of the Lincoln administration.
If the war was about the ill treatment of another race of people, then why would Lincoln allow General John Pope who stated, "It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux... They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means a people with whom treaties or compromises can be made." to remain in charge? Because he didn't care about other races. On December 26, 1862, thirty-eight Native Americans were hanged in Mankato, MN under orders from President Abraham Lincoln himself!
O.M. Pie voiced his dismay at seeing so many corpses of women and young children in the streets of Atlanta, but Lincoln's chosen general, Sherman, said it was "a beautiful sight". There are no accurate casualty accounts, but many eyewitness accounts tell of large numbers of civilians, including slaves, being killed and maimed. The many instances of rape by federal soldiers are not documented. Black women suffered the most, and in response, blacks became just as bitterly opposed to the Federal army as any secessionist was.
Blacks who joined Sherman's army were made the personal servants of officers. So much for liberty and freedom for all!
One of Sherman's soldiers wrote in his diary, "Never before have I witnessed so much wanton destruction as on this march." Captain Poe described the march as an orgy of "robbing and plundering" and prayed that "it may never be my duty to see the like again."
In light of Lincoln's compulsion to be in contact by telegraph with his military commanders, it is safe to assume that he, too, approved of this type of warfare against unarmed women and children. Lincoln spent more time in the war office than he did in the White House, and repeatedly thanked Sherman, Sheridan, and Grant for their service.
To use the excuse that these men were just following orders is wrong. These men made certain that there were no paper trails that showed their heinous crimes, in fact they made sure to write down "orders" contrary to what their men were doing. These men could have, at any time, spoken against the depravity that was happening, yet many of them joined in it with great zeal! And the Generals turned a blind eye.
Acts 5:29- Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men.
Those who write about Lincoln generally gloss over or downplay these accounts as a byproduct of "times of war". However, if any Southern Generals had perpetrated these atrocious acts in Northern towns (the rampant destruction and murder of civilian life, along with leaving any surviving people to starve in the dead of winter) they would be written about as one of the greatest war crimes in history. It's quite fascinating how people can justify any amount of cruelty if it fits their ideoloty!
Genesis 9:6- Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.
Abraham Lincoln was very guilty in God's eyes. He shed blood abundantly in the pursuit of his political agenda. And it was pointless since there were plenty of groups standing up in protest of slavery!
The Quakers were among the first abolitionists because of their belief that slavery was an offense against God. Enlightenment advocated individual rights and the idea of impartiality for all human beings to be treated equally under the law.
Peaceful emancipation happened between 1813 and 1854 in at least 12 different countries and colonies. The political support structures for slavery were breaking down all around the world! It did not have to be done through bloodshed.
Missionaries and many other people assisted the ex-slaves in integrating into society, but the primary concern of the Lincoln administration was to get them registered to vote Republican- not to educate them, feed them, or help them find employment. If it was all about equality in voting, then why were blacks in Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Kansas not extended those rights? The war ended in 1865, but the 15th Amendment wasn't made law until 1870- five years later. Why weren't women given those rights? The 19th Amendment wasn't passed until 1919- forty-nine years after that!
Leviticus 24:22- Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger, as for one of your own country: for I am the LORD your God.
Don't think that I believe that slavery is okay. I believe the opposite, and the Bible teaches the opposite. Exodus 21:16- And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death. The bible requires capital punishment for slave traders.
The Bible is for voluntary servitude, not forced slavery. If a person indentures himself into a profession that is quite different than someone forcing another human being to live under their rule through threat of violence as a hostaged slave. God abhors the institution of slavery in all of its forms.
History has been rewritten to suit a certain party's political purposes. The notion that the federal Union preceded the states is a lie that Lincoln embraced as his main rationale for denying the rights of the states. The idea that slavery was the main reason for the Civil War is not true. Lincoln waged war in order to create a consolidated, centralized empire and the South tried to secede because it wanted no part of it!
Lincoln's own words and actions show the war was never anything else. In August 1858, he said, "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races." The indiscriminate bombing of cities by federal armies did not distinguish between soldiers and civilians, let alone between black persons and white persons. They waged the war to see to it that their agenda prevailed.
A centralized federal government doesn't take into account the needs of the individual. Its main objective is to maintain the power of the federal government. De Toqueville said it best, "However enlightened and however skillful a central power may be, it cannot of itself embrace all the details of the existence of a great nation... Centralization succeeds more easily, indeed, in subjecting the external actions of men to a certain uniformity, which at least commands our regard, independently of the object to which it is applied… Even whilst it invokes their assistance, it is on the condition that they shall act exactly as much as the Government chooses, and exactly in the manner it appoints."
The problem is the government. You have a choice, in Tocqueville’s view, between a government that protects freedom and a government that provides material security. You cannot have both.
When you take away the sovereignty of the state, which has representatives in the government to stand for the local citizens of its region and replace that with the sovereignty of the federal government, you end up with a system that decides where assets are allocated. Usually, the citizens aren't included in that decision. The "agenda" will be the most important thing, and you will be forced through either constant narrative or legal repression or military force into compliance.
You know who else is prophesied to want a centralized government? The antichrist! He wants a centralized global government of which he is the head.
Revelation 17:12-13- And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast. These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength unto the beast.
Daniel 7:24-25- And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise: and another shall rise after them; and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings. And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time.
What does the antichrist do when he comes into power? He changes times and laws. He persecutes those who don't submit to his authority.
Revelation 13:16-17- And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
The antichrist will make it impossible for those who don't submit to him to be able to buy and sell. He will destroy nation's economies with little regard for the innocent who will perish under his reign.
I see no difference between the tactics of the antichrist and those which Abraham Lincoln employed during the Civil War.
Lincoln’s political views were not those of our founding fathers, so one should not expect Lincoln to lead the nation after the ideas of our founders. The Union which existed before the Lincoln years must have been very different from the one that existed after, or else dictatorial powers would not have been needed in order to “save” it.
He was not the "honest Abe" we were all told he was in school. He was an agenda-pushing warmonger who created a dictatorship in America long before Hitler instituted his reign of terror in Europe. Just because the Civil War didn't include the rest of the world and didn't claim as many lives doesn't mean it was any less repugnant. Any person who would chose violence of force over peaceful negotiation should never be in a position of power, because as John Dalberg said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority." And unfortunately, Lincoln exercised both and Americans paid the price!
You may not agree with me, but I challenge you to get any book written by survivors from the South, on any of the Northern Generals, or even Lincoln himself, and see their words describing this war (along with their twisted justifications for such actions). I recommend The Real Lincoln by Thomas J. DiLoreno.
You have the right to your own opinion. However, you cannot change facts.
I Corinthians 14:38- But if any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant.
