and was so impressed I'm posting it here.
President Lincoln, who is considered by most historians (or at
least the politically correct ones) to be the best and certainly the most
important U.S. President, wielded power in a fashion never seen before nor
since. The fact that he died as a martyr is why history has viewed him in such
a kind albeit sanitized light.
During the Civil War,
Lincoln continuously circumvented the law and in many cases suspended the
Constitution altogether. In doing so, Lincoln denied the rights of citizens he
was sworn to protect. He suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus, closed courts by
force, and arrested citizens and elected officials without cause. Lincoln also
raised troops without the consent of Congress, closed-down newspapers whose
writers displayed any dissent to U.S. policy.
Lincoln’s
troops razed the South and doomed to poverty–generations of Southerners for
many years to come. General Sherman‘s
“March to the Sea” was nothing more than a marauding rampage filled with
robbery, rape, and murder. These men were less soldiers on a military mission
and more common thugs on a crime spree. Northern armies brought war to women,
children, and privately held property as a matter of official policy (rather
than as so-called “collateral damage”).
Lincoln ordered
the arrest of Baltimore police chief George P. Kane, police commissioner
Charles Howard, as well as fellow commissioners: William H. Gatchell, John W.
Davis, and Charles D. Hinks. Baltimore Mayor George W. Brown was arrested and
sent to Fort McHenry. The men were incarcerated because they dared to publicly disagree
with Lincoln and refused to carry-out the President’s tyrannical orders.
Baltimore was
placed under federal control and a military police force was formed.
Both the
continents of Europe and South America ended the practice of slavery, and
unlike the United States government–they did so without murdering 700,000 of
their own citizens. The abhorrent practice of slavery could have and would have
been ended in this country, without ever firing a shot.
Contrary to
popular belief (as perpetuated by government schools), slavery was a national
institution, it was not unique to the South. Upon his inauguration, Lincoln
could have freed the slaves in the Northern states which would have put severe
diplomatic pressure on the South. However, Lincoln besides being a tyrant was
also an incredible hypocrite. Lincoln’s multitude of personal letters show his
outright disgust for the black man and his truly racist views.
Consider a few
rarely spoken facts:
- -Northern
General U.S. Grant continued to hold a slave for nearly a year after the
war. In fact, it took an act of Congress to finally free the man from
Grant’s possession.
- -Northern
General Tecumseh Sherman was arrested many times for brutally abusing
several of his slaves.
- Conversely,
Confederate General Robert E. Lee
freed all of his slaves prior to the start of the war. That act by the
military leader of the South truly displays that for the
Confederacy, the war was only about states’ rights and a just
rebellion against tyranny–not about slavery!
Lincoln’s War
(otherwise known as the Civil War), was much less about freeing oppressed
blacks and much more about the federal government exerting complete control
over all citizens. Lincoln’s actions were a direct assault upon the wishes of
our founding fathers. Lincoln cared very little for the rule of law, as
evidenced by his numerous suspensions of U.S. Constitutional rights.
I believe that
had Lincoln survived his second term–his place in this nation’s history would
be seen in a much different light. Furthermore, had the Civil War ended with a
different outcome, Lincoln and many of his generals would have been deservedly
tried as war criminals.
Of course, the
victors write the history books–even when they tell lies.
LINCOLN’S
CRIMES
1. Lincoln
waged a war that cost the lives of 620,000 Americans. Including the murder of
50,000 innocent Southern civilians.
2. He arrested
several thousand Marylanders suspected of Southern sympathies, including 30
members of the State legislature, a US Congressman representing Maryland, the
mayor and police commissioner of Baltimore, and most of the Baltimore city
council. These political detainees were imprisoned in Fort McHenry and Point
Lookout without trial, in many cases, for several years.
3. He suspended
the writ of habeas corpus without the consent of
Congress (as required by the Constitution).
4. He illegally
shut down and confiscated the printing presses of dozens of newspapers that had
spoken out against him.
5. He
re-instated and summarily promoted an Army officer who had been court martialed
and cashiered by the US Army for war crimes.
6. He even had
an arrest warrant issued for the Chief Justice of the US Supreme
Court because said justice refused to back his illegal actions.
7. Chief
Justice Roger B Taney ruled that Lincolns actions were illegal, criminal and
unconstitutional.
8. He invaded
the South without the consent of Congress as required by the Constitution.
9. He blockaded
Southern ports without a delclaration of war, as required by the Constitution.
10. He
imprisoned without trial, hundreds of newspaper editors and owners and censored
all newspaper and telegraph communication.
11. He created
two new states without the consent of the citizens of those states in order to
artificially inflate the Republican Partys electoral vote.
12. He ordered
Federal troops to interfere with Northern elections to assure his Parties
victories.
13. He
confiscated private property, including firearms, in violation of the Second
Amendment; and effectively gutted the Tenth and Ninth Amendments as well.
14. He had his
Generals attack US cities full of women and children and burn them to the
ground.
Still not
convinced? Well let’s look at some really really hard facts that will be hard
for you to swallow. The follow was written by Thomas J. DiLorenz.
One hundred
thirty-six years after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox,
Americans are still fascinated with the War for Southern Independence. The
larger bookstores devote an inordinate amount of shelf space to books about the
events and personalities of the war; Ken Burns’s “Civil War” television series
and the movie “Gettysburg” were blockbuster hits; dozens of new books on the
war are still published every year; and a monthly newspaper, Civil War News,
lists literally hundreds of seminars, conferences, reenactments, and
memorial events related to the war in all 50 states and the District of
Columbia all year long. Indeed, many Northerners are “still fighting the war”
in that they organize a political mob whenever anyone attempts to display a
Confederate heritage symbol in any public place.
Americans are
still fascinated by the war because many of us recognize it as the defining
event in American history. Lincoln’s war established myriad precedents that
have shaped the course of American government and society ever since: the
centralization of governmental power, central banking, income taxation,
protectionism, military conscription, the suspension of constitutional
liberties, the “rewriting” of the Constitution by federal judges, “total war,”
the quest for a worldwide empire, and the notion that government is one big
“problem solver.”
Perhaps the
most hideous precedent established by Lincoln’s war, however, was the
intentional targeting of defenseless civilians. Human beings did not always
engage in such barbaric acts as we have all watched in horror in recent days.
Targeting civilians has been a common practice ever since World War II, but its
roots lie in Lincoln’s war.
In 1863 there
was an international convention in Geneva, Switzerland, that sought to codify
international law with regard to the conduct of war. What the convention sought
to do was to take the principles of “civilized” warfare that had evolved over
the previous century, and declare them to be a part of international law that
should be obeyed by all civilized societies. Essentially, the convention
concluded that it should be considered to be a war crime, punishable by
imprisonment or death, for armies to attack defenseless citizens and towns;
plunder civilian property; or take from the civilian population more than what
was necessary to feed and sustain an occupying army.
The Swiss
jurist Emmerich de Vattel (1714-67, author of The Law of Nations, was
the world’s expert on the proper conduct of war at the time. “The people, the
peasants, the citizens, take no part in it, and generally have nothing to fear
from the sword of the enemy,” Vattel wrote. As long as they refrain from
hostilities themselves they “live in as perfect safety as if they were
friends.” Occupying soldiers who would destroy private property should be
regard as “savage barbarians.”
In 1861 the
leading American expert in international law as it relates to the proper
conduct of war was the San Francisco attorney Henry Halleck, a former army
officer and West Point instructor whom Abraham Lincoln appointed
General-in-Chief of the federal armies in July of 1862. Halleck was the author
of the book, International Law, which was used as a text at West Point
and essentially echoed Vattel’s writing.
On April 24,
1863, the Lincoln administration seemed to adopt the precepts of international
law as expressed by the Geneva Convention, Vattel, and Halleck, when it issued
General Order No. 100, known as the “Lieber Code.” The Code’s author was the
German legal scholar Francis Leiber, an advisor to Otto von Bismarck and a
staunch advocate of centralized governmental power. In his writings Lieber
denounced the federal system of government created by the American founding
fathers as having created “confederacies of petty sovereigns” and dismissed the
Jeffersonian philosophy of government as a collection of “obsolete ideas.” In
Germany he was arrested several times for subversive activities. He was a
perfect ideological fit with Lincoln’s own political philosophy and was just
the man Lincoln wanted to outline the rules of war for his administration.
The Lieber Code
paid lip service to the notion that civilians should not be targeted in war,
but it contained a giant loophole: Federal commanders were permitted to
completely ignore the Code if, “in their discretion,” the events of the war
would warrant that they do so. In other words, the Lieber Code was purely
propaganda.
The fact is,
the Lincoln government intentionally targeted civilians from the very beginning
of the war. The administration’s battle plan was known as the “Anaconda Plan”
because it sought to blockade all Southern ports and inland waterways and
starving the Southern civilian economy. Even drugs and medicines were on the
government’s list of items that were to be kept out of the hands of
Southerners, as far as possible.
As early as the
first major battle of the war, the Battle of First Manassas in July of 1861, federal
soldiers were plundering and burning private homes in the Northern Virginia
countryside. Such behavior quickly became so pervasive that on June 20, 1862 –
one year into the war – General George McClellan, the commanding general of the
Army of the Potomac, wrote Lincoln a letter imploring him to see to it that the
war was conducted according to “the highest principles known to Christian
civilization” and to avoid targeting the civilian population to the extent that
that was possible. Lincoln replaced McClellan a few months later and ignored
his letter.
Most Americans
are familiar with General William Tecumseh Sherman’s “march to the sea” in
which his army pillaged, plundered, raped, and murdered civilians as it marched
through Georgia in the face of scant military opposition. But such atrocities
had been occurring for the duration of the war; Sherman’s March was nothing
new.
In 1862 Sherman
was having difficulty subduing Confederate sharpshooters who were harassing
federal gunboats on the Mississippi River near Memphis. He then adopted the
theory of “collective responsibility” to “justify” attacking innocent civilians
in retaliation for such attacks. He burned the entire town of Randolph,
Tennessee, to the ground. He also began taking civilian hostages and either
trading them for federal prisoners of war or executing them.
Jackson and
Meridian, Mississippi, were also burned to the ground by Sherman’s troops even
though there was no Confederate army there to oppose them. After the burnings
his soldiers sacked the town, stealing anything of value and destroying the
rest. As Sherman biographer John Marzalek writes, his soldiers “entered
residences, appropriating whatever appeared to be of value . . . those articles
which they could not carry they broke.”
After the
destruction of Meridian Sherman boasted that “for five days, ten thousand of
our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes,
sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire…. Meridian no longer exists.”
In The Hard
Hand of War historian Mark Grimsley argues that Sherman has been unfairly
criticized as the “father” of waging war on civilians because he “pursued a
policy quite in keeping with that of other Union commanders from Missouri to
Virginia.” Fair enough. Why blame just Sherman when such practices were an
essential part of Lincoln’s entire war plan and were routinely practiced by all
federal commanders? Sherman was just the most zealous of all federal commanders
in targeting Southern civilians, which is apparently why he became one of
Lincoln’s favorite generals.
In his First
Inaugural Address Jefferson said that any secessionists should be allowed to
“stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may
be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” But by 1864 Sherman would
announce that “to the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is
mercy.” In 1862 Sherman wrote his wife that his purpose in the war would be
“extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but
the people” of the South. His loving and gentle wife wrote back that her wish
was for “a war of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like
swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one
habitation is left standing.”
The Geneva
Convention of 1863 condemned the bombardment of cities occupied by civilians,
but Lincoln ignored all such restrictions on his behavior. The bombardment of
Atlanta destroyed 90 percent of the city, after which the remaining civilian
residents were forced to depopulate the city just as winter was approaching and
the Georgia countryside had been stripped of food by the federal army. In
his memoirs Sherman boasted that his army destroyed more than $100 million in
private property and carried home $20 million more during his “march to the
sea.”
Sherman was not
above randomly executing innocent civilians as part of his (and Lincoln’s)
terror campaign. In October of 1864 he ordered a subordinate, General Louis
Watkins, to go to Fairmount, Georgia, “burn ten or twelve houses” and “kill a
few at random,” and “let them know that it will be repeated every time a train
is fired upon.”
Another Sherman
biographer, Lee Kennett, found that in Sherman’s army “the New York regiments
were . . . filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails
of the Old World.” Although it is rarely mentioned by “mainstream” historians,
many acts of rape were committed by these federal soldiers. The University of
South Carolina’s library contains a large collection of thousands diaries and
letters of Southern women that mention these unspeakable atrocities.
Shermans’ band
of criminal looters (known as “bummers”) sacked the slave cabins as well as the
plantation houses. As Grimsley describes it, “With the utter disregard for
blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave
cabins, taking whatever they liked.” A routine procedure would be to hang a
slave by his neck until he told federal soldiers where the plantation owners’
valuables were hidden.
General Philip
Sheridan is another celebrated “war hero” who followed in Sherman’s footsteps
in attacking defenseless civilians. After the Confederate army had finally
evacuated the Shenandoah Valley in the autumn of 1864 Sheridan’s 35,000
infantry troops essentially burned the entire valley to the ground. As Sheridan
described it in a letter to General Grant, in the first few days he “destroyed
over 2200 barns . . . over 70 mills . . . have driven in front of the army over
4000 head of stock, and have killed . . . not less than 3000 sheep. . . .
Tomorrow I will continue the destruction.”
In letters home
Sheridan’s troops described themselves as “barn burners” and “destroyers of
homes.” One soldier wrote home that he had personally set 60 private homes on
fire and opined that “it was a hard looking sight to see the women and children
turned out of doors at this season of the year.” A Sergeant William T.
Patterson wrote that “the whole country around is wrapped in flames, the
heavens are aglow with the light thereof . . . such mourning, such
lamentations, such crying and pleading for mercy [by defenseless women]… I
never saw or want to see again.”
As horrific as
the burning of the Shenandoah Valley was, Grimsley concluded that it was
actually “one of the more controlled acts of destruction during the war’s final
year.” After it was all over Lincoln personally conveyed to Sheridan “the
thanks of the Nation.”
Sherman
biographer Lee Kennett is among the historians who bend over backwards to
downplay the horrors of how Lincoln waged war on civilians. Just recently, he
published an article in the Atlanta Constitution arguing that Sherman
wasn’t such a bad guy after all and should not be reviled by Georgians as much
as he is. But even Kennett admitted in his biography of Sherman that:
Had the
Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their
chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves
justified…in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command
for violations of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against
noncombatants.
Sherman himself
admitted after the war that he was taught at West Point that he could be hanged
for the things he did. But in war the victors always write the history and are
never punished for war crimes, no matter how heinous. Only the defeated suffer
that fate. That is why very few Americans are aware of the fact that the
unspeakable atrocities of war committed against civilians, from the firebombing
of Dresden, the rape of Nanking, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the World Trade
Center bombings, had their origins in Lincoln’s war. This is yet another reason
why Americans will continue their fascination with the War for Southern
Independence.
Thomas J.
DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. He is the
author of, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an
Unnecessary War.
