This week on Q&A, our guest is Thomas DiLorenzo, author of two books on Abraham Lincoln, The
Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked.
Thomas DiLorenzo, when did you first get interested in Abraham Lincoln?
Probably in the late 90s when I was a Civil War buff and I started reading a lot about
about the Civil War and took courses at the Smithsonian, I went on field trips, it was
just a hobby of mine, and I'm an economist by training, I'm an economics professor at
Loyola College in Baltimore, and I started thinking of how I could combine my profession,
economics, with Civil War history, and I thought writing about Lincoln was the way, and I think
the economic side of the story of Lincoln and the Civil War has been underdeveloped,
How would you describe your feelings about Lincoln today?
I think it's dangerous to deify a politician. I mentioned in my writings that politicians of all parties, even the Communist Party USA, have tried to attach their agenda to the martyred Abraham Lincoln and have used him and his words and his deeds for all sorts of purposes, some good and some not so good.
And so I think it's a really high opinion.
And I guess one of the things that really bothered me when I started looking into this was when I found out that all the other countries of the world that ended slavery in the 19th century did it peacefully.
That included New England and Ohio and Pennsylvania and Indiana, the northern United States.
And as an economist, I started thinking, well, why was this not an alternative for America?
Why was it only in America where there was a war attached to the ending of slavery?
And that's why the subtitle of my first book, The Real Lincoln, includes the words an unnecessary war.
I think it could have been possible for us to do what England and Spain and France and Denmark and other countries did, end slavery peacefully.
So what was the purpose? And I've concluded that the purpose of the invasion of the southern states was, what Lincoln said it was, was to destroy the secession movement.
and he called it Saving the Union, but all the death that was attached to that is the thing that sort of haunts me that, you know, was it really necessary for some 650 million or 650,000 Americans to have died and, you know, if you standardize that to today's population, which is ten times higher than it was in 1860, you're talking the equivalent of five or six million people dying, you know, standardizing for a much larger society
and so that is what really hit me hard of why all that death was necessary just to save the union and on top of that I argue that the union wasn't saved because the union was voluntary.
The union of the founders was voluntary and it was no longer voluntary after 1865.
When did you write your first either essay or book on Abraham Lincoln?
I guess my first essay was in a journal called The Independent Review in 96.
It's a peer-reviewed academic journal published in California, and after a couple of years of continued research on this topic, I decided that each section of that paper could be expanded to tell a longer story, and so I did that.
I did that. I published a book called The Real Lincoln in 2002, and it was kind of interesting.
I had already finished this, and a publisher who called me, a commercial publisher, said,
I read your article and I liked it a lot. Would you be interested in expanding this into a book?
And I had the book sitting right in front of me, and so I didn't need to hire an agent or shop around the manuscript.
It was Prima Publishing Company, and they were bought out by Kronforum about a year later, after the book came out.
In this book I have in my lap, Lincoln Unmask is crime form.
And how do your books sell? How well?
Well, The Real Lincoln sold very well. I was interviewed, the person who wrote the forward to The Real Lincoln is Walter Williams,
this syndicated columnist, he's a professor at George Mason University not too far from here in Fairfax, Virginia.
And he was a guest host of the Rush Limbaugh show one day and he called me up at 7 a.m.
And he said, Rush Limbaugh is ill. I'm his guest host. Would you like to come on and talk about your book?
You know, Every Author's Dream. And he kept me on for an entire hour.
And my Amazon.com sales rankings went to number two the next day.
I think Montel Williams' diet book was the only one that beat me out on that one day.
So for a while it sold very well and created tremendous controversy, as I'm sure you know.
Why, from your perspective, do you think that people are deifying him unnecessarily?
Well, there's sort of an interesting history of that. After the war, after Lincoln was assassinated, the New England clergy began with a deification.
I have in my files, in my research files, an old magazine article that has a picture of Abe Lincoln with angels wings ascending into the sky in an open tomb at the bottom of a picture.
And this was the sort of thing that went on in the immediate years after the Civil War.
And I think that sort of led to the deification of the presidency, of the American presidency.
And this idea that some people call American exceptionalism, that Americans are exceptional people,
where there was a new birth of freedom during the Civil War, the story goes.
And I think a lot of Americans sort of attach their own sense of morality to the whole story of Lincoln.
And so I think that's one reason why I get attacked a lot for trying to criticize certain things that Lincoln has done.
Who attacked you?
Well, I've had quite a few debates with the academics who have had careers in sort of deifying Lincoln in their writings.
And so I'm an economist and I'm used to a lot of back and forth debates and criticisms for 20 years before I wrote the Lincoln book.
I was an economics professor and I would go to meetings, academic meetings, and that's what we do.
We criticize each other and it's usually constructive criticism.
It's not just showboating or trying to attack somebody.
I found that this part of the history profession, when it comes to Lincoln, you can criticize Thomas Jefferson, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Franklin Roosevelt, but you can't criticize Lincoln, apparently, in the history profession.
And I thought that was very unscholarly and unprofessional and closed-minded, sort of an attitude on the part of some segments of the history profession, which is a big part of the history profession.
And so I see no reason why you can't take a look at Lincoln, just like you look at any other president, and look at the good and the bad, as far as that's concerned.
And there's plenty of bad, you know, like Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and the mass arrests of tens of thousands of northern civilians.
It is shutting down of hundreds of opposition newspapers. These are things that most Americans have never heard of.
I've given public speeches about this. People are dumbfounded. They accuse me of being a liar because they were never taught this in school.
And, of course, it's all well documented. It's not a secret, but it's just one of these things that the historians know about all of this.
But the average American doesn't seem to know, unless he reads my books, I guess, and the books of a few others.
Where did you get your education?
I got my PhD at Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
Back then they called it VPI when I was in school,
and then it turned into Virginia Tech
once they got a good football team.
It sort of changed, so that's where I got my PhD.
I was a student of James Buchanan and Gordon Tulloch,
who are now at George Mason,
right down the road from here once again.
And they were sort of pioneers in a field called public choice
that combines economics and political science.
And so that's one of the reasons why I get interested in sort of analyzing a historical figure like Lincoln, drawing on both economics and politics at the same time.
Where did you get your undergraduate work?
I went to Westminster College in Pennsylvania, a small liberal arts college in western Pennsylvania.
And Loyola of Baltimore is what kind of school?
Loyola College in Baltimore. It's a liberal arts college. It's associated with the Jesuits, just like Georgetown is or Notre Dame.
We have about 3,500 undergraduate students. We have an engineering school, but the emphasis is on liberal arts.
And we have a big graduate business program and education program.
How long have you been there?
I've been there since 1992.
And what happened, once you started writing what a lot of people would say would be somewhat anti-Lincoln stuff, what happened to your life? How did it change?
Well, I've been in quite a few debates as far as that goes, and just last October I was in a debate in Chicago in front of 600 people with a local lawyer who's quite a Lincoln fan, and I think his law firm has the word Lincoln in it, the Lincoln law firm, and he's a big shot in the Republican Party in Illinois,
And so I went into the belly of the beast and had a debate on, was Lincoln a friend or foe of freedom?
And so I never would have thought when I was working on my PhD in economics that someday I would be going to Illinois and debating whether Abraham Lincoln is a friend or foe of freedom.
But so that certainly was a huge change. I've enjoyed the second book that you have in your lap there.
The reason I wrote that was after the first book came out, The Real Lincoln, there were also lots of responses by academics and others,
and I kept responding, and I kept coming up with new material, and I learned that I had sort of an army of researchers all around the world
that would keep sending me material that they had dug up of graduate students and others,
And so I gathered so much more information that I decided, well, I have a new book. I have enough for a second book on this. And that, again, I never anticipated I'd be writing two books on Abraham Lincoln after spending 20 years writing articles for academic journals and economics and public finance and things like that.
Let me read something that you wrote this couple years ago, a plagiarist's contribution to Lincoln idolatry.
And you wrote it for LewRockwell.com, which I see you write a lot for. Who is Lew Rockwell?
Lew Rockwell is a friend of mine who started a, it's not really a think tag, it's an educational institution in Auburn, Alabama, where Auburn University is.
And it's devoted to putting on programs of study of the free market Austrian School of Economics.
Probably the best known Austrian economist is Friedrich Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize in 1974.
and so there's a whole long tradition that started out in Europe and Hayek
and his mentor Ludwig von Mises both came to the United States Mises right
during World War II and in his student Hayek later years and so this
organization in Auburn Alabama carries forward their work in economics and so
And Lew has a website, lewrockwell.com, it's separate from the Mises Institute, which is his institute in Auburn, but it deals more with political issues as well.
A lot of economic policy issues are covered, but political, historical issues and even health.
People write articles on alternative methods of health maintenance all the time on there.
You're a Hayek follower. What does that mean? What do you believe?
You believe that private property is the essential ingredient of a free society and a sound economy.
You believe that markets tend to allocate resources better than governments.
And you probably believe that governments are sort of destined to do very poorly at just about anything they do,
whether it's waging war or solving poverty, things like that.
And Hayek was a very learned scholar as he has adherents all over the world.
And so if you want to study markets and understand how markets and the commercial world works,
that's how I was attracted to it.
I thought that these people like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman,
the late Milton Friedman, all really understood and had a deep knowledge of how the commercial world works.
And they were all good writers.
They did not concentrate on math as much as your typical economist does, but they wrote for the people, for a broad audience as well as their fellow academics. I always found that very attractive.
What would Abraham Lincoln have thought of a Friedrich von Hayek had he been alive back in his time?
Well, Lincoln was a, I call him the political son of Alexander Hamilton in my book.
And Hamilton, when he was Treasury Secretary, he advocated essentially bringing the British mercantilist system to America.
This mercantilist system, it's kind of a tongue twister of a word.
It was basically a system of policies that benefitted primarily politically connected businesses
at the expense of everyone else, at the expense of consumers and other businesses.
There were government sanctioned monopolies in England, for example.
There were barriers to international trade as part of it.
There were what we today would call corporate welfare or subsidies to politically favored businesses.
And Hamilton favored all of this.
And after his death, the mantle for this movement to sort of bring British mercantilism to America
fell to the Whig Party and Henry Clay and then to the Republican Party.
And Abraham Lincoln always said that Henry Clay was his political role model.
He called him the Boe ideal of a statesman in one of his speeches.
And this, by the way, is one of the reasons I got interested in writing a book on Lincoln,
The great thing is that he spent 28 years of his off and on political involvement before becoming president,
advocating what Henry Clay and Hamilton called the American system of high protectionist tariffs,
a central bank run by politicians in the nation's capital, and government subsidies to corporations.
And the Whig Party thought this would be the key to perpetual political power,
have a bank that could print money, tariffs that would block competition, so you would have all of the big corporations, mostly in the North, on your side as the Whig Party.
And so Lincoln picked up that mantle as the Republican nominee and then President.
And one of the stories I tell in my book, The Real Lincoln, is that there was a political battle over these economic policies for about 70 years.
And the Whigs and the old Federalists of Hamilton's day had very little success in getting any of this done over this time.
But it was all put into place during the Lincoln regime.
Tariffs went up to 45 to 50 percent and stayed there until Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913.
The National Currency Acts that I write about in my writings, that was sort of a resurrection of Hamilton's central banking idea.
And of course the railroad subsidies, the big subsidies to the railroad corporations that started during the Civil War and thereafter.
And so Hayek would have been opposed to every bit of that. That's all interventionist, anti-free market, big government economic policy.
And so there are a lot of historians who don't understand much about economics and they look at these things and they tend to judge these policies by the intentions of the people who advocate them.
I'll say, well, I think Abraham Lincoln was a great man. He educated these things. Therefore, they must have been good ideas. That's essentially the arguments that are made.
Well, you can agree that he was a great man and he had good intentions, but these were bad policies nevertheless. I think bad for America.
I still want to come back to what you wrote, but I want to ask you something. You said, was he a great man?
When you consider that he had less than one year of formal education, and he became one of the top lawyers in the United States, self-taught, he certainly had greatness, I think he was brilliant, I think he was a genius, and I think a great tragedy for America, however, is that he used his genius to essentially manipulate the South Carolinians into firing the first shot at Fort Sumter and plunging the whole nation into a war and then invading his own country.
After, you know, at Fort Sumter, as I'm sure you know, no one was killed or hurt, but the response was a full-scale invasion of the entire southern states, and so I think he used his genius in a way that, in my latest book, Lincoln Unmasked, I write about how wouldn't it have been great had he used this genius to be more statesmanlike and end slavery peacefully, like the British and the Spaniards did, and then do other things for America.
How did he trick the South Carolinians?
Well, he promised he would not send warships to Fort Sumter, certainly, when he did.
And then in my book I quote him a letter from Lincoln to his naval commander, Commander Fox,
This is David Fox thanking him for his assistance in getting the outcome that they desired and the outcome that they desired was getting the South Carolinians to fire on Fort Sumter because he guessed correctly that the people of the North would rally behind the flag and support the war that he wanted to get into.
At the same time, the Confederates had sent peace commissioners to Washington to offer to pay the South's portion of the national debt, to pay for federal forts like Fort Sumter. Napoleon III of France offered to broker some sort of compromise, but Lincoln refused to speak to any of them. He wouldn't see any of them. He was determined to go to war, which he did.
Why was he determined to go to war?
I think he came up with this idea of the mystical union.
One of his speeches he talked about the mystic chords of memory of the union.
But up to that time, a great deal of Americans, I would argue most Americans,
understood that the union was voluntary and that it would be an atrocity
and if any state left to march an army into that state and kill some of its inhabitants
just to keep it back into the Union.
In my book, The Real Lincoln, I ran across a big two-volume set of books called Northern
Editorials on Secession by a man named Howard Perkins and it just reprinted Northern newspaper
editorials in 1859, 1860, and 1861 about this whole issue of secession and some other topics
And he concludes that the majority of the newspapers, from New York to Cincinnati to Vermont, Wisconsin, in the North,
were in favor of letting the South go peacefully, because they believed in the old Jeffersonian dictum that the Union was voluntary.
In the Declaration of Independence, when governments derived their just powers from the consent of the governed,
And when the northerners saw the south saying, we no longer consent to being governed by Washington, D.C., most of them said, well, we'll let them go. Horace Greeley, the famous newspaper man, he's often quoted as saying this.
He might have thought they were mistaken or wrong-headed, but let them go, and maybe we can persuade them to come back into the Union at some future date, which seemed to be the attitude of a lot of these newspaper people.
Let me read finally what you wrote in lewrockwell.com. You say, Doris Kearns Goodwin is a museum-quality
specimen of a court historian, an intellectual or pseudo-intellectual who is devoted to pulling
the wool over the public's eyes by portraying even the most immoral, corrupt and sleazy
politicians as great, wise and altruistic men. What's behind that, Stan?
Well, you know, if you read my article, I went through all the research from the internet on how Doris Burns Goodwin essentially admitted plagiarism, and she was taken off the air.
She was the usual commentator on the presidency on network television for years, and she was taken off the Pulitzer Prize committee because of the plagiarism.
And she laid low for a couple of months, and then she's back on television telling us who we should vote for president, and pontificating about all these sorts of issues.
And so that's one of the reasons why I thought this is sort of odd.
She had just written this big book on Lincoln called Team of Rivals.
I think it's a 960-page book. You probably have interviewed her.
But I'll give you one example of what I mean there.
And when Lincoln was inaugurated in his first inaugural address, he pledged his support for a constitutional amendment that had already passed the House and the Senate that would have forbidden the federal government from ever interfering in southern slavery.
And not only did he support that, it's right there in his first inaugural address, but he orchestrated the whole thing.
After he was elected, he got William Seward, who would become his Secretary of State, to get this through the Senate.
And Doris Kearns Goodwin writes about this, as I do.
I look at these facts that Lincoln was willing to see slavery exist enshrined within the Constitution,
and it had never been explicitly in the Constitution, long after his own lifetime, as far as he knew.
And I thought that was an immoral act.
I think that's not only an immoral act, but it's one of these things where it's been kept from Americans.
I was looking at emails from people challenging me to show them where this amendment is.
It was called the Corwin Amendment, named after a member of Congress.
Doris Kearns Goodwin writes about the same thing and praises Lincoln for it because she claims it helped him keep the Republican Party together by doing this.
And the theme of her whole book is what a clever political manipulator Lincoln was, and then it kept the party together.
My view of that is that a clever political manipulator can be a horribly dangerous thing.
How do you get to be a clever political manipulator?
Well, you're an expert liar and conniver. That's my view of it.
And so people who write books about liars and connivers and politics and praises them,
I'm a little dubious of their reputations.
I don't think they deserve the respect that they sometimes get in their profession or in the public.
in the public.
Were there other people that she wrote about you felt that she has applied this to?
Well, she's written about Lyndon Johnson, who she worked for, and you just say a lot
of good things about Lyndon Johnson, and of course he's had his share of criticism too.
But I thought she kind of pulled her punches, and a lot of things she wrote about Lyndon
Johnson and the Kennedys seem to me to be idol worship as opposed to analysis.
And she claims that part of her expertise is in a field that I discovered when I started becoming more interdisciplinary in writing on Lincoln. It's called Psychohistory.
And not psycho, crazy psycho, but sort of, it seems to be people who study history and gain enough knowledge, maybe in their graduate training, like Doris Burns Goodwin did at Harvard,
about psychology, to claim to be sort of amateur psychologists in analyzing the motives of a man like Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt or the Kennedys.
And I've read a good bit of this psychohistory and it seems to me that they take actions by a lot of these politicians and just dream up excuses.
There are sort of armchair psychology that they use and they dream up excuses or rationales for things that they did.
And the whole enterprise sounds very dubious to me, in psychohistory, and that's what Doris Kerns Goodwin claims her PhD was in at Harvard, and is the basis of her books on the Kennedys and Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, rather, and other people.
I want to break down that first sentence a little bit more. What's a museum-quality specimen of a court historian? You write about court historians a lot.
Well, a court historian is somebody who's sort of on the payroll of the king, so to
speak, and so writes in support, provides intellectual support for what the king wants to do. Of
course, we don't have a king, we have a president in the Congress, but that's what a court historian
is meant, somebody who writes sort of propaganda to prop up the state, to make the state look
a little better than it really is.
Who are some of the others?
Well, I think when I write about the Church of Lincoln, a lot of what motivates, I think,
a lot of the so-called Lincoln scholars is using the whole Lincoln legend to prop up
their version of the state.
In my book, Lincoln Unmasked, I mention Eric Foner, who's a well-known Columbia University
historian, been on television a lot, at Civil War-ish shows.
And I quote him in an article in 1991 in the Nation magazine where he opposed the breakup
of the Soviet Union and the title of the article was Lincoln's Lesson.
He basically argued that Gorbachev was a softy, he allowed the Soviet republics to succeed
peacefully but our Abraham Lincoln would not have done that and he was apparently upset
about that and so he's using sort of a Lincoln legend to promote his agenda of big centralized
government.
He's a self-described Marxist among historians, and as a Marxist, he's probably not a fan of decentralized government.
On the right, I criticize a lot of people on the right, like Newt Gingrich, for example, an article in the Wall Street Journal online a couple of years ago,
advocating that we, Americans, invade Iran, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Syria and North Korea.
And the title of the article was Lincoln and Bush.
And he started out with a quotation of Abraham Lincoln.
And again, he was trying to attach the reputation of Lincoln to his agenda,
to Gingrich's agenda of invading all these countries with a military occupation.
And so you have people on both sides of the political spectrum that I've written about
that I call court historians to try to use the history, the history of Lincoln in particular,
to promote their own particular agenda, whatever it is, left and right.
In another column you wrote for LewRockwell.com, you said,
I've also learned that there is only one genuine Lincoln scholar in America.
David, you don't use his middle name, but David Herbert Donald.
David Donald, and he's retired, retired from Harvard. The rest are all Lincoln cultists
and court historians. Why are you so, and I actually listened to a speech you gave on
the web where you said the same thing about David Donald. What is it about David Donald
about?
Well, you know, I've read quite a lot of these so-called Lincoln scholars. They're everywhere.
There's not enough time in one man's life to read all the books that come out about
at Lincoln. And you really get a distinct difference in David Donald's books. For someone like me who's been an academic for 28 years, I can tell when I'm reading a book by a scholar if this person is really pursuing the truth, if that's what motivates this person to pursue the truth, or if he has some sort of agenda he's trying to promote and twisting the truth.
And just of all the Lincoln scholars I've read, David Donald is my favorite mainstream scholar.
You learn a lot from him and more than any of the others, I think.
You read other books about Lincoln, they'll take a 1,700-word speech and write an entire book about it.
And that in itself sounds kind of dubious to me because what's usually done is they'll take a sentence by sentence
and then interpret for you what you should think about this sentence.
That may or may not be useful. My experience has been a big waste of time to read books like that.
You never get any of that with someone like David Donald.
I'm a big fan of his work, as far as all the mainstream historians are concerned.
What do you think is driving most of it?
Depending on what figure you use, Andrew Ferguson wrote about you and his book,
What's the motivation, and how much of it is making money?
Well, there's a whole group in the academic world.
There are Lincoln Book Awards.
If you want a career as a historian, as an academic historian,
and you want to write books and get book contracts from big publishers,
You'll get letters of recommendation to do that from all the big shots in the Lincoln world
if you are what I call a member of the Church of Lincoln.
But if you're a dissenter, you cannot have a career as an academic historian if you're a critic of Abraham Lincoln.
You won't get a job, no one will hire you, maybe you can teach high school somewhere,
You can write a dissertation that's critical of Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington, of any other president, but not Abraham Lincoln.
And when my book first came out, rather than arguing with me, a lot of academics started personally attacking me.
He's lying. He made this or that up. I'm not that foolish. I'm publishing a book on Abraham Lincoln to get away with something like that. Not that I would ever try to get away with fabricating these things.
But what they didn't like was a lot of the facts of Lincoln's life and experience, such as suspending habeas corpus and having the military mass arrest tens of thousands of northern citizens.
I just laid that out and left it there. I didn't make any excuses for it. I didn't say he was forced into it. The devil made him do it. I didn't say any of that.
and that really, really upset a lot of the Lincoln scholars.
One of the things I found out is the way to become a Lincoln scholar is to take something like this,
this sort of atrocious attack on civil liberties in the northern states and dream up some excuses for it.
Think of why he had to do it.
And if you do that, you're a Lincoln scholar.
And I didn't play that game.
which is laid out there and either said nothing or said the obvious, that this was an atrocious infringement on freedom and of course the Supreme Court even on this topic agreed with me in 1866.
There was a statement that the Supreme Court said about suspension of habeas corpus and they said essentially that it's especially important to enforce the Constitution during wartime.
It's not, because Lincoln and others have given, made the statements that, well, we need to suspend constitutional liberty at wartime and then we'll return it to normalcy after the war.
But even the courts disagreed with them after the Civil War was over.
And so, I think that's what sort of drew a lot of dislike of me.
When my book first came out in 2002, The Real Lincoln, I had an email from a syndicated columnist, Paul Craig Roberts, who wrote a blurb for the back of the book.
He said, you're destroying their human capital, that's why they're attacking you.
And what he meant, human capital is a word we economists use for your body of knowledge, your education, your skills and so forth.
And so you have a lot of people who have spent careers writing books and articles, sort of deifying Abraham Lincoln.
And then the spunk of the garden party shows up.
Are you the only one around?
No, there are other critics. I know you've interviewed Lerone Bennett Jr., who's a big critic of Lincoln.
You can find articles in academic journals.
Professor Clyde Wilson from the University of South Carolina, Donald Livingston at Emory University,
also academic Lincoln critics.
I just got a paper from a young man who published a journal in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.
His name is Phil Magnus, who wrote a very critical article of Lincoln and his so-called colonization idea.
He had this fetish almost about colonizing free black people and sending them to Liberia, Africa, anywhere but here.
And Lincoln's idea actually about equality, he said it many times that he didn't believe black people could actually be equal in America.
Back in what he called their native climb, Africa or Haiti or something like that, Lincoln said they could be equal but not here.
And so this young man, Philip Magnus, who sent me the article, essentially showed that almost up to his dying day, Lincoln was working on this.
He was working on what to do with the freed slaves after the war.
And he was wondering, do we have enough ships to send them, to deport them, essentially to some other place?
And during his presidency, he did actually allocate several million dollars to send some free black people to Liberia in Africa.
in Africa, but the man he put in charge of it turned out to be an embezzler and so nothing
came of that, nothing much came of that, and he held a meeting of some free black men in
the White House during his administration urging them to lead by example and leave the
country and go to Liberia again, and these men wisely said no thanks, and so there's
research of that sort that I'm pleased to see young scholars like the man I mentioned
are starting to look into the truth, and you don't have to be an attacker of Lincoln to write about the truth about what he did. I think American adults can take it.
Another one of your columns, you said Lincoln was personally corrupt as well.
Yes, well, one example is, there's an old book that was published in the 20s and recently reprinted called Lincoln and the Railroads.
And Lincoln was an attorney for all the main railroads in the Midwest.
He was offered the job of general counsel of the New York Central Railroad.
And that, of course, is not corrupt. That's a perfectly legitimate thing.
But one of the things that I found in this book was that Lincoln bought a bunch of land in Council Bluffs, Iowa in 1857.
And around the same time, he was offered the job of the general counsel of the New York Central Railroad,
and had a pay of $10,000 a year, which was a very princely sum in those days, 1857.
And he turned it down. And then a few years later, after he got elected president, one of the first things he did was to call a special session of Congress.
And the war had started to get the ball rolling on the Pacific Railroad bill. And the bill passed about a year or so later.
And the bill gave the president the right to determine the eastern terminus of the transcontinental railroad.
and guess where he chose? He chose Council Bluffs, Iowa and so he must have made a killing on that and there was another instance written about in this book where Lincoln worked for his client, the Illinois Central, on a tax case which he won and he presented them with a bill for $5,000 and that was an enormous bill and the vice president of the Illinois Central that he was dealing with said, my board of directors will not pay a $5,000 bill to a country lawyer from Illinois.
in Illinois. So he sued. He sued the Illinois Central. And then when he went to court, the lawyers for the Illinois Central did not show up. And he won the $5,000 by default. And the author of this book, John W. Starr, he can't prove that there was some sort of corrupt deal between this vice president of the Illinois Central and Lincoln. But he strongly suggested there was something. And I think there probably wasn't. By the way, the vice president was George B. McClellan. And I've read about
I kept reading it over and over and thought, surely this is not the George McClellan, the general, but it was. It was the same man that he was dealing with at the time.
He would become the commander of the Army of the Potomac four years later after this whole episode happened.
And so, I gave a speech in Springfield, Illinois, last year, and I visited Lincoln's home, and he lived on a place now in Springfield, it's called Old Aristocracy Row, and he lived in the biggest house in Old Aristocracy Row, and his law offices are still there.
Lincoln and Herndon law offices are about a hundred pieces from the old state capitol
building in Springfield and so he was essentially a lobbyist the way we would think of him today
for the railroad companies and that in itself is not corrupt but I think he did demonstrate
some corruption in his career.
What do you think of the bicentennial 200 year celebration of his birth?
Well, it's going to be quite a big party, I guess. I know there's a commission with all the big shot Lincoln scholars on this commission,
and they've already begun publishing things and putting them on television shows about it.
You know, people ask me, since I'm sort of a big Lincoln critic, people ask me if I think he should be on Mount Rushmore.
And I tell them I don't think anyone should be on Mount Rushmore, because of what I said earlier, that I think it's unhealthy for society to deify politicians, even the ones I like, like Thomas Jefferson, I think it's just unhealthy to deify politicians like that, and so this whole 200th anniversary is sort of like that. It's mostly a celebration of the American state. I don't think it's the people on this commission are so in love with Abraham Lincoln or the government that is funding it,
If you were invited to serve on that commission, what would you tell them?
and every political debate, even the debate over the legacy of Abraham Lincoln.
And I doubt that they will listen to me, but that's what I would urge on them.
And have you gone to most of the Lincoln sites around the country?
Sites, what sites?
Anything like Ford's Theater and the Peyton Peterson House and the Lincoln Memorial?
Oh yeah, Ford's Theater, Lincoln Memorial, I've been there quite a few times.
Should there be a Lincoln Memorial like that?
Well, why not? I don't know. There should be a Lincoln Memorial. There's nothing wrong with that, if the people want to memorialize one of their presidents.
But the memorial itself, though, is quite a spectacle. It sort of looks like a Greek temple to me.
And so, of course, Washington, D.C. is one big city of memorials, and the memorials are all to the state.
I'm not necessarily, and my interpretation is, I'm not necessarily memorializing George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or FDR.
It's the government itself that is memorializing itself with all these monuments here in Washington D.C.
And I'm a Libertarian, I'm a Ron Paul Libertarian politically, and so you can probably sense where I'm coming from.
I think when I say this is unhealthy for society, that's why.
I believe in the old Jeffersonian dictum that bigger government means less freedom in general, and this is all promoting bigger government, all these memorials and monuments to our politicians.
Have you ever been invited to speak to the American Lincoln Association in Springfield or the Lincoln Forum that's put on by Frank Williams and Harold Holzer?
No, I've never been invited to speak there.
What would you do if you were invited?
What depends on the ground rules? I've been around some of these Lincoln Scholars before and I've had some experiences that were sort of appalling.
For example, the History Channel, one of your competitors, they interviewed me for about an hour and a half on Mudd Live.
And then they used about 20 seconds of the interview and they somehow managed to make me appear to say exactly the opposite of what I actually said in the interview.
So it was a real set up, sort of a hatchet job, and they had to have some academic advisors
advising them on how to go about doing this.
What was their point, do you think?
What was their point?
Now, what were they trying to get at, and what was the documentary like?
Well, the documentary was, they talked about, they had a series on American presidents,
and they talked about several presidents, not all of them, but maybe five or six before
for Lincoln. And they had almost nothing good to say about any of them. And the point was
to make Lincoln seem even bigger, even better than we think of him even now, because the
others were so bad. And so they interviewed me, and I must have been totally contrary
to that, the theme that they apparently wanted to put out there. And so I don't know why
they used any of my interview. They used about 20 seconds of it. But I think it was just
to sort of needle me, to aggravate me, because they actually twisted my words around to make
me say the opposite of what I actually said about Lincoln during the interview, by editing
out certain parts of what I was doing. And so that's probably what motivated me, very
dishonest. And so if I were to be invited, I would insist on knowing the ground rules
of any kind of debate, rather than being sort of set up.
Andrew Ferguson wrote about a meeting you had in Richmond. What was that?
In Richmond? Well, after my book came out, it created quite a... I had a lot of fan mail,
thousands and thousands of emails from all over the world, and it created a lot of controversy,
and I'd been in a couple of debates with some well-known Lincoln scholars,
and so we put on an academic conference in Richmond. We thought it would be a good thing to do,
This was a good thing to do, and we had six or seven academics talking about different aspects of Lincoln, and we put it on at a hotel in Richmond. It was a very low-cost event. It was at the old John Marshall Hotel in downtown Richmond, which was being renovated at the time.
We had over 300 people in attendance on a beautiful spring day in April on a Saturday.
What year?
This was, I guess this was, I think it was 04, I'm pretty sure it was 04.
And so we had a big attendance and we had, I think, seven academic, give speeches, give talks,
and then we had a 90-minute question and answer session at the end, and I thought it was all very educational and very stimulating.
A lot of people in Washington, D.C. drove down to Richmond to see this event, and Andrew
Ferguson wrote about it. I was kind of disappointed in him, though. He said almost nothing about
the substance of what was said at our conference, but he did mention it in his book.
And did you try to balance your conference out, or did you do the same thing your kids
and the others had done?
No, our conference is the balance. I mean, as far as it is...
The whole conference?
Well, when we opened it up, there was an open question and answer session after each presentation and there were 300 people in the audience.
And then we left an extra hour and a half at the end to ask any question to any of the speakers.
And so I've never been to a conference dominated by the Lincoln Scholars that did that.
In Richmond, there was a panel discussion with a well-known Lincoln scholar who was identified
himself as the president of the committee, the head of the committee that gives the Lincoln
Book Award out every year.
Is this the Mr. Borat at Gettysburg College?
No, no, no, it was somebody else who was much less known than Gabor Borat.
But anyway, during the course of this panel discussion, this man stands up and says things
like, no private property was ever stolen from a southern household by Sherman's army.
And this was in Richmond.
And I'm astounded at a statement like that.
I've read, you can go to any Barnes and Noble this afternoon and pick up books on Sherman's
March and read the exact opposites about that whole episode.
And I got to wondering, well, why would a man like this stand up and say such an obvious
falsehood?
And the impression I got was that he was just trying to make me out to be saying the falsehood
because he was the Lincoln Scholar.
I'm just some economist who picked this up as a hobby, sort of what he seemed to be saying,
but he's a real expert.
And so he made statements like that, another statement, he denied the killing of civilians
by Sherman's Army, Sherman's March.
I was astounded at that too.
He said Lincoln never killed any civilians,
as the commander-in-chief.
Of course, he never pulled the trigger to kill anybody.
There have been quite a few books about it.
James McPherson, one of his books,
said there were about 50,000 southern civilians
who just disappeared by the end of the war,
killed, died one way or another.
So you don't have to be a Lincoln critic like me
I think it was just to make me out to be, you know, I'm spreading falsehoods because I'm just an economist. He's the expert. That's how some of the Lincoln people have behaved.
Did Lincoln free the slaves?
Well, the 13th Amendment freed the slaves, to be sure, and Lincoln, late in his term, did support the 13th Amendment, and so when the states ratified the 13th Amendment, that's what freed the slaves.
During the war, a lot of slaves freed themselves, as two huge armies went through and created anarchy and chaos.
The Emancipation Proclamation, who anyone can read online or offline, specifically exempted all the areas of the United States that were in control of the Union at the time.
It was even so specific as to mention each parish in Louisiana where the Union Army was in charge at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation.
and so it didn't apply to what was called rebel territory and so it literally didn't have the ability to free anybody
and besides that the president at the time didn't have the ability to end slavery, that would have been a constitutional amendment which is what happened eventually
but that's one of the great myths of American history I think and I was surprised by the way I went to the new Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Illinois
Illinois, which is a really a remarkable technological feat. It's a beautiful museum. And they have the face of an ex-slave on a big screen and a voiceover saying what I just said to you, saying that calling Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation a sham and it didn't free anybody. And I was frankly shocked that they would put this up in the Lincoln Museum because I've got all kind of criticism for merely stating the obvious.
And at the time there were newspapers in Europe and America that were saying this.
There were abolitionists in the North who were condemning Lincoln because they thought this was a fraud.
They thought, you know, he says he wants to emancipate the slaves, but look at the document, it doesn't emancipate anybody.
It just, it only applies to rebel territory where they had no ability to emancipate anyone.
If you could get everybody that you call the Lincoln cultists or people who are members of the Church of Lincoln in front of you,
and we don't have a whole lot of time left, but if you were going to tell them what you think they ought to do,
tell them what they ought to change, just tell them what you think about them, what would you say to them?
I think they need to get back to pursuing the truth of history in their careers.
One of the debates I was in with another Lincoln scholar, he said at one point in a debate that was printed, it was published eventually, that, well, this debate ended over secession, states' rights with the war, and so what is the point of all this, he was saying, what is the point of bringing this up again, and my answer was, well, the pursuit of truth in history is the point of it.
Mike doesn't make right. Yes, military might was used to prove, so to speak, that secession is illegal and unconstitutional. But Mike doesn't make right. So pursue the truth, is what I would tell them. And maybe I might embarrass a few of them into changing their ways.
How would you embarrass them, you think?
Well, I think some of the more thoughtful people might look at what they've been doing in terms of their work and maybe reevaluate, because it is sort of a closed society, this whole Lincoln, what I call the Lincoln cult.
And when you only are around other people who think alike and not only that, who pressure you to think alike and punish you professionally if you don't think like everyone else,
And it's sort of incestuous and that's not good for the expansion of knowledge and for the generation of ideas and learning.
And I think there are some thoughtful people in the industry profession who would get away from that and start considering alternative ways of looking at Lincoln and the Civil War.
Is there a leader of the cult?
Well, there are probably several people who like to think of themselves as cult leaders.
Harry Jaffa is one person who seems to be the most cult leader-like.
He has a number of arguments that he has come up with over the years.
And he has a number of followers who repeat all these arguments.
And they tend to personally attack people who disagree with their arguments.
And the arguments are all basically Lincoln's arguments.
The states were never sovereign, for example.
The first example was Lincoln's argument in his first inaugural address. The union created the states. The states didn't create the union, which I think is just historically untrue.
But that was sort of the mantra of, actually it began with Alexander Hamilton. And so a person like Jaffa repeats the old Lincoln arguments, and he has a number of followers who do this.
Is he still at Claremont College?
I think he's retired from Claremont College. I think he's still associated with something called the Claremont Institute out in California.
Who else on your list?
Well, James McPherson would be up there. He's always...
Princeton.
Princeton, yeah. This debate I mentioned with another historian was published in North and South Magazine a few years ago.
And I was told to meet him back and forth. We went back and forth several times. I thought it was a very good debate.
And I was confident that I did well in the debate, and when the magazine came out, we did the debate online, the magazine comes out, and I open it, and there's a little article by James McPherson in the middle, taking my opponent's side.
And I was not informed of that, and I was not invited to respond to McPherson on that, and so he seems to have his fingers poked in everything that has to do with Lincoln and the Civil War.
And I thought this was a very dishonest way of conducting himself in the North and South magazine.
I think it was a discredit to them to do that as well.
One more.
One more Lincoln cultist.
I might as well throw Harold Holcher in there, as far as that goes.
And why him?
Well, he's no different in my book than Jaffa and the rest.
I guess I'll put him in there as someone who doesn't seem to tolerate any dissent over and not willing to have a conversation, is my impression about these things.
He was invited to be on a radio show with me and he cancelled.
And so I think they're not really willing to have a conversation about these things.
Who in your life had the most impact on you besides the people you mentioned back in your early life that may have gotten you down this road toward libertarianism?
The Friedrich Hayek Magazine called the Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education in New York.
It had a lot of articles by Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman,
and all these people who were sort of torch bearers of what used to be called classical liberalism,
or libertarianism, today. So I guess as an eighteen-year-old I started re-educating myself
I have a book coming out in October of 2008 called Hamilton's Curse. The subtitle is how Jefferson's arch enemy betrayed the American Revolution. There's a book by John Stowe Gordon called Hamilton's Blessing about how he betrayed the American Revolution.
Thank you, Thomas J. DiLorenzo. We appreciate it. The author of the illustration book is written called Lincoln and Mass. Thanks for joining us.
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