I'm trying to make it a fun week and an educational week for everybody that's here, and I might as well get started.
My first topic of the day is Lincoln's tariff war, and I thought I'd start with this because, you know,
I've written quite a lot, as most of you probably know, about the American Civil War, which I call the War to Prevent Southern Independence,
Because, strictly speaking, a civil war is a war contest over control of the central government of a nation.
And the American Civil War, so called, wasn't a civil war any more than the American Revolution was.
George Washington did not want to rule England.
And the Southerners, who seceded from the United States, did not want to rule Washington, D.C.
They just wanted to separate. So these were both wars of secession.
and in the day they could use the word separation, not secession, so I call it the war to prevent
southern independence, just to be accurate.
And I've written, as you know, I've written quite a bit about it and generated quite a
bit of controversy and I write about that controversy in my next book that's published
in October that Mark just mentioned, it's called Lincoln Unmasked and the subtitle is
and what you're not supposed to know about dishonest Abe, and there's a whole section
called The Politics of the Lincoln Cult.
And one of the things I've learned over the past several years in writing and speaking
in this whole area is that, and this whole area of literature is very different than
what I was used to in economics, and economics when we go to conferences and present papers
and engage in research, we go there, we do these things to take criticism that we can
to improve the quality of our writing and some of it we take, some of it we don't take, some of it we ignore.
That's the whole purpose of the whole academic enterprise is to throw your ideas out there and get critical review if you can and then benefit from that.
One of the things I discovered is that the history profession, at least the part that's involved in Lincoln and the war to prevent southern independence,
is not interested in that, and they don't use the scientific method in any sense of the word.
As most economists do, even Austrian School economists consider economics to be a scientific enterprise.
But they sort of have a church. They have a church, or an official belief, is the Church of Lincoln.
And whenever there are criticisms, they react personally.
And the biggest and the most violent reaction I get when I write about this is whenever I mention the possibility that American politicians in the mid-19th century,
at least politicians such as Lincoln, may have possibly been motivated, at least in part, by the pursuit of money and power.
If you bring that up, the Lincoln cult goes nuts. They're outraged that a politician would
be interested in the accumulation of power and wealth and money. And nothing causes them
to become more vitriolic than to mention that the tariff dispute between the northern states
and the southern states, which had been brewing for 35, 40 years by the time the war broke
had something to do with the war because the official mantra today is that the
one and only cause was slavery although the history profession I one of the
debates I was in with a historian I got him to admit that no no serious
historian would say that the southern states were invaded for the purpose of
freeing the slaves so so I've got these people to admit on record in print that
that the purpose of the invasion of the southern states
was to destroy the secession movement.
That had nothing to do with slavery per se.
But we can talk about that as the week goes on
in more detail, tariffs are the topic of the day for now.
And so that's why I thought I'd start
with my discussion of tariffs,
because I get this vitriolic response.
So let me start with a little history of the tariff dispute
And the history begins in 1824 with Henry Clay, the American politician Henry Clay who, you know, variously served as Speaker of the House of Representatives, Secretary of State, he was, you know, probably the most powerful and influential member of the House of Representatives for several decades, the famous Henry Clay, and he, by the way, was Lincoln's idol, Lincoln's political idol. In Lincoln's speeches he always said that his
In his mind, his mentor, it wasn't literally his mentor, but as a philosophical mentor was Henry Clay.
He called him the Boe ideal of a statesman, and Lincoln did.
Anyway, Henry Clay was always a protectionist, and in 1824 he sponsored a tariff bill that about doubled the average tariff rate.
And that immediately caused a great deal of alarm, mostly in the South.
And why the South? Why were they so alarmed at this? Well, they believed that the Constitution was a compact that included a prohibition against discriminatory taxation by region, by population, and so forth.
And they saw this big tariff increase that would raise the tariff rate far in excess of what was needed to finance the government,
Keeping in mind that at the time there was no income tax and that most of the revenues
that were raised by the central government were raised by tariffs and a few excise taxes.
They thought this went way beyond that and it was a protectionist tariff.
It was aimed at protecting mostly northern industry from competition in England, France,
elsewhere in Europe primarily.
And they were right because the South was an agricultural society.
And by 1860, the South was exporting as much as three-fourths of what it grew.
Three-fourths of the whole southern economy, as much as three-fourths, was being sold in
Europe.
And it was sort of similar in the 1820s.
And so what they saw is all these high tariffs on farm tools, woolen blankets, there was
was a 200% tariff on woolen blankets, shoes, all the things that they bought, which they
did not manufacture, were getting more expensive.
And the same was true of people in the North.
They had to pay more for all these things too, but the South saw it as all cost and
no benefit.
They were just getting ripped off.
They were just paying more for these things, and nobody in the South, save maybe a few
Southern votes for the 1824 tariff, 3 yes votes out of 107, that was 2.8% in the House of Representatives, and in the Senate, 2 out of 25, so 2 southern senators out of 25 voted for this, and like I said, the South was not unanimously in favor of free trade, but pretty darn close, pretty darn close.
And the North was the opposite. The North was nearly unanimous in favor of protectionism at the time, purely self-interest.
So the point I'm making here was that as early as 1824, there was a regional battle over the tariff,
where the northern states began to view this clearly as a tool of political plunder,
as a way of simply, literally stealing money from southern farmers for the most part,
and transferring it into their own pockets and of course that is always the
case with tariffs it's always a form of protectionist tariffs form of legalized
theft legal plunder as Friedrich Bastiat called it and so that's how the vote
broke down and then so the tariff did increase and the the protectionists again
led by Henry Clay Abraham Lincoln's hero felt emboldened and they raised the
Tariff again in 1828 and southern politicians called this the tariff of
abominations. It's the word they gave it. Some of you may have heard of this before
the tariff of abominations and for the same reason they thought it was pure
plunder and the state of South Carolina denounced it as they called it
usurpation, a system of robbery and plunder which made one section
from one tributary to another, so that corrupt politicians could buy up partisans and retain power.
These are all quotes from a proposition that was put out there by the South Carolina State Legislature.
And I think this is all true.
And I've long thought it was not just an accident that the first English translator in America of Friedrich Bastiat's work
was a woman from South Carolina named Louisa McCord.
and I've read about her, she was quite an amazing young lady, if anybody would like to do some historical research, maybe a term paper on this, Louisa McCord, the University of Virginia Press just published in the past 10 years or so, some of her writings.
By the time she was 18, she was fluent in I think six or seven languages and was just a brilliant young woman and if you've ever run across any of Bastiat's writings, he wrote some very large books,
Around 1850, around that area, one of them is called Economic Harmonies, and for an 18-year-old to translate that and to understand the economics that is in it is quite an accomplishment.
But this occurred in South Carolina. This translation and the publishing of these books occurred there before anywhere else in America, with kind of an interesting fact.
So the South Carolina legislature condemned this, of course, and Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama joined South Carolina.
So you had these major southern states joining South Carolina in voicing opposition to this big tariff increase,
whereas Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Indiana, and New York also issued resolutions through their legislatures in favor of protectionism.
and Tariff Protectionism.
So very early on, the stage was set for a tariff battle and by 1832, this went on for
several years, by 1832 the state of South Carolina issued an ordinance of nullification
and for those of you who don't know what nullification is, you have to understand that until the
War to Prevent Southern Independence. It was not considered to be true that the U.S. Supreme
Court would have the last say on issues of constitutionality. That only occurred after
1865. Before 1865, the thinking was, well, yes, the Supreme Court is an important voice on issues of
what's constitutional and what's not, but so is the president, so are the state legislatures,
especially, and so are the citizens of the states. For example, when Andrew Jackson was
president of the United States in the late 1820s, he had a big dispute with the Bank of the United
States, which was a precursor to the Fed, the Federal Reserve Board, and he vetoed a bill that
would have re-chartered this bank so that the bank was allowed to fade away and go out of business.
It was a very big political battle, and the United States Supreme Court weighed in and said the bank
is constitutional and they thought that would force Jackson to say well okay you win but Jackson
responded by I'm going to quote him you know precisely tomorrow I believe it is he responded
by saying to the Supreme Court thanks for your opinion but my opinion is different and that's
the way things were that's essentially what he said that and that's the way it was prior to 1865
In fact, the American founding fathers would have thought it to be a complete absurdity to have fought a revolution in the name of liberty and then to place everyone's liberty in the hands of five lawyers, five government lawyers with lifetime tenure.
They would have thought that was the dumbest thing you could imagine ever doing.
But that's exactly what we've got now. Five, the majority of the Supreme Court, five government lawyers with lifetime tenure are supposedly the guardians of everyone's liberty.
It wasn't always like that. And so states like South Carolina, when they thought the central government was overstepping its bounds constitutionally, would issue ordinances of nullification.
And northern states did this as well.
During Jackson's big dispute with the bank, Ohio led the way in essentially nullifying
the existence of the Bank of the United States in the state of Ohio.
The Bank of the United States opened up two branches in Ohio, and the state of Ohio imposed
$100,000 a year taxes on the Bank of the United States.
And this is around 1830, around there, $100,000 a year was a lot of money, even to a central
Bank back then. And that's where the famous dictum by Chief Justice John Marshall, that
the power to tax is the power to destroy, came from. That was his decision on the constitutionality
of the bank. And what he meant was the power of the state of Ohio to tax the central bank
had the ability to destroy the central bank. That's what that meant, power to tax is the
Power to Destroy it. And so, but the state of Ohio eventually prevailed because the Bank of the United States became defunct in the early 1830s. And so that's what nullification is. So the South Carolinians did what states north and south did up until the Civil War, the war to prevent southern independence. They simply said, we believe this is unconstitutional. Therefore, we are not going to obey this law. This was pretty commonplace back then. And they meant business.
A law, this nullification law, authorized importers to recover any goods that had been impounded by tariff collectors.
Sheriffs were instructed to seize the personal property of the tariff collectors and award it to the importers until the seized goods were returned.
All duties were to be reimbursed to the importers with interest.
And the tariff collectors themselves were subject to fines and imprisonment for any attempt to resist the nullification law.
So that if the tax collector showed up in South Carolina, he would be thrown in jail.
And no jail in the state could be used to imprison anyone for failure to pay the tax, to pay the tariff tax.
And then finally, the South Carolina legislature, this was in 1832, allocated $200,000 to the governor
for the purchase of buying firearms with which to keep the tax collectors away, if need be.
B. It didn't come to that, so they were dead serious. They were not going to collect this
tax and they didn't. Andrew Jackson eventually backed down and they reached a compromise
lower tariff and the compromise lower tariff became lower and lower until 1857. By 1857,
The average tariff rate in the United States was about 15%, 1.5.
So from 1832 to 1857, it was a period of freer and freer trade because the tariff became
lower and lower over time.
There were some ups and downs, but Frank Taussig, who wrote a book, Tariff History of the United
States, that ends around 1915 or so, it's an old classic.
It's available for free on the Mises.org, by the way, under the books section, said
that 1857 was probably the lowest average tariff rate in the 19th century for the United
States.
So it was sort of a high watermark for free trade in the United States as far as that goes.
And I think to understand why the South was so agitated for decades about this, keep in
In mind, the American Revolution was fought over the cry of taxation without representation.
The taxes the British imposed on the Americans were pretty minor, certainly by modern standards.
You're talking three percent, something like that, fought a revolution over this sort of
taxation.
And here you go, the U.S. government imposing a 50 percent tax, close to 50 percent on imports,
which was paid primarily by the southerners who did not manufacture much of anything.
And so, you know, that puts in a little perspective as to why they were so upset about this.
But you also have to understand a little bit about the economics of agriculture.
And since the southern states exported the majority of what they produced,
they were in a situation of where, one, they were paying more for all these manufactured goods,
from clothing to farm tools and everything else.
And then two, they found out that if you put a tax on imports, which is what a tariff is,
our trading partners become poorer because they earn fewer dollars.
They sell less of their goods to us here in this country.
And that means they have less money that they can use to buy American exports.
And the Southerners fully understood this because every time the tariff rate was increased,
they saw their bank accounts diminish.
Because why? Because they have fewer orders from Europe. They have fewer customers in Europe buying their cotton, tobacco, rice, and all the agricultural products.
So they didn't have to study economics to know this. They just knew it from experience.
But it just so happens that this is a very fundamental aspect of international economics that a tax on imports is ultimately a tax on exports as well, for the reason I just gave.
It causes our trading partners to become poorer, therefore they will buy fewer exports coming out of the United States.
So the U.S. Constitution outlaws taxes on exports, but a tax on imports is effectively a tax on exports,
even though it's unconstitutional to have an explicit tax on exports.
And this always harms farmers the most.
In giving an example, you know, textbooks in economics typically make an effort to express the status quo in the profession.
That's what textbooks are supposed to do.
And there's one that's a widely used international trade textbook by Wilson Brown and Jan Hoegendorn that says this,
with regard to a tariff, the only group that is powerless to pass the cost of protectionist
tariffs on further are the exporters who have to sell at world prices and swallow these costs.
So what they're saying is, well yes they had all these higher costs imposed on them by the tariffs,
the southern farmers did, and then they sold this stuff in Europe, but competition was so intense
in Europe that they couldn't pass on any of these costs by raising their own prices.
Whereas in the northern states, there was more latitude to do that. There's more latitude to try to raise your prices if you're a merchant to
pass on some of these higher cost of living. And so this has been known for a long time. To give you an idea of how
the leaders of the southern nullification movement knew this or understood this,
John C. Calhoun, who was the former vice president of the United States, secretary of war for a time,
I'm a senator from South Carolina. He wrote a letter to a man in New York called Mika
Sterling, a political associate, in 1828, explaining this. 1828 was the year the
terror of abominations was put into place. He said, a protectionist terror gives to one
section, the north, the power of recharging, passing on the cost, the duty, while to the other,
The South was engaged in cultivating the great staples of the country for a foreign market,
in a market where we can receive no protection and where we cannot receive one cent more
to indemnify us for the heavy duties we have to pay as consumers.
And Calhoun, who was familiar with Bastiat, in fact he corresponded with the British free
trade advocates that was known as the Manchester School or Richard Brighton Cobden.
Some of you have read about Calhoun had been corresponding with them.
And in some of his writings on trade, he sounds very much like Bastiat or Richard Cobden in
his rhetoric.
and he gave a speech on protectionism and he said protection against what he said well protection
against low prices that's what we're being protected against against low prices and and of
course that is absolutely true and so so that's why southerners were so agitated they saw this as a
triple tax on them with no benefit at all and all the benefit was going to basically northern
and Manufacturers. It wasn't just the antebellum cell. If you study economic
history, farmers everywhere have complained about tariffs. There's a great
little book called The Income Tax, Root of All Evil by Frank Choterov, probably
50 years old or so now, and he has a little section on this. He has a
discussion of how the income tax came into being, and he's talking about
about Midwestern farmers in the 1880s, long after the Civil War.
He said, the plight of these farmers was made worse
by the protectionist tariff policy of the government.
By the 1880s, the average tariff rate was in the 45% range.
It was put there during the so-called Civil War
and remained in that range until 1913
when the federal income tax was enacted.
He says, the best day the Midwestern farmers
should get for their products was the competitive world price, while the manufacturers they
bought from the East were loaded down with duties, the populists clamored for lower tariffs."
End quote.
So it wasn't just Southern farmers and Midwestern farmers, any farmers anywhere, that felt they
were plundered by protectionist tariffs.
But the South was so unique because it was so overwhelmingly an agricultural society
at the time.
Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America, when he gave his first
inaugural address, the word slavery does not appear in there, but here's what he says.
He says the South is, quote, an agricultural people whose chief interest is the export
of a commodity required in every manufacturing country.
Our true policy is peace and the freest trade, which our necessities will permit.
It is alike our interest, in that of all those to whom we would sell, and from whom we would buy, that there should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon the interchange of commodities."
And when Abraham Lincoln gave his first inaugural address, he also emphasized in one part of it the tariff issue.
And so to Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, the tariff was an important issue. They highlighted it in their respective inaugural addresses.
But to the American history profession, they'll call it a red herring, an old chestnut.
In one of the magazines I was in a debate in, a North and South magazine, a Civil War history magazine,
William C. Davis, who's a pretty well-known Civil War historian, threw a hissy fit over my suggestion that the tariff may have had something to do with this conflict and called it an old chestnut.
That's pretty much how they argue. They don't make an argument. They'll call it some kind of nut fruit or animal herring chestnuts, something like that, and that passes for an argument anymore.
that's how cultists argue, you know, they're cultists. So free trade prevailed for the most
part until 1857. There was a, in the meantime, the population of the northern states was growing
much faster than the south. The voting population of the north was about three times the voting
population of the south by 1860. And so there were, the south was greatly outnumbered in the
in the House of Representatives.
There were twice as many US senators in the North
than there were in the South.
And by the time the war broke out,
and the Republican Party, the new Republican Party
that took shape in the mid-1850s first gained some clout
in the 1859, 1860 session,
when they used the occasion of a deep recession in 1857
To say, well, this proves that we need more protectionism. We were in a recession. Unemployment is rising. What's the solution?
Cut off trade. That's the solution. So that argument is still made today. You still have protectionists making the argument
whenever there's a recession, we need to protect American jobs. And they were successful.
They passed the Morrill Tariff,
named after a
congressman,
A member of Congress named Justin Morrill from Vermont spelled M-O-R-R-I-L-L in the 1859-1860 session of the House of Representatives.
And this was long before Lincoln was nominated. This was long before any state seceded.
So this was not a war financing tariff. This was a protectionist tariff, the moral tariff.
And the vote on the moral tariff broke down like this, this says southern votes for the 1859 moral tariff in the House of Representatives, 1 out of 105.
And so, clearly, this same north-south division existed over free trade versus protectionism, just like it did in 1824.
for One Vote, and that was one voter from Tennessee.
And like I said, there was probably a hemp growing district
and hemp was included in the moral tariff
and therefore a member of Congress
from the hemp growing district voted for the moral tariff.
And that's how this works.
And so, then comes Lincoln.
This is my topic is Lincoln's Tariff War.
Lincoln comes in, and I argue that Lincoln owed just about everything politically to the protectionists in the northern states.
That's how he got the nomination. If it weren't for his record as a lifelong protectionist and the efforts of a lot of people on his behalf,
from Illinois and elsewhere to pander to the protectionists in Pennsylvania especially.
He probably would not have gotten the nomination. And this is all laid out in an article in the
American Historical Review in July 1944 by Professor Reinhard Luthen, L-U-T-H-I-N, called
Abraham Lincoln and the Tariff, a very well researched article in the preeminent publication
of the History Profession at the time, the American History Profession at the time.
And what happened was Lincoln, who was a master politician, and Murray Rothbard once said that
a master politician, keep in mind, is a masterful liar, conniver, and manipulator. So when you hear
this word master politician, and I would agree with that, I think Lincoln was Bill Clinton
7 times 10 as far as a politician, skill as a politician, masterful skill at lying, conniving
and manipulating people.
No one has ever come close in American history, in my view, to just read some of his speeches
and you get that, not quotes from the speeches where he quotes the Bible, read the whole
speeches.
That's usually what his supporters do, even though he never became a Christian himself.
But in this article, Pennsylvania was the key because it has the second largest number of delegates in the states.
And so there's a new book out called Lincoln's Wrath, by the way.
And it's all about things that I've written about, about how Lincoln shut down over 300 opposition newspapers in the northern state.
That's What His Wrath Was.
And one of the things that I learned in reading this book,
Lincoln's Wrath, it was published just in the past year,
was that not only Lincoln, but all the leading lights
of the Republican Party at this time,
were connected in some way with the newspaper industry.
I never realized how savvy the Republican Party was
with this relatively new technology of political journalism.
Lincoln himself actually purchased
three German language papers in the upper midwest and of course they all editorialized in favor of
him because there were there were many many thousands of German immigrants moving to the
upper midwest and so Joseph Meadowl the editor of the Chicago Press and Tribune which was a very
influential newspaper in Chicago was Lincoln's political spokesman when he was waging his
His campaign for the nomination and he wrote all the top Republican movers and shakers in Pennsylvania to assure them that Lincoln was their man.
Here's what he said in one of his letters. He says, Lincoln is an old clay wig and his old Henry Clay wig.
He is right on the tariff and he's exactly right on all other issues.
Is there any man who could suit Pennsylvania better? End quote.
That was Joseph Meadow, M-E-D-I-L-L is how that's spelled.
And then Lincoln himself wrote letters to some of the movers and shakers in Pennsylvania politics.
He wrote a man named William Wallace.
This is not the William Wallace of Braveheart.
It's a different William Wallace, several centuries earlier.
He said, well, the brother of William Wallace, who was a friend of his.
He said, my dear sir, your brother showed me a letter of yours in which you kindly mentioned my name, inquired for my tariff view,
and suggests the propriety of my writing a letter upon the subject.
This is Lincoln talking.
I was an old Henry Clay tariff wig.
In old times, I made more speeches on that subject than any other.
I have not changed my views.
And so he solidified his reputation among the Pennsylvania protectionists, which was
the heart of the steel industry, even in the 1860s was the heart of the steel industry.
But Lincoln faced a dilemma in getting this nomination because, as I said earlier, the
The agricultural parts of the country were free traders and so his dilemma was how can
he convince the industrialists that he was a protectionist while keeping this from the
agricultural regions who also were going to vote at the convention.
And so what they did is he sent a personal envoy, his friend David Davis, who was later
appointed in the Supreme Court, to Pennsylvania with the original copies of 11 pro-tariff
of Speeches that he had made, only the originals, sort of like a Mission Impossible thing.
I could see David Davis with a suitcase with handcuffs, handcuffs to his hand, going to
Thaddeus Stevens and Simon Cameron and other big shots in Pennsylvania politics to show
them this, you know, here's the Da Vinci Code of American politics, Lincoln's protectionist
speeches, and here it is. And so he did that. And Davis met with, like I said, the big shots.
He met with Simon Cameron, if you ever read anything about Civil War history, was the
most notoriously corrupt, crooked scoundrel in probably in American politics up to that
time. Even Lincoln had to fire him for stealing so much money for his buddies through the
War Department and also Thaddeus Stevens, like I said. But here's what Simon Cameron
said to David Davis, Lincoln's friend. He said this, quote, nothing about these speeches must
get into the newspapers, end quote. And the reason why? They didn't want the people in the
farm states to know about this. And so when the protectionist plank passed the platform,
and of course in Pennsylvania put their votes behind Lincoln. Here's what
Professor Luther, who I'm quoting from this article, said, he said, the
Pennsylvania and New Jersey delegations were terrific in their applause over
tariff resolution and their hilarity was contagious, finally pervading the whole
vast auditorium and he said it was exhibited, they exhibited the wildest
This fervor and frantic jubilation," end quote, and it's, you know, there had to be a reason
for that, right?
All these Republicans, frantic jubilation, well, they're going to be protected from
competition and make a lot of money, and that's what they were frantic over, frantic jubilation.
When Lincoln returned to Springfield, Illinois, and they had a big parade that the Republican
Party put on after he won the nomination, there was a giant billboard that broadcast
a slogan that would be on his campaign poster.
I should have brought this in, I'm packed in a bit of a hurry yesterday, but the official
campaign poster of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin, his vice presidential candidate, had
a picture of the two of them and on the bottom it said, protection for home industry, that
That was the theme and that's what it said on the big billboard in Springfield, Illinois
when he returned home as the favorite son who won the nomination of the Republican Party.
So it seems to me that protectionism was a pretty important issue to the Republicans
in 1860 in contrast to what William C. Davis and all these other historians say about it.
Once Lincoln was nominated, he openly stumped for the moral tariff because it hadn't passed
the Senate yet.
So he stopped in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on February 19th, 1861, and he was inaugurated
just two and a half weeks later.
But he told the audience there that no other issue, nothing, was more important to their
congressional representatives than raising the tariff, and nothing, nothing at all.
When he gets inaugurated, Lincoln is inaugurated, and by the way, he had some kind of some rather
kooky views on international trade, which I've quoted in my book and elsewhere.
Lincoln, like a lot of the prominent Republicans of the time, took their advice on trade issues
from a man named Henry Carey, Henry C. Carey, C-A-R-E-Y, who was a publicist for the steel
industry.
from Carey, Lincoln got this, he believed that free trade would increase prices, and why is that?
The reason he gave was that transportation costs were in his words useless labor.
So if you transport something from England to Boston, that's useless labor, and of course there will be a transportation charge added to the price of the thing
thing transported from England to Boston he said therefore we should not allow in
the country goods that involve useless labor well of course the same argument
could made about things that are transported from Chicago to Springfield
Illinois the trains the railroads are all useless labor then in fact and Lincoln
was a big railroad lawyer his entire career he's a railroad lawyer so now if
you look at it that way even he devoted his life to useless labor there's a
Council for the, General Council for the Illinois Central, and of course this is
the old socialist argument that has been made for a long long time that
doesn't understand that in the process of competition there are all sorts of
things like advertising, transportation costs that businesses incur to compete
but the end result of the competition is always lower prices and better quality
The end result of the process of competition will be, you block the competition, you're going to get higher prices.
So he had it all backwards.
In fact, Lincoln was on record in his speeches. I mentioned these 11 terrorist speeches.
His position was, anything that could be grown or manufactured in the United States should have zero competition from abroad.
He gave the example of coffees. If we can't grow coffee here because of the climate,
of the Climate, then we will allow the importation of coffee, but we can go grow cotton, therefore
no cotton grown in Egypt should ever be sold in the United States or anywhere else, so
and you can make the same thing for shoes, if we can make shoes here, nobody from Canada
should be allowed to sell shoes, so he was an extreme protectionist, he was actually
in favor of almost an extreme form of autarky, of economic self-sufficiency with regard to
and his views on trade. So he was a real extremist on trade there.
So he gets inaugurated, and I mentioned that Jefferson Davis prominently mentioned the
tariff issue in his first inaugural address, and so does Lincoln. In fact, keep in mind
what I said about the tariff of abomination. South Carolina threatened secession. They
gave the governor 200 grand to buy guns in case the Jackson administration tried to enforce
This is his new big new tariff and the federal government backed down. They reached a compromise.
30 years later, almost 30 years later, Lincoln is now president. He literally threatens a military
invasion of any state that tries to do what South Carolina did 28 years earlier. And if we just read
first, Lincoln's first inaugural address, it's on the internet everywhere. And how does he do that?
Well, he says this. Well, first of all, he's 100% accommodating as far as slavery. He says over
and over in the address that he has no intention of disturbing slavery, and even if I did, he said
it would be unconstitutional to do so. Another thing he says in his first inaugural address
is he gives his support for a constitutional amendment that had just passed the House of
and the Senate that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering in southern slavery.
In Lincoln's words, he said he would want to make that irrevocable.
He would want to make southern slavery and its legality irrevocable.
That word irrevocable is in his first inaugural address.
Now, this is one of the things you never learn in history class, but it's a true fact.
And it's also a true fact, and I was shocked, I read Doris Kearns Goodwin's horrible 960-page book on Lincoln several months ago.
But I was shocked that she actually discusses this whole thing, and because the theme of this book is, man, he was a darn clever politician.
And to someone like Doris Kearns Goodwin, that's the highest praise.
To someone like me, it's the highest damnation, but to her it's the highest praise.
and so she was bragging about what a clever manipulator Lincoln was by saying this,
not only did he support this constitutional amendment to prohibit the federal government from ever interfering in Southern slavery in his first inaugural address,
but the amendment was his work, it was his doing, he's the one who got the Congress to write up this amendment.
He instructed William Seward, who would become his Secretary of State, to get this amendment through what was called the Committee of 13 in the Senate, the 13 most prestigious, powerful members of the Senate, and he did.
He got that through and he also got through a federal law that would have nullified the nullification of the Federal Fugitive Slave Act that some of the northern states were engaged in.
The Fugitive Slave Act was a federal law that compelled northern states to run down runaway slaves and return them to their owners.
Some of the northern states said, we don't want to do this. We are going to impose Thomas Jefferson's idea of nullification to say, we are not going to enforce this law, just like South Carolinians did the same thing and said, we are not going to enforce this tariff law.
Lincoln had a law passed when he got in that would make this type of nullification illegal, and he got William Seward to push that through the Congress.
And this was all in the first couple of weeks of his administration.
So on the issue of slavery, he was 100% accommodating, even to the extent of constitutionally, explicitly constitutionally guaranteeing that the government could not interfere with slavery.
But on the tariff, he threatened a war.
on the tariff. He said, he went on, in the first inaugural address, he said this,
there needs to be no bloodshed or violence and there shall be none unless it is forced upon the
national authority, end quote. Now what was he talking about? What would cause bloodshed and
violence and what could cause the national authority to engage in bloodshed and violence
and all this? Well, failure to collect the tariff. That's what he said, failure to collect the tariff.
And he says this, after making the obligatory statement that it is my duty to possess the property and places belonging to the government, he said this, he said it was his duty, quote, to collect the duties and imposts, tariffs, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using force against or among the people anywhere.
So, he talked in Clintonese, he was a skilled trial lawyer after all, but listen to that,
it's my duty to collect the duties and imposts, but beyond what may be necessary for these
objects there will be no invasion, no using force against or among the people anywhere.
So he's saying, collect the tariff that we have just doubled, the moral tariff doubled
the average tariff rate, we the Republican party have just doubled the tariff rate.
So keep in mind also what I said about southerners and how they opposed the tariff and why they
did.
This was the main form of taxation.
In 1860, 90 percent of all federal tax revenues came from the tariff.
So the federal government was financed almost entirely by the tariff.
There were a few excise taxes also at the time, a little bit of land sales, federal
land sales, but the tariff was about 90 percent of all federal revenue.
And Southerners felt they were paying the lion's share.
They were being ripped off, plundered by this tariff, and it's doubled.
Most of you in the audience are students, but if you've ever worked and had a job and
got a W-2 form and filled out a W-2 and paid income tax, imagine your tax being doubled,
how you would like that.
And so this is what they were saying, we're going to double your tax, and any failure
to collect this tax like the South Carolinians did 28 years ago, there will be an invasion.
He said there will not be an invasion as long as you pay the tax.
So the way I see it is he is saying pay up or die.
That's the way I'm putting it.
It's right there in the first inaugural address.
You just read it.
If you understand the context, you understand what was going on.
And then two weeks after Fort Sumter, when Lincoln put together a blockade of the southern
ports, a naval blockade of the southern ports, one of his first acts of war, he gave one
reason.
He made a speech announcing there was going to be a naval blockade of the southern ports
and he gave one reason for the blockade.
Who would like to guess what the one reason was, a naval blockade of the southern ports
in light of what I've been going on and on about, tariff collection, yeah that's what he said, he said it's him once again it's my obligation to enforce this constitutional provision of equal taxation and if the southern states secede they are not paying equal taxes in fact so that's that's an absurdity on several counts because the southern states had seceded they were a separate country so they didn't need to pay taxes to a foreign government and second of all the reason they seceded
One of the reasons they had been complaining about for 30 years was they thought this protectionist tariff was unconstitutional.
It wasn't equal taxation based on population as it required, as the Constitution required.
And so those are basically the main reasons why I believe the tariff was an important cause of the war, why I call this Lincoln's Tariff War.
And this is my story of how a tariff war turned into a shooting war over money.
And when we go, you know, I'm going to talk a lot more about this in the next couple of lectures.
But to lay some of the groundwork, I think the thing you have to understand about the whole slavery issue in this era
is that neither Lincoln nor the Republican Party as a party opposed Southern slavery in their platform or in their speeches.
They opposed the extension of slavery into the new territories. That was that was their position.
And they were very clear on why they did that. They gave two main reasons, maybe three main reasons.
One was the North was a pervasively racist society and they wanted to pander and they wanted to keep
it a white society. And you could only keep it a white society by prohibiting not only free blacks
but slavery from the new territories. They were very explicit about that.
Those of you who have studied history and have heard of the Wilmot Proviso,
named after Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, that never actually became law,
he called it the white man's proviso. He wanted, they wanted, because the Republican party
and a big portion of the Whig party that came before it simply wanted to keep all black people
out of the north, out of northern states. They were very explicit about that. The second reason
One was pure protectionism for jobs.
They did not want either free blacks or slaves to compete for jobs with the white laborers
who were voters after all.
Only males could vote in this era, this period of time.
And the third reason they gave for this was there was the Constitution had something called
the Three-Fifths Clause where five slaves counted as three people for purposes of determining
The Theory of Money and Credit
The other thing you have to remember when you study this era is that people like Lincoln
and the other Republicans, like everyone else, condemn slavery on abstract grounds, philosophical
grounds, but when it came to doing something about it when they could, that was different.
That's why in my new book that comes out, I have a whole chapter on how Lysander Spooner's
deep hatred for Lincoln and his regime, the famous libertarian philosopher Lysander Spooner,
who was a contemporary, he sat there and listened to the speeches by William Seward and Lincoln
and others for years, and he wrote a book in the 1840s called The Unconstitutionality
of Slavery, and he believed it had never been rebutted and that if the government really
wanted to end slavery peacefully like every other country on earth did in the 19th century.
They could do so.
They could declare it unconstitutional, force the hand of the southern slave owners.
And by the way, there was slavery in New Jersey until 1865, so it wasn't exclusively southern
slave owners.
New York until 1855, New York City.
So Spooner argued that.
And he thought that people like Seward and Lincoln were extreme hypocrites for talking
about freedom while not actually doing what could have been done and avoiding a war.
And he thought the war was, what Lincoln said it was, a war to save the Union or to crush
the secession movement, not to free the slaves.
And Lincoln said that many times, he said, whatever I do about slavery, it's only to
save the Union.
The famous letter he wrote to Horace Greeley, a newspaper editor, in 1863, I believe it was.
He said, whatever I do about slavery, I'm paraphrasing, I do to save the Union.
He said, if I could save the Union by freeing some slaves and leaving others in bondage, I would do that.
If I could leave them all in bondage, I would do that too.
Whatever I do, my goal is to save the Union.
And as you'll hear tomorrow, I guess, from me,
that I make the argument that the Union was not saved
but destroyed because the Union was a voluntary union
prior to 1865.
After that, it became a coerced union and an empire
as opposed to a confederacy of states.
And so the whole thing was destroyed.
But that's my story about the tariff issue
and why I think this is very important.
And if you read past generations of historians,
They didn't argue this way.
This idea that slavery was the sole cause of the war,
I think is relatively new beginning in the mid-1960s.
If you were a college student in the 1960s,
and you took a course on the Civil War,
you probably would have read a book by Kenneth Stamp,
who was a former president
of the American Historical Association,
called The Causes of the Civil War, causes plural.
And so this was typically taught,
Just like any war in human history, there are multiple causes. These are very complex events.
But there were some revisionist historians, mostly left-wingers, who came around, some Marxists, some liberals mostly,
in the 1960s and decided that they wanted to use history as a tool with which to crusade for the civil rights legislation
and the great society welfare state legislation of the Johnson administration.
and they thought that a rewriting, literally a rewriting of civil war history could be used to support these things and so they did.
History was rewritten. Eric Foner says that right in his book on reconstruction and so does Kenneth Stamp.
He has a book of readings on reconstruction where he says the whole history of reconstruction which was 1865 to 1877 has been rewritten with that in mind.
that history is to be used as a political tool, not as a means of understanding history or reality.
And so I think that's why, in my opinion, the view that the tariff is not important is so pervasive.
This has become part of the Church of Lincoln, a part of the view of the Church of Lincoln, part of the Bible.
And I'm just amused now at how apoplectic some of these people get.
They get so apoplectic that I was in a debate in North and South magazine a year and a half or so ago, maybe two years now,
with a professor from East Carolina University, and they asked me to do the debate online, just back and forth between him and me,
which we did, we went back and forth three or four times, and then they would publish the whole debate in North and South magazine.
And so we did, we did that, and I felt confident, I felt really good that I won the debate, because near the end I got him, he started saying things like, why are we talking about this anyway? This was all settled by the war, why are we even debating these things?
And so, but I really knew that I really won the debate when the magazine came out, that was the clincher to me.
Because without my knowledge, the magazine came out, they added an additional article by James McPherson weighing in on my opponent's side without telling me about it and without offering me the opportunity to respond to McPherson.
So that told me that I wanted to debate it. They had to pull the big shot from Princeton out to make it an unfair two against one debate and not allowing me to respond to what he had to say.
So I responded on Lew Rockwell's website and emailed the person in the article, so I'm sure you heard about it, and hopefully I gave him a little heartburn over that.
I can say this, this is being videotaped, because I'm sure he's not going to give my next book a good review anyway.
And he was also, I'll tell you one last story.
The History Channel called me up about two years ago to interview me about a documentary
on Lincoln and they interviewed me on tape for about an hour and a half.
I went down to Washington DC, they had a studio set up down there for a whole hour and a half
and they asked really good questions.
The woman that interviewed me was, she had really done her homework and was really up
on this stuff.
And so I sat there and just exhausted myself for an hour and a half on camera.
When it actually came out, they used maybe 20 seconds broken up into three different
segments and one of them actually made me sound, like I was saying, exactly the opposite
of what I actually said.
And then when the credits rolled, it said, it said, historical advisor James McPherson.
So I guess I know who was responsible for that kind of creative editing.
And so that's like the second or third time I fell for that.
They'll say, oh, we're going to do it something different than just a sop to Father Abraham
or something like that.
They were telling me, we want to make this interesting for a change, but they didn't.
This is probably the worst Lincoln documentary ever made because it was part of a series
on American presidents, and all the presidents leading up to Lincoln, they made it look pretty
bad.
Zachary Taylor, when they got to Zachary Taylor, the only thing they said was Jefferson Davis was once his son-in-law.
And so you're supposed to conclude to that, well he must have devil horns growing out of his head.
But the purpose of making all the previous presidents look bad was to make Lincoln look even bigger.
And it's kind of like, even after that they did a different documentary last fall on Lincoln's mental illness.
There's a book out on Lincoln's mental illness. He suffered from depression and other maladies.
He took drugs that had heavy doses of mercury in them that I think created other problems.
He believed that he contacted syphilis in the 1830s from a prostitute. He said that and of course
that could lead to problems too. And so there's a whole book out and the History Channel did a
documentary on Lincoln's mental illness and the way this sort of thing is spun is just amazing.
You know they mentioned all these facts like he was he talked suicide his whole adult life.
As a young man he quit carrying a knife with him for fear he would stab himself. Even in the
White House he was always talking about suicide and he was well known so they admit all these things
and then but the spin is that well he's even greater than we thought he achieved
all he achieved despite the fact he was mentally ill but my interpretation is oh
my god a crazy crazy man is elected president of the United States and
plunges his country into the bloodiest war in human history that's sort of the
first thing that came to my mind not how great he is despite his mental illness
But that's the kind of spin, which is why I think there's a great deal that can be done with people who write about this period of history from an economic perspective, because the history profession, even though they comment on economic issues, they're basically very poorly uninformed, they're not trained in economics, and I recommend to all of you Mark Thornton and Bob Eaklin's book, Tariffs, Blockades and Inflation, which is an excellent book on the economics of the American Civil War, although I wish it would have
The economics of the war to prevent southern independence, but they couldn't get it by a mainstream publisher to do that.
So for those of you who are students, if you're looking for dissertation topics or undergraduate paper topics, this is a very fruitful area.
Most economic historians who have written on his era have beaten to death the economics of slavery.
There's a gigantic literature that's been going on for 30 years on this, but there's a lot more, a lot more that can be done.
Was there anybody injured in the war against the parents responsible for the Northern Free Traders?
New York City.
The mayor of New York City was a man named Fernando Wood who wanted New York City to
secede from the state of New York and the United States.
And his brother was the editor of a newspaper that was pro-free trade and it was one of
the 300 newspapers that was put out of business by the Lincoln administration.
So when you say the north, the Midwest where there were a lot of farmers, that was a very
free trade area, and I think it's not just a coincidence that a great deal of the opposition
to the Lincoln administration in the north came from the Midwest.
And there's a book, there's a historian named Frank Clement, K-L-E-M-E-N-T, who's the historian
of the copperheads.
The Republican Party labeled northern opponents to them as snakes in the grass, copperhead
is a snake, a rattlesnake.
And so he writes very prominently about the Midwest, the upper Midwest copperheads who
were being strangled economically by this high tariff policy and continue to be strangled
economically for decades after the war.
And in fact, one of the unintended consequences or side effects or second order effects of
the Republican tariff policy, and like I said, this kept in place until 1913, the average
was that these farmers became advocates of an income tax because they thought the income tax would take the heat of raising tariffs to raise money for the federal government.
And so you had these onerous protectionist tariffs that really plundered American farmers from all regions, whether it was the Midwest or the South,
and that led them to be in favor of an income tax because they were promised
if you vote for an income tax we will reduce the tariff rate which disproportionately burdens you
and so what happened was that happened that they reduced the tariff rate at the same time
the federal income tax came in in 1913 but then by nine years later they raised the tariff rate
I don't want to quote the exact rate I don't have it written down here but so we ended up you know within a decade we ended up with an income tax and higher tariff rates anyway so it was a big bait and switch that went on but there were free traders there were a lot of there was a lot of commerce between north and south especially in and out of New York City and I think this is probably one of the reasons why Lincoln really cracked down on New York City in terms of shutting down newspapers
Stone's Throw from Where I Live and it's at the spot where probably the first
bloodshed of the war took place where the first train load of troops from
Massachusetts were making their way to Washington DC and the citizens of
Baltimore stoned them as they were getting off of one train to go to
another they stoned them, shot some of them, soldiers shot back and so there's a
The Big Riot, right there, and today it's a Civil War Museum, but if you walk in the front door, I was just in there about two weeks ago, the first thing you see is photographs of all the Baltimore and State of Maryland newspaper editors and state legislators who opposed the Lincoln administration and who were thrown in prison, either at Fort McHenry or at Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor, and this included the grandson of Francis Scott King, who was a newspaper editor and had been
...editorializing against Lincoln's arrest without due process of political dissenters
since he illegally suspended habeas corpus in order to do that.
And so Francis Scott Key's grandson was editorializing against that, and for sticking up to the Constitution,
he too was put in prison in Fort McHenry of all places, not too far from where his grandfather
wrote the Star Spangled Banner anthem.
So there was a lot of opposition in the North, it's been whitewashed though.
I'm told Scott Trask, who comes to the Mises Institute a lot and has written a lot for
the Institute, has a whole book, it's his dissertation from the University of South
Carolina on the northern descent during the war.
But so far it's just a dissertation, it's not a book.
There was a congressman named Clement Volandegam from Ohio, from Dayton, Ohio, who gave speeches
on the floor of the House of Representatives denouncing the Lincoln administration's suspension
of habeas corpus and so forth, and I could probably find some of his quotes, well maybe
I won't quote them, I'll save it for tomorrow, but he railed against the suspension of habeas
Corpus, the shutting down of newspapers in the north, the imprisoning of dissenters, and that's why
you know the Constitution requires that the states requires the central government to see to it that
the states have a representative form of government. Here's the Lincoln administration putting state
legislators in prison. If there's any, if there ever was a direct violation of the clear language
of the Constitution, there it is right there.
And so, Volandegam from Ohio was complaining about this on the floor of the House of Representatives.
He retired from Congress and went back home to run for governor of Ohio.
And he started making the same speeches.
And Seward, who created a secret police, who thousands, he had thousands of secret spies
The Blandigam speeches were deterring enlistments in the army, in other words, encouraging desertion.
And so therefore, in April of 1863, 67 armed Federal soldiers broke down the door to Congressman Blandegam's home in Dayton, Ohio and dragged him off to prison without due process, without a lawyer or anything like that.
And they wanted to make the argument that all dissenters in the North were spies and traitors.
And so they ceremoniously handed him over to a Confederate commander in Tennessee.
And the Confederates pretty much said, what do we want with this guy? Who is he?
And Volandegam starts explaining to them that he was favoring the peaceful reuniting of the two sections.
and they didn't want to be reunited.
And so the land again went to Canada and ended up going to spending, being in exile in Canada
and he won the Democratic nomination for governor even though he was in exile in Canada.
He lost the election of course, but the Democratic Party of Ohio still nominated him as their
gubernatorial candidate.
And then the Lincoln administration was still not finished with him.
They started spreading stories. They set up a propaganda arm called the Union League.
It was a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.
And they started spreading rumors that some of the...
John Hunt Morgan, the Confederate raider and guerrilla fighter who passed through Ohio at one point,
he was taking orders, supposedly, from the Landegam.
And they also said the reason Robert E. Lee went into Pennsylvania
Prior to the Battle of Gettysburg, Vlandegam told him that's what he had to do.
So they were literally saying Robert E. Lee was taking directions from a former member of Congress from the same state that Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman are from.
That was a story. Then the New York Draft Riots came, and that of course was the work of Vlandegam.
They portrayed him as the Wizard of Oz up there in Canada, pulling levers and pushing buttons, causing all this catastrophe.
And of course, it was Lincoln's conscription law that caused the New York City draft rights.
It wasn't some old man who got kicked out of his home by soldiers. What power would he have?
But that's how they operated. And to this day, when I wrote about this in my book,
I had some of the Lincoln cult members repeat this as though it's gospel.
They said, well, he tells the story about Volandegam, but Volandegam was a spy and he caused the New York City draft riots.
And so this is, that's another weird thing about this period of history.
A lot of it that you read is not history.
It's taken from the propaganda pamphlets of the Republican Party.
Now those are the original sources that are sometimes used.
In fact, there was an article that I've written about in Insight Magazine, it's the neocon magazine associated with the Washington Times, a couple years ago, and it was trying to make the case that today's congressional opponents to the war in Iraq could be construed as traitors and treated as traitors, because after all, that's what Lincoln did to Volandegam, and this article in Insight Magazine sort of told the Volandegams
The Man to Gap story, but the spin was, and the spin always is, if Lincoln did it, it must be okay.
Therefore, if Lincoln deported a member of Congress who opposed him, so can George W. Bush.
He should go ahead and get Ted Kennedy and hold your applause, please, but deport him, too, or whoever.
Ron Paul, deport him, he's opposed to the war.
And so he was trying to make this case, and then near the end of the article,
The author, his name is Michael Waller, he says, you know, I've been very careful about my research here.
I've been very careful and I made sure I went to the original sources to make sure I got the story straight about what Lincoln did to Volandegamb.
And so I'm going to reveal my source. My source was the Union League.
He said it was the Union League, which was the Republican Party's propaganda arm at the time.
It's absurd, it's not real history, that's not, it's one political party's version of history, that's like studying the history of the 1990s by reading Bill Clinton's speeches, that won't get you very far in terms of truth, but yeah that's, yes sir.
I'm more familiar with the praxeology and the Harry Joppa.
They seem to have different reasons for phrasing reasons.
For being a great statement and a great practitioner of tradition,
of traditionals and of pragmatic politics.
They do the elections, starting with making them either free or at play,
and more of being a great politician.
statesman. They always call him a statesman. Yeah, he's prudent, too. Yeah, Fort Sumter,
you know, when the South Carolina militia decided that Fort Sumter was theirs, it was on their
property, it was their country, and they made the argument that, well, we will not tolerate a foreign
fort on our property any more than George Washington would have tolerated a British fort in New York
Harvard and they made that argument and the bombing of Fort Sumter did not kill
anybody and it did not even harm anybody and so according to Jaffa and the
Strausians at Claremont it was prudent for them for him to then wage a full
blown military invasion of all the southern states that led to 600,000
deaths that's prudence that was prudence it was also prudent of him to refuse to
meet with Confederate commissioners who wanted to meet with them and offer to
to pay for the South's portion of the public debt and federal property.
That's prudent in their view.
It was also prudent, supposedly, for him to refuse to meet with Napoleon III,
who offered to try to broker a peace agreement.
So prudence is in the eye of the beholder.
But the Claire Montistas, as I refer to them as, you're right.
There are leftists who thought we could rewrite the history of reconstruction
to support civil rights legislation in the 60s.
In my new book, I quote Eric Foner,
who's one of the real big shots
in so-called civil war history.
He wrote an article in 1991 in the Nation Magazine,
I think it was November 11th, as I recall,
opposing the breakup of the Soviet Union.
And the title of the article was Lincoln's Lesson.
He said, Lincoln would not have approved of this,
and I hope Gorbachev does not allow
the Soviet republics to secede.
And so you have totalitarians like Eric Foner, totalitarian socialists who understand you need monopoly government to have socialism, so they're for it, they're for it for that reason.
Now the Straussians at Claremont and elsewhere, they're first and foremost champions of executive power, nationalism and military adventurism, I would say.
And so that's why in my view they look at Lincoln as their idol, their role model.
He ignored the Constitution and became a strong executive, he waged the bloodiest war in American history, and they kind of like that out there, they're all in favor of there.
Not all of them, some of them are now wavering out there in the Iraq war, but most of them seem to be in favor of it.
When I debated Jaffa himself, 9-11 had happened, and he said at one point that 9-11 shows that now more than ever we need a strong federal government.
and you know my response was to say that the strong federal government is what
caused 9-11 you know our interventionism all over the world is what caused 9-11
and so they do have a different agenda and I think to understand that agenda
you have to understand not just Jaffa and the Straussians Walter Burns who's a
Straussian at the American Enterprise Institute he wrote a book called Making
Making Patriots, I call it Making Cannon Fodder, because there's a chapter and a half in it
where he says the problem with America's youth today is that they're too egotistical, they're
too centered on earning a living, raising a family, educating themselves, making money,
buying a house, living peacefully, we can't have that.
And he says, we need to be concerned about the plight of humanity everywhere, and we
need American military intervention to improve the plight of humanity from time to time.
So the real dilemma for America is how to persuade the youth of America to join the
military and invade Iran.
How can we do that?
And he says, fortunately, and I'm quoting, he does use the word fortunately, he says,
We have a national poet that we can invoke to persuade America's youth to do this.
And who is the national poet?
Abraham Lincoln.
And that's what Jaffa is all about.
It's about Lincoln's rhetoric.
Not what he did, what he said, not even all that he said.
You'll never hear Jaffa quote Lincoln's white supremacist statements, for example, of which
he did his whole life.
I don't believe in making voters or jurors or negros or intermarrying among the races.
You know, he even used the word superior to describe his preferred position between the
races. You won't hear them quote that. It's only the political speeches where the atheist
Abraham Lincoln quotes scripture. That's where you'll hear Jeff a lot.
What's that? Oh yeah, his whole career, Lincoln, so you really have to understand, you have to read my new book to really fully understand all this stuff, but when it comes out in October, but the North, the North really was, the Tocqueville, noticed in the 1830s, the irony that even though there was slavery in the North in the 1830s, but there was much more of it in the South,
But Tocqueville noticed that racism was actually worse in the north than in the south.
And there's a book by Joanne Melish who teaches at Brown University, it's called Disowning Slavery,
about how the northern states got rid of slavery beginning in 1794 and ending in 1865 in New Jersey.
It's a long time. Most of the slaves were not freed, but were sold to southern plantation owners.
The relatively few free blacks who remained in the north had no rights to speak of, for the most part, in the few places they did, but most places they didn't.
And they were literally burned out in many communities in New England. They literally burned down their homes and things like that.
And so there's a really ugly history of that, and these were Lincoln supporters.
These were Lincoln supporters, the North, he didn't get any votes from the South.
And so his promise to keep slavery out of the territories was partly a promise to keep black people out of the territories.
The way I put it in my forthcoming book is that the Free Soil Party, Lincoln was in line with them, they were the big supporters of Lincoln.
They were in favor of land giveaways, that's why it's called free soil, but they were also in favor of soil that was free of black people.
You just read what they said.
And so Lincoln favored deporting blacks to Liberia or Panama, Haiti, anywhere but here.
And even when he did mention during his presidency the possibility of buying the freedom of some of the slaves in the border states,
He coupled, as a way of ending slavery there, he coupled that with the requirement that any slaves that were freed in that way, which is, by the way, how all slaves were freed, the other 94% of all the slaves in the western hemisphere were freed voluntarily in that way.
Lincoln wanted to couple that with deportation. If there were any slaves in Maryland or Missouri, they were to be freed, they were to be immediately deported to Haiti or something like that.
And so you have to understand that he was a master politician and that was his constituency.
They wanted a white continent north of the Mason-Dixon line.
There's another new book out by Michael Lind called What Lincoln Believed.
And Lind takes on the Lincoln historians for ignoring this, ignoring Lincoln's white supremacist
his views and the views of all his supporters in the North and it's kind of refreshing
for me to read an honest writer for a change on this whole argument and Lind even, he goes
so far as to, he almost praises him for making these statements and it's kind of hard to
figure out why he's so praiseworthy of this, but he does.
So this is no secret, no big secret, it's just been swept out of the rug.
I think you also have to understand the conservative movement.
Murray Rothbard, in terms of their idolizing Lincoln, Murray Rothbard smoked out William
F. Buckley in the 1950s, as far as this goes, Mr. Conservative.
And National Review Magazine, in 1965, there was an article by Frank Meyer, who was the
by the editor of National Review Magazine, and there's a review of a book called Freedom Under Lincoln by Dean Sprague which mentioned the suspension of habeas corpus, it lists many of the newspapers that were shut down in the northern states, the imprisonment of dissenters and so forth, and all this stuff, and Frank Meyer reviewed this and said, you know, this atrocious trashing of the Constitution has had bad ramifications for the whole society.
and that it established a precedent for other presidents like FDR to just ignore the Constitution and Meyer made the case that the whole apparatus of the welfare state and big government would have had a much harder time to come into being had it not been for Lincoln's trashing of the Constitution and in future issues he was rebuked by Harry Jaffa and by William F. Buckley himself and I don't think there were any more Lincoln criticisms in National Review after that
that and in the meantime Rothbard comes along even before this and found some
writings by Buckley where Buckley said in order to fight the Cold War we need to
support a totalitarian bureaucracy within our own borders those are the
exact words Buckley used complete with heavy taxation a CIA a big military
industrial complex and on and on so in 1950s William F. Buckley jr. was on
in record as saying his preferred form of government because of the Cold War was, quote,
totalitarian bureaucracy.
Who is a better idol to look, to point to for totalitarian bureaucracy within our borders
than the man who suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned all dissenters, shut down the opposing
newspaper?
Talk about, this is in the north, this is not the south, this is the north.
And so I think in my view that is why to this day, the past two years I've been reading
And I'm reading article after article after article on townhall.com and all the right-wing websites essentially saying Lincoln did it, therefore we should do it.
And it has to do with whether it's torture, which Lincoln did in his gulags, domestic spying, which he censored all telegraph communications,
Michelle Malkin has written a whole book saying put all the dissenters, anyone who looks like a Muslim thrown in prison, you know, I don't think she says exactly that, but that's the theme of her book essentially, she makes the case that the imprisonment of the Japanese Americans during World War II is a good precedent for cracking down on Muslim looking people, Arab looking types in America today, and of course she invokes Lincoln also as a historical president.
So this is still used to this day by the party of Lincoln to justify all this, and they keep
saying if Lincoln did it, it must be okay.
Even torture.
There's a book called Fate of Liberty by Mark Neely, who's a very famous Lincoln scholar,
and he mentions torture, water torture that was used in Lincoln's gulags, and it became
This became public because a British citizen was mistakenly arrested and imprisoned and
subjected to water torture, which was sticking a hose down your throat and turning the water
on and you either confess to some crime or your intestines explode, water torture.
And this became public because the British foreign minister got wind of it and made a
big stink.
And Mark Neely says that the Lincoln administration still kept doing it.
Even though it became public, they didn't stop engaging in water torture.
These were northern civilians.
These were not Confederate soldiers.
These were northern newspaper editors, ordinary people.
In my new book, I quote Lincoln himself in one of his speeches as saying that anyone
One who remained silent when there was a discussion of the war or his policies was guilty of treason.
Remaining silent, you know, so if some people were sitting around talking about the war
and you said nothing, then in Lincoln's eyes, that was a treasonous offense.
And if he believed that, then I would suppose William Seward could also construe that as
saying, well, let's get our secret police to run that person down and send him to Fort
Lafayette.
So that's how it was, and I think that's one of the reasons why some of the neocons love Lincoln so much.
I think you had your hand up.
There's a book by a man named Sheldon Van Auken called The Glittering Illusion,
And what it was, it was about British opinion of the war during the time.
He surveyed the British magazines, newspapers, anything he could find.
Because after all, if you read southern newspapers, they're all one-sided.
The northern newspapers were censored or shut down, so you're not going to get a good sense of public opinion in America during the war.
and what Van Auken concluded was the big majority of British opinion makers were against Lincoln, they thought the war was a war of, the tariff was a big issue, and they said it was a war of consolidation and empire, a war for empire.
There were some dissenters. There was a debate in British magazines between Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill.
Charles Dickens was on the side of the South. John Stuart Mill sided with the Lincoln.
Karl Marx was a Lincoln supporter. He wrote him a letter of congratulations after he was re-elected in 1864.
So there were all kinds of opinions, but Van Auken makes the case that the big majority of British opinion makers
thought that the South had a right to secede and that the war was not to free the slaves.
They didn't think it was any more sincere.
When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, it only applied to rebel territory.
That meant it only applied to areas where no slave could be freed.
And so European opinion makers looked at this and thought it was rank hypocrisy because
at the time it specifically exempted in words.
All the parishes in Louisiana that were under control of the Union Army at the time, it
specifically exempted West Virginia, where there were slaves, but it was part of the
Union.
And it exempted New Jersey, where there were slaves, still slaves in New Jersey.
And so the Emancipation Proclamation said, we're going to free the slaves where they
cannot be freed, but where they are freed, it doesn't apply, or where they are able to
be freed, it doesn't apply.
And so in my book, I quote various European opinion makers as saying this is a fraud.
This didn't free anybody.
And a lot of them thought it was essentially an attempt to incite slave insurrections in the South,
not a real emancipation proclamation in a genuine sense.
A lot of them voiced that kind of opinion.
In every major battle of the war, there were northern slave owners who fought against
southern yeoman farmers who never owned slaves, because there were slaves in the border states
and in some of the northern states like New Jersey, and their owners who were in the war
were allowed to keep their slaves if their state was in the Union.
And of course the big majority of southern soldiers were yeoman farmers and small merchants
In the 19th century, I guess one more is end up first, and then Mark Thornton, the
The Southern is going to completely abolish the advance and find them in a different form, or is it going to allow them to pass down a few of their money to the government?
That was during the actual government. I think the average tariff rate was about 13% on average, but that means it could have been some things that had a 90% tariff as an average.
The Confederate Constitution outlawed protectionist tariffs.
It was actually written in their Constitution that you cannot have a protectionist tariff.
It would seriously deter international competition.
They eliminated the General Welfare Clause of the Constitution, they prohibited corporate welfare for everything except dredging of harbors.
You couldn't use tax money for anything but dredging of harbors.
Whereas, you know, the Republican Party was the party of railroad subsidies, big time.
They just opened the floodgates to corporate welfare.
The Confederate Constitution outlawed that altogether.
But of course the war came and no government is going to abide by the constitution like this at wartime.
Put yourself in Jefferson Davis' shoes in Richmond in 1862.
The biggest and best-equipped army ever assembled in the history of the world is a couple of miles outside your capital city,
hell-bent on destroying the entire place.
And so what are you going to do? Are you going to make speeches quoting John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, or commandeer resources to defend yourself?
So they commandeered a lot of resources, they nationalized industries, and so they did all these things that were very bad ideas, economically.
But that's what governments do in wartime. That's what they do in wartime.
And I read Mark Thornton's book with Bob Eakland. They make a compelling case that they were very foolish in engaging in these kinds of interventionist policies because they would have been better off militarily had they maintained freer trade and not nationalized those industries like they did.
Are we out of time, Mark?
Okay.
This guy back here has had his hand up for a while.
I'm sorry, my question is really for everybody, but did you clarify before the question on real-life banking, you're sending that link in, and we're at the end of the day, and you're asking not to pay, does that have to do with the moral tariff?
The highest tariff rate from about 15%, 1.5%, to a little over 32% at that point, a little more than half, a little more than doubling.
When he made his first inaugural and he literally threatened an invasion of any state that didn't collect that, that's what he was talking about.
Then right after that it went up to 42 and then even higher. There were 10 tariff increases during the Lincoln administration.
and they stayed in place for the most part for the next 50 years or so, so it wasn't just a wartime policy, that always was the cornerstone of Republican economic policy, protectionist tariffs because primarily they wanted that to finance their big enterprise of corporate welfare for the railroad industry, that was another big plank and of course they did and I'm going to tell
So that's the story this afternoon about Lincoln, the great railroad lobbyist. That's one of the ways I think of him. Thank you.