Welcome back. I tried my best to scare everyone off yesterday, but it didn't work.
I usually do that with my classes, but on the first day I punch a hole in the blackboard.
So they think I'm crazy, but there's no blackboard here.
I have a short announcement to make.
She reminded me.
Today is 6606, and so naturally we'll talk about Lincoln today.
So yesterday the major emphasis of what I had to say was about economics, Lincoln and economics.
The tariff issue and the mercantilism issue, that was topic for yesterday.
Today, it's more going to be on an emphasis on liberty, Lincoln and liberty, and Lincoln
and the Constitution and states' rights, but they are all ultimately linked to economics
as well.
After all, economic liberty is arguably the most important form of liberty.
Without economic liberty, we can't really have any other kind of liberty.
And so it's not as though these are mutually exclusive topics.
And that's, by the way, that's one of the things I always admired and was fascinated
by when I, as a student, I was your age, ran across the Austrians, like Ludwig von Mises
and Murray Rothbard, in that they understood this, they understood that to understand economics
took more than just economic theory.
You had to understand something about history, philosophy, mathematics, statistics, as well
as well as a body of economics, and there are different schools of thought of economics.
So I would urge you to think of your educational experience, those of you who are students,
I guess you're all students, one way or another, as more interdisciplinary, and look at the
Austrian School that way too.
And so, Lincoln and the Constitution, there are a number of books I'll tell you about,
And one of them, but first I want to ask you a question, I think Lew Rockwell just came
in a little late and he didn't see my introduction, I don't think.
Can you read that, Lew?
But as far as books go, I'm going to be giving you names of some books on Lincoln and the
Constitution, but I wanted to ask you, since everyone here is presumably a student and
I'm a student of the Constitution, I think.
What part of the Constitution allows for a dictatorship?
Who can tell me that?
I'll buy you a milkshake at Tumors, if you can tell me that.
That's right, he got the right answer.
There is no provision of the U.S. Constitution
that allows for a dictatorship.
Well, one book I'll mention is,
there's a man named Clinton Rossiter
who taught Cornell for many, many years, decades, I think.
He wrote a book called Constitutional Dictatorship,
which sounds, in the American tradition,
it sounds like an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp,
military intelligence, and so forth.
But in Constitutional Dictatorship,
he devoted a chapter called The Lincoln Dictatorship,
where he says this, dictatorship played a decisive role
in the North's Successful Effort to Maintain the Union by Force of Arms.
One man was the government of the United States.
Lincoln was a great dictator and a true democrat.
And so those are two words you don't usually put together, dictator and democrat, but that's
the sort of thing you run into in this literature.
And he also went to say, Lincoln's amazing disregard for the Constitution was considered
by Nobody as Being Legal, end quote.
And so I've read all this literature, you can read, the history is out there.
It doesn't make it into the textbooks that you use in high school or maybe even college,
but the scholarly works are out there like this.
And when I debated one of the big shot Lincoln, I call them idolaters, I don't call them scholars,
idolaters, Harry Jaffa, he sort of angrily announced that Lincoln never did anything
anything that was unconstitutional which is a flat contradiction of what
generations of scholars have said and he didn't provide any explanation of why he
thought that but I'm going to I'm going to tell you why he was wrong you know
with some historical facts. Other authors have said similar things James
Randall another book if you're interested in his whole topic is
constitutional problems under Lincoln by James Randall. James McPherson the
A well-known historian at Princeton calls Randall the preeminent Lincoln scholar of the last generation.
He wrote in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s for the most part.
He was the academic mentor of David Donald, who was another well-known Lincoln biographer.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on Lincoln.
But here's what Randall says.
He says, if Lincoln was a dictator, it must be admitted that he was a benevolent dictator.
He doesn't say why it must be admitted. When I read that, I had a vision of James Randall pointing a gun at me saying it must be admitted, it must be admitted, but there's no explanation why it must be like that.
He wishes he was a benevolent dictator. But I would think that if you asked somebody in, say, South Carolina in 1865 if Lincoln was a benevolent dictator, he would probably disagree with James Randall.
So in another book that talks about the Lincoln dictatorship is Freedom Under Lincoln by Dean Sprague and also I mentioned this yesterday, Emancipating Slaves and Slaving Free Men by Jeffrey Hummel surveys some of this literature and the preeminent scholar of the copperheads, the northern opposition is Frank Clement, K-L-E-M-E-N-T and he wrote a book called Lincoln's Critics and it contains a couple of chapters
on Civil Liberties Issues during the war.
So that's, as far as constitutional issues,
that's another good source.
He has a good discussion of that.
So the question is, why is it that all these generations
of scholars, and these are all pro-Lincoln scholars,
by the way, in my favorite book of all of these
is Freedom Under Lincoln because of the information
that's in it by Dean Sprague, but still the last chapter
is called Lincoln the Humanitarian.
So he writes a whole book about the trashing of the Constitution, and then the last chapter is why it was a good thing that he did this. He's a pre-humanitarian.
Why did they do this? Why did they say these things? Well, among the things that he did was to launch a military invasion without the consent of Congress, first of all.
George W. Bush was not the first president to do that.
He blockaded southern ports without first declaring war,
and he unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus.
The Congress eventually came around and played its role in suspending habeas corpus.
Of course what habeas corpus is, is what gives American citizens due process.
If you're accused of a crime, you have a right to confront your accuser,
of a Right to a Speedy Trial, and so forth.
But when that is lifted, Lincoln just announced that this was no longer to be, then the military
could arrest anybody without even telling that person why and then it could drag them
off and they did not feel obligated even to tell their family or anybody where they were.
So there were some people who were dragged off and thrown into prison by the Lincoln
Administration, who their families had no idea what happened to them for months, months
and months at a time and over a year in some cases.
And so that was the suspension of habeas corpus.
And there were, William Seward, the Secretary of State, was put in charge of a secret police
force and there were thousands of these people who were spies, it was sort of like in Eastern
in Europe under the Soviet Bloc, where people would spy on their fellow citizens, and if
they were overheard saying something that was construed as being not friendly to the
Lincoln administration, then they could be hauled off in jail.
And as I told you yesterday in one of Lincoln's speeches, he actually said that if a conversation
is being held about his policies, the war, and so forth, and a man remains silent and
not taken, judges did not sit, juries were not impaneled, convictions were not obtained
and sentences were not pronounced. The Anglo-Saxon concept of due process, perhaps the greatest
political triumph of the ages, and the best guardian of freedom, was abandoned."
As I said, there were thousands of political prisoners in various places like the Port
Lafayette and New York Harbor. Sprague said that it was sort of strange that the only
One place in the northern states where there was genuine free speech was in Port Lafayette
because once you're in prison for speaking freely, what have you got to lose?
What are they going to do?
Put you back in prison?
You're already there.
And so men could speak and women could speak freely if they were in one of these gulags
that the Lincoln administration administered.
And these were not spies and traitors as you may have read somewhere else.
There may have been some spies in there, but they were all northern citizens, including
the mayor of Baltimore, Congressman Henry May from Maryland, about 20 members of the
Maryland legislature were thrown in this prison, newspaper editors from all over the country,
ordinary people, so it was a lot of people like that.
Hundreds of newspapers were shut down.
I think that James Randall, he mentions that over 300 of newspapers were shut down and what usually happened was they were shut down or they were denied the use of the mail and in those days newspapers were all delivered by mail.
There were no paper boys or paper girls. In those days they were delivered by mail. So if you can't use the mail, the government monopoly on mail, then you can't have a newspaper and that's a good argument against the government monopoly on mail.
and which is why I'm going to mention in a little bit Lysander Spooner by the way
and his comments on all of this and one of the things he is known for is
trying to break up the government mail monopoly. He started up a private mail
service and underpriced the government mail monopoly. It was illegal to do that
but he gave it a try. So these newspapers were shut down. Now
imagine this, imagine if George W Bush issued this order to one of his military
Generals, which is not too hard for me to imagine, but imagine he said this, you, the
general, you will take possession by military force of the printing establishments of the
New York Times and the Washington Post and prohibit any further publication thereof.
You are therefore commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison the editors, proprietors and
publishers of the aforesaid newspapers, end quote.
Now, wouldn't you think that would be a horrible affront to freedom of speech, the President
of the United States ordering a military general to shut down some of the biggest newspapers
in the country and put the editors and owners in jail?
Oh, of course.
Well, what I was reading was an exact order given to General John Dix by Lincoln, but
But I substituted Washington Post and New York Times for the New York World and the
Journal of Commerce, which were two big New York City newspapers at the time.
So this is the sort of thing that went on.
Generals were giving these orders.
There were also mobs of Republican Party hacks, and sometimes including soldiers, who would
literally destroy the printing presses.
And I mentioned a new book yesterday, it was a new book called Lincoln's Wrath, that I
I reviewed it on lewrockwell.com a month or so ago. If you're interested in this whole topic, it's written by a journalist and a historian who just got interested in this whole topic and it centers on events in Pennsylvania, but it also has some nationwide implications.
and I was happy to see that. It's the first book that I know of in probably 25 years or so
by scholars that have actually taken on this whole issue of the
demolition of civil liberties during the Lincoln administration
and his wrath was the shutting down of all the newspapers,
the opposition press,
and one of the reasons why this is important is it abolishes the myth of
northern unity during the war.
All the textbooks will talk about the great unity there supposedly was.
Well, of course, if you jail all the opposition, then whoever's left is going to be pretty unified.
And so, and this, of course, had a big censorship.
You know, a lot of newspapers who weren't shut down, that weren't shut down, got the message.
They didn't have to shut down every last newspaper in America.
They just had to rough up a few of the owners and editors of the bigger ones and make sure everyone knew about this.
And that would intimidate everybody else away from speaking up against the Lincoln administration.
So you can find some criticisms in northern newspapers at this time, but the thing is
you don't know that maybe a week later Seward showed up for one of his secret police and
shut them down.
I was in a debate with a Lincoln idolater from North Carolina State University in Richmond
and he thought he found proof that I was lying about all this and he found one newspaper in Ohio I think it was and he found they had a criticism of the Lincoln administration and he thought that was proof that this is all a myth, they didn't shut down newspapers, which is ridiculous, probably a couple of weeks later they probably did that very newspaper as far as we know, but that was how they operated. All telegraph communication was censored. This kind of reminds me of the Bush administration
Domestic Spying Program, we have high technology now, but censoring the telegraphs achieved the same thing, listening in on everybody's messages.
The railroads were nationalized. Federal troops were ordered to interfere with Northern elections. This happened quite a bit.
Federal troops would flood into an area and instructed to vote Republican to make sure that the Republican candidate would win.
Lincoln was known to have his generals furlough soldiers to go and vote if they were Republican, keep the Democrats out in the field, that sort of thing.
And in my book I cite David Donald, the Lincoln biographer, as saying that Lincoln won New York State in the 1864 election by 7,000 votes,
quote, with the help of federal bayonets, end quotes. They literally intimidated the Democrat voters with bayonets.
They sometimes used different color ballots. The Democrat ballot would be one color and the Republican would be another color.
Today, maybe the Republican ballot would be red and the Democrat would be blue, so the soldiers would know who to intimidate.
If you had a certain color ballot in your hand, they would intimidate you out of voting.
We mentioned yesterday that somebody asked about Clement Volandegam, the congressman from Ohio,
and I mentioned that this was another affront to the Constitution,
and that one of the essential elements of the Constitution is supposed to be the separation of powers.
And so here is the President essentially deporting the most outspoken member of Congress, Clement Volandegam,
I mentioned how 67 armed Federal soldiers broke into his home in Dayton, Ohio.
One of the best renditions of this story is in that book by Frank Clement that I mentioned, called Lincoln's Critics.
But I thought it would be worthwhile reading to you a few things that Volandegam said that got him in trouble.
He got him in trouble. He was a congressman who made speeches criticizing all of these acts that I've been talking about on the floor of the House of Representatives.
And then when he retired from Congress to run for governor of Ohio, he went back home to Dayton and said many of the same things.
And the Lincoln administration accused him of discouraging enlistments in the Army or encouraging desertion by criticizing the government.
Think of it in today's context.
That would mean if a politician like Ron Paul
is out there criticizing the war in Iraq,
the argument would be made, well, he's encouraging desertion
because these soldiers may be listening,
reading Ron Paul's speeches on lewrockwell.com.
They've got the internet over there in Iraq.
That's the same kind of thing that was going on.
What was he saying?
Well, here are some of the things.
There's a whole book of the Landegam speeches
that's been published by a Crown rights publishing company.
He said that Lincoln's first inaugural address was, quote,
spoken with the forked tongue and crooked counsel
of the New York politician, leaving 30 millions of people
in doubt whether it meant peace or war, end quote.
So you can see how that would have gotten under Lincoln's skin.
He denounced the tariff, the moral tariff,
which we talked about yesterday, as, quote,
obscure, ill-considered, ill-digested,
and unstatesmanlike.
He condemned the whole administration for its, quote, persistent infractions of the Constitution,
its high-minded usurpations of power, which formed any part of a deliberate conspiracy
to overthrow the present form of federal Republican government and to establish a strong centralized
government in its stead, end quote.
He also went on to say, he called the administration wicked and cunning, and he said, starting
Condemning a war without the consent of Congress was the kind of dictatorial act that would
have cost any English sovereign his head at any time within the last 200 years.
So he was a fiery orator, if you will, to say the least.
We don't have anybody like this anymore.
Then he went on to say, condemning Lincoln for the quartering of soldiers in private
homes without the consent of owners, that's one of the things that was mentioned in the
Declaration of Independence and the Train of Abuses by Jefferson, and without any manner
having been prescribed by law to the subversion in part at least of Maryland, of her own state
government and of the authorities under it, to the censorship over the telegraph and the
infringement repeatedly in one or more of the states of the right of the people to keep
and bear arms for their defense, free speech too has been repeatedly denied, end quote.
That was the Landy Gamm again.
And finally, and this is, in my view, this is what really had to be stopped.
The landigam was letting the cat out of the bag.
He was going all over the place saying things like this.
The purpose of the war, he was saying, was, quote, national banks, bankrupt laws, a vast
and permanent public debt, high tariffs, heavy direct taxation, enormous expenditure, gigantic
and stupendous peculation.
means stealing or embezzling, and strong government, no more state lines, no more state governments,
and a consolidated monarchy or vast centralized military despotism."
That's what the Landegam was saying was the real purpose of the war, to establish all
of that.
And so for doing this, he was accused of treason, and as I said, they wanted to make a big show
The border states were systematically disarmed in violation of the Second Amendment.
In fact, you can make an argument that the whole invasion of the southern states was
an abolition of the Second Amendment, because if you understand James Madison's rationale
Now for the Second Amendment, it was that an armed populace would be a deterrent to a central government invasion that would deprive them of their liberties.
That was the whole purpose of an armed populace, according to James Madison.
And so the disarmament of the border states did this, disarmed them and allowed them to come and run roughshod over the whole country.
There were two confiscation acts passed by the Lincoln administration that allowed for the confiscation of private property of dissenters, essentially.
And they included lines like this, any U.S. citizen, this applied to the citizens of the North as well as anywhere else.
And keep in mind, Lincoln never said that the southern states had legally seceded.
He always considered them to be part of the United States and that all the people would be citizens of the United States.
And so if a federal law was passed, they always considered that this applies to everyone, north and south.
But these confiscation acts, a U.S. citizen could have all of his private property confiscated for such crimes as,
and I'm quoting directly from the law, falsely exalting the motives of the traders.
So, if you were to, if somebody were to say, well you know, if you read the Declaration of Independence, it says, governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and these Southerners are saying, we no longer consent to being governed by Washington D.C., so maybe they have a point.
In fact, in my book, I talk about how the majority of the northern newspapers said this at the time.
But with the confiscation laws that were passed, that would be a crime,
and you could have all of your property confiscated by the state by saying that, by saying something like that,
by falsely exalting the motives of the traders.
So, you know, no free speech there.
Or this, this is the exact words of the law, overstating the success of our adversaries.
If you were heard to overstate the success of the Confederate Army, you could be hauled
into prison and have all your property confiscated.
Like if in 1861, this law passed after that, if someone were to say something like, damn,
we really got our butts kicked at Manassas, didn't we, and I suppose that would qualify
as overstating the success of our adversaries and you could have all your property.
For this, this is another of the exact wording of the law,
inflaming party spirit among ourselves.
No party dispirit permitted.
What party could that be?
I would guess the Republican Party would be my guess.
Party spirit among ourselves.
And there was a charming little part of this law
that said that informers who turned in their neighbors
or whoever, you turn somebody in,
and they were prosecuted.
They did have a due process after a while with these cases.
If they were convicted, you, the informer, could keep 50% of that person's property.
And so they understood incentives, I guess they understood incentives like we economists
do back in those days.
And so this was very similar to totalitarian communism that we've all learned about during
in the 20th century, countries like Albania, places like that, Bulgaria, very similar.
And so these are some of the things that are the reasons why all these historians I mentioned
refer to the Lincoln dictatorship.
And for a long time, if you get into this literature, you'll find that a lot of historians
have praised Lincoln for this, praised him for this.
In Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln, James Randall devotes hundreds and hundreds
of pages to describing what happened, and I encourage you to read this book if you're
interested in this topic.
It's really well worth it, it's about this thick, a big, fat book, but then he makes
excuses for it all at the end by saying things like, great social purposes can be promoted
by abandoning constitutional barriers.
And so, you know, why do we have constitutional barriers if great social purposes can be
promoted by abandoning them?
You know, when I mentioned also that Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and Congress then
went along with it.
He did it unilaterally.
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney, did issue a ruling that this was
was unconstitutional, and his reasoning was very sound. His reasoning was the Constitution
talks about the suspension of habeas corpus in the section on congressional powers, not
executive powers. He went back to British law as well as American law. It is very clear
that the President cannot unilaterally do this in Tawny's view. And Lincoln's response,
which I'm going to talk about shortly, was to issue an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice.
So, demolishing the other side of the separation of powers by intimidating the Supreme Court.
But after the war in 1866, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling that neither
branch can legally suspend habeas corpus as long as the civil courts are operating.
In fact, in this decision in 1866, they made the argument that a crisis like a war is the
It's the most important time of all to keep the Constitution intact.
It's just the opposite of this argument that you often hear that, well, this is an emergency, things are different.
For example, if you were to listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity on this topic, they'll repeat ad nauseam.
Everything has changed since 9-11.
What they're saying is if the Bush administration wants to suspend habeas corpus, torture prisoners, spy on us, that's okay.
Everything has changed.
In 1866, I think the Supreme Court did get it right by saying if the purpose of this Constitution is to protect the liberty of the people, that's the most important time of all, in times of emergency or war, to enforce the Constitution, not to suspend it.
If not, governments will constantly be fabricating crises, they're talking about phony crises to justify watering down the Constitution and grabbing more power and destroying more liberty.
and they understood that back then but you know who expects Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity to
understand this? I wouldn't. So Randall went on to say that the Constitution should be looked at as
a vehicle of life and a matter of growth, development, and interpretation and he sort of
denigrated the founding fathers by saying we should not tolerate excessive reliance upon the
and the Political Wisdom of a Bygone Generation, and so that was sort of, he was our so-called progressive, Randall was, and so that was sort of a way of defining what's called the living constitution, and more recently there was a man named George P. Fletcher who wrote a book called Lincoln's Constitution, and I was kind of surprised by this title because I didn't know Lincoln had his own constitution, I always thought we had one for all of us, but apparently he had his own, and he comes right
Lincoln's Casual Attitude Toward Formal Constitutional Institutions
and maybe fascism and socialism combined.
And in my book, I contrast this to what George Washington
had to say about this sort of thing,
this casual attitude toward the Constitution.
In his farewell address, he said,
if the Constitution is to be altered, he said,
quote, let it be corrected by an amendment
in the way in which the Constitution designates.
There is a process for this.
And then he goes on to say,
but let there be no change by usurpation,
For though this in one instance may be the instrument of good, it is a customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.
So you might agree with it now.
You might think that, well, let's let George W. Bush violate the Constitution in this or that way.
But you might think it's a good thing now.
But who's to say there won't be a tyrant in office next year who will not be quite as benevolent?
Now, on the business of Judge Taney and the suspension of habeas corpus, you know, I didn't actually, I didn't go in my, in the real Lincoln, I didn't mention this on purpose, because I knew that there was a lot of dispute over this, and at the time, I only knew of one source of the story that Lincoln issued an arrest warrant.
All I mentioned was that Tawny did issue a statement that this was unconstitutional,
but I didn't say in the book that Lincoln issued the arrest warrant,
because the first source was a book by Ward Layman,
who was Lincoln's close friend, law partner,
and he worked in the White House in the Lincoln administration, who said this.
He wrote a biography, and he said this.
He said that Lincoln issued an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice.
And so the Lincoln cult, or the Lincoln idolaters as I call them,
they respond to this by saying, well, Ward Layman was a drunk.
You can't believe him.
And how could you disprove that?
He's a drunk.
They also acknowledged that Ulysses S. Grant was a notorious drunk.
But they don't question much of what he says.
But they said, well, he's a drunk.
And usually, you know, with the Lincoln cult, that's sufficient. Personal smear, ignore him.
Okay, that's the way they operate. But since then, I've uncovered several other sources that are much better than Ward-Layman's.
And not that I buy the drunk explanation. I think Ward-Layman was right on in what he said.
In fact, Charles Adams, who wrote the excellent book, When in the Course of Human Events, tried to get a copy of the manuscript of Ward-Lehman's book, which is on microfilm at the Huntington Library, and they wouldn't allow him. They apparently knew who he was, and so they wouldn't give him access to it.
However, a graduate student at George Mason, about two years ago, is doing research on the whole tariff issue, the LinkedIn tariff issue, dissertation research. He has got a copy of it.
He's an unknown graduate student, they don't know who he is, so he got the actual thing from the Huntington Library, and the last I heard from him, he's trying to get somebody to put it on the internet, the whole thing, because it's on microfilm now, it has to be transferred from microfilm to the internet, so the whole thing might be out there.
But another source is George W. Brown, the wartime mayor of Baltimore.
He wrote a book called Baltimore in the 19th of April, 1861, where he talks about this.
He talks about a conversation he had with Judge Tawny, and where Judge Tawny told him that he,
the judge, knew about the arrest warrant for him in response to his opinion, his opinion.
And there's a, by the way, about a mile down Charles Street from my office,
This is a big statue of Roger B. Taney, he's a Baltimore native.
Another one, another source is a book called
A Memoir of Benjamin Robbins Curtis.
Benjamin Robbins Curtis was on the United States Supreme Court.
He defended Andrew Johnson in his impeachment trial.
He wrote the dissenting opinion in the Dred Scott case
and resigned from the court over the Dred Scott case.
and but nevertheless he refers to the arrest warrant for the Chief Justice as quote a great crime,
a great crime in his memoirs so that's yet another source so I think these are unimpeachable sources
as far as sources go that this did happen you know the Lincoln administration could have appealed
this this opinion they could have gone to court but they chose not to they chose to just ignore it
and to continue to suspend habeas corpus and another thing that I found that was going on
here was not just the intimidation of Judge Taney but the intimidation of many judges federal judges
who were attempting to issue writs of habeas corpus to four people that were accused of being
traitors by simply disagreeing with the Lincoln administration and here's something I dug up
and this is all in my forthcoming book that's going to be published in October, but what I dug up was a if anybody's interested I can give you the actual law case citations for this, but there was a federal judge in Washington DC, his name was W.M. Merrick, M-E-R-R-I-C-K, and he was going to court the next day and he was going to issue a writ of habeas corpus to
This is a letter that he wrote to his fellow judges on the Federal District Court in Washington D.C. as to why he did not show up in court that day. He never made it.
He says this, quote,
After dinner, I visited my brother judges in Georgetown and returning home between half past seven and eight o'clock found an armed sentinel stationed at my door by order of the provost marshal.
I learned that this guard had been placed at my door as early as five o'clock.
Armed sentries from that time continuously until now have been stationed in front of my house.
Thus, it appears that a military officer against whom a writ in the appointed form of law has first threatened with and afterwards arrested in prison the attorney who rightfully served the writ upon him,
So they arrested the attorney who served the writ.
He continued and still continues in contempt
and disregard of the mandate of the law
and has ignominiously placed an armed guard
to insult and intimidate by its presence
the judge who ordered the writ to issue.
So they had armed guards stationed outside of the house
of the judge so that he couldn't leave and go to court
and issue writs of habeas corpus.
And I found that numerous instances like this
and several different law cases and things.
So this apparently was going on
not just with the Chief Justice.
And as far as the Constitution goes,
this is another attack on the separation of powers
because it's the intimidation of judges.
And like I said with the newspaper,
you don't have to intimidate every last judge in America.
Just a few well-publicized acts of tyranny will do.
It will intimidate most of them
And the final thing I want to mention here, with regard to the Constitution, and then I want to say something about Lysander Spooner and his take on all of this, was that there has been a lot of
and all of this, was that there has been a myth that has been created to justify all
of this, and to justify really the perversion of the Constitution.
And the perversion of the Constitution that I'm referring to is the supposed illegality
of secession, and I'm going to talk more about this in my next lecture on states' rights,
But all I'll say about it for now is that the states were sovereign.
They did hold conventions to ratify or not ratify the United States Constitution.
And New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia, as conditions of ratifying the Constitution,
reserved the right to withdraw at any future date if this new central government became
abusive of their liberties.
And they were all three accepted into the Union with that understanding.
And under the Constitution, no state has more powers or more rights than any other state.
So that if they accepted those three in, then I think it had to have been presumed that
all the states would have this right to withdraw from the Union if they wanted to, in some
future date, if they decided the government was abusive of their liberties.
And the idea that they had to get the permission of all the other states, I think, is kind
The State of America is kind of absurd because if you have a right of secession, you don't have a right of secession if it's subject to somebody else's approval.
Either you have that right or you don't. But if it's subject to somebody else's approval, you don't have that right.
Further evidence that it was understood that states had a right to secede was in the weeks after Lincoln's inauguration,
There were three bills put before Congress to make secession illegal, and so why would
they propose legislation to make secession illegal if they thought it was already illegal?
Well, obviously, they didn't think, the U.S. Congress didn't think it was illegal.
They thought it was perfectly illegal for that to happen.
And so the whole invasion, the whole invasion of the Southern states, I argue, was unconstitutional,
and that is probably also why they never brought Jefferson Davis to trial after the war.
They destroyed the right of secession at gunpoint, but then they held him in prison for several years, Jefferson Davis, after the war, but they never brought him to trial.
A man named Frank O'Connor, who was a well-known New York lawyer, offered to defend Davis,
And that was apparently enough to intimidate the entire U.S. government out of going to trial
because they didn't want to resurrect the right of secession in the courts after destroying it on the battlefield.
And so I think that's further evidence that they did have this right.
But there's a whole body of theory that has been developed to rationalize this,
to rationalize the notion that there never was such thing as state sovereignty.
2020. And this theory actually developed before Lincoln. It was developed by Daniel Webster
and then Joseph Story, the Supreme Court Justice, also popularized this notion. And it was the
notion that the Constitution was created by the whole people. If you read Alan Key's speech,
you'll probably see the words the whole people in there. And if you're wondering, what the
The whole people, the half people, the quarter people, this is what he's talking about, he's talking about nationalism, nationalism, the whole people.
You know, if this were true, if the whole people created the government, the Constitution, then the states were never sovereign.
It was this thing called the whole people that were sovereign.
James J. Kilpatrick, who was a syndicated columnist, he retired some years ago, he was an excellent writer.
and he wrote a book called The Sovereign States and he says this about this idea, he says
the delusion that sovereignty is vested in the whole people of the United States is one
of the strangest misconceptions of our public life.
Where did this come from?
Well, one of the things the modern proponents point to is the preamble of the Constitution
which says we the people of the United States do ordain and establish this constitution
and so they will usually say, aha, there it is, it's the whole people, we the people.
Well, if you read James Madison's notes of the debates in the Federal Constitution,
which is the source that we have of what went on during the Constitution,
what you will learn is that the reason why it says we the people in the preamble to the Constitution
is that when they proposed the Constitution, they originally had a different preamble.
The preamble originally read this, I'm quoting it,
We the people of the states of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Providence,
Plantation, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia,
North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, do ordain, declare, and establish the following
Constitution and so forth.
But then they realized, well, wait a minute, we don't know that all these states are going
How can we put them all in the preamble? Some of them may vote no. So let's just leave it at we the people of the United States. So that's what they did.
But it was understood by everyone that the states were sovereign. And when they talked about we the people of the states, they didn't mean state legislatures. They meant the citizens of the states.
That's who's sovereign. We are creating this central government as our agents. That's what they were saying.
James Madison himself, everyone calls the father of the Constitution, was very clear on where sovereignty resided. It wasn't the whole people.
Here's what he said in his notes on ratification. He says, the Constitution would be ratified by the people, I'm quoting,
the people composing those political societies in their highest sovereign capacity, political societies of the states, is what he's referring to.
So it was not state governments, as I said, but the citizens of the states.
So even James Madison was very clear on that.
And so it's hard to understand how anyone could honestly make this argument of something called the whole people.
There was never any national referendum on the Constitution. That never happened.
North Carolina took well over a year to ratify the Constitution.
And the way the ratification went, it only required nine states.
And so the nine states voted and they had a new constitution and North Carolina waited another year or so before they went in.
But believe it or not, nobody at the time suggested that North Carolina be invaded and one out of four men of military age be killed and the cities burned down.
Honestly, God, that didn't happen. Everyone, how was the opinion? Well, they're a separate country. Leave them alone. Good luck to them.
When Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address when he said a new nation was created, it's not true. They didn't create a new nation in 1776. They created a confederacy. They created a confederacy of states.
The very words of the Declaration of Independence contradict this theory about the whole people. Just read it.
Someone asked yesterday about the Straussians. They tend to harp on a few words of the Declaration.
They claim to be the experts on the Declaration of Independence, and they focus on the all-men are created equal language.
and they have their own unique definition of equal also, we can talk about that later,
but they tend to ignore the rest of the declaration.
If you read the rest of it, well first of all, it was a declaration of secession from
the British Empire, that's what it was.
It wasn't a declaration of revolution, it was a declaration of secession, they used
the word separation from the British Empire, and the founders were all secessionists, every
The Declaration is a statement of state sovereignty.
These colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.
They have full power to levy war and conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce,
and to do all other acts and things which independent states may have right do.
So they thought of themselves as separate countries.
In fact, until the 1860s, it was common for Americans to refer to their state as my country.
When the American Revolution ended, the King of England signed a peace treaty with the
individual states.
There was no such thing called the United States of America that was involved in the
The Peace Treaty with the King of England at the end of the American Revolution.
And in every one of the founding documents, the U.S. Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence,
the word United States is always in the plural, meaning the states, the free and independent states are united in doing this.
It doesn't say that there's some organization called the United States. It says the states which are united.
It's always in the plural, never in the singular, in any of the founding documents.
In the Treaty with Great Britain, it says this,
His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the United States,
these New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, Providence Plantations, Connecticut,
he listed all the states, the colonies, individually.
That's who he thought he was signing a peace treaty with, not with something called
the United States government.
So anyway, this idea that the whole people created the Constitution is part of the myth
that has been around since the days of Daniel Webster to justify a consolidated monopolistic
government and to deny states' rights, essentially state sovereignty.
And the final thing I want to mention before I take questions is, since many of you know
I want to let you know who Lysander Spooner is, or who he was, and even if you don't, I'd like to pique your interest.
He was a well-known libertarian philosopher, legal scholar in the mid and late 19th century.
There are a couple of good books of his readings, readings of Lysander Spooner that the Liberty Fund, I think, publishes one.
and the Foundation for Economic Education has published a couple of his books of readings.
His essay, No Treason, is a famous libertarian publication.
And he was also an abolitionist from Massachusetts.
And he wrote a book in 1845 called The Unconstitutionality of Slavery.
He also wrote a book that was sort of a guide to lawyers for how to go about nullifying
and the Fugitive Slave Law.
So he was considered to be a hero to the abolition movement from the 1840s on in Massachusetts
and throughout New England.
And yet, he really despised Lincoln and his entire administration, and I'd like to bring
to your attention some of the things.
I dug up a letter that he wrote to William Seward in 1860, and I also dug up, I'm not
I'm not going to mention both of them. An 1862 letter that he wrote to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who was also one of the leading Republican big shots at the time.
And Seward was known to have publicly admitted that Spooner's argument in his book, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, was impregnable. It was unassailable.
Sumner said that, and so Spooner wrote to him and said this,
Why then, in heaven's name, do you not take that position?
Why don't you come out and say this?
He accused him of only opposing slavery in the abstract, not in reality.
And what Spooner believed was that had these people,
Seward, Lincoln, Sumner, all these people who made all these grandiose speeches about liberty and freedom,
Freedom and Condemning Slavery thought in terms of a practical way of ending slavery,
they could have avoided the war. But all they wanted to do, in Spooner's view, was to talk
about it only in the abstract, which everyone did. I said yesterday, Robert E. Lee said
slavery was a moral and political evil wherever it was practiced. Everyone condemned it that
But the thing was, why was it not possible for America to do what every other country on earth, the British, the Spanish, the French, the Danes, the Dutch, did, and end slavery peacefully through compensated emancipation of some kind?
Only in America was there a war that was involved in the ending of slavery.
And here's what Spooner said about this.
He said, had all those men at the north who believed these ideas, that is the unconstitutionality of slavery to be true, promulgated them as was their plain and obvious duty to do, it is reasonable to suppose that we should long since have freedom without shedding one drop of blood.
So he was saying he thought this war was totally unnecessary and he didn't believe that the war was being fought to end slavery anyway, Spooner didn't.
And he went on to say that the South could consistently and with honor and probably would long before this time and without a conflict have surrendered their slavery to the demand of the Constitution and to the moral sentiment of the world.
You and others like you have done more according to your abilities to prevent the peaceful abolition of slavery than any other men in the nation.
Spooner was not a friend of the Lincoln administration. He said even nastier things to Seward, and he was not finished. He went on to say,
In your pretended zeal for liberty, you have been urging the nation to the most frightful destruction of human life,
and through a series of years betrayed the very citadel of liberty which you were under oath to defend.
There has been no other treason at all comparable with this. Treason to the Constitution is what he was referring to.
and so in his in his famous 1870 essay No Treason, Spooner wrote that the war
erupted for purely pecuniary considerations and not for any moral
reason. He said that the war was being fought for northern bankers, manufacturers
and railroad corporations who we call lenders of blood money who had for a
long series of years previous to the war been willing accomplices of the
of Slaveholders in Perverting the Government from the Purpose of Liberty and Justice.
And he was really on a roll in this article.
If anyone wants to read this, I'll give you the web address.
It's on the web if you want to print it out or read the actual article.
And he called Grant the chief murderer of the war in this essay.
And he interpreted the crushing of the Southern secessionists as saying,
Here's what the government is saying, saying submit quietly, submit quietly to all the robbery and slavery we have arranged for you, and you can have your peace.
That's Spooner's rendition of what the U.S. government, what the Lincoln administration was saying to the Southerners.
And he went on to say that the Republicans did not end slavery as an act of justice to the black man himself, but only as a war measure.
They did this because they wanted his, the black man's, assistance in carrying on the war they had undertaken for maintaining and intensifying that political, commercial and industrial slavery.
He was talking about the tariff, primarily, industrial slavery.
He said it eventually enslaved everybody, north and south, to pay more for goods and services.
That's about enough of Spooner.
the message about Spooner. He didn't like Lincoln and his administration. And the final
thing I'll mention about this in regard to Spooner is that after the war, the deification
of Lincoln occurred, which sort of allowed Americans to accept all of this. It's a good
thing. It still exists. And one good example of how this deification proceeded. I have
in my files, by the way, I have my files of magazine articles, copies of magazine articles
from the 1870s and 1880s that have pictures of Abe Lincoln being resurrected from his tomb
with angel's wings.
He's rising up to the heavens and there's this tomb with a door open on the bottom and
this all throughout New England this sort of thing happened.
And here's what a Unitarian minister named Henry Bellows said after the war was over,
you know, he said this, the state is indeed divine as being the great incarnation of a
Nations' Rights, Privileges, Honor and Life."
So it wasn't just the deification of Lincoln, it was the deification of the state in general
that we eventually got from the deification of Lincoln.
And if you read this literature, read Harry Jaffa, for example.
Not too much though, it'll make you sick, but he calls Lincoln Father Abraham.
They compare him to Jesus Christ.
They say things like Lincoln died for the sins of his country, just like Jesus died for the sins of the world.
There's a book that was published last year called Redeemer Presidents.
That's the theme, Redeemer Presidents. He's redeeming our sins for us.
They compare him to Moses also. They say he led his people to the promised land but didn't make it there himself, just like Moses.
And so they compare him to Father Abraham, Jesus Christ, Moses, and that began with the New England Preachers of the late 19th century.
And it continues today with the Claremont Institute and people who write books with titles like Redeemer President that try to, and it's idol worship.
Someone asked me recently if I thought Lincoln should be sandblasted off of Mount Rushmore.
That's a loaded question for me, but my answer was I think the whole thing should be blown off.
I don't like the idea of any politician being a big stone head, whoever it is.
It's the deification of politics, no matter who it is.
So I would sandblast all of them is my answer.
And maybe that's all I'll say for now.
So that's it for now, and I'll be glad to take questions, comments, brilliant commentary, or snide remarks, doesn't matter.
Anybody have any burning questions on their minds?
Well, treason was what was always stated, treason was the idea.
It was an opinion that he issued as a circuit court judge.
In those days, Supreme Court judges also had duties as circuit court judges and he was in
and that circuits around DC, Baltimore and he issued this opinion that this is where
this was going on. They were arresting the Maryland legislature and not arresting them,
imprisoning them. There were no charges ever filed and that sort of thing. And they simply
said it was treasonous to stop them from doing that because they considered the people they
were imprisoning as traitors, spies, the enemy. And so if you're aiding the enemy by stopping
It seems outlandish and unbelievable today, but this is all part of the historical record.
It's the same way for the newspaper editors.
So you have to understand that Lincoln, he identified himself as the Union, so you criticize
me, you're criticizing the Union, and he made a sort of sacred thing out of the Union.
But most people at the time the war broke out, thought, well this Union is a convenient arrangement
whereby we can provide for say the national defense in case of an invasion, and if we
If we all band together, we have a better chance of fending off a military invasion by some foreign power than if we all act individually.
So we have these few delegated powers we're going to give to the central government, but they didn't think of it like Lincoln did.
He made speeches about the mystic cords of memory is what tie the union together and things like this.
So he used this religious language and sort of psychic language, actually, to talk about this union.
The first Americans didn't think of the Union that way at the time. That was propaganda to justify what they were doing, the crushing of the secession movement.
And so he did identify the Union with himself, I think, and so if you criticize me, you're criticizing the Union, and this is this glorious thing.
The whole idea of a perpetual union, you know, the Articles of Confederation, the official title was the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.
Then, when the states seceded from that and adopted the Constitution, they dropped the
words perpetual union. It's not in the Constitution. They said something about a more perfect union,
but that doesn't mean a perpetual union and that we will kill you if you leave. That was
The Constitution was barely ratified by a hare as it was. What chances would there have been of it ever being ratified if it was understood that you could never leave under any circumstances, no matter how tyrannical the central government became?
No one would have, that would never have been ratified like that, but that was Lincoln's theory of what went on at the ratification of the Constitution.
That was his theory of the understanding that the whole people decided that after fighting a war of secession, a revolution, a war of secession against the tyrannical government,
they would tie themselves forever to a different central government that they were sure would never be abusive of liberty.
I think that's just too tall a tale to believe.
You mentioned the Pacific Act spending there.
Do you have any plans for other Pacific Act spending?
Oh, sure.
Do you have specific plans for those?
Yeah, I do in my writings.
This sort of thing went all over.
I could cite Dean Sprague again, I guess,
I guess is talking about how wide this was, how widely spread this was.
It was everywhere. Let's see.
Well, the newspapers were shut down. In my writings, I list them from all over the country.
It wasn't just the New York City newspapers. It was everywhere.
I'm not going to spend time looking through the index here.
here but one of the statements Dean Sprague made was that he was he talked
about what this meant for governmental power he said yeah I can paraphrase him
I don't have the exact quote he said father Abraham was born it was the last
line of his quotation of his I'm thinking of and he was saying that when
the US government could snatch a man from Maine from his home for criticizing
and then do the same to another man from Pennsylvania or Ohio. Then it
demonstrated that he had real power, whereas previous to this it didn't have
that kind of real power. The time the war broke out, the average American paid
about $45 a year in taxes and the only contact he or she ever had with the
central government was through the post office. So it was pretty much in terms of
the central government, a libertarian society, that the government was local
And the central government, there wasn't even a standing army to speak of. A few thousand troops in the Indian forts here and there. But it was minuscule as far as standing armies go.
But that all changed, Dean Sprig, when the government could snatch men everywhere, shut down newspapers in Ohio, Minnesota, New York, all over the place. So this wasn't just Maryland in the DC area. This happened all throughout the north.
All the border states, Missouri, as well as Maryland and Kentucky, the firearms were confiscated by the army, and people were sent to prison from all over, so this wasn't a localized thing.
The Lincoln cult, the number they put on the number of people in prison was 13,000, but there is a Columbia University Law Journal article that says that it's probably closer to 30,000,
And I think it's probably even more than that, as far as individuals from the North thrown in jail.
And James Randall says about 300 newspapers were shut down.
That's a lot of newspapers considering how small the country was then compared to today.
Population of 30 million in total.
That's one-tenth the size of the population today in the United States.
Well, I know during Reconstruction, the Republican Party actually subsidized with tax dollars
pro-Republican newspapers, and I don't know that they intimidated the opposition newspapers
like they did during the war, Lincoln was gone and so it takes a real dictator and a tyrant and a brute to go through with this and I don't think Andrew Johnson or Ulysses Grant were like that as much as Lincoln was and so I'm not aware that there was a big crackdown on the newspapers but I do know that they did subsidize with tax dollars the pro-republican papers especially in the south
after the war.
How was the press in the South?
The press in the South?
Yeah, there was some of that.
But I don't think there was much of a need for it.
The Richmond newspaper is probably the biggest paper in the southern states.
and it was just reporting on the war and it was supportive of course of the whole
effort so there would never have been any need for the government to censor them
if Jefferson Davis wanted to censor that but I'm not aware of any
literature that talks about a widespread censorship in the southern state there in
fact there there were a lot of debates that went they did go on a lot of the
States governors and state governments disagreed with Jefferson Davis's war policies and would
sometimes refuse or delay sending more troops when he would ask for to run to send more militia
troops and so this was widely known that there was disagreement there's a man named George Rable who
wrote a book I think it's called the Confederate Republic I think Confederate something like that
and it was about the dissent and differences of opinion between the
different groups within the Confederacy and so that that was expressed they did
have arguments and it wasn't crushed like it was in a Lincoln administration
You mentioned that in one of your debates that one of these Lincoln idolaters denied that Lincoln ever did anything unconstitutional.
How would one of these idolaters then deal with the suspension of KB's court? What would their response be?
He's not a political scientist by training, he's not a historian by training, he's not a civil war historian, he's not an economist, he's rhetoric.
And he's written two books 50 years apart on Lincoln's speeches, basically.
And so you can read this whole book, his latest book, you can read the whole book, and there's no mention anywhere of anyone dying in the book.
It's about Lincoln and the Civil War and so forth, but there's no blood, there's no war, there's very little real history in it.
and the history in it, it's all rhetoric and interpretations of rhetoric,
clever interpretations of rhetoric, and so it's sort of like the Bill Clinton style of historical research
by focusing on speeches and what people say as opposed to what they do,
and if you do that, if you look at Lincoln's speeches on the Constitution,
well you could probably make a very strong argument that he was a big supporter of the Constitution
and Human Action because he said he was, he hears his speeches, and I think that's what Jaffa would do, that's what he does, he focuses on not all of Lincoln's speeches, but the prettier sounding ones, especially the ones that invoke God, even though Lincoln was not a believer in God as far as anybody knows, but he did know the Bible, he read the Bible, he read Shakespeare, his library consisted of the King James Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and all the rest were books on rhetoric and speech making,
Library. There's no evidence that he ever read the Federalist papers as far as I'm concerned. There's nothing hard landing at all, nothing at all in political philosophy, history, his rhetoric and speech making, the law. He was a lawyer. He was a trial lawyer in Shakespeare and the Bible. And that was a great way to, he was a genius at using, you know, the stories from Shakespeare and the Bible to persuade audiences of his points. But I think that's what Jaffa would
to do it. He would look at his speeches. He has these followers that repeat. He puts out
the mantra, Lincoln never did anything constitutional, and he'll give a re-explanation based on Lincoln's
speeches. And then his followers will all repeat this over and over and over and over
again. They seem to hope that repetition will make it true. That's why when I debated him,
I mentioned facts. This is what happened. And he got very angry. That's why he keeps
Lincoln never did anything that was unconstitutional, but I can't see how you can do that.
In fact, there was an audio of that, and I don't know if it picked it up, but there was a lot of laughter in the audience when he said that,
because I had just recited all these facts, and even during my debate with him, I cited that same thing from King George,
where he had listed the individual states that he was signing a peace treaty with, and he denied that that was true.
and I actually had a photocopy of the actual treaty with Great Britain in my hand and read from it and then he denied that that was true and I was mystified at that point, how could he deny this but I think I did figure it out though that it's all based on rhetoric.
If you read Lincoln's speeches, he'll deny that any such thing as state sovereignty ever existed.
University, who wrote an article that was on lewrockwell.com, critical of the Strausians and Jaffa in particular, and they've had a whole debate on the Claremont Institute's website over this, and Professor Rind sent the whole thing to me online, and he said he was sort of taken aback at how so many of the comments were personal, just personal attacks. It was not just Jaffa, but he has this stable of followers that do the exact same thing.
Jaffa himself accused Professor Wren of being, he said he's not just criticizing me and my fellow Straussians, but he's criticizing Jesus Christ himself.
And Jaffa's logic was Professor Wren was criticizing people who claim that it's just for the American military to wage war in foreign lands on the basis of some abstract principle that has nothing to do with justice or national defense.
and National Defense, like Democracy in the Middle East, for example.
And that's what Jaffa is known for, spouting off these abstract principles to justify interventionism.
And one of Jaffa's responses in this recent exchange between him and Professor Rin, the RYN is outspilt,
was that, well, Jesus Christ believed in absolute principles, you know, do unto the Bible,
do unto others as you would want others to do unto you.
So I suppose Professor Wren is calling him a Jacobin, just like he's calling me a Jacobin.
So it's a semantic BS is what they specialize in. It has nothing to do with history or reality,
but that's the sort of thing you get. Fortunately, very few people in the academic world pay attention to these characters.
That's why almost none of them has a real academic job. There are very few of them.
That's why they're all at think tanks in the AEI and the Claremont Institute.
I've heard very good examples for reasons why Lincoln didn't maintain the Union. I think the most preferred I've heard is that if Lincoln didn't maintain the Union because he never fought Hitler during World War II. So we have to thank Lincoln for defeating Hitler.
It was a coalition, wasn't it?
Why wouldn't the southern states join the coalition with the northern states, for one
thing?
And I also think, you look at history, another book I'll recommend to you is Wilson's War
by Jim Powell.
He was a friend of the Austrian School.
He was a student of Friedrich Hayek at the University of Chicago, among other.
Hayek wasn't his dissertation advisor, but Hayek was there when Jim Powell was a student.
He was a classmate of Ralph Rakos, Jim Powell, and he argues that Woodrow Wilson was probably the worst American president ever, because he plunged us into World War I when it wasn't any of our business, and he explains his theory of why he thinks that event, American entry into World War I, ended up strengthening the hand of the Bolsheviks in Russia and led to Hitler in Germany.
because of the Versailles Treaty was so oppressive to the Germans that the German people fell for a dictator who promised, you know, great things for Germany after that.
And so he makes a book-length case of this. And I would add to that, I would make the case that if the South had seceded peacefully,
It would have been the one counter-example in the entire world in the early 20th century
of a government that was not a highly centralized, consolidated, monopolistic state.
Because after this, we had the Russian government and the German government.
The trend was massive consolidation of the government's forming empires that became imperialistic.
And had the South peacefully seceded, this would have been a counter example to all of that government.
And I think it would have not only been a counter example to the world, but it would have greatly weakened the U.S. government.
The U.S. government, if nothing else, it wouldn't have been able to tax a big chunk of the population, the southern states.
And it would also have known that if it would engage in unconstitutional actions like the Spanish-American War that had nothing to do with the defense of the United States, that there might be another threat of secession.
You know, the War of 1812 in New England essentially seceded from that by not participating, by refusing to send troops in any significant degree.
If they even went so far as to put men in debtors' prison, if there were recruiting officers coming around trying to recruit militia for the War of 1812, and then when they would leave, the guy would get out of debtors' prison, things like that.
And so I think that sort of thing might have happened, that there would have been a bigger break on these unconstitutional usurpations of power that the United States government had.
and if that had happened, there may never have been an American entry into World War I
and if not, there may not have been a World War II.
If you want to speculate about the Nazis and things like this, I can speculate too,
but I think my story is much more plausible than we wouldn't have been able to defeat the Nazis without this.
I give a talk at Grove City College and some of the history and political science people there came up to me afterwards
I gave it on Lincoln's birthday last year, February 12th, and said, well, isn't it a good thing that Sherman's march, where he bombed cities, burned cities to the ground, and did all this, that it sort of established a precedent for the bombing of Dresden and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, isn't that a good thing?
And I said, no, mass murder of civilians is mass murder of civilians, no matter who does it.
And so, but that's the way some people think.
It's a thank goodness Sherman mass murdered civilians
because it established a precedent for future U.S. governments to mass murder civilians.
And isn't that a good thing?
And this is at a religious school.
These are, this growth city is supposedly a religious school.
There's still mandatory chapel there.
And that's how a lot of modern evangelical Christians think, apparently, that it bombs away, somewhere in the Bible, they apparently believe, I don't know.
Yes sir, he had his hand up.
Let me ask you first...
He was referring to the decoration in a tennis court less defensible I think.
Oh yeah.
Why wouldn't he have chosen something more different from the look of the hand?
Yeah, well, he made a big deal.
And the decoration didn't.
Yeah, that's why, nothing...
we mentioned, Harry Jeff, I don't think anything
Like anything he has ever written in his 60-year career, he's been around a long time, is any
different than Lincoln's own propaganda.
It might use different language slightly, but it's just book after book written, article
after article, essentially the same, rendition of the same propaganda.
But he certainly chose 1776 to make his point that the country was founded there because
I think because he knew that the Constitution, which occurred much later, there were state ratification elections, and so the states were sovereign.
They chose to join the Constitution or not, and that would have been too obvious that he was in the wrong and the South was in the right if you mentioned the Constitution.
So he chose the Declaration and he chose not all the Declaration though, he chose the all men are created equal slogan in the Declaration, but ignored the rest of it, which is a classic states' rights doctrine.
It refers to the states as free and independent sovereign states all throughout.
Read the last paragraph, the very last paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, it doesn't say anything about the whole people in there.
But that was his tactic and rhetoric, I think, is to focus on that one line, that all men are created equal, and that's what Jaffa has done his whole life.
Although, clearly, Lincoln did not believe in equality, equality of rights for black people. He was against it every step along the way.
He was opposed to giving them the right to vote, allowing them to be jurors.
He supported the Illinois Black Codes. He was a manager of the Illinois Colonization Society, which succeeded in getting the legislature to allocate money to deport the free black people out of the state.
And as president, he actually got millions of dollars allocated to increase the colony in Liberia of American blacks, and he sent 500 of them there.
Joe Sobran, the columnist, once remarked that if Lincoln believed in equality, he only believed that black people could be equal somewhere else, not here, somewhere else other than the United States.
But that's been the whole schtick of the Claremont Institute and Harry Jaffa, that Lincoln supposedly was a champion of equal natural rights for all people.
That's based just on the Gettysburg Address Statement.
It's not based on Lincoln's lifelong behavior and his many other statements of other kinds everywhere.
They ignore all these other statements where he even used the word superior
to describe what he thought should be the proper relation between the white and black races.
The white race should have the superior position as his exact words.
And so that's not equality.
But again, you know, the slick use of rhetoric and the careful selective choosing of out-of-context quotes can help you make the case that he was an advocate of natural rights for everybody.
And that's basically what they do. I think that's why he chose 1776 in the Gettysburg Address.
A good critique of the Gettysburg Address is one by H.L. Mencken, which you can find online.
And another one is Charles Adams. In his book, When in the Course of Human Events, he has a whole chapter dissecting the Gettysburg Address, almost line by line, and raising big questions over what it all is saying.
Mencken's main point was, it was all backwards. It was the South that was fighting for the right of consent.
The question about this topic, or maybe a comment. You were talking about the South, because of the Senate, if you're talking about the right-wing.
The extension of slavery into the territories was another issue, but it was related to the economic issues, like the tariff and the bank, because...
Well, I had a look at the South Carolina administration, and it's all about slavery, so no mention at all about the tariffs.
Yeah, right. Well, that's one statement. And the war, though, the war is different. I mean, the question is, what is the reason for the war?
No one says, not even historians today say the war, the North attacked the South to free the slaves.
The purpose, the reason Lincoln gave, the reason the U.S. Congress gave and anyone else in the North was to save the Union or to destroy the secession movement.
The thing is, the two are related. Without the Union, with the South out of the Union, there was no hope of having a continental empire.
The South was declaring itself essentially a free trade zone with minimal tariffs, whereas the North had 50% tariffs.
And so even before the war broke out, there were northern newspapers calling for the bombardment of the southern ports
because they thought much of the commerce of the world would flow to New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina and away from Boston and New York.
And so these plans that the Republican Party had for high tariffs to finance railroads and all that would have been crushed by the secession of the South.
So that's why I say that the two things, the saving the Union or keeping the South in the Union and these economic issues are not separate.
That was the reason for keeping, in their eyes, for keeping the South in the Union and going to war over it.
The Deep South mentioned slavery and I think what they were most afraid of was its slave insurrections that might have been encouraged by the North.
I don't think slavery was a secure institution at that time.
They weren't seriously concerned about the demise of slavery at that time.
The whole debate was only about the extension of slavery.
I think what they were saying is that we'll do with slavery what the people of New England did
and get rid of it on our own terms, but they didn't want what they did about it to be dictated to them.
They didn't dictate to the New Englanders how they should deal with their slavery.
And slavery existed in New England for over 200 years, beginning in the 17th century, and so that's another one of the myths, the myth of the morally superior North that existed.
But slavery existed beginning, I think, in the early 1600s in New England.
The Transatlantic slave trade was centered in Newport, Rhode Island, in Boston, Massachusetts.
Even after the Civil War, they were still building slave ships that were used to gather
slaves from Africa and ship them to the Caribbean, because their slavery didn't end in places
like Brazil until 1887.
And how they ended slavery in the North was they began in 1794 with phased-in, emancipated
Proclamation, they would pass laws saying that any babies born of slaves will be free
upon reaching age 21 or 25.
And so what that did was they phased out slavery and took them until 1865 to finally get rid
of slavery in New Jersey.
And so it's kind of a complicated issue of that.
They issued these statements about slavery.
You can also look at Jefferson Davis' first inaugural address.
He didn't mention slavery.
He mentioned economic issues, but not slavery in his first inaugural address, like Lincoln
did.
Lincoln's first inaugural address doesn't mention slavery as a reason for the war.
Just the opposite.
He denies that it has anything to do with his intentions at all, but he did promise
an invasion in his first inaugural address over tax collection, like I said yesterday.
The Upper South seceded, which was Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee.
They originally voted to stay in the Union, but then after Lincoln began invading their
sister states, they took a re-vote and re-voted and changed their minds and seceded.
And so it's hard to make the case that slavery had a lot to do with that because they originally,
Mises' position was, you can keep your slaves if you're in the Union, but if you secede,
we're going to do whatever we can to disrupt this and take your slaves away from you because
the slaves will help you in your war effort, in the war effort against us.
And so his policy was always, you can keep your slaves as long as you stay in the Union
and continue to pay taxes to us.
In fact, all throughout the war, like I said yesterday, there were Southern non-slave-owning
soldiers who fought against northern slave-owning soldiers in every major battle of the war,
because the northern states and the border states that were allowed to keep their slaves
as part of the Union had soldiers in all the major armies, in all the major battles.
That's sort of an irony there.
But those secession documents aren't proof of the cause of the war by any means.
The Theory of Money says that's what the cause of the war was.
Any other questions or brilliant commentary out there?
Like I said yesterday, this historian I debated in North and South magazine,
I did get him to admit that no respectable historian today will say that the North invaded the South to free the slaves.
That's kind of preposterous to believe that.
You know, I doubt that a single person who voted for Lincoln in 1860 thought that if I vote for him, he'll raise an army and go down and kill 300,000 people and free the slaves.
That just wasn't on the radar screen at all.
No, they've been getting worse and worse every year.
There's no saying that it'll cooperate with you at all.
Robert is a foil last year, right, with how not to study history, which I think is a compliment
to me because I, when Lincoln is concerned, you know, how to study history as a Lincoln
scholar is to take all these devious deeds he did and if you can dream up five or six
excuses for them, then you're a respected Lincoln scholar.
And so it's sort of a compliment to me that they use my book as a foil as how not to do
it because thank God, I don't want to be an example of how to be a Lincoln scholar.
The textbooks usually take 20 years to incorporate new knowledge anyway, of any kind, but who knows, I have another book coming out in October, and I know there are other people that are writing books like this.
Professor Clyde Wilson just has an edited book of readings that I just had him send to my publisher for their consideration.
So who knows, in a few years things might change a little bit, but it's pretty much extraordinarily politically correct right now.
It's probably the most extreme case of political correctness there is, is this whole area of Lincoln and the Civil War and states' rights and all that.
The Confederate Constitution forbade the transatlantic slave trade.
The U.S. Constitution, it was 1808 when the slave trade was ended and the Confederate
Constitution did the same thing. There are a number of ways you can interpret that. One way to interpret it is, you know, there were existing slave owners who had big plantations and owned many slaves, and it would benefit them economically to have a ban on the importation of slaves because it would prop up the price of their slaves in a sort of protectionist argument. So you could make a moral argument for that, and you could also make a purely economic protectionist argument
for the Ban on the Importation of Slaves, and there probably were people who believed, on both sides, but being an economist, I would tend to think it was mostly the economic argument is why they put that in there, because it enhanced the value of the slaves of the existing slave owners, just like if it was banning the importation of automobiles, it would let you sell your automobiles for a higher price here in the United States.
sort of a similar kind of thing there was an article about this on the Mises.org
a couple weeks ago on this very topic so by who it was you remember mark who yeah
Norman van Cot yeah if you did a search of Norman van Cot two words B-A-N-C-O-T-T
they got that article and I think it had to do with the the US Constitution's
Prohibition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but it's the same principle, same economic principle.
I don't think it's the same principle, but I've said that for the last 20 years, that the country's been certified, and it's had some relations with them and the slave trade.
No, I'm not going to have to recheck that. It's been...
I don't think it's been rechecked. I think you can't say that it's still lasted 20 years.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So it lasted a while. It lasted a while.
Well, they did end it for the most part, although, you know, the transatlantic slave trade, it was run out of New England, it wasn't run out of the South, it was Boston and Rhode Island is where it was the epicenter, in fact, they even used slaves to build the slave ships in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, you know, in the early 1800s and 1700s, and so that's where the slave trade existed, and so the fact that there might have been laws against it didn't mean they didn't do it.
do it, we're still engaged in it, even if they transported slaves not here, somewhere
else.
The shipping part of it was centered in New England.
This is about time to quit.