TOP TEN REASONS ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS A MONSTER

by PAUL H. BELZ

10. The first military draft and the first income tax in the nation’s history. Lincoln’s son Robert received the nation’s first student deferment from a military draft as he remained enrolled at Harvard while the rich people who put Lincoln in office like Andrew Carnegie were rewarded by allowing them to buy their way out of the draft. Carnegie paid another man $850 to take his place after being drafted. The poor were guaranteed social ostracism if they didn’t volunteer and were shot if they deserted or ignored the draft. If Lincoln’s income tax wasn’t paid, property was seized, auctioned and a stiff penalty added.

9. Violated the oath of office and suspended the Constitution. Lincoln planned to arrest the chief justice of the Supreme Court and gave his friend and U. S. Marshal appointee Ward Lamon the discretion over when to execute the warrant. The effort was short-circuited when Congress eventually informed Lincoln that if and when habeas corpus were ever to be suspended, that action would be under its purview not his. He ignored that Congressional directive but dropped the effort to arrest Chief Justice Taney. Lincoln suspended the Constitution he was sworn to uphold and made himself a dictator. He totally eliminated free speech and press, eliminated due process even though civilian courts were still operating, and eliminated the public’s protection from him (habeas corpus). He discarded the 2nd amendment by confiscating guns from legitimate state militias in states which had voted to remain in the Union (Missouri and Maryland). He eliminated the 10th amendment by arresting entire legislatures which had voted to remain in the Union, basing such incredible actions on the hunch that they might change their minds. Maryland's was arrested and Missouri's chased into exile and replaced by sycophants. He unconstitutionally created two states (West Virginia and Nevada) to increase his electoral college total in a close re-election bid.

8. Invaded another country in what was NOT a Civil War. The Confederacy was not a rag-tag guerrilla operation nor a military dictatorship. It was an organized nation that followed Constitutional procedures in seceding from the Union just as the New England states had done to varying degrees five times throughout the years. In the South, state conventions were held and the public chose to leave the Union. This was no military coup led by a dictator. Jefferson Davis was elected in a democratic process. A Congress was also elected and foreign diplomats were sent abroad who secured “belligerent nation” status from England. The Confederacy was not seeking to take over Washington or invade the North and it offered to compensate the government for forts within its territory and to pay its share of the national debt. It was a war for independence from oppressive taxes that dwarfed King George III’s, and then it became a war to repel the invasion of the North, a war begun by Lincoln without consulting Congress.

7. A mercantilist and the original special-interest president. Lincoln was a mercantilist who catered to the railroads and other industrialists who put him in office. He carried out their plan to leverage wealth by building a world empire aligned with Russia, and that plan could not abide secession of any states. It required displacement of the American Indians to accommodate the transcontinental railroad and concomitant settlements in the West. Secession would have meant the loss of the Mississippi River and the necessity of paying tolls to use it. Lincoln’s Union Pacific Railroad was the first American railroad funded by taxpayers and he rewarded almost 200 of those who put him in office by appointing them as directors of the new railroad thus ensuring the enduring, tax-infused wealth of families like the Carnegies, Cornells, and Scrantons.

6. Violated existing standards of international law. Lincoln’s naval blockade of food and medicine from the Confederacy was a violation of existing international standards of warfare, although there was not yet a Geneva Convention in place. The atrocity at Andersonville prison was caused by this blockade. Targeting civilians was another violation of international standards as was burning towns and civilian food supplies, a notable example being Sheridan’s ravaging of the Shenandoah Valley. Cities such as Atlanta were burned after Confederate soldiers had left, and in Missouri, whose only crime was the desire to remain neutral, all residents of three counties were given 15-days’ notice to vacate their homes, after which the properties were burned.

5. Didn’t follow the world’s example for freeing slaves. Almost every country on earth with slavery freed their slaves peacefully prior to America’s Civil War, yet Lincoln refused to negotiate the matter, even when staying at the same Washington hotel as a month-long National Peace Conference in 1861. England freed its slaves in the 1830s and followed with a 6-year period of indentured servitude to integrate free blacks seamlessly into British society. England compensated former slave owners in recognition of the fact that the entire nation, not just a fragment of it, created and maintained slavery. The model was there for Lincoln to use. He preferred emancipation linked to deportation.

4. Slaughtered his own men. Lincoln was told by his military commander and the commander of Fort Sumter to abandon the fort because it was not worth the sacrifice in lives it would take to resupply it. He ignored that advice and assigned a naval force to Sumter with a flagship capable of answering Confederate guns. Without telling his Secretary of the Navy or the naval force commander, he then sent the flagship to Florida instead. The expedition commander could only watch in humiliation as Sumter was bombarded for three days while he awaited the flagship (Powhatan), without which he could not defend the fort. Lincoln must have expected his men to be killed when he deliberately left them defenseless. Miraculously, none were, but many Northern newspapers excoriated Lincoln for this transparent plan to sacrifice his men to enrage the Northern public against the South and win support for his planned invasion. At Andersonville prison, Union soldiers were starving because of the Union naval blockade which prevented food and medical supplies from reaching the Confederacy. Confederate law required prisoners to receive the same food as guards, but Lincoln’s war against civilians ravaged the food supply of the South. With Lincoln’s approval, General Grant stopped exchanging prisoners. When Andersonville’s population tripled, the Confederacy offered to allow the North to pick up its men without conditions, but Grant refused. The Union prisoners at Andersonville passed resolutions praising the Confederate efforts on their behalf while Lincoln let his own soldiers die. Lincoln found a military commander in Grant who understood that if the opposing armies simply engaged regularly regardless of tactical recklessness or huge casualty counts, the South would run out of men before the North. Consequently Grant, unlike McClellan, was reckless with his men's welfare. Charges against entrenched forces such as were ordered at Cold Harbor resembled outright murder more than warfare.

3. A racist by any definition of the word. Lincoln was a racist, providing legal representation for slave-owners trying to recover runaway slaves in court, marrying into a slaveholding family, choosing a slave-owning military commander, earning the hatred of most abolitionists because of his hypocrisy, rigorously championing colonization throughout his adult life, and repeatedly espousing enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act and a 13th amendment to the Constitution that would have preserved slavery and protected it from future Congressional interference. In social settings, he told obscene jokes targeting slaves and parodied slaves just as modern-day Saturday Night Live comedians parody politicians. His close friend Ward Lamon said he preferred the racist minstrel shows over legitimate theater. His staff generals and even visiting European generals complained about his promiscuous use of the word “nigger.” The day before his Emancipation Proclamation, he shipped 5,000 free blacks to Haiti, most of whom died. He told black leaders assembled at the White House that “Our race suffers from your presence." By contrast, Jefferson Davis adopted an orphaned black child.

2. Genocide against the Indians and Southern civilians. Lincoln created and enthusiastically supported the generalsCespecially Sherman, Sheridan, and CusterCwho committed genocide against the Indians. On the subject of displacing Native Americans to facilitate Lincoln’s transcontinental railroad, General Sherman, who coined the term “final solution,” boasted later in life that “We were not going to allow a bunch of savages to block the nation’s progress.” During his retirement, Sherman wrote a letter to his son expressing regret that he hadn’t killed every Indian on the continent. Major General Philip H. Sheridan incinerated the Confederate “breadbasket,” (the Shenandoah Valley) in September 1864, and bragged to Grant: “I have destroyed over 2,000 barns, filled with wheat, hay, and farming implements, along with over 70 mills, filled with flour and wheat.” He accomplished this in less than a two-week period. In 1870, Sheridan was an observer with the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War, and he told Chancellor Otto von Bismarck that defeated civilians “must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.” Lincoln’s generals burned entire cities. Lincoln’s legally meaningless Emancipation Proclamation was not intended to free slaves but to encourage slave uprisings to kill even more civilians in the South. He told Southern leaders in 1865 that it was a war tactic that would have no legal standing after the war. If it had been designed with altruistic intentions, the proclamation would have freed the slaves in the North, which it did not do. That didn’t happen until brave Congressmen wrote and passed numerous laws over presidential vetoes---after Lincoln was dead.

1. 850,000 dead and millions maimed. In the September, 2012 issue of America’s Civil War, Harold Holzer writes that the Civil War death toll is probably 20% higher than the traditionally accepted 620,000 according to a “demographic historian” from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Dr. J. David Hacker counts the number of 20 to 30-year olds in the 1860 census and the 1870 census, subtracts the difference and concludes the death toll could have been as high as 850,000. If soldiers didn’t die quickly enough, they weren’t counted in the official death toll. This blood is on Lincoln’s hands because if his war was about slavery, every other country had already abolished it peacefully, and if it was about secession Washington, Jefferson, Madison, John Adams and John Quincy Adams among other presidents thought it was legal. Several legal teams assembled after the war to summarily try and hang Jefferson Davis also believed it was legal because they rejected their assignments for fear secession would be upheld in court. Reluctant New York would never have joined the Revolution if it had suspected that secession would be forever precluded. Secession has never made it to court and President Johnson pardoned Davis. No Confederate was ever convicted of treason, and it wasn’t because the will for vengeance wasn’t there. It was because fear was there of treason trials legitimizing secession. Ironically, the U. S. has supported every secession movement in the world during its lifetime---except its own. If Lincoln’s war was about empire building and leveraging wealthy industrialists’ fortunes as Charles Dickens believed, then the end (the country we enjoy today) was not justified by the bloodthirsty means which produced the most prolific arms merchant in world history and the nation responsible for developing and using the first weapon capable of annihilating the human race.