Abraham Lincoln

And then there is Lincoln. Kauffman ... agrees "with the Peace Democrats that the war was a tragic mistake. No cause is worth 600,000 deaths ..." Kauffman introduces us to Ohio congressman Clement L. Vallandigham, who "publicly denounced the 'wicked and cruel' war by which 'King Lincoln' was 'crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism,'" and to Lieutenant Governor Sanford Church, who "vilified the Lincoln administration for seeking to 'absorb, centralize and consolidate the rights and powers of the loyal States in the general government.'"

Abraham Lincoln was by far the most avid champion of democracy among nineteenth-century presidents—and the president with the greatest visible contempt for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He swayed people to view national unity as the ultimate test of the essence of freedom. That Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, jailed 20,000 people without charges, forcibly closed hundreds of newspapers that criticized him, and sent in federal troops to shut down state legislatures was irrelevant because he proclaimed "that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom ..."

Although other presidents have engaged in conduct that arguably could be termed an abuse of power, no one truly claimed "emergency" powers until Abraham Lincoln, who in 1861 suspended habeas corpus, ordered the arrest of thousands of people, and held others without trial ... he established a number of precedents that demonstrated that if a president wishes to cross the line of legality, there is little to stop him from doing so ... From the blockade against Southern ports to the war effort itself, Lincoln assumed powers of the presidency that his critics said were not appropriated by the Constitution.

In 1862, Congress granted Lincoln's request to issue $150 million in Treasury notes to finance the war effort during the War Between the States ... Congress provided that the notes would constitute "legal tender." What did "legal tender" mean? It meant ... that for the first time since the founding of the nation, Americans would be required to accept the federal government's paper money as a medium of exchange. Why was that important to Abraham Lincoln? Like so many other government officials in history, Lincoln was resorting to the printing press—inflation—to finance his war expenditures.

One of Jefferson's recent biographers remarks that this argument was 'dangerously close' to an argument for the states' right to secede from the Union. ... The new president, Abraham Lincoln, who claimed to be a disciple of Jefferson, had to ignore much of Jefferson's thought in order to justify suppressing secession as 'rebellion.' He incessantly cited the truth that all men are created equal, but he evaded the part about the consent of the governed and established military dictatorships in the conquered South, while effectively criminalizing Jefferson's views on secession in the North.

According to Lincoln, the Declaration 'brought forth a new nation.' That is plainly not true. The Declaration says nothing about a 'nation'; it speaks only of 13 'Free and Independent States.' ... But Lincoln’s worshippers, bewitched by his eloquence, ... overlook not only his lapses in logic but his gross violations of the Constitution: usurpations of power, suspension of habeas corpus, arbitrary arrests of dissenters and even elected officials, crackdown on the free press, the Emancipation Proclamation (Lincoln himself doubted his authority to issue it but finally yielded to Republican pressure), and so on.

Lincoln was the anti-Jefferson. ... Lincoln waged the bloodiest war in American history to destroy the Jeffersonian states' rights doctrine. ... Lincoln's overriding purpose in his war was to destroy the secessionist and states' rights principles of the Declaration (while using slick rhetoric designed to pretend that he revered the document). ... Lincoln eviscerated constitutional liberty by illegally suspending habeas corpus, shutting down the opposition press, imprisoning thousands of political opponents, confiscating firearms, and many other atrocities.

It does seem too preposterous to be true, probably because of all the grave errors and wrongs allegedly committed by Lincoln's administration, this would rank at the top of the list. ... Lincoln ... accepted the Machiavellian doctrine that the end justified the means, when the end was to preserve the Union, and was to be achieved regardless of the Constitution and rulings of the Supreme Court. Lincoln expressed that policy to a Chicago clergyman: 'As commander in chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy.'

Lincoln's vision of the society he wanted to build implied an aversion to the society it would replace. In many ways his father, Thomas Lincoln, symbolized everything he wanted to eradicate from American society ... Lincoln was a direct descendant of the modernizing Puritans of the 17th century, who banned the large number of saints' days on which peasants previously rested and celebrated, and imposed the Calvinist Sabbath on what had been a day of games and enjoyment ... [T]he economy that Lincoln built compelled the average person to work harder than necessary to achieve a given level of consumption.

It does not matter how ill-conceived [a] war may be. Lincoln achieved his presidential immortality by quite unnecessarily plunging America into its greatest bloodbath—ostensibly to maintain the boundaries of an existing federal union, as if those boundaries possessed some sacred status ... What weight does Grant's Credit Mobilier scandal have in comparison to Lincoln's 620,000 dead in the Civil War? ... Were I to rank the presidents ... Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Truman, and [LBJ] belong at the bottom, for their statist economic policies as well as their supremely catastrophic war policies.

In April 1846, Mexican troops attacked a small contingent of American soldiers across the river from Matamoros, Mexico ... Polk advised Congress that American troops had been attacked by Mexico. Congress declared war. The Mexican War had began. Support for the war, however, was not unanimous. Rep. Abraham Lincoln challenged Polk to prove that the land where the troops had been attacked was truly American territory. Other opponents of the war included Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. Were these people patriots or traitors for standing against their own government?

Abraham Lincoln is justly celebrated as the Great Emancipator. ... unfortunately, Lincoln did almost as much to repudiate as to reaffirm the radical principles of the Declaration of Independence. To begin with, the 16th president's determination to hold the Union together with military force was an explicit rejection of the revolutionary right of self-determination. ... Moreover, Lincoln elevated the suppression of Southern independence above any concern for blacks. ... Fortunate for the slaves that Lincoln ultimately concluded that freeing them offered the most military and political advantages.

In 1846, James K. Polk took Americans to war after falsely proclaiming that the Mexican army had crossed the U.S. border and attacked a U.S. army outpost—"shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil." Though Polk refused to provide any details of where the attack occurred, the accusation swayed enough members of Congress to declare war against Mexico. Congressman Abraham Lincoln vigorously attacked Polk for his deceits. But Lincoln may have studied Polk's methods, since they helped him whip up war fever 15 years later.

Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. In the case of Ex parte Merryman, Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that only Congress had the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, but Lincoln refused to obey the Supreme Court's ruling ... Although Lincoln (in Stone's view, rather feebly) defended the arrest [of Rep. Vallandigham], he did order that the Chicago Times be permitted to reopen ... Stone argues that the Lincoln administration for the most part was willing to leave dissenting voices undisturbed and usually countermanded the arrests and seizures of zealous military commanders.