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Book Review
by
Richard M. Ebeling,
August 2002
The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an
Unnecessary War by Thomas DiLorenzo (Roseville, Calf.; Prima Publishing,
2002); 333 pages; $24.95.
In his books Race and Economics (1975) and Markets and Minorities (1981),
free-market economist Thomas Sowell explained and analyzed the nature and
workings of the slave economy in the pre-Civil War American South. He
emphasized that there were a number of unique and special qualities of the
slave experience in the United States that distinguished it from slavery in
many other parts of the world in the 19th century.
First, slavery was being practiced in a country formally dedicated since its
founding to the principles of individual freedom and democratic order. This
meant that to justify (in 1860) holding in slavery 4 million people out of a
total population of 31 million in the United States required defining the
enslaved as inferior and unfit for freedom. Slavery had to be defended not
merely as economically beneficial to those who were slaveholders but as the
best of all possible systems for those who were held in permanent bondage.
Indeed, some, such as Jefferson Davis, argued that enslaved blacks were far
better off than the “free persons of color” in the Northern states.
Second, for a wide area of the Deep South, slavery was economically
profitable. This applied most particularly to the predominantly
cotton-growing areas. Cotton growing for the most part required simple,
unskilled plantation field labor for planting and picking the crop. The
slave population could be kept in ignorance and without skills while being
watched by a handful of overseers to ensure that the minimal-skill-type work
was performed and to prevent slaves’ attempting to escape or do harm to
their owners or their property.
Third, the mark of slavery — both to rationalize it and to minimize the
cost of identifying those in the slave status — was based on race. That
made catching runaway slaves an easier process and defined and delineated
the boundary between the characteristics of a free man and those of a slave.
But Sowell also emphasized that slavery had its costs, both to the slave
owners and to the people of the South in general. To prevent slaves from
acquiring the knowledge and the means of opposing their slavery or trying to
make their escape required keeping them in illiterate ignorance. But that
limited their usefulness as a privately owned “capital asset” for anything
other than low- or minimal-skill fieldwork or household duties for the
master and his family.
It also required limits on freedom for the white population in the South.
There were censorship laws that prohibited advocating abolition or
disseminating abolitionist ideas or literature. The U.S. mail was inspected
and seized by the Southern state governments when it was suspected of
containing “subversive” ideas. It restrained intellectual freedom and
discourse in Southern universities. It acted as a deterrent for attracting
northern businessmen and their capital investments that would have assisted
in raising the material standard of living and quality of life in the South.
And it created an anti-work cultural attitude among many Southern whites,
who argued that many forms of everyday normal labor and enterprise were fit
only for slaves.
But in spite of these tendencies, Sowell also explained, there were
counterforces at work in many parts of the old South that were breaking down
the slave culture, attitudes, and institutions.
There were many activities, including tobacco growing, forestry, and
fishing, in which unskilled slave labor was inherently inefficient. And this
was most especially the case in the growing urban and city areas of the
South. Here slaves needed skills and education and mobility to perform the
manufacturing and service-industry tasks of a market-based system of
division of labor.
Slaves were often allowed or expected to find their own employment, housing,
and amenities, while simply giving a portion of their market earnings to
their nominal masters. Urban blacks, therefore, lived more on a contract and
employer-employee basis. They had the time and ability to learn, read about,
and realize the possibilities of freedom. And they formed secret
associations to go out to the rural areas to clandestinely school the
plantation slaves and educate them in the idea of freedom.
That the state governments in the Deep South had to continually pass laws
against the educating of the plantation slaves and to impose various
penalties for doing so suggests the increasing extent to which slavery was
threatened with being undermined. The market economy and its cultural
spillover effects were slowly but surely eating away at this “peculiar
institution” of the American South. It also suggests that even without the
Civil War, which cost the lives of 620,000 people and untold hardship and
destruction for millions more, slavery would have come to an end in the
United States, and most likely in a
peaceful manner, in the same way it had in almost all other parts of the
world in the 19th century.
This lengthy prologue may help to set a context for the arguments that
Thomas DiLorenzo makes in his new book, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at
Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. Abraham Lincoln has
been elevated almost to the status of a political deity in American history,
a deity who “preserved the Union” and “freed the slaves.” In comparison with
all the works that have been written on Lincoln and the Civil War, few
directly challenge this image. (See the review of When in the Course of
Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, by Charles Adams in
Freedom Daily, November 2000.)
Lincoln's economic philosophy
DiLorenzo explains that from the time of his entry into politics, Lincoln
was devoted to the principles of what the 19th-century economist Henry Carey
had labeled the “American System.” Its three leading tenets were
protectionism, “internal improvements” (government-subsidized canal and
railway development, and other related interventionist policies), and a
national banking system. Drawing upon Lincoln’s speeches and letters,
DiLorenzo is able to show that Lincoln’s entire “domestic policy agenda” was
focused on advancing these three goals.
Manufacturing was mostly centered in the Northern and New England states,
where the greatest special-interest pressure was concentrated to lobby for
high tariffs and other trade barriers to keep out less-expensive and
better-quality European and, especially, British industrial goods. The
South, on the other hand, was the main exporting region of the country,
specializing in cotton, tobacco, and other goods, and it imported most of
the finished goods consumed by the Southern population. Thus, the high
tariffs and trade barriers hit the Southern states the hardest, while the
greater portion of the import taxes collected by the federal government was
spent in the Northern states. And Lincoln wholeheartedly supported a system
of high tariffs.
From the time of Alexander Hamilton, there had been a sizable segment in the
business and political community that argued that economic development and
geographical unification of the country could not be left up to the
competitive forces of the market. The federal government needed to direct
and plan development and national unification by subsidizing transportation
and communication facilities. There had been many politically scandalous and
economically wasteful experiments with “internal improvement” projects at
the state levels. But in spite of these failures, Lincoln was part of that
segment of the political establishment who wanted to expand them to the
national level. The greatest resistance to them often came from the
representatives of the Southern states in Congress.
Finally, there were those who wanted a national central banking system to
supply cheap credit and loans both to fund these government “internal
improvements” and to provide a money source from which various
special-interest groups could support various segments of the political
establishment in Washington and selected state capitals. Historically, many
of the Southern states had resisted a centralized banking system as a threat
to their economic interests and well-being. Lincoln was a strong supporter
of a national banking system.
Those were the real, leading factors, DiLorenzo reasons, that were behind
Southern secession. With the coming of Lincoln into the White House in March
1861, many of the Southern states believed that he would dramatically push
for all the elements in this agenda of greatly increased federal government
spending and control.
Lincoln and slavery
As for the slavery issue, DiLorenzo makes clear that for Lincoln freeing the
slaves was merely a pragmatic political tool that he decided to use when the
war had been going badly for the Union side for a long time. The
Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed slaves only in those areas of the
South still under Confederate control, but not in other states or in those
parts of the Southern states under Union military occupation.
While opposed philosophically to slavery, Lincoln had long argued that it
was constitutionally legal and could not be overthrown without a
constitutional change or by the states themselves. He did not believe in the
equality of blacks and whites, thinking that blacks were inferior to the
white population in general. He opposed integration and intermarriage, did
not think that freed slaves should be given full legal and voting rights
equal to whites, and forcefully advocated before and during the Civil War
that all blacks should be deported by government subsidy either back to
Africa or to the West Indies.
War crimes and civil liberties
In addition, DiLorenzo chronicles in detail the brutality and destruction of
the Union army’s conquest of the Southern states. In contradiction to
established international norms and customs of warfare, which were taught at
the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Union armies looted and burned
the private property of noncombatants, destroyed entire cities and towns,
and ruined large portions of the countryside.
In addition, thousands of opponents of Lincoln’s war policies were arrested
and imprisoned for the duration of the conflict, including dozens of
newspaper editors and publishers. The writ of habeas corpus was revoked, and
mail and press censorship was imposed. Taxes were dramatically increased and
a national banking system was established that made the new paper money,
“greenbacks,” legal tender, resulting in the worst inflation in U.S. history
since the American Revolution.
Lincoln and his war, DiLorenzo concludes, set the tone and implemented the
policies that were the beginning of centralized and intrusive government in
America. Therefore, Lincoln’s policies and war represented the beginning of
the end for the idea of limited government that the Founding Fathers had
tried to institute through the Declaration of Independence and the U.S.
Constitution.
Richard Ebeling is the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College in Michigan and serves as vice president of academic affairs at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va.
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