Suprynowicz on Lincoln, Slavery and Taxes

Conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the one I love

Every time I make some passing reference in print to the tyrant Lincoln, as I did a few weeks ago, a fair number of readers insist on proving the dangers of letting unionized government functionaries “educate” our children.

I believe we can confidently presume most who rail “Such a bizarre and outlandish statement proves what dangerous wackos Suprynowicz and his conservative pals are!” (I’m a libertarian; I’ve never claimed to be a “conservative”) are government-school ex-inmates.

I dare say they have read no legitimate scholarship on “Honest Abe” since hearing him praised decades ago in a room smelling of poster paints and waxed sawdust floor-sweeping compound as a “strong leader who saved the nation and ended slavery” by a government employee with a vested interest in seeing the state continue to tax our parents (and now us) within an inch of our lives to fund today’s largest remaining American institution of compulsion, incarceration, and propaganda — the “public schools.”

(No, old Abe didn’t ride into town on a donkey, playing a Jew’s harp, and spring the innocent defendant by proving Ward Bond lied when he said it was “moon bright” the night of the killing. That was Hank Fonda, courtesy of the old Irish mythmaker, John Ford. The real Lincoln was a railroad lawyer, who had an interesting pre-war business relationship with one George B. McClellan, among others.)

Do yourself a favor. Open your own eyes to what unadulterated hogwash they fed you in the public schools, and how it’s twisted your understanding of American history and politics ever since. To expose just this one example, read at least one of the three books “Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War,” by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, or Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s “Lincoln Unmasked” or “The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War,” all now available in paperback for about eleven bucks plus postage.

As local reader Nicholas Gausling wrote in, last week (in part):

“Besides Professor Thomas DiLorenzo’s excellent book on the underlying causes and philosophy of the Civil War, entitled The Real Lincoln, the modern reader will be hard-pressed to find an honest, thorough historical analysis of Lincoln’s legacy. While mainstream scholars do occasionally mention some of the less-than-admirable actions of Lincoln — such as throwing most of the Maryland legislature into a military prison, trying to arrest Chief Justice Roger Taney because he embarrassed the Lincoln administration in a court ruling, or having the Secretary of State operate a secret police force to silence Lincoln’s critics — they typically do so in an attempt to defend his blatantly lawless acts.”

Mr. Gausling could also have mentioned arresting Chicago newspaper editors who criticized the tyrant’s policies; instituting an unconstitutional income tax and a constitutionally unauthorized and unprecedented draft (with an exemption for the rich!); telling the South they could keep their slaves if only they’d stay in the union (unless, of course, you think “Honest Abe” was lying about that); waiting years to finally “free” only those slaves inside the Confederacy while allowing union generals to retain in bondage black folk who were proving useful to harvest and export the cotton crop in union-conquered portions of Texas and Arkansas; happily endorsing the war crimes of Grant and Sherman as the former shelled the civilian populace of Vicksburg and the latter burned Atlanta … not to mention the simple fact that he invaded and conquered previously sovereign states which no one — including Young Mr. Lincoln himself — had previously believed lacked the right to secede, the very right that gave birth to The United States of America in 1776.

“But Lincoln ended slavery!” appears to be their last resort.

Chattel slavery was indeed ended on these shores by the Thirteenth Amendment in late 1865, months after Lincoln’s death. Though it had not been his stated goal, Lincoln’s war did hasten that outcome. Though the attempt by Congress to extend the right to keep and bear arms (a necessary precursor to full freedom) to the freedmen via the Fourteenth Amendment was not then nor ever has been fully successful. Just ask yourself how so many blacks could have been lynched and raped in the ensuing century if they’d been generally “allowed” to carry guns.

It’s April now. More than half of Americans just spent dozens of hours — or paid someone else to spend dozens of hours — detailing for the massive central government the names, ages, and Social Slave numbers of their children; how much they spent on medical care last year; how much they spent on housing last year; how many miles they traveled on business last year … things a slave would regularly reveal to his master, but which no free man in his right mind would ever disclose to hostile government agents with guns, who don’t even advise us of our Miranda right to “remain silent.”

Yes, America was freed of slavery. For 48 years, from 1865 to 1913.

The Lincoln-lovers hated the fact that the Supreme Court had ruled his income tax illegal, see. So they “fixed” it — all in memory of “the Great Emancipator.”
Was Lincoln a tyrant? The more relevant question is when we last had a president who did NOT practice tyranny by routinely violating his oath to protect and defend a Constitution of limited government.

It’s all well and good to say men like Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan “meant well,” that they were “decent souls at heart,” that Reagan (especially) “never could have gotten a real reduction of government through the Congress,” that he “at least didn’t expand the intrusiveness of the federal government MUCH, compared to the rest of the gang.”

But a president who took office today and actually ordered the shutdown of every office and program created since 1912 and not specifically authorized by the Constitution (don’t give me any of your “general welfare” or “interstate commerce” guff) — in order to achieve the “budget annually balanced” that was cynically promised in the 1932 campaign platform of one Franklin Delano Roosevelt — would bring ululations from the shores of the Hudson and Potomac shrill enough to make your head spin, and probably find him or herself either impeached or shot within a fortnight.

“Land of Liberty,” indeed. The “Land of Liberty,” if not buried in a secret grave in Fort Marcy Park, is today on life support, with Barack Obama smiling as he prepares to plug its I.V. into wall suction.

And it mostly started with the tyrant Lincoln.