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The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War
written by Thomas Dilorenzo
Studio : Three Rivers Press
by Three Rivers Press
Release Date : 2003-12-02
Publisher : Three Rivers Press
Released : 2003-12-02
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780761526469
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 291 reviews)
List Price : $15.95
Our Price : $9.48
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Product Description |
A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War
Most Americans consider Abraham Lincoln to be the greatest president in history. His legend as the Great Emancipator has grown to mythic proportions as hundreds of books, a national holiday, and a monument in Washington, D.C., extol his heroism and martyrdom. But what if most everything you knew about Lincoln were false? What if, instead of an American hero who sought to free the slaves, Lincoln were in fact a calculating politician who waged the bloodiest war in american history in order to build an empire that rivaled Great Britain's? In The Real Lincoln, author Thomas J. DiLorenzo uncovers a side of Lincoln not told in many history books and overshadowed by the immense Lincoln legend.
Through extensive research and meticulous documentation, DiLorenzo portrays the sixteenth president as a man who devoted his political career to revolutionizing the American form of government from one that was very limited in scope and highly decentralized—as the Founding Fathers intended—to a highly centralized, activist state. Standing in his way, however, was the South, with its independent states, its resistance to the national government, and its reliance on unfettered free trade. To accomplish his goals, Lincoln subverted the Constitution, trampled states' rights, and launched a devastating Civil War, whose wounds haunt us still. According to this provacative book, 600,000 American soldiers did not die for the honorable cause of ending slavery but for the dubious agenda of sacrificing the independence of the states to the supremacy of the federal government, which has been tightening its vise grip on our republic to this very day.
You will discover a side of Lincoln that you were probably never taught in school—a side that calls into question the very myths that surround him and helps explain the true origins of a bloody, and perhaps, unnecessary war.
"A devastating critique of America's most famous president."
—Joseph Sobran, commentator and nationally syndicated columnist
"Today's federal government is considerably at odds with that envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. Thomas J. DiLorenzo gives an account of How this come about in The Real Lincoln."
—Walter E. Williams, from the foreword
"A peacefully negotiated secession was the best way to handle all the problems facing Americans in 1860. A war of coercion was Lincoln's creation. It sometimes takes a century or more to bring an important historical event into perspective. This study does just that and leaves the reader asking, 'Why didn't we know this before?'"
—Donald Livingston, professor of philosophy, Emory University
"Professor DiLorenzo has penetrated to the very heart and core of American history with a laser beam of fact and analysis."
—Clyde Wilson, professor of history, University of South Carolina, and editor, The John C. Calhoun Papers
From the Hardcover edition. |
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Must Read! |
Lincoln had been my "favorite president" throughout my life based on the history taught in high school and college, but no more.
This book opened my eyes to the other side of this American icon, the side responsible for the centralization of our once democratic government.
Very easy to read - see for yourself.
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The Real Lincoln |
I found the book discussing many facts that I had already studied because I always felt that our teachers were mouthing what was fed to them by the Great Northern Machine that rolled over the agricultural South and therefore wrote the history books.
This book is as much about the Republican Party, their insincerity, bigotry and their military-industrial complex as it is about Lincoln. Good or bad, we should look at history in its full context and this book gives us a good start. You may also want to do as I do and Google those parts where you want more knowledge on the subject, good or bad. No such book is without its faults.
One fact that most blacks miss, is that while Lincoln emancipated them, for political reasons, the results of the war and the way "reconstruction" was carried out in the South for the next decade, caused hatred and kept the blacks as second class citizens for another one hundred years and even today, they are struggling. Lincoln and Obama's own state wanted laws, making free black's persona, non grata in Illinois. This did not happen to England, Spain, and France who did not fight a war and kill their own people to free the slaves.
The Democratic Party finally saw the error of their ways but the Republican Party would like to still keep this hate, status quo.
George Bush, like Lincoln, is careful to not keep written word of his misdeeds and of his administrations secretes. Also his lackeys are destroying and hiding their actions as well. He is also guilty of some of the same crimes as Lincoln and even more which are too numerous to name here. He says that History will show him to be a great leader. HA! He must think that history will be as kind to him as it was to Lincoln. Lincoln and the Republicans had the benefit that the winner of a war writes their history. This is not the case for Bush or the Republican Party. Maybe this book will throw a little light on what happens when Americans believe, without question, all the propaganda that is thrown at them.
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This book is brilliant! |
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Overall, this book is exciting and fast paced. I received my Ph.D in American History at Georgetown and I thought his account of Abe was spot on. This book repeats at time but Thomas Dilorenzo makes up for it in posterity and style. This book should be required at every school! |
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Baffled by the criticism of this book |
I read this book after seeing a few libertarian critiques of Lincoln, thinking they made sense, and hearing this was a good summary of the libertarian arguments against Lincoln. I found the book very compelling, and would ask critics of the book and Lincoln to stop focusing on the trees and look at the forest of Lincoln:
-Why did habeas corpus have to be suspended?
-If slavery was the reason for going to war, why was the Emancipation Proclamation not issued until the war was over a year old, and why did it explicitly keep slaves in border states enslaved?
-Why did Lincoln imprison thousands of Americans and shut down tens if not hundreds of newspapers?
Even if you think the author selectively picks and chooses quotes of various people to make his points, it's hard to read this book, think about what actually happened from 1861-1865, and not have a much different opinion of Lincoln than what most of the United States currently does. |
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REVIEW OF THOMAS DELORENZO'S THE REAL LINCOLN BY JOHN CHUCKMAN |
Let me say, right off, that this is not a biography of Lincoln. It is not even a character study because most of Lincoln's character is never touched here. This is a study - I think it fair to call it an attack - of one aspect of Lincoln, his ideological purpose in fighting the Civil War. However, it is a determined, fact-filled attack, worth reading.
I have always believed, on the basis of my own studies, that the American Civil War was unnecessary, but this is a view that arouses hostile feelings in Americans as it runs against the public-school civics course beliefs around that conflict.
There is definitely an American Civic Religion with a set of tenets and sacred writings and a cast of mythically-endowed characters comparable to the chief figures of the Old and New Testaments. Many well-known American historians, some quite eminent, are conscious or unconscious proponents of the Civic Religion, not such a difficult thing as you might first imagine because history, just like good police detective work, involves interpretation, judgment, and instincts. The raw facts, when they are even known, are always susceptible of emphasis and interpretation.
So it was refreshing to find a serious writer who also believes that the war was unnecessary.
However, Dilorenzo's reason for saying the war was unnecessary is different to my own. The author believes that Lincoln consciously used the war to impose the so-called American System of the Whig Party and Henry Clay, destroying the powers of the individual states and centralizing government in the United States. I believe rather that this was one of the unavoidable effects, wars always and everywhere being far more revolutionary events than people generally recognize.
There can be no doubt that Dilorrenzo marshals a strong case, but I believe that he largely fails to prove his main thesis. Lincoln, although not the sentimental figure of American text books and the Lincoln Memorial, was not America's Joseph Stalin.
Most of his fact-marshalling is impressive, but when he goes off on a tangent to give a background on the basic political split between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians, he actually gets it rather wrong. Jefferson was anything but the kind of figure he is in the eyes of libertarian devotees like Dilorenzo. He was hungry for power, hungry for empire, and ruthless to those who opposed him. He bent or broke laws many times and never was bothered about rights of others where they stood in the way of his vision. Jefferson was, in short, everything the author claims Lincoln was.
The tone of this book becomes almost oppressive as the author hammers away with citations and anecdotes tending to support his view - in other words, the author is guilty of overkill.
The sense of oppressiveness is increased by the fact the author writes from an ideological viewpoint, not many pages convincing the reader of the author's pronounced libertarian attitude. In general, I do not like histories or biographies written with an ideological perspective, but here the fault is compounded by the author's narrow focus.
I don't think anyone with a fairly open mind can study Lincoln and come away with a view like Dilorenzo's. Lincoln himself was a victim of believing in the American Civic Religion of his day. He genuinely believed in The Union as a semi-mystical concept. Lincoln was a genuine skeptic with regard to conventional religion and the existence of God, and the feelings that might have had an outlet there attached themselves to "The Union." He was tough and hard-headed in many respects, but he would have been, in this writer's judgment, temperamentally incapable of launching and continuing a vast war for the purpose of installing Whig policy.
For those interested, the reviewer believes the Civil War was unnecessary because most great wars are unnecessary and rarely solve anything. For example, World War I only created the foundation for World War II. The American Civil War, which was not fought over slavery, solved little about the ugly institution of slavery. The South went on for about a century afterward with a new set of arrangements for its black citizens hardly better than the previous institution.
The Civil War did establish the anti-democratic principle that no state can separate from the United States, hardly an admirable or advanced attitude. The Civil War is also the tipping point in America becoming a world power with fervent imperialistic views (demonstrated earlier in a more provincial theater of operation in many policies such as the Mexican War), again hardly an admirable outcome.
I believe too that the angry, long-unforgiving South actually dragged the United States backward in social progress over the next century. The United States might have become a better, more decent place without the South and its superstitious religion and traditions of personal honor, much resembling the blood-feud attitudes of backward places like Armenia. And slavery itself would have naturally died out even in the South in a few decades as it did in so many places like Brazil.
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