Don’t Miss The Political Truths That Nobody Wants To Know
Headlines are so contentious these days, even vicious, one way or the other. But, in fairness, nobody can rightly say that Joe Biden is the first president in our history to weaponize federal agencies to censor political speech, or even to indict or imprison his political opponents. Abraham Lincoln was.
Most Americans find it hard to reconcile that with everything else that we’ve learned about Lincoln. But in fact there’s a long train of abuses across the Lincoln administration, with ample documentation that’s always been available — just ignored. A good place to start is John A. Marshall’s American Bastile: A History of the Illegal Arrests and Imprisonment of American Citizens in the Northern and Border States on Account of Their Political Opinions During the Late Civil War (Philadelphia 1883).
Then there are the private letters, diaries, and memoirs that relate how the Lincoln administration posted armed troops at the polling places across the North, ready to arrest anybody who picked up a Democrat ballot. How Lincoln soldiers kicked in the doors of opposition candidates at midnight and dragged them away to military prisons a thousand miles away, without charge or habeas corpus, leaving Republicans to run unopposed. How they smashed the presses of opposition — or even just accurate — newspapers. Posted armed guards in churches to ensure that only the sermons written by the Secretary of War were proclaimed from the pulpit — and pistol whipped any clergyman who strayed, dragging him bloody through the congregation and off to those same distant prisons.
Well, even the standard histories of the time tell how the administration cut off the South’s trade with all parts of the world, and declared themselves invested with power to legislate in all cases whatsoever. How they affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power, keeping among Americans, North and South, standing armies, quartering large bodies of armed troops in people’s houses, protecting soldiers from punishment even for murder while depriving citizens of the benefits of trial by jury — took away our charters, abolished our most valuable laws, and altered fundamentally the forms of our governments — plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people — in short, how the Lincoln administration combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws, running through practically the whole list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence four score and seven years before.
Best documented and most outrageous, there’s the overlooked case of Clement Vallandigham, sitting Representative of Ohio, arrested, imprisoned, tried by a military tribunal on vacant charges and transported contrary to the First Amendment and Art. I Sec. 6 (“The Senators and Representatives shall … be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and … for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place”, you know). But his was only one of thousands of such cases — all of them in the North, where the Lincoln administration still had its civil authority, and most in states that had voted the Party into office, where state and local officials wouldn’t interfere.
Of course, like Biden and Carter and quite a few other recent incumbents, Lincoln had very little idea of what was being wrought in his name. His handlers had chosen him as a candidate explicitly because they themselves were too well known to be electable and he was a complete non-entity. His brief but famous speeches were written by others to be read off under strict orders to never speak extemporaneously. Nobody attended his posted cabinet meetings; his secretaries ignored his scattershot and usually trivial orders, and normally Secretary of State William H. Seward told the president what was going to be done, or really what had been done.
Most interesting in that line, there’s Seward’s troubling “Some thoughts for the President’s consideration” of April 1, 1861.
“My system is built upon this idea as a ruling one,” Seward wrote, “namely that we must Change the question before the Public from one upon Slavery, or about Slavery for a question upon Union or Disunion.”
In other words, from what would be regarded as a Party question to one of Patriotism or Union
The occupation or evacuation of Fort Sumter, although not in fact a slavery, or a party question is so regarded…
I would therefore terminate it as a safe means for changing the issue.
Lincoln replied that same day: “I do not perceive how the re-inforcement of Fort Sumpter would be done on a slavery, or party
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.