Lincoln Unbound Read Free Page A

his revolution, for the coercive welfare state to come into being and bring about the conditions against which we are fighting today.”
    Kendall and Meyer think Lincoln should have let the South merrily go its own way in 1861. Contemporary libertarians take a similar tack. Rejecting praise for Lincoln as “one of our greatest presidents,” Ron Paul wonders why Lincoln didn’t forestall the war by simply buying up all the slaves and freeing them—­a market solution to the sectional conflict. With his usual sense of realism, Paul ignores the fact that Lincoln repeatedly advanced schemes for just such a compensated emancipation. Lincoln argued for these proposals as “the cheapest and most humane way to end the war.” Except in the District of Columbia, they went precisely . . . nowhere. The border states weren’t selling, let alone the South. Even little Delaware, which was selected as a test case because it had only 587 slaveholders out of a white population of 90,500 in 1860, couldn’t be persuaded to cash out of slavery. One plan proposed by Lincoln would have paid four hundred dollars or so per slave and achieved full abolition by 1893. A version of the scheme failed in the state’s legislature.
    The Lincoln-­hating libertarian Thomas DiLorenzo expands this line of criticism in a rancid book-­length prosecution of ­Lincoln as the Whore of Springfield. In his telling, Lincoln was a racist dictator who didn’t care about ending slavery so much as aggrandizing the central government and crushing federalism and states’ rights. Lincoln, DiLorenzo concludes with his typical judiciousness, “was an even worse tyrant than George III was.”
    Where to begin? These critiques from the right amount to the contention that the Constitution was so precious and inviolate that half the country should have been permitted to exit from it, and write a new explicitly pro­slavery one. In contrast to the U.S. version, the foundational governing document of the Confederacy didn’t tiptoe around the issue. It was full of explicit references to slavery, or as Article IV, section 2 put it, “slaves and other property.” It accorded the so-called peculiar institution high, protected status: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” It guaranteed slavery in new territories.
    The South seceded to protect human bondage, not to vindicate liberty. Prior to the Civil War, it didn’t even honor that most elemental political freedom, free speech, which it trampled to suppress the expression of abolitionist opinions. Its commitment to federalism was highly situational. It insisted on a federal Fugitive Slave Act to tighten the screws on anyone in the Northern states who was insufficiently zealous about returning runaways. Southern Democrats walked out of the 1860 Democratic convention, in a foreshadowing of secession, when the party couldn’t forge a consensus on a platform demanding federal protection for slavery in the territories.
    The ensuing war necessarily entailed the growth of the state, but this hardly makes Lincoln a forerunner to FDR or LBJ. The income tax to fund the war, instituted in 1861 and soon made into a progressive tax with higher rates for the wealthy, was eliminated in 1872. (The Confederacy had its own income tax, with highly progressive rates.) In 1860, the federal budget was well under $100 million. By the end of the war, it was more than $1 billion. Wars are expensive. The budget dropped back down to about $300 million, excluding payments on the debt, within five years of the end of the war.
    To see the makings of the modern welfare state in any of this requires a leap of imagination. In the midst of the war, the State Department had all of thirty-­three employees. The famous instances of government activism not directly related to the