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Hi everybody! My name is Stefan Molyneux and I am the host of Freedomain Radio, the largest
and most popular philosophy show in the world. I hope you're doing well. So, this is "The
Truth About Abraham Lincoln"; I've done a series of these recently on Martin Luther
King, on Gandhi, on Marx, and so on and there is a purpose. There is a reason why I'm doing
all of these. It is a tragedy how often our heroes are found to have feet of clay, but
in my experience, having spent a lot of my life looking for heroes, looking for heroism
is a great way of avoiding one's own capacity for heroism; and so I hope that this series
is of use to you. I certainly know that it's been important to me throughout my intellectual
development to come to a clear, historical, moral, and empirical assessment of the people
that our culture and our government calls "heroes", also that our intellectuals call
"heroes" and I think it's worth examining this to some degree. This is not a history
of the Civil War. This is not a history even of the Lincoln presidency. These are very
specific and salient facts—shocking facts, doubtless—about Abraham Lincoln and his
goals in life as far as can be ascertained. So, we're going to start with his childhood.
"The child is the father of the man", as the poem says, and so it's well worth examining
his childhood to see if can understand how he came to be who he was as an adult and how
that may have influenced his motives. So, his paternal grandfather and his namesake
Abraham originally had moved his family from Virginia to Kentucky, where tragically, he
was ambushed and killed by an Indian raid in 1786 as Abraham's father Thomas looked
on. So, seeing your own father murdered by the Indians was probably fairly formative
in Lincoln's father's life. He spent his—Thomas Lincoln, Abraham's father—spent his childhood
and teen years living with various relatives and as an adult he worked for a time as a
slave catcher; and given Abraham Lincoln's subsequent relationship with his father, this
may not be entirely unimportant. He was not a brilliant man, but he had kind of a targeted
persistence to him and he actually accumulated two farms of a couple hundred acres each before
people found out that he hadn't filled out the proper paperwork and therefore his farm
was taken away from him after a legal battle; and he went out into the wilderness to start
again. Thomas Lincoln, Abraham's father, was even by the standards of the time a brutal
father. He was reported to have beaten Abraham repeatedly and mercilessly, and this was pretty
brutal. Abraham Lincoln grew up, of course, in the log cabin with very little education
and a school opened up nearby and his mother said, you know, you got to go to school, but
it was so far away it took between two and a half and three hours to walk each way and
the school did not last very long. Later on, Abraham Lincoln pointed out that his education
as a child had not exceeded 12 months the entire time. Sort of reminds me of Shakespeare
who went to school for 12 weeks a year and still managed to polish off a few decent iambic
pentameter couplets. When Abraham Lincoln was 9, his mother died of milk sickness. This
happens when a cow eats a poisonous plant. The poison then goes through the cow and if
some people who ingest the milk get sick and die. His mother died, I would assume in significant
pain and perhaps lingering. This was pretty horrendous. Now, when Abraham Lincoln's mother
died, his father left Abraham and his sister Nancy—Abraham was 9 and his sister was 11—in
the log cabin with some supplies, mostly dried berries that Nancy had picked, and he went
to go and find a new wife. And, this was just horrendous. The children had very little to
eat after their father left, just some dried berries that I mentioned that had been stored
away by Nancy. A neighbor who stopped by reported that the children were filthy, half-starved,
and that the house was in a terrible condition. And, this abandonment by their father lasted
for six months. And, of course, the children didn't know it was going to be six months.
They simply knew that their father had gone away; and imagine—this is really out in
the wilderness and you're frightened to go out. There are coyotes. There are bears and
wolves and no neighbors for miles and miles around, no help of course of any kind; and
you don't know if your father is coming back. This went on for half a year. I can't conceive
of how terrifying and frustrating this must have been for the children. This is a truly
terrifying amount childhood trauma that he went through, and this was long before things
like talk therapy and so on. So, this had significant effects, I would argue, on his
adult state of mind and his subsequent permanent separation from his father. So, he never quite
seemed to get along hugely well with his new stepmother, Sarah. His father did come back
with a wife. He provided for her after his father died, Lincoln did, but he never introduced
his stepmother to his wife and children. And when he married, Mary Todd his wife, neither
Thomas's father nor Sarah his stepmother were invited to the wedding, so we can assume things
were somewhat frosty, and this is, I think, important. So, he left home as a young man
and now he did—he was farmed out by his father to go and work in other people's farms
and he had to remit all of his income that he got from working on other people's farms
to his father, which was an accepted and legal practice at the time, but probably did not
endear him to his father much, if at all. So, he had very little to no contact with
his father after Abraham left home. Sometimes he would send him small sums of money, but
he never invited his father to visit him or his family. And, in the winter of 1850-1851,
Lincoln's father, Thomas, became seriously ill and as so often happens with people, the
moral horror of history catches up with us in a fist of ash and we regret the wrongs
that we have done in the past when we face our own mortality. Thomas wrote many letters
to Abraham Lincoln, but Abraham Lincoln did not answer them; and finally he wrote to a
third-party. In a January 12, 1851 letter, he wrote, "Say to him (my father) that if
we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would not be more painful than pleasant,
but that if it is to be his lot to go now, he will soon have a joyous meeting with many
loved-ones gone before." Now, Lincoln had some serious mental health issues, to put
it a mildly as possible. This really translated into his marriage. There's a story by those
who knew Lincoln and his wife Mary when they lived in Illinois that says, the Lincolns
were at home one night. Mary asked her husband to add logs to the fire. He was reading and
didn't do what she asked—maybe didn't hear her fast enough—she reportedly became angry
enough to toss a piece of firewood at him, smashing him in the face, which led to him
appearing in public the next day with a bandage. So, she had a temper, I suppose. And, we will
get to the politics and the war in a moment, but Mary's instability was fairly well known.
The Lincoln's had four children, only one of whom made it to adulthood, which was Robert
Todd Lincoln. And to fast-forward, hopefully not to disconcertingly, ten years after Lincoln
was assassinated, Robert was very upset with his mother for her embarrassing or eccentric
behavior, so he charged—he arranged to have his mother put on trial and charged with being
insane. So, there was a very strange trial that happened in Chicago on May 19, 1875 just
a little after 10 years after her husband's ***. So, she was surprised at her home
in the morning by two detectives and was yanked off to court. She didn't have time to prepare
any defense for what was coming up, and following testimony about her behavior from various
witnesses, the jury concluded, "Mary Lincoln is insane and is a fit person to be in a hospital
for the insane". Now, of course, nineteenth century hospitals for the insane... not very
great places to be. Now, I mean, to be fair, a few months afterwards—she was in for three
months—and sometime afterwards she got the verdict overturned, but I think this tells
you something about the dynamics within the family; that this is a lack of bond that Abraham
Lincoln had with his father translated, I would say, to the lack of a bond that Robert
Todd Lincoln had with his own mother to the point that this savage in-fighting was occurring.
So, the effects of these intense childhood terrors and privations did give—I think
,would argue, have significant impact on Abraham Lincoln's mental state as an adult. He maintained
suicidal thoughts, he had nervous breakdowns, was gripped in staggering levels of depression.
A neighbor related that "Lincoln told me that he felt like committing suicide often". Neighbors
and friends were compelled to keep watch and ward over him. They were concerned that he
was going to kill himself. When Lincoln's first love became ill and died in August 1835,
they actually had to keep knives and sharp implements away from him, everybody was so
concerned about his desperate state of mind; and he suffered a first bout of major depression,
had another one in 1841, and people kept guns and knives away from him. According to one
biographer, letters left by the president's friends referred to him as the most depressed
person they've ever seen. In 1846, Lincoln wrote—and look, when you have a childhood
that is so random where your mother dies, your father abandons you for a month after
month to starve in the wilderness, you don't get a very strong sense of control over your
own life.—and in 1846, Lincoln wrote, "What I understand is called the doctrine of necessity.
That is that the human mind is impelled to action or held in rest by some power over
which the mind itself has no control." And, this lack of a sense of control, that the
mind is moved by impulse—of course, if you suffer from depression and suicidality, nervous
breakdowns which you don't understand because self-knowledge has not really been a major
focus of Western philosophy. I mean, Aristotle's "know thyself", Socrates "know thyself", but
until the post-Freudian Revolution of the late 19th century, it really wasn't much of
a focus in the Western world. So, drilling into and dwelling in the past is a way of
unraveling the Gordian knots of the future, unleashing one's potential into the future
was not really well understood at the time.
So, let's turn a little bit towards—a spotlight on some of the events leading up to and including
the Civil War, so that we can get a sense more of what was going on and why the decisions
were made, as best we can unravel. Of course, the American Revolution was fundamentally
a secessionist revolution. They seceded from the British Empire and the Constitution was
a pact between the sovereign states with which the ultimate power lay; and these states devolved
to the central government its limited power. The central government was supposed to be
very limited. With this confederation of sovereign states the Founders intended to curb the overreach
of a central government. And, my argument has been that America was an experiment in
the very smallest government known to man. It has now grown into the very largest government
with the most devastating military and political power that the world has ever seen; and, it
did not take long for the United States federal government to overreach the bounds of the
Constitution and turn in to what has now become just another desperate and predatory center
of empire. I mean, if you think of George Washington riding down with his troops to
collect the whiskey tax from the Pennsylvania farmers, you can get a sense of how little
respect there has been for the necessary restraint of political power. Whether it's even possible,
is a question I've been asking myself for years.
So, how did Lincoln become president? Obviously, a very intelligent man, a very witty man,
a good storyteller, and a great debater, but his political career really had him firmly
in the hands or, I guess rather, the pockets to Northern protectionists, especially the
ones in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. So, a Northern protectionist is an industrialist
who wants to shield products from foreign or even domestic competition. So, a protectionist
is someone—they want to build a tariff wall around their area of trade to keep foreign
goods out or other goods out of the marketplace, which gives them the chance to raise their
prices. So, if you're a sweater manufacturer and the Chinese are sending sweaters over
at ten bucks a sweater, and you can only manufacture yours for twelve bucks, then you sort of a
50% tariff on the Chinese sweaters, so that they're fifteen bucks, and therefore you can
compete. Rather than trying to figure out how to compete with them in a free market
scenario, you go to the government and ask for protection from foreign trade. So, one
of the triggers for the significant conflict between the North and the South that many
people have argued was really the catalyst for the Civil War was something called the
"moral tariff". So, Lincoln, in his first inaugural address promised a military invasion
of the South if the new moral tariff was not collected; and this was a tariff that disproportionately
fell upon the South and disproportionately benefited the North, and we'll get into some
of the numbers in a second. So, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the moral tariff
in the 1859-60 session, and then the Senate passed it in 1861, two days before Lincoln's
inauguration. President James Buchanan, a Pennsylvanian who owed much of his own political
success to the Pennsylvania protectionists, signed it into law. The bill immediately raised
the average tariff rate from about 15% to 37.5%; and with a greatly expanded list of
covered items, the tax burden would almost triple, and soon thereafter, a second tariff
increase increased the average rate to just over 47% tax on goods. This was catastrophic.
And, just to sort of mention, the union between business and the state is so inevitable, once
the government has the power to benefit certain economic sectors at the expense—almost always—of
the general consumer and through debt of the unborn, it's going to happen. The government's
power to meddle in the economy is like chemicals' or drugs' power to enhance athletic performance.
Once you allow this to happen in sports, then anybody who doesn't take those performance
enhancing drugs in sports is just going to lose—just going to lose. And, you can look
at the government's role in benefiting certain economic sectors at the expense of others;
you can look at that as a performance-enhancing drug for the business world. If it's legal,
it's going to be pursued. If it's legal and it allows you to win, it's going to be pursued.
Once that power is available—once you can donate to politicians and get them to provide
you economic favors and protectionism in return—it's simply going to happen. There's simply no
way to stop it. Again, if you made performance-enhancing drugs legal and then said, "Well, it'd be
nice if people didn't use them", you're dreaming. Right? So, this is what happens—the argument
is that we need a separation between state and economy in the same way we needed a separation
of church and state, sort of for the same reasons. So, the federal government, of course,
75% of its income came from the Southern ports, which is where they could collect the tariff.
Abraham Lincoln's relationship to secession was kind of what you'd expect from a politician.
He actually coaxed West Virginia into seceding from Virginia in order to gain two senators
who were going to vote his way. His relationship to slavery was quite complex; his wife's family
in Kentucky were large plantation owners and kept many slaves, which of course was the
foundation of her wealth. Lincoln had the typical corruptions of politicians as a whole.
He signed the Rail Act after ensuring that his property in Iowa would be the hub of the
rail system, thus massively increasing its value. But, to return to the tariff... So,
the Northern states were very densely populated relative to the South, which had, you know,
these big sprawling plantations and farms; so, the North had more seats in the legislative
branch and the power therefore to tax the Southern states unfairly. So, the import-dependent
South was paying as much as 80% of the tariff. The South, of course, is complaining bitterly
that most of the revenues were being spent in the North because they were doing all of
these works projects and railroads for the transportation of their goods and so on. So,
the South felt that it was being plundered by this tax system and wanted no more of it.
Why would we want to pay this massive amount of money which then gets shipped off to the
North and spent on political cronyism? And so, even before the tariff was tripled, the
South was already complaining, and, of course, once it became tripled or once it was tripled,
everybody said, "Well, what's the point of this?" Remember, America has succeeded over
a tiny tax—a tiny tax, a few percentage points—and this was a massive tax. 47% on
most things that were imported; and, of course, the South imported a lot of stuff because
they didn't have a manufacturing base.
So, what Lincoln said in his inaugural—what did he say? He said, "the power confided in
me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government
and to collect the duties and imposts, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects,
there will be no invasion. No using force against or among the people anywhere." So,
basically saying, "I'm going to invade and use force to collect this tax, this tariff."
So, as mentioned, the South paid the bulk of the taxes; the North enjoyed the benefits
of pork-barrel spending. The North outnumbered the South in Congress and could actually pass
whatever measures it wanted without a single Southern vote. So, the North could unilaterally
impose its will on the South without a single Southern vote. Lincoln himself was elected
without a single Southern vote, so it's not like they felt any particular loyalty towards
Lincoln. And, given that there was still people alive who had been alive during the Revolution,
it was kind of hard to argue that you should never succeed because taxes are being raised
unjustly, which really was the foundation of the entire American experiment. And...
well, we'll get to the declaration and proclamation in a moment. So, to fast-forward—and we'll
get into more of the details of the war, but I just want to go to the end. So, we're looking
at sort of the events that led up to it. In 1866, slavery was ended with the 13th Amendment,
but at the cost of 620,000 lives, and some people have argued that the cost of life was
actually north of 800,000, and hundreds of thousands more of those people were crippled
for life. And, the Civil War destroyed almost half of the entire wealth of America. Just
astounding. These wars are just so staggering in cost. I mean, the First World War left
over 10 million dead, destroyed almost all of the economic gains of the Industrial Revolution
almost down to the penny. It's astonishing; and was it necessary? Well, as I argued in
a recent video that I did "The Truth About Slavery", I mean, dozens of other countries:
Argentina, Colombia, Chile, all of Central America, Mexico, Bolivia, Uruguay, the French
and Danish colonies, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela... they all ended slavery peacefully during the
first sixteen years in the nineteenth century. Why not the United States? Well, if the war
was not about slavery, then that would explain why not. If you really wanted to end slavery
in America, you could have had the federal government pay slave owners—it's what happened
in England and throughout the Empire—you could pay the slave owners for their slaves
and set them free, certainly would have been a lot cheaper than the war. So, what was the
North's attitude towards race? Well, many Northern states adopted laws like Indiana
which prohibited blacks and milatos from entering the state. They did not recognize contracts
with blacks. They fined employers who encourage black employees to enter the state. They prohibited
blacks from voting or marrying white persons, which was punishable by imprisonment, or testifying
in court against a white person. So, you could accuse a black and he or she would not even
be allowed her day in court. Illinois, "the Land of Lincoln", prohibited the immigration
of black persons into the state, and Lincoln is his long career never expressed any opposition
to this and even supported a state program to colonize or deport free blacks out of Illinois.
So, his solution was to ship the blacks off country. There is a strong argument; whether
it's conclusive I will lead to your judgment. There was a strong argument that slavery was
actually more secure in the Union than out of it. In other words, if the South had seceded,
slavery would have ended very quickly. And, both Confederate vice president Alexander
Stevens and the preeminent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison believed this, believed that
slavery was "more secure in the Union than out of it". This is partly because of something
called the Fugitive Slave Act, which Lincoln wholeheartedly supported. This Act compelled
the Northern states to capture runaway slaves. Now, they were provided due process, but local
magistrates were paid ten dollars for returning a slave to his owner and only five dollars
for granting him freedom. Hmm, let me stroke my beard and wonder which way these courts
would vote. So, this basically was a massive federal subsidy to prop up the institution
of slavery and would have had become defunct with secession. In other words, if the South
had succeeded, then there would be no financial incentive, no laws compelling the return of
slaves to the South. As soon as they made it across the border they would have been
free. And, this is why Garrison and other Northern abolitionists, they wanted the South
to secede from the Northern states to get rid of these kinds subsidies, thus bringing
about the economic therefore peaceful end to slavery.
Now, Lincoln and his political views. So, people, of course, argue that Lincoln was
very pro-freedom, pro-individualism which is why he didn't like slavery—really not
the case at all. Running on protectionism is running to benefit very significant and
powerful economic interests—large corporations, mining companies, railroad companies, and
so on—at the expense of the general population. And, he first ran for the Illinois legislature
in 1832, and he said, "my politics are short and sweet like the old woman's dance"—whatever
that means—"I am in favor of a national bank". Oooh, not good! "...in favor of the
internal improvements system and a high protective tariff"—probably what got him the protectionists.
So, these three things—protectionism, government subsidies to railroads and canal building
companies, and central banking—were called the American system by Henry Clay. Economists
kind of have another word for it, "mercantilism", which is where the central bank gets to make
up money out of thin air, basically the nineteenth century equivalent of typing whatever they
want into their own bank accounts and shielding domestic industries from foreign competition,
and basically buying political donations by returning voters money to very concentrated
economic concerns. Not a free-trader, not an individualist, certainly had nothing in
common with the Founding Fathers as far as all that stuff went.
Now, the war starts and again the argument that was being made by many people, including
me—remember, I'm just funneling information forward. I have my opinions, but I'm trying
to keep them, at least to some degree, to myself. So, what happened during the war?
Well, you know there were six to eight hundred thousand deaths, hundreds of thousands of
maimings, the destruction of half the U.S. economy, and Lincoln unconstitutionally conducted
the war without the consent of Congress. I mean, there's been very few wars that Congress
has actually approved of in the hundred plus wars of the American Empire. This would be
one of them. He suspended habeas corpus for the duration of the war. He conscripted railroads
and censored telegraph lines—I guess, a very early NSA. He—that is Lincoln—imprisoned
without trial some 30,000 Northern citizens for merely voicing opposition to the war,
at least that's the cover story. Of course, if you don't get them a trial, you don't know
if they're innocent or guilty of voicing opposition to the war, but he imprisoned without trial
30,000 Northern citizens, of course, in a much smaller population than America has today.
He actually—Lincoln deported a member of Congress, Clemet L. Valendingin of Ohio, for
opposing Lincoln's income tax proposal at a Democratic Party political rally. Had the
man deported... Lincoln closed down hundreds of Northern newspapers and imprisoned their
editors for questioning his war policies. Really shocking stuff, I mean, this is pure
fascism, naked blade state power. He ordered federal troops intimidate voters into voting
Republican and intentionally waged war against civilians; and even by the rules of war at
the time, this was not even remotely good. According to Mark E. Neely of "Fate and Liberty",
there were more than thirteen-thousand arrests of Northern civilians after Lincoln had unconstitutionally
suspended the writ of habeas corpus, including dozens if not hundreds of newspaper editors
and owners who were critical of the Lincoln administration. Neely gives an account in
his book of how Lincoln's military became quite proficient at torturing Northern civilians
who had been arbitrarily arrested without a warrant. On page 110 of "Fate and Liberty"
he writes, "Handcuffs and hanging by the wrists were rare, but in that summer of 1863 the
army had developed a water torture that came to be used routinely. Upon learning of the
use of torture, not one member of the Lincoln administration, including Lincoln himself,
expressed any personal outrage or personal feeling at all over it including Lincoln's
Secretary of State William Seward. Now, habeas corpus may be suspended in times of emergency,
but the Constitution is silent on who may suspend the writ—sort of an important thing
to try and figure out. Lincoln simply took that power on himself without constitutional
authority. He imprisoned members of the Maryland legislature who opposed his war on the South.
He used military tribunals to try civilians for disloyalty, even in the North where the
civil courts were open and functioned. The reason, of course, was that a guilty verdict
was assured; enemies of the war were effectively silenced. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled
that this use of military tribunals was unconstitutional and yet Lincoln did it, just as Lincoln threatened
to imprison the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for disagreeing with him on the legality
of secession. So, imagine this. George W. Bush imprisoned the California legislature
until they cease their opposition to a free market in electricity. George W. Bush would
have shut down the Wall Street Journal and locked up its editors because the journal
has at times been critical of Bush. Uh, this is pretty shocking stuff even by the standards
of the time. So, he did, of course, impose the protectionist tariffs. The second part
of Mercantilism, the Mercantilist platform, centralized banking was achieved by the National
Currency Act of 1863 and 1864. And, of course, when the government gets the power to create
its own currency, there's a virtual explosion of government subsidies to railroads and other
businesses that bankrolled the Republican Party. The inevitable consequence was the
notorious corruption of the Grant administration. Imagine, you can just print whatever money
you want; you're going to go on a spending binge, particularly if those you spend money
on can help you get into or stay in power?—and this, of course, continues to the current
time. Now, the Emancipation Proclamation was supposed to have freed the slaves, but the
reality is that it really should be more realistically viewed as a destabilizing tactic to disrupt
the opposing states in the Civil War, the Southern states. The Emancipation Proclamation
guaranteed that slaves were freed only in the parts of the Confederacy inaccessible
to the Union army. So, he freed the slaves he had no control over and did not free the
slaves he had control over. Union soldiers were permitted to confiscate slaves in rebel
territory and put them to work for the Union army. Um, I don't know about you, but I'd
rather be a slave than conscripted into the American Civil War. So, in areas loyal to
the Union, slaves were not emancipated and that is—it was not a principle. It was a
military tactic to disrupt the Southern states. Of course, after the war, Lincoln offered
little land to the freed men, for the freed slaves. Most of the land was parceled off
to his constituent power bases, the railroad and mining companies. It's just the same corruption
that goes on and on. Another little mention of Lincoln's nature, which was often not talked
about in history books, in 1862 there was a small, I guess you could call it, "war"
between federal soldiers and the Santee Sioux Indians of Minnesota. At the end of the hostilities,
over three hundred Indians who were just around, not necessarily part of the fighting were
arrested. They were imprisoned and they were scheduled to be executed after military "trials"
that lasted about ten minutes each. Lincoln was fearful that the European powers might
encouraged to be more supportive of the Confederacy if they learned of the mass execution of over
three hundred men whose guilt had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. So, he paired
the number down to just thirty-nine—lied about it. Now, this was the largest mass execution
in American history. Have you ever heard about it? Well, no. It happened under Lincoln's
watch and Lincoln deliberately deflated figures in order to avoid any condemnation from the
European powers. I think that that stands for itself. So, since secession, or the right
of secession was at the root of the Civil War, what did Lincoln think about the right
of secession? So, this is what he said, which is pro-Declaration of Independence. He said,
"The expression of that principle (political freedom) in our Declaration of Independence
was most happy and fortunate. Without this, as well as with it, we could have declared
our independence from Great Britain, but without it, we could not. I think it secured our free
government and consequent prosperity." It was a good thing. Eh, you know, once he gets
into power it's a little bit different. In 1864, he issued the following order: "You
will take possession by military force of the printing establishments of the New York
World and Journal of Commerce and prohibit any further publication thereof. You are therefore
commanded forthwith to arrest and imprison the editors, proprietors, and publishers of
the aforementioned newspapers." So, free government, independence, liberty from the arbitrary power
of the state—no. He said, "arrest and imprison"; not "try", not "charge", "arrest and imprison".
This is pure fascism. Lincoln's belief in the Union went against the Declaration's view
that when people have the right to dissolve their government. In January 1848, he said,
"Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake
off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better." Well, unless
they're in the South and aren't paying the kind of tariffs the North can use to buy off
special interest groups in the economy in return for their support of political power.
So, again, I mean, this is just what people say; what they actually do is very, very different,
particularly in politics. In Lincoln's 1860 inaugural address, he said, "I have no purpose,
whether directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states
where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so and I have no inclination to
do so."—1860. Two years later, Lincoln wrote, "My paramount objective in this struggle is
to save the Union and it is not either to say or to destroy slavery. If I could save
the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it and if I could save it by freeing some
and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored
race I do because I believe it helps to save the Union." That was what he wrote in a letter.
In 1858, Lincoln had written, "I am not, nor have ever been, in favor of bringing about,
in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not, nor
have ever been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negros, nor of qualifying them
to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. There is a physical difference between
the white and the black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together
on terms of social and political equality." So, America had to destroy half the economy
and between six hundred and eight hundred thousand people. Well, what did Britain do?
Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. It gave all the slaves in the British
Empire their freedom. The British government paid compensation to the slave owner, and
the amount that the plantation owners received depended on the number of slaves they had.
For example, the bishop of Exeter had six hundred and sixty-five slaves that were freed,
so he got twelve thousand seven hundred pounds. So, of course whoever wins the war writes
the history and turns themselves into heroes. I mean, if Hitler had won the Second World
War, what would have been spoken of in the Battle of Britain? Well, Churchill would be
the new Hitler. So, Lincoln ruled the country by presidential decree, exercised dictatorial
powers over a free people, and waged war without a declaration from Congress. He blockaded
Southern shipping ports justifying his actions by saying he would "enforce all laws and collect
all revenues due to the North". The blockades were an act of war. He set his Northern army
upon the South at Fort Sumter and set in motion one of the most brutal attacks upon freedom
by maneuvering the South into firing the first shot at their Northern aggressors. Lincoln
signed more than ten tariff raising bills throughout his administration. He manipulated
the American public into the first income tax. He handed out huge land grants and monetary
subsidies to transcontinental railroads, just another example of the corporate welfare of
Mercantilism. He took the nation off the gold standard turning the dollar into toilet paper,
allowing the government to have absolute control over the monetary system. And then, he virtually
nationalized the banking system under the National Currency Acts in order to establish
a machine for printing new money at will and to provide cheap credit for the business elite.
Oh, it's a good thing that practice stopped, isn't it? This mercantilist tyrant, really
could be called, ushered in central banking which has really been the greatest economic
curse to this day. The total wars of the 20th century would have been virtually impossible
without countries going off the gold standard, without central banking, and so on. By way
of conscription, he assembled a vast army at presidential decree, an act of flagrant
misconduct which drafted individuals into slavery in the federal government. How on
Earth do you oppose slavery using the draft? It's like opposing Gangrene by blowing up
a city. And, he started the acceleration of federal power significantly. Northern newspapers
ran editorials calling for the death of every man, woman, and child in the South and the
colonization of the then empty Southern states by Northerners. And, as mentioned before,
he wanted the slaves deported back to Africa and thought that the white race was superior
and that Blacks and Whites could not live together at all peacefully. As an attorney—prior
to becoming president—as an attorney, Lincoln two masters in the return of their runaway
slaves. So, Lincoln actually sent runaway slaves back to their masters. Is that the
story of Abraham Lincoln that you've heard in government-run schools? So, while the Union
army was struggling in the first few years of the war, the Lincoln administration doled
out millions of dollars to railroads to run rails to the west—during a time of war,
never let the deaths of hundreds of thousands interfere with pork-barrel spending. And,
you should read Tom de Lorenzo on this. We'll put links to the book in the notes. As the
economist Tom de Lorenzo has contended, Lincoln's goal in waging the war was to benefit Northern
manufacturing interests and protect his own political career by preserving the Union.
It would have been far cheaper and far less destructive for Lincoln simply to buy the
slaves and free them. I mean, of all the nations that abolished slavery in the eighteen hundreds,
only two required a civil war: America and Haiti—absolutely unnecessary. Of course,
it must be remembered that Lincoln did not free any slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation
did not apply to the border states that Lincoln needed to keep in the Union—Maryland and
Kentucky, for example. Slave labor was used to build the U.S. Capitol building while the
war went on. These are just matters of fact. And, of course, there was nothing new about
the South wanting to secede; this had come up many times before. At the Harford Convention
in 1814, several Northern states, among them Massachusetts, vowed to secede because of
their opposition to the War of 1812. Forty-eight years later, Massachusetts would not allow
the South to secede. They wanted to secede, then the South is not allowed to do so. This
obsession with the Union is a bit confusing. What does it matter if a union disintegrates?
What does it matter if the South secedes? Since the North was ending slavery anyway,
and I'm sure the slaves would rather not die by being drafted involuntarily into the army.
I mean, let's say that the European Union fragments tomorrow. Is that worth waging war
that kills millions of Europeans over it?—of course not. I mean, the very formation of
the European Union represented a change in the relationships between the member states.
Is that worth waging a war over?—No, political configurations come and go all the time. Nine
out of ten of the people of the North were opposed to forcing South Carolina to remain
in the Union, which is why you had to have a draft. They didn't care if the South seceded,
not to the point where they're willing to go and die for that. I mean, this is literally
forcing people into human shredding machines at bayonet point, and it's all of course referred
to as some sort of heroism. As of 1857, writes Roy Baster, the editor of Lincoln's collected
works, Lincoln had rarely ever mentioned the issue of slavery and even then "When he spoke
of respecting the *** as a human being, his words lacked effectiveness. What did preoccupy
Lincoln's mind throughout his twenty-eight year political career prior to becoming president
was the political agenda of the Wig Party and of the man he revered most in life, the
Kentucky slave owner Henry Clay whom Lincoln eulogized in 1852 as, "the great parent of
Wig principles" and "the fountain from which my own political views flowed". His great
hero was a Kentucky slave owner. So, it is important to understand the great moral crusades
of history are usually the icing thrown over the dead bodies of economic self-interest.
Human beings rarely fight for principle. They fight because they're forced to go fight or
die or be imprisoned in a place where you'll catch Typhus and die. The cattle prodding
of individuals over the landscape of human history is really just psychopathic shepherds.
It's cockfighting. It's really all it is with the intent, of course, of making massive amounts
of fake money, massive amounts of blood money through taxation. This is the history of the
species. I will argue very strongly—which is why I am doing this whole series—I will
argue very strongly that there is no such thing a love of abstractions without a corresponding
love of individuals. There's no love of mankind and hatred of most of the people in it. When
we look to someone who proclaims himself as a moral savior, we look to that person's personal
relationships first and foremost. The fact that the man defended slaves is significant.
The fact that he was an underhanded racist is significant. The fact that he funneled
money desperately needed for a war to his political economic cronies and friends is
significant. The fact that his family life was a complete disaster, that his wife was
abusive, and his son attempted to get his wife ten years after his death succeeded in
getting her thrown into an asylum—which was pure torture at the time—is significant.
We cannot continue to live in the cloud-fog of bloody and victorious propaganda. We look
at the people, we look at the facts, we understand the economic drivers between the mass slaughters
of mankind, and then we will no longer respond to the trumpet calls of war because we know
they are merely the funeral dirges of our future hopes. Thank you.