Abraham Lincoln, the consumate political manipulator, often spoke out of
both sides of his mouth on the subject of race, depending on who he was speaking
to. Much the same was true of his utterances on politics. Here are some samples
of each. Judge for yourself the words versus the reality of Lincoln's
actions.
ON POLITICS:
"This country with its institutions,
belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the
existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it
or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."
"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. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and
believe is to liberate the world."
With statements like these one
wonders how Lincoln could have opposed Southern secession. Could it be that
Lincoln was a liar? Did his words depend on who he was speaking to? Actions
speak louder than words, and Lincoln's actions brought about the deaths of over
600,000 Americans.
Was Lincoln a liar and a murderer as
well?
ON RACE:
"What I would most desire would be the
separation of the white and black races."
— Spoken at Springfield,
Illinois on July 17th, 1858; from ABRAHAM LINCOLN: COMPLETE WORKS, 1894, Vol. 1,
page 273
"See our present condition---the country engaged in war! Our
White men cutting one another's throats! And then consider what we know to be
the truth. But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men
engaged on either side do not care for you one way or another.
"Why
should the people of your race be colonized, and where? Why should they leave
this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration. You
and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists
between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not
discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I
think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours
suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this be
admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated. It is better
for both, therefore, to be separated."
— Spoken at the White
House to a group of black community leaders, August 14th, 1862, from COLLECTED
WORKS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Vol 5, page 371
"I will say, then, that I
AM NOT NOR HAVE EVER BEEN in favor of bringing about in any way the social and
political equality of the black and white races---that I am not, nor ever have
been, in favor of making voters
or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them
to hold office, nor to intermarry with White people; and I will say in addition
to this that there is a physical difference between the White and black races
which will ever FORBID the two races living together on terms of social and
political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain
together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as
any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White
race."
— 4th Lincoln-Douglas debate, September 18th, 1858;
COLLECTED WORKS Vol. 3, pp. 145-146
Lincoln the Racialist? NOT.
An answer to yet
another Lincoln lover
"There is a rancor in our hearts you little dream.
We hate you sir."
— Gen. Henry A. Wise, CSA, to a Union officer at Appomattox
It is with some considerable measure of sorrow that I pen this response
to Richard McCulloch's article praising Abraham Lincoln and Mr. McCulloch's
native North for their putative once-upon-a-time belief in "racial purity" ("The
Open Wound", February 1997). Unlike Moriarity—who first raised the subject of
Lincoln, but who is unknown to me—Richard McCulloch is a friend. We have spoken
and corresponded over the years, and I have the greatest respect for the
contribution he has made to racial awareness with his books. I keep a stack of
The Nordish Quest at hand for whites awakening to the realities of
race.
However, his apologia for Lincoln and the North in provoking and
prosecuting their fratricidal war against the Confederate States of America is
so divergent from historical reality and so utterly devoid of understanding of
the Puritanical political climate of the mid-19th century as to be laughable. It
demands reply despite ties of friendship or consideration of past service to our
common cause.
Briefly, Mr. McCulloch's thesis is that Lincoln was really
a racialist at heart. He and the saintly Northern people wanted nothing less
than an all-white Nordic nation. But those nasty, selfish Southerners just
wouldn't give up their slaves. Lincoln was forced to call out the army and
invade the South for the greater good of whites everywhere. Had he not been
assassinated, after he finished killing a few hundred thousand recalcitrant
Southerners he would have magically whisked away America's blacks. We few
survivors of his benevolence would have then lived happily ever after, with nary
a black in sight to spoil our Nordic paradise. No doubt this would have, in
time, assuaged our anger over our wrecked nation and our grief over our 260,000
dead fathers, sons, uncles, nephews and cousins.
Thus, according to Mr.
McCulloch, Abraham Lincoln's war was really fought to create an all-white
America. Those evil Southerners fought to preserve multi-racialism— and so they
and their country had to be destroyed in order to save whites from their folly.
As evidence, Mr. McCulloch cites the sometimes reluctance of Northern states to
admit blacks and Lincoln's occasional statements supposedly voicing a desire to
expel blacks. Conveniently ignored, of course, is the historical fact that
during the war Lincoln emancipated all those slaves he did not control and kept
as slaves all those he could have himself sent back to Africa.
Mr.
McCulloch makes much of Lincoln statements defaming blacks. However, he has made
the mistake of believing what Lincoln said and ignoring what Lincoln actually
did. Since Lincoln was a consummate liar, telling each audience what it wanted
to hear in order to advance his political career, it is easy to find pretty much
anything one wants in Lincoln's utterances. For example, Lincoln, often cited
for his atheism by close associates—so much the atheist that he wrote a book in
his youth parodying Christianity—cynically invoked America's religious values in
public as a means of gaining a political following.
His 1848
Congressional speech for self-determination ("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.") led many
European statesmen to believe Lincoln could not, on principle, oppose Southern
secession. What Europeans did not account for was Lincoln's duplicity. In
reality, 1848 was the year communist revolutions broke out all over Europe.
Lincoln's speech gave encouragement to those revolutionaries, many of whom later
served as officers in his Union invasion army. However, closer to home, where
Anglo-Saxon America was engaged in wresting the Southwest away from mestizo
Mexico, he bitterly opposed the Mexican-American war as immoral.
Lincoln
carefully targeted his speeches to fit the audience. While campaigning for the
U.S. Senate against Stephen Douglas in southern Illinois, an area sympathetic to
the South, he said "I will say, then, that I am not nor have ever been in favor
of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and
white races. . .and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the
superior position assigned to the White race."
However, in northern
Illinois—filled by that time with German and other non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants—he
glorified Negro equality: "In the right to eat the bread his own hands have
earned he is the equal of Judge Douglas, or of myself, or any living man." Carl
Sandburg's adulatory biography quotes a private statement written during the
debate, belittling "inferior race" and "Negro equality" abolition opponents.
This pro-abolition paean ends as follows: "I am proud, in my passing speck of
time, to contribute an humble mite to that glorious consummation, which my own
poor eyes may not last to see." Nowhere in this private confession is black
separatism to be found. His famous "house divided against itself cannot stand"
speech was universally seen both in the North and the South as a harbinger of
emancipation, not of separatism.
Racialist sentiments undoubtedly existed
in the North, as they certainly did in the South—a region that lived day and
night with the terrifying possibility of racially motivated massacres. But it
was not the majority opinion. Northern politics was dominated by outrage at the
"immorality" of slavery and not by "racism." Set against this backdrop, it seems
likely that Lincoln's flirtation with "black separatism" was a ploy designed to
appease a racialist minority while allowing prosecution of the war to continue.
His refusal to free slaves in Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware with the
Emancipation proclamation fits the same mold. He needed these states to sustain
the war effort. And so, as the eternally opportunistic politician, he took
whatever actions required to achieve his objective, no matter how bizarre they
might appear to an objective observer.
It is a historical fact that in
1860 Lincoln was the candidate of the abolitionist Republican Party. As their
candidate, he inevitably reflected their viewpoint. Not without reason were they
called "Black Republicans", hardly the sobriquet one would apply to white
separatists. Black Republicans did not advocate removal of blacks to Africa.
They wanted not only black emancipation but social and political equality as
well, a status they enforced with a vengeance as soon as the war was over—a
predictable outcome that is utterly at odds with Mr. McCulloch's
thesis.
Also conveniently ignored is the historical fact that a black
repatriation movement had existed since the 1820s. The American Colonization
Society, founded by Southerner James Monroe, never attracted a politically
significant (i.e. vote-getting) following in the supposedly white separatist
North. Monrovia, the African city created for black repatriation, received only
a few thousand blacks, most of whom settled there voluntarily rather than by
forcible removal. If the North was determined to create an all-white nation, the
vehicle had been available for decades. Since this option languished, one
suspects that Northern motives were somewhat less racialist than Mr. McCulloch
contends.
Also conveniently ignored is the historical fact that Lincoln
never publicly offered the South a separatist solution to the race crisis. If he
wanted an all-white America, he could have, at any time—either before the War or
after it began—proposed a plan to purchase and repatriate all slaves from
federal tax revenues, thus obviating Southern concern over financial loss. If
the Northern people really supported such a solution, it would have cost him
nothing politically. If refused, it would have put the South in the untenable
position of renouncing an ideal solution to the crisis. (Southerners might have
been excused if they had objected—well over half of all U.S. tax revenues came
from tariffs on Southern imports and exports.) But Lincoln never made such an
offer—for the very good reason that he neither truly believed in it himself nor
judged that the Northern electorate would accept it.
In his 1860
inaugural address, Lincoln said that he had no intention to interfere with
slavery because he had no legal right to do so. When this ploy failed to bring
undeceived Southern states back into his clutches, he then proceeded with armed
conquest, his 1848 speech affirming the right of self-determination
notwithstanding. Lincoln soon put the lie to his words professing respect for
law by his actions. He arrested Maryland's legislature on the eve of their
secession vote, installing fiat legislators who then voted as he directed. This
initiated a long bout of constitutional mayhem. When informed that the Supreme
Court had ruled that he had no constitutional authority to wage war against
Americans, he asked derisively if the Supreme Court had an army to enforce its
ruling. And, of course, the utterly illegal Emancipation Proclamation stood the
constitution on its head, making Lincoln solely culpable for destruction of the
Founders' creation.
The Emancipation Proclamation—an expedient designed
to keep Britain and France out of the war, and not, as Mr. McCulloch suggests,
to give "meaning, dignity and noble purpose to the traumatic suffering"—is the
ultimate refutation of Mr. McCulloch's "Lincoln-as-racialist" thesis. Had
Lincoln really wanted to remove blacks from America, surely he realized that,
once blacks were freed, equality would be impossible to prevent—exactly the
outcome that did occur after the war? Had the North really wanted to expel
blacks, would they not have removed Lincoln from office in the 1864 election for
freeing blacks rather than expelling them? Would not the Northern states have
refused to ratify the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments after the War? No, the
simpler explanation—and the correct one—is that the Northern majority saw
slavery as a moral issue and not a racialist one. They approved of emancipation,
never dreaming that one day their grandchildren would reap the whirlwind they
had so foolishly sowed with their pious moralizing.
Evidence of this
permeates the historical record. Northerners operated the notorious Underground
Railroad. Northerners—by refusing to return escaped slaves to their owners as
the Constitution required—provoked the crisis that drove the South from the
union. Northerners—such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the scurrilous Uncle
Tom's Cabin—fanned the flames of race war, emitting a veritable flood of
provocative lies in order to inflame opinion against the South. Northerners
financed atrocities such as John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's
Ferry—the purpose of which was to arm Virginia's slaves for massacre of
Virginia's white population. Finally, a Northern Congress whitewashed Brown and
the abolitionists who backed his murderous ambition.
The late Revilo
Oliver, an Illinois "Yankee"—and one of the foremost racialist intellects of the
20th century—nailed Brown and his admirers in America's Decline:
". .
.Americans have been taught to venerate a particularly vicious homicidal maniac
named John Brown, who, after a long series of murders in Kansas, appointed
himself President of the United States and slipped into Virginia in the hope
that he could enjoy seeing white men, mutilated but alive, hanging by their
heels from trees while their intestines were pulled out of their bodies and
torches were used to ignite their hair, and he yearned to see white women
blinded and herded together in pigpens, but kept alive for the amusement of
black beasts."
Oliver adds: "Of Brown's purposes and plans there can be
no possible doubt, for he openly boasted that he would model his work on the
great slave revolt in Hispaniola, which, after the extermination of the Aryans
by the procedures I have mentioned, eventually produced the fetid pest-hole now
called Haiti." It is this same John Brown that Northerners eulogized as a holy
martyr after Virginia hung him for murder. Oliver concludes his skewering of
Brown's admirers thus:
"[T]hose facts were, of course, well known to the
liars, chiefly of degenerate Puritan stock, who started the canonization of
Brown and publicly compared him to Jesus Christ as they labored to arouse
enthusiasm for an invasion of the more civilized states in the southern half of
the nation—enthusiasm for the war that they greatly enjoyed, to say nothing of
its aftermath, when they so richly appeased their sadistic lusts with the
suffering they inflicted on the conquered white population."
Also
conveniently ignored is the historical fact that miscegenation between blacks
and whites was far more prevalent in the North than in the South. In his 1867
book, A Defense of Virginia and the South, Robert L. Dabney, chaplain to Thomas
J. "Stonewall" Jackson, analyzed pre- war census records. Prior to the war,
census-takers noted the race of each person counted, a record that included
mixed-race mulattos. Dabney found that the greatest percentage of mulattos lived
in the North. In many Northern states, mulattos exceeded half the non-white
population. On the other hand, Southern Negroes were largely pure African.
Contending that the same people who bred so freely with their few blacks were in
reality frothing white separatists is simply a case of wish replacing
reality.
Dabney's book lays bare the hypocrisy of Northern commercial
interests and political leaders on the issue of slavery. Forgotten is the fact
that slavery was at first legal in Northern states as well as Southern. Slave
ships were exclusively of Northern registry. Virginia efforts to eliminate
slavery in the early 1770s were opposed by Northern slave trading interests. As
Northern slavery was phased out— due to climate and unsuitability of African
labor in a rapidly industrializing North—laws allowed sale of slaves out of
state but did not require repatriation. Northerners cynically sold their
"problem" to the South. Only after they had recouped their own investments did
they begin self- righteously beating the drums for emancipation—and let the
South's financial interests be damned.
Finally, also conveniently ignored
is the historical fact that it was the South that—after the horror of
Reconstruction was thrown off—imposed a virtually air-tight political and social
apartheid on its blacks. Northern attitudes toward blacks in the intervening
century have unquestionably been more tolerant than those of Southerners. It
took two 20th century invasions by the United States Army to defeat Southern
segregationist resolve—one by Midwesterner Dwight Eisenhower (he of German
descent, a fact that will not be lost on Mr. McCulloch), and a second by that
self-absorbed son of an Irish bootlegger, John F. Kennedy. Are we to believe
that, up until the War, Northerners were rabid white separatists, but that by
some mysterious Vulcan mind-meld they suddenly became ardent
pro-integrationists—while racially tolerant Southerners simultaneously underwent
an equally miraculous reverse transformation? This tortured explanation defies
the bounds of credibility.
No, the North's acts were not those of noble
idealists, intent on creating an all-white America. They were the acts of venal,
self-serving, holier-than-thou zealots—the kind of people who always know what
is best for everyone else but who never get around to applying their pious
drivel to their own lives. The word that describes them is "liberals", and
nothing has changed in 130 years—as is amply attested by current Northern voting
patterns.
Perhaps the saddest point of all is Mr. McCulloch's plea for
acceptance of Lincoln as "one of our own." We are asked to embrace a genetic
defective, an illegitimate bastard, an inveterate liar, a delusional egotist, a
homosexual deviant, a communist sympathizer, an emancipator of 4 million
Africans, and a man whose war caused as many white deaths as all other American
wars combined. Think, for a moment, about who one allies oneself with in bowing
to Lincoln. Shall we lick the tyrant's hand, thus dancing as puppets for our
Marxist adversaries' amusement? The effrontery of this boggles the
mind.
Finally, why is it "highly partisan" to criticize a man who killed
one-quarter of the South's military-age men—but "non-partisan" to praise him? No
wonder the white race is in trouble. If racialists are unable to ascertain truth
and to accurately assess self-interest—even when it smacks them in the face with
the force and stench of a dead fish—where is our hope of victory? I cannot say
what others may think about this self-abasing homage to Lincoln. But I can tell
you that this son of Scottish and Scotch-Irish pioneers and Confederate veterans
knows who the enemy is—and eagerly awaits the coming day when the redemption of
the destiny of our people begins.
Nemo me impune lacessit. . .
(No one
provokes me with impunity)