I decided to write some more and sip a little more scotch, not necessarily in that order. I find that there are some authors who write what most care not too. There are many who will tow the line to be either politically correct, historically pleasing, or just out and out lie to keep a sacred cow from being slaughtered. This has become part of the historic circle. everyone quotes each other and it is often rehashed trash in new words.
I often think of many historic figures have been made into wax figures with a large sign on them saying....
DO NOT TOUCH!
I am always in awe of writers such as Gore Vidal who shares a birth day with me. Not the year, just the month and day. He was a great in satire, history, essays, drama, and movies. He influenced many, and I have read his books with great relish.
He had many great feuds and was not at all friendly with Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and William F. Buckley. When told that Capote had died Vidal told his publisher "It was a good career move". He could be hard to deal with and blunt. But till the last few years he was always on the money.
He lived to see all of his detractors die. Then he passed his mortal coil and joined the majority. I bring him up cause he pretty much alone brought back much of history to the common reader. He made a nitch for himself with so many glorious pieces of historic fiction. But what he did also was to give life to many of the historic figures and brought them back from being icons and back into men and women. For that we should be thankful. For as I have said before history is really starting to look like a valentines club where historians who really do not write much of anything new fawn over their subject like a lovesick girl.
I think that is the biggest load of bullshit ever!
This is why Vidal was disliked by many historians as he knew more than them and was also not afraid to be honest about the historic figures themselves.
I have mentioned before the stupidness of many Lincoln scholars who just quote each other! What about some original and damning critical information.
It reminds me of David Irving.While I am not a great fan but must agree that he works hard at what he does. He has brought out more information on the 3rd Reich than any 5 historians put together as he just uses original sources. His quote that I liked was "If you copy from one book you are a plagiarist, if you copy from 5 books you are a good researcher" That is how many histories are written today.
Irving's book on Winston Churchill was wonderful in its freshness and sheer information. It did show Churchill as he was. A sort of drunk Dick Chaney figure who had no trouble lying, deceiving, covering up, destroying people, and working hard to start a war and by doing so ruining the economy and the empire. Of course this is not what the Church of Churchill wants to hear. They have created a myth and likes to stand by it. Churchill had some good qualities of course and was wonderful in his running of the war. If you have not read the book I would recommend it.
The many books by Thomas DiLorenzo are at times very strongly worded. He is not a fan of what he calls the Church of Lincoln and I can understand that. They are like a team of wagons and if there is an attack they circle the wagons and let no one in, and no information out. I found this article by him about what Lincoln was up to in the beginnings of the Civil War. It makes for interesting reading.
The Lincoln Cult's Latest Cover-Up
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Actually, the letter is not at all "amazing" to anyone familiar with the real Lincoln. It was a copy of a letter that was sent to the governor of every state urging them all to support the amendment, which had already passed the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, that would have made southern slavery constitutionally "irrevocable," to use the word that Lincoln used in his first inaugural address. The amendment passed after the lower South had seceded, suggesting that it was passed with almost exclusively Northern votes. Lincoln and the entire North were perfectly willing to enshrine slavery forever in the Constitution. This is one reason why the great Massachusetts libertarian abolitionist Lysander Spooner, author of The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, hated and despised Lincoln and his entire gang.
The Lincoln cult knows about all of this, but works diligently to keep it out of view of the general public. The fact that news organizations reported the "find," however, creates a problem for the cult. A cover-up/excuse-making campaign must commence.
The document was found in the Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, Historical Society archives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The director of the Society, Joseph Garrera, described in the press as "a Lincoln scholar," immediately announced that the document is not at all important, since such documents are "a dime a dozen."
Well, not really. Most of these kinds of documents have been meticulously whitewashed from the historical record. When they do surface and are made public, the Lincoln cult gets to work burying them in an avalanche of excuses designed to fog the real meaning of the documents in the minds of the average American. Garrerra's statement is the first attempt at this.
Every
once in a while, though, a cult member (or an aspiring cult member)
slips up and spills the beans. A recent example is the "political
biography" of Lincoln recently published by the confessed plagiarist
Doris Kearns-Goodwin entitled Team of Rivals. This is Goodwin's first publication on Lincoln, and she has apparently not been filled in on the standard modus operandi
of cover-up and obfuscation that is the hallmark of "Lincoln
scholarship." She discusses the above-mentioned "first thirteenth
amendment" in some detail (as I do in my forthcoming book, Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe, to be published in October). Goodwin dug into the same original sources that all Lincoln scholars are familiar with, but unlike most others, she includes the information in her book. Not only did Lincoln support this slavery forever amendment, but the amendment was his idea from the very beginning. He was the secret author of it, orchestrating the politics of its passage from Springfield before he was even inaugurated. Not only that, but he also instructed his political compatriot, William Seward, to work on federal legislation that would outlaw the various personal liberty laws that existed in some of the Northern states. These laws were used to attempt to nullify the federal Fugitive Slave Act. As explained by Goodwin (p. 296): "He [Lincoln] instructed Seward to introduce these proposals in the Senate Committee of Thirteen without indicating they issued from Springfield. The first resolved that ‘the Constitution should never be altered so as to authorize Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in the states.' Another recommendation that he instructed Seward to get through Congress was that ‘all state personal liberty laws in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law be repealed.'"
Goodwin reveals all of this because the theme of her book is what a great political conniver and manipulator Lincoln was and this, of course, is a good example of such deceitfulness. In the eyes of a lifelong statist like Goodwin, lying, deception and fakery are praiseworthy traits for a politician. She praises him for his pro-slavery amendment because it supposedly "held the Republican Party together."
Lincoln's efforts in this regard were enormously popular in the North, and especially in Boston. A thoroughly racist society, the vast majority of northerners wanted slavery to persist in the South because that would keep black people in the South. They opposed the personal liberty laws for the same reason: They wanted any escaped slaves to be eliminated from their midst. Thus, Goodwin writes of how, when Seward made a speech announcing these two proposals (the constitutional amendment and the abolition of personal liberty laws) in Boston, "the galleries erupted in thunderous applause." Lincoln's political handler and campaign manager, the thoroughly corrupt New York City politician Thurlow Weed, "loved the speech," writes Goodwin, again making the point that the proposals were good politics because they "kept his fractious party together."
Lincoln's slavery forever amendment read as follows:
"No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State. (See U.S. House of Representatives, 106th Congress, 2nd Session, The Constitution of the United States of America: Unratified Amendments, Doc. No. 106-214).
In his first inaugural address Dishonest Abe explicitly supported this amendment while pretending that he hardly knew anything about it (i.e., lying). What he said was: "I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution . . . has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the states, including that of persons held to service." Then, while "holding such a provision to be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable."
Lincoln was not an abolitionist and, unlike Lysander Spooner, he believed that slavery was already constitutional. Nevertheless, he also favored making it "express and irrevocable."
The
director of the museum in Allentown where Lincoln's letter to the
governors was recently discovered made a feeble attempt to dismiss this
entire episode as unimportant by saying that Lincoln was only being
"pragmatic." Actually, exactly the opposite is true. Another reason why
abolitionists like Spooner detested Lincoln, Seward, and the rest is
that he understood that their opposition to slavery was always
theoretical or rhetorical. They never came up with any kind of pragmatic
plan to end slavery peacefully, as the real pragmatists — the British,
Spanish, Dutch, French, and Danes — had done. Indeed, the political
leaders of these countries could have provided the Lincoln regime with a
detailed roadmap regarding how to go about it. But as Lincoln
repeatedly said, his agenda was always, first and foremost, to destroy
the secession movement, not to interfere with slavery. And as this
episode reveals, for once his actions matched his words.
July 24, 2006
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, (Three Rivers Press/Random House). His next book, to be published in October, is Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe (Crown Forum/Random House).
Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com
Thomas DiLorenzo Archives at Mises.orgAs you can see he is really not at all happy with a few Lincoln scholars. But I gather that everyone has an opinion and this is his.
So there are many authors who do not fit the bill with standard operation procedure as set by many historians. So as we find a few renegades here and there it makes the playing field of history a lot more interesting.
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