I. The U.S. Civil War--the Revisionist View

As Gore Vidal presents it in Lincoln, the U.S. Civil War was caused, not by slavery, but by the intransigence of President Lincoln, who insisted adamantly that no state could legitimately secede from the Union and that the Union could never be broken up. In Vidal's account, Lincoln cared nothing for the plight of the slaves. Nor did he care about the U.S. Constitution's guarantees of individual liberty: he shut down newspapers that opposed the war, imprisoning their editors; he held prisoners indefinitely, flouting habeas corpus; he imposed the first military draft in the nation's history, then used troops to crush the riots that resulted; he financed his war by imposing and collecting the nation's first tax on incomes, despite the lack of any constitutional basis for such a levy.

Vidal might well have found inspiration for such a view of the war in the writings of Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams. For, as Beard wrote in 1927 in Volume II of The Rise of American Civilization,

Since [...] the abolition of slavery never appeared in the platform of any great political party, since the only appeal ever made to the electorate on that issue was scornfully repulsed, since the spokesman of the Republicans emphatically declared that his party never intended to interfere with slavery in the states in any shape or form, it seems reasonable to assume that the institution of slavery was not the fundamental issue during the epoch preceding the bombardment of Fort Sumter.²⁰⁰

Williams agreed. In his Contours of American History (1961), he wrote that "neither Lincoln nor the majority of northerners entered the war in an abolitionist frame of mind or entertaining abolitionist objectives." ²⁰¹ Williams is even more explicit in his 1976 book America Confronts a Revolutionary World: 1776-1976. "Put simply," he writes, "the cause of the Civil War was the refusal of Lincoln and other northerners to honor the revolutionary right of self-determination—the touchstone of the American Revolution." And this was rank hypocrisy on Lincoln's part, according to Williams, for on January 12, 1848, the Great Emancipator had intoned:

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. [...] Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may revolutionize, and make their own, of so much of the territory as they inhabit.²⁰²

Joseph R. Stromberg, the historian who touched off the current wave of serious revisionist investigation of the U.S. Civil War among libertarian scholars, had read both Beard and Williams. And in his influential essay, "The War for Southern Independence: A Radical Libertarian Perspective," published in 1979, while he was still a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida, he staked out a position even more radical than anything either Beard or Williams had ever proposed—something very like the vision of the war laid out in Gore Vidal's Lincoln. Strom-berg didn't go into a lot of detail in presenting his take on the war, but two other Libertarian historians have done so. These are Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, in Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (1996), and Thomas J. DiLorenzo, in The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (2002).

Hummel's view of the Civil War is remarkably like Vidal's. "Historians and buffs debate the fundamental causes of the American Civil War almost as hotly today as the combatants did then," he writes. "We can simplify our understanding of the Civil War's causes, however, if we follow the advice of one eminent historian, Eric Foner, and ask two separate questions. Why did the southern states want to leave the Union? And why did the northern states refuse to let them go?" These are two separate questions, Hummel insists, because "[e]ven if slavery explains why the southern states left the Union, it does not necessarily either explain or justify the national government's refusal to recognize their independence." In fact, he maintains, "[n]ot only does slavery fail to explain why the northern states resorted to coercion, but letting the lower South go in peace was a viable, untried antislavery option. As the most militant abolitionists themselves demonstrated, there was no contradiction between condemning slavery and advocating secession."²⁰³

In fact, as Hummel points out, one of the most prominent leaders of the abolitionist movement, William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the weekly abolitionist paper The Liberator and one of the organizers of the leading abolitionist organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society, was an enthusiastic proponent of secession—for the North. Garrison and his followers "felt that this best hastened the destruction of slavery by allowing the free states to get out from under the Constitution's fugitive slave provision." The seceded North, in Garrison's vision, would have "become a haven for runaway slaves."²⁰⁴

Why did President Lincoln choose another path—the use of military force against the seceded Southern states? In August of 1862, according to Hummel, Lincoln answered this question. "My paramount object in this struggle," the president said,

is to save the Union, and is not either to save 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 all the slaves 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; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help save the Union.²⁰⁵

In effect, Lincoln refused to allow, first the lower South, then the entire Confederacy, to go in peace because he was committed to a conception of the United States as a perpetual nation, with whose central government the component states had no right to end their association—he was committed, not to a voluntary Union, but to a compulsory one. In defense of this compulsory Union, according to DiLorenzo,

Lincoln implemented a series of unconstitutional acts, including launching an invasion of the South without consulting Congress, as required by the Constitution; declaring martial law; blockading the Southern ports; suspending the right of habeas corpus for the duration of his administration; imprisoning without trial thousands of Northern citizens; arresting and imprisoning newspaper publishers who were critical of him; censoring all telegraph communication; nationalizing the railroads; creating several new states without the consent of the citizens of those states; ordering Federal troops to interfere with elections in the North by intimidating Democratic voters; deporting a member of Congress, Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, for criticizing the administration's income tax proposal at a Democratic Party rally; confiscating private property; confiscating firearms in violation of the Second Amendment; and effectively gutting the Ninth and Tenth amendments to the Constitution, among other things.²⁰⁶

"One victim of Lincoln's suppression of Northern newspapers," DiLoren-zo writes, "was Francis Key Howard of Baltimore, the grandson of Francis Scott Key." Howard spent "nearly two years in a military prison without being charged and without a trial of any kind." "Fort Lafayette in New York Harbor," he notes, "came to be known as the 'American Bastille' because it housed so many political prisoners during the Lincoln administration." At one point, "Fort Lafayette was filled with newspaper editors from all over the country who had questioned the wisdom of Lincoln's military invasion and his war of conquest."²⁰⁷

DiLorenzo quotes Clinton Rossiter in support of his contention that Lincoln's war policies were widely regarded as unconstitutional even at the time of their original enactment: "This amazing disregard for the. Constitution was considered by nobody as legal." That being the case, however, one must wonder how Lincoln explained his policies to the people around him at the time. According to DiLorenzo, the president

"justified" his unconstitutional power grab by "discovering" presidential powers in the Constitution that no previous president, or, indeed, anyone at all, had ever noticed. Specifically, he claimed that the commander-in-chief clause of the Constitution, when combined with the duty of the president to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," gave him carte blanche in ignoring any and all laws, and the Constitution itself, in the name of presidential "war powers."²⁰⁸

It will be noted that DiLorenzo indulges a marked taste for the polemical and tends toward more than a bit of hyperbole in his writing. Lincoln does not seem really to have believed that he had "carte blanche in ignoring any and all laws," for example; he does seem, however, to have believed that he had carte blanche to ignore those laws he felt were in conflict with what he saw as his duty—to save the Union, price no object. DiLorenzo has also been accused, by more than one reviewer, of "careless errors of fact, misuse of sources, and faulty documentation." Richard M. Gamble details these technical criticisms of DiLorenzo's book at some length in the Spring 2003 issue of The Independent Review, and regards them as evidence of a serious problem with DiLorenzo's scholarship. But even he concedes that "individually these flaws may seem trivial and inconsequential."²⁰⁹ And so they do: a quotation cited as being on page 60 is in fact on page 61; information attributed to page 316 of a work by a noted Lincoln scholar is instead to be found on the same page of another work by the same scholar; an article cited as having been published in 1988 was in fact published in 1998. Not only are errors of this type (unfortunate though they are) both trivial and inconsequential, but also not a few of them would appear to have resulted from proofreading errors, which can hardly be blamed on the author. In any case, as Peter Novick notes, "when citations [...] are illustrative of a synthetic interpretation arrived at through 'deep immersion,' even the demonstration that several citations are faulty is far from constituting a refutation of the thesis they underpin."²¹⁰ And as Gamble himself acknowledges, DiLorenzo's book "is essentially correct in every charge it makes against Lincoln," and is, apart from its too numerous technical errors, "a sobering study in power and corruption."²¹¹