Organized Crime

In his 2009 book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, historian Larry Tagg utilized thousands of primary literary sources to make his case that Abraham Lincoln was by far the most hated and reviled of all American presidents during his lifetime. After his death Lincoln was turned into the kindly, grandfatherly, saintly figure that he has been portrayed as ever since then. This “makeover,” as Professor Tagg explains, was the work of the Republican Party propaganda machine with significant assistance from the New England clergy.

As for how the people of the North—and the rest of the world—viewed Lincoln while he was alive, Tagg writes:

The violence of the criticism aimed at Lincoln by the great men of his time on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line is startling. The breadth and depth of the spectacular prejudice against him is often shocking for its cruelty, intensity, and unrelenting vigor. The plain truth is that Mr. Lincoln was deeply reviled by many who knew him personally, and by hundreds of thousands who only knew of him.

Larry Tagg is no neo-Confederate. He is a native of Lincoln, Illinois, and he thanks the prominent Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer in his acknowledgements. He goes on to say that Lincoln was widely denounced in the Northern states during his administration for being “a bloody tyrant” and a “dictator” for his “arbitrary arrests, the suspension of habeas corpus, and the suppression of newspapers,” among other things. He quotes the abolitionist Wendell Phillips as saying that Lincoln was “a first-rate second-rate man.” Historian George Bankroft called Lincoln “ignorant, self-willed, and is surrounded by men some of whom are almost as ignorant as himself.”

The Lacrosse, Wisconsin Democrat newspaper advocate assassination when it editorialized in November of 1864 that “If Abraham Lincoln should be reelected for another term of four years of such wretched administration, we hope that a bold hand will be found to plunge the dagger into the tyrant’s heart for the public welfare.” The New York Times was just as harsh when it editorialized in May of 1864 that “No living man was ever charged with political crimes of such multiplicity and such enormity as Abraham Lincoln. He has been denounced without end as a purjerer, a usurper, a tyrant, a subverter of the Constitution, a destroyer of the liberties of his country, a reckless desperado, a heartless trifler over the last agonies of an expiring nation.” There is no place in hell, the Times continued, that is “full enough of torment to expiate his iniquities.”

The most interesting chapter of The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln is the final Epilogue entitled “The Sudden Saint.” Here Professor Tagg explains how the Republican Party, with the aid of the New England clergy, created out of thin air the myth of the “sainted” and “beloved” Abraham Lincoln. The assassination was a miracle of luck as far as they were concerned, for it put in their lap an opportunity to deify their Big Government political agenda by attaching it to the soon-to-be-deified Lincoln. As Tagg explains, the Republican Party “saw that his death was a propaganda windfall—Lincoln could be made to stand for the North, for freedom. . . .” He quotes Senator James Grimes of Iowa as saying that the party’s propaganda campaign to deify Lincoln was so successful that it “has made it impossible to speak the truth of Abraham Lincoln hereafter.”

Professor Tagg explains how it was Secretary of War Edwin Stanton who decided to use Lincoln’s funeral as a massive propaganda tool as he “made the martyr’s corpse a traveling exhibit of Southern wickedness.” The funeral procession took a 1600-mile route, and Stanton prohibited anyone to obscure the damage done by the assassin’s bullet so that the corpse would appear as gruesome as possible.

Many New England preachers who had reviled Lincoln just a few months earlier got with the program and deified him. Henry Ward Beecher was arguably the biggest hypocrite of all of them. He had viciously attacked Lincoln in his pulpit for years, but after his death he “heaped only praise on Lincoln,” writes Tagg.

The Republican Party also continued the thuggish tactics that it had used to intimidate the Northern public during the war. “The Democratic papers quickly realized that if they didn’t repent their opposition to Lincoln,” writes Tagg, “they risked ruin by mobs like the ones that had gutted their offices in the first summer of the war.”

The Republican Party’s army of thugs also did its best to censor free speech in the North, as they had also done during the war. One observer of the Lincoln funeral “sent up a cheer for Jefferson Davis,” and “was set upon by mourners and nearly torn to pieces.” A Chicago man was overheard in the lobby of a hotel saying “it served him right” and was promptly shot to death in front of dozens of witnesses. But “there was no arrest, no one would have arrested the man” who did the shooting, says Tagg.

Americans were imprisoned all over the North for making similar statements, as Tagg documents. “The doors of local jails rattled shut behind men in every city who were heard exulting the news of Lincoln’s death.” The editor of a Maryland newspaper was “killed by a mob after he had published criticism of Lincoln.” Roving mobs of Republican Party thugs traveled from one opposition newspaper to another, as they had done during the war in the North, and “emptied their contents into the street amid the applause of an immense crowd.”

For several generations, media opposition to the Republican Party was rendered prostate. Ministers in the South were ordered by their military occupiers during “Reconstruction” to deliver sermons deifying Lincoln and many Southern newspapers were ordered to do the same. To defy such orders meant the “terror of confiscation and imprisonment,” writes Professor Tagg. Not surprisingly, there appeared “sudden proclamations of Lincoln’s nobility” all throughout the South.

This is how the Lincoln myth was invented and explains why the average American knows almost nothing at all about the nation’s most notorious president.