Organized Crime

CHAPTER29 Distorting History in Service of the State

A “court historian” is someone who produces statist propaganda disguised as “scholarship.” The purpose of the court historian is to provide cover, to pull the wool over the public’s eyes, to make excuses for, and glorify the state and the ruling class. A corollary purpose is to criticize or even demonize the civil society, especially the private enterprise system. In return, court historians are often given privileged positions in academe, government “research grants” to finance their careers, newspaper columns, and are turned into television and radio “celebrities.” They are the propaganda megaphones of the state.

This chapter discusses two exceptionally egregious examples of the attempted rewriting of history to glorify the state—one by one James Loewen, a sociologist associated with the left-wing hate group known as the Southern Poverty Law Center, and another one by Newt Gingrich and historian William Forstchen. Loewen fancies himself as a self-appointed historical truth teller, having published articles and books with a theme of “lies your professors taught you.” He authored a Washington Post article on January 9, 2011 entitled “Five Myths about Why the South Seceded” as part of the Post’s commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the start of the War between the States. Almost everything in the article is historically inaccurate.

In discussing the role of federal tariff policy in creating regional, North/South political tensions during the antebellum period, Loewen refers to the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations,” which led to South Carolina’s Ordinance of Nullification, whereby the state condemned the increase in the average tariff on imports to 48 percent as a blatant act of plunder (mostly at the South’s expense) and refused to collect it at Charleston Harbor. He wrote that “when, after South Carolina demanded the right to nullify federal laws or secede to protest, President Andrew Jackson threatened force.” That much is true. Loewen continued to say that “no state joined the movement, and South Carolina backed down.” That is blatantly false.

Historian Chauncey Boucher wrote in his book, The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, that North Carolina and Alabama joined South Carolina with their legislatures publicly condemning the Tariff of Abominations, while Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Indiana, and New York, whose legislatures were all heavily influenced by protectionists, issued resolutions in support of plundering the South with protectionist tariffs.

Nor is it correct to say that “South Carolina backed down,” as Loewen wrote. South Carolina and the Jackson administration reached a compromise that reduced the tariff rate over the succeeding ten years. They both “backed down,” but Loewen misleadingly claims that only South Carolina did so. Court historians have a long and pathetic history of rewriting the history of tax protests in this way. In Loewen’s case, he has a secondary motivation for fibbing about history: He wants Americans to believe that, unlike all other wars in world history, the American “Civil War” had nothing to do with economic conflict. He is a purveyor of the cartoonish theory of American history that Southern racism was the sole cause of the war, which was prosecuted by racially enlightened Republicans from Northern states.

Loewen then spread a mind-boggling falsehood about the role of tariff policy in precipitating the “Civil War.” “Tariffs were not an issue in 1860, and Southern states said nothing about them,” he wrote in the Post. “Why would they?, he asked. “Southerners had written the tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning. Its rates were lower than at any point since 1816.” Every word of this narrative is false.

A protectionist tariff was a part of the Republican Party platform of 1860, whereas Southerners were such staunch free traders that protectionist tariffs were literally outlawed in the Confederate Constitution (see Marshal DeRosa’s The Confederate Constitution of 1861). Lincoln’s official campaign poster featured pictures of himself and his vice presidential running mate Hannibal Hamlin over the protectionist caption of “Protection for Home Industry.” In a speech delivered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania shortly before taking office, Lincoln declared that “no other issue” was more important to the nation than raising the federal tariff rate. He said this as part of the protectionsts’ campaign to get President James Buchanan to sign the legislation enacting the Morrill Tariff of 1861, which he did two days before Lincoln’s inauguration. Once the war had commenced, Lincoln announced a naval blockade of the Southern ports and gave only one reason for it: it was his duty, he said, to collect the federal tariff tax.

In his first inaugural address Lincoln announced that it was his duty “to collect the duties and imposts” and that “beyond that” there would not be any “invasion” (his word) or “bloodshed” (his word) in any state. He literally threatened war over tariff collection. Abraham Lincoln was not going to back down to tax protestors from South Carolina or anywhere else, as Andrew Jackson had done. It is undeniable that tariff policy was an extremely important issue to Abraham Lincoln in 1860, contrary to Loewen’s assertion.

The most egregious falsehood spread by Loewen is to say that the tariff that was in existence in 1861 was the 1857 tariff rate, which was in fact the lowest rate of the nineteenth century. The issue was not that tariff rate, but the Morrill Tariff rate, which was more than twice as high (32.6% vs. 15%). At a time when tariffs accounted for at least 90 percent of all federal tax revenue, the tax rate was more than doubled by the law that passed the U.S. House of Representatives during the 1859–60 legislative session, and then the U.S. Senate in the 1860–61 session, and signed into law on March 2, 1861. The words “Morrill Tariff” do not appear anywhere in Loewen’s Washington Post article.

Loewen was also dead wrong when he claimed that Southerners said “nothing” about the tariff prior to the outbreak of the war. Confederate President Jefferson Davis emphasized tariff policy in his first inaugural address (delivered in Montgomery, Alabama on February 18, 1861) as much as Lincoln did in his. He said this:

An agricultural people, whose chief interest is the export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country, our true policy is peace, and the freest trade, which our necessities will permit. It is alike our interest, and all those to whom we would sell and from whom we would buy, that there should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon the interchange of commodities. There can be but little rivalry between ours and any manufacturing or navigating community, such as the Northeastern States of the American union. It must follow, therefore, that a mutual interest would invite good will and kind offices. If, however, passion or the lust of dominion should cloud the judgment or inflame the ambition of those states, we must prepare to meet the emergency . . .

Thus, in Lincoln’s first inaugural address he announced that protectionism was the cornerstone of the U.S. government’s economic policy, and that he was willing to launch an “invasion” of “any state” that resisted. In Jefferson Davis’s first inaugural address he announced that the Confederacy’s economic policy was the exact opposite: the “freest trade” possible. When he said in the above quotation that “we must prepare to meet the emergency” he was saying that he knew the North would be willing to go to war over tax collection this time, unlike the Tariff of Abomination crisis some thirty years earlier, and that the South should “prepare” for a possible invasion. And James Loewen would have us believe that no one on either side said anything at all, whatsoever, about the tariff issue in the months leading up to the war.

The rest of Loewen’s Washington Post article was no more accurate. For example, it is well known that only a very small percentage of Confederate soldiers were slave owners. The obvious question then becomes: why did they fight? They not only did not own slaves, but many of them were yeoman farmers who were harmed by the institution of slavery because the large, slave-owning plantations competed unfairly with them. And many more were deprived of job opportunities in farming because of the fact that much of that work was performed by slaves.

Rather than consulting scholarship on why Confederate soldiers fought, Loewen fabricated a ludicrous answer to the question of why Confederate soldiers who did not own slaves fought: they supposedly expected to magically become wealthy slave plantation owners after the war, he said! This is what passes for historical “scholarship” in the Washington Post. If Loewen had read James McPherson’s book, What They Fought For: 1861–1865, he would know that the average Confederate soldier said in letters home that he was fighting against an aggressive foreign government that was invading his country, bombing and burning his towns, and threatening harm to his family and friends.

Left-wing hate group activists are not the only court historians when it comes to the subject of Lincoln and his war. Neoconservatives consider “The Myth of Father Abraham” to be an essential ingredient in their warfare state ideology and seem willing to say and write just about anything to perpetuate their mythology. An example of this phenomenon was a February 9, 2009 article on the Web site Newsmax.com by Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen entitled “What Would He Say to Us Today?” The article was yet another rendition of the neocon tactic of suggesting that Abe Lincoln would approve of their political agenda if he were alive today. If “Father Abraham” would approve, how could anyone object? Dozens, maybe hundreds, of articles have been written by neocon political activists along the lines of this general theme. (The neocons are not alone in this venture; Mario Cuomo and Harold Holzer wrote an entire book entitled Lincoln on Democracy arguing that Lincoln would be a “social democrat,” a.k.a., socialist like them, if he were alive today.)

Gingrich and Forstchen engage in the typical deification of Lincoln by calling the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. “his throne” that is “modeled after Grecian temples.” This of course is true: King Lincoln does have a Zeus-like appearance sitting there in his D.C. “throne” (although historian Clyde Wilson more accurately described this symbol of the American state as “a corporate lobbyist sitting in an armchair”).

Gingrich and Forstchen call the Lincoln Memorial “our American temple to democracy.” Of course, the American founding fathers feared and even loathed democracy, described by James Madison as “the violence of faction” in Federalist #10. The last thing in the world a James Madison or a Thomas Jefferson would have done would have been to support the building of a temple to democracy. The whole purpose of the Constitution, Madison wrote in Federalist #10, was to control and restrain democracy, or “the violence of faction.”

In reality the Lincoln Memorial is a temple that celebrates the destruction of the Jeffersonian idea that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Such destruction is hardly democratic. It was the South, after all, that no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C. in 1861. It was Lincoln and the Republican Party that held the position that government in America was not voluntary; that, contrary to Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence, the people do not have a right to “alter or abolish” their own government; and that the federal government does have a “right” to invade, murder hundreds of thousands, and bomb and burn entire American cities and towns to the ground to enforce this view.

Gingrich and Fortschen claim that all of this bloodshed, death, mayhem and destruction is how America became “united.” Theirs is a very odd definition of “united” and is more reminiscent of how the Soviet Union was “united” than the original American union. If one person holds a gun to another person’s head and asks that person if he agrees with him then, yes, one can say that at least rhetorically the two are “united” in their opinion.

It is a tenet of Anglo-Saxon law that contracts consummated under force or fraud are not legal or legitimate. The same can be said of the American union in the post-1865 era.

Perhaps the biggest whopper told by Gingrich and Fortschen is that Lincoln “was a man of deep abiding faith.” That would be shocking news to Lincoln’s wife and closest friend and law partner, William Herndon, both of whom attested that Lincoln never became a Christian. In preparing his biography of Lincoln Herndon asked Mary Todd Lincoln about this and she said that her late husband “had no faith. . . . He never joined a church [and] . . . he was never a technical Christian” (see Edgar Lee Masters, Lincoln the Man, p. 150). This fact is well known by Lincoln scholars despite the absurd statement made by Gingrich and Fortschen. For example, in her book Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns-Goodwin wrote at length about the fact that Lincoln was never a believer. The spin that Goodwin placed on this fact was that we should all feel even more sorry for poor old Abe because he must have suffered more than most since he did not believe in an afterlife.

Lincoln’s war was a total war waged on the civilian population of the South as well as the combatants of the Confederate Army. Lincoln knew of every atrocity and is praised by historians for his role in micromanaging the waging of total war on citizens of the Southern states. He rewarded generals like Sherman and Sheridan who did not excel as military strategists but were invaluable to Lincoln as terrorists who murdered civilians, bombed and burned cities and towns populated only by civilians, and looked the other way while their troops stole millions of dollars worth of private property—everything from silverware to livestock. Lincoln was also famous for experimenting with bigger and bigger weapons of mass destruction to be used on American cities like Richmond, Virginia, Atlanta, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, where literally thousands of artillery shells fell in periods of only a few days at times when there was no enemy army present.

Gingrich and Fortschen apparently believed that Americans are completely unaware of these facts when they wrote that Lincoln had “a deep sense of love and compassion for everyone. He even knelt and prayed with a wounded Confederate soldier in a hospital”; “his eyes filled with pain over the suffering of others”; and he “was known for extreme gentleness to an injured animal.” They provide no references for such outlandish statements, only saying that they come from “stories” (but do not even reveal the sources of the “stories”).

Gingrich and Fortschen also mislead their readers into believing that Lincoln was enlightened on the issue of race by saying that he “was the first American president to invite and socially greet a delegation of African-Americans into the White House.” Lincoln did hold a meeting with a group of free black men in the White House, but it was not the first of such meetings according to Professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard University. The purpose of the meeting was not to make a statement about racial equality, as the Gingrich/Fortschen article misleadingly implied. Exactly the opposite is true: The purpose of the meeting, which is described in Lincoln’s Selected Writings and Speeches in the entry for August 14, 1862, was to urge the free black men to “lead by example” and self-deport themselves out of the U.S. “You and we are different races,” Lincoln sagely observed. “We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. . . . This physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both . . . and affords a reason at least why we should be separated. . . . It is better for us both, therefore, to be separate.”

He then urged the men to go to Liberia, stating that there was already a colony of American black people there (established in the early nineteenth century by the American Colonization Society), although most of the original colonists had perished. Lincoln tried to assure the men that such a venture would be advantageous even though most of them would also probably perish from disease or starvation. If they procreated before hand, Lincoln surmised, then someday their descendants would probably outnumber them. The free black men wisely turned down Lincoln’s generous offer to pay for their deportation to Liberia.

The false history of Lincoln and his war has long been used to prop up the idea of “American exceptionalism,” which in turn has become an all-purpose excuse or rationalization for the U.S. government’s imperialistic military adventures around the world.