A Lesson for Britain From Honest Abe

By Mary Ellen Synon
http://synonblog.dailymail.co.uk/
16 December 2008 1:36 PM

At the moment, Barack Obama is trying to pose as the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Early in his campaign, however, he was trying to pose as the new Abraham Lincoln, the straight, simple man who went to Washington from Illinois. Last year Obama even went to the the steps of the Old State Capitol Building, in which Lincoln had once served in the Illinois legislature, to make his announcement that he would run for the Democratic nomination.

But he has gone quiet on that one lately. Hardly surprising. These days a connection with Illinois means a connection with the facts of corruption not the myth of Lincoln.

But in Illinois, they just can't keep Lincoln out of the picture. Even the US Attorney who is prosecuting the present governor, Rod Blagojevich, with 76-pages of allegations of corruption, says that all he has found out about the level of corruption in 'the Land of Lincoln' now 'Would make Lincoln roll over in his grave.'

High-level corruption in the Land of Lincoln, and this US Attorney thinks we should be surprised at that -- and Lincoln would be shocked. Oh, sure. As Captain Renault was shocked to find there was gambling going on at Rick's Café.

I am not surprised to see yet more evidence that corruption is endemic in the Land of Lincoln. I'd call it highly appropriate. But then, I've known enough about Lincoln all my life to know that the sobriquet 'Honest Abe' was originally meant as irony. Lincoln was venal and greedy, and long before he was elected president in 1860, the people of Illinois knew it.

You no doubt think Lincoln was some kind of country lawyer who went into politics for noble reasons. Wrong on both counts. Before he was president, Lincoln was the highest-paid trial lawyer in Illinois. His clients included the Illinois Central Railroad, which at the time was the biggest corporation in the world.

As Prof Thomas J. DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln, has found in his research, Lincoln was essentially a lobbyist for the Northern plutocracy and its anti-populist, mercantilist policies.

As for Lincoln's supposed commitment to racial equality, he was as morally corrupt on that one as he was financially greedy on the other: 'Lincoln states over and over again that he was opposed to political or social equality of the races; he was not an abolitionist but denigrated them...his primary means of dealing with racial problems was to attempt to colonize all American blacks in Africa, Haiti, Central America -- anywhere but in the United States.'

The fact is that from the moment in 1832 when Lincoln announced he was going to run for the state legislature in Illinois, his agenda was almost solely economic -- for example, demanding protectionist tariffs and taxpayer subsidies for his old friends in the railroads and other corporations. Lincoln the Lawyer even had personal use of a private railway carriage, the Gulfstream jet of its day.

Like most Northerners, Lincoln was what today would be called a racist. He had no interest in liberating slaves, not until years into the war which he had started for mercantilist reasons. Even then, Lincoln only made the Emancipation Proclamation for political reasons; more, he excluded from emancipation the slaves owned in the four slave states which stayed on the Union side and did not join the Confederacy.

What drove him to launch a war against the South was the fact that 80 percent of the foreign earnings of the United States came from the agricultural exports of the Southern states. Lincoln decided to open the floodgates on a sea of blood rather than let the Southern states secede, as was their undoubted right. A South in control of its own foreign earnings could have threatened the fortunes of his rich friends in the industrial North.

Lincoln's moral corruption went far beyond greed and slavery, though. The late historian, Webb Garrison of Emory University, wrote that when Lincoln was informed how the federal army had pillaged, plundered, burned and raped its way through the defenceless Shenandoah Valley in 1864, Lincoln only conveyed 'the thanks of a nation' to General Sheridan, the chief plunderer.

Lincoln's wartime villainy brings us back to present day Illinois villainy. One of the crimes of Lincoln was his unconstitutional suspension of the writ of Habeas Corpus. He ordered the army to arrest thousands of Northern civilians and imprison them without trial. Among them were hundreds of editors, journalists and newspaper owners who were opposed to the war.

Back in Chicago today, we see that one of the corrupt deals in which Governor Rod Blagojevich was apparently involved was a financial squeeze on the Chicago Tribune to try to force them to fire journalists who criticized him.

But Blago couldn't pull off the deal, couldn't put the screws on even one paper. As Aaron Wolf says in Chronicles Magazine, 'Threatening newspapermen for writing things critical of the chief executive? Rod, you have a lot to learn from Honest Abe.'

As Britain has a lot to learn from the history of the South, and what happened when it tried to withdraw in peace from what was in law only a federal union of sovereign states...

December 16, 2008 Permalink Comments (11)