March 23, 2026
In what passes as accepted history today, Abraham Lincoln is praised as the "Great Emancipator" who freed the nation from the curse of slavery. Most of my readers will be aware that this view is completely false. Lincoln didn't care much about freeing the slaves, so long as the South remained in the Union. He was an extreme nationalist.
Even if you know this, you have a lot to learn from the great Murray Rothbard. In his article "Just War," he analyzed Lincoln with his characteristic depth and knowledge of historical detail. As he saw it, the Republican Party at its inception favored three key ideas: a Protestant postmillennialist pietism that wanted to establish a Kingdom of God on earth and was anti-Catholic; a nationalist economic policy that stressed high tariffs, and an abolitionist movement that wanted to revamp Southern institutions. Rothbard called this program an "integrated despotic outlook"
What was Lincoln's place in this scheme of things ? Rothbard tells us that "in the Republican Party, the 'party of great moral ideas,' different men and different factions emphasized different aspects of this integrated despotic world-outlook. In the fateful Republican convention of 1860, the major candidates for president were two veteran abolitionists: William Seward, of New York, and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Seward, however, was distrusted by the anti-Catholic hotheads because he somehow did not care about the alleged Catholic menace; on the other hand, while Chase was happy to play along with the former Know-Nothings, who stressed the anti-Catholic pant of the coalition, he was distrusted by Sewardites and others who were indifferent to the Catholic question. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois was a dark horse who was able to successfully finesse the Catholic question. His major emphasis was on Whig economic statism: high tariffs, huge subsidies to railroads, public works. As one of the nation's leading lawyers for Illinois Central and other big railroads, indeed, Lincoln was virtually the candidate from Illinois Central and the other large railroads."
Lincoln won the nomination through a corrupt bargain: "One reason for Lincoln's victory at the convention was that Iowa railroad entrepreneur Grenville M. Dodge helped swing the Iowa delegation to Lincoln. In return, early in the Civil War, Lincoln appointed Dodge to army general. Dodge's task was to clear the Indians from the designated path of the country's first heavily subsidized federally chartered trans-continental railroad, the Union Pacific. In this way, conscripted Union troops and hapless taxpayers were coerced into socializing the costs on constructing and operating the Union Pacific. This sort of action is now called euphemistically 'the cooperation of government and industry.'"
Lincoln was an extreme advocate of protective tariffs in order to promote American industry. (Sound familiar?) "But Lincoln's major focus was on raising taxes, in particular raising and enforcing the tariff. His convention victory was particularly made possible by support from the Pennsylvania delegation. Pennsylvania had long been the home and the political focus of the nation's iron and steel industry which, ever since its inception during the War of 1812, had been chronically inefficient, and had therefore constantly been bawling for high tariffs and, later, import quotas. Virtually the first act of the Lincoln administration was to pass the Morrill protective tariff act, doubling existing tariff rates, and creating the highest tariff rates in American history."
Tariffs were much more important to Lincoln than ending slavery. "In his First Inaugural, Lincoln was conciliatory about maintaining slavery; what he was hard-line about toward the South was insistence on collecting all the customs tariffs in that region. As Lincoln put it, the federal government would 'collect the duties and imposts, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against... people anywhere.' The significance of the federal forts is that they provided the soldiers to enforce the customs tariffs; thus, Fort Sumter was at the entrance to Charleston Harbor, the major port, apart from New Orleans, in the entire South. The federal troops at Sumter were needed to enforce the tariffs that were supposed to be levied at Charleston Harbor."
Although slavery was far less important to Lincoln that economic nationalism, his "moderate" remarks about slavery were deceptive. He intended all along to coerce the South. "Of course, Abraham Lincoln's conciliatory words on slavery cannot be taken at face value. Lincoln was a master politician, which means that he was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar. The federal forts were the key to his successful prosecution of the war. Lying to South Carolina, Abraham Lincoln managed to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt and Henry Stimson did at Pearl Harbor 80 years later - maneuvered the Southerners into firing the first shot. In this way, by manipulating the South into firing first against a federal fort, Lincoln made the South appear to be 'aggressors' in the eyes of the numerous waverers and moderates in the North".
Rothbard points out that aside from the fanatic New Englanders, most people in the North didn't favor forcing the South to remain in the Union. "Outside of New England and territories populated by transplanted New Englanders, the idea of forcing the South to stay in the Union was highly unpopular. In many middle-tier states, including Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, there was a considerable sentiment to mimic the South by forming a middle Confederacy to isolate the pesky and fanatical Yankees. Even after the war began, the Mayor of New York City and many other dignitaries of the city proposed that the city secede from the Union and make peace and engage in free trade with the South. Indeed, Jefferson Davis's lawyer after the war was what we would now call the 'paleo-libertarian' leader of the New York City bar, Irish-Catholic Charles O'Conor, who ran for President in 1878 on the Straight Democrat ticket, in protest that his beloved Democratic Party's nominee for President was the abolitionist, protectionist, socialist, and fool Horace Greeley."
Once Lincoln succeeded in provoking war, he went ahead with the whole despotic outlook. "The Lincoln Administration and the Republican Party took advantage of the overwhelmingly Republican Congress after the secession of the South to push through almost the entire Whig economic program. Lincoln signed no less than ten tariff-raising bills during his administration. Heavy 'sin' taxes were levied on alcohol and tobacco, the income tax was levied for the first time in American history, huge land grants and monetary subsidies were handed out to transcontinental railroads (accompanied by a vast amount of attendant corruption), and the government went off the gold standard and virtually nationalized the banking system to establish a machine for printing new money and to provide cheap credit for the business elite. And furthermore, the New Model Army and the war effort rested on a vast and unprecedented amount of federal coercion against Northerners as well as the South; a huge army was conscripted, dissenters and advocates of a negotiated peace with the South were jailed, and the precious Anglo-Saxon right of habeas corpus was abolished for the duration."
Rothbard mordantly sums up his view of Lincoln: "While it is true that Lincoln himself was not particularly religious, that did not really matter because he adopted all the attitudes and temperament of his evangelical allies. He was stern and sober, he was personally opposed to alcohol and tobacco, and he was opposed to the private carrying of guns. An ambitious seeker of the main chance from early adulthood, Lincoln acted viciously toward his own humble frontier family in Kentucky. He abandoned his fiancé in order to marry a wealthier Mary Todd, whose family were friends of the eminent Henry Clay, he repudiated his brother, and he refused to attend his dying father or his father's funeral, monstrously declaring that such an experience 'would be more painful than pleasant.' No doubt ! Lincoln, too, was a typical example of a humanitarian with the guillotine in another dimension: a familiar modern 'reform liberal' type whose heart bleeds for and yearns to 'uplift' remote mankind, while he lies to and treats abominably actual people whom he knew. And so Abraham Lincoln, in a phrase prefiguring our own beloved Mario Cuomo, declared that the Union was really 'a family, bound indissolubly together by the most intimate organic bonds.' Kick your own family, and then transmute familial spiritual feelings toward a hypostatized and mythical entity, 'The Union,' which then must be kept intact regardless of concrete human cost or sacrifice."
Let's do everything we can to promote a correct understanding of the monster Lincoln, based on Murray Rothbard's teaching!