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Lincoln’s Party
 As
we debate the constitutional wartime powers of
the president, it’s instructive, and exciting, to read a new book called
Lincoln’s Wrath, by Jeffrey Manber and Neil Dahlstrom
(Sourcebooks). It will come as a shock  to anyone who still believes in the myth of the Great
Emancipator.
A shock, I say, because Lincoln has
been enshrined as the very incarnation of freedom. To many people, calling
him a destroyer of freedom sounds not just wrong, but impossible,
paradoxical, bafflingly counterintuitive. What on earth can you mean?
John Hodgson knew what it meant.
The book tells how he ran afoul of the Lincoln administration for the crime of
publishing his opinions.
Lincoln took the view that his
“vast reservoir” of powers, as one of his admirers has called
them, included suppressing any critics and any opposition press. What about
the First Amendment? Lincoln never directly mentioned it; in all his many
speeches extolling liberty, I don’t recall a single word about the need
for freedom of speech or a free press. In this he stands in striking contrast
to Jefferson.
Lincoln explained that just as
“often a limb must be amputated to save a life,” by analogy
“measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful, by
becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the
preservation of the nation.” So “the nation” could be
saved only by amputating several limbs of the Constitution.
Lincoln suspended habeas corpus
on his own authority; the first Republican Congress obligingly passed an act
authorizing the confiscation of private property used in aid of the
“rebellion.” Since the Republicans regarded any failure to
support his war as pro-Confederate “treason,” this meant, in
practice, the seizure and destruction of printing presses of hundreds of
Democratic newspapers. More than 10,000 dissenters were also arbitrarily
arrested, without warrants or specified charges, and held without trial.
![[Breaker quote for Lincoln's Party: Please open before February 12.]](2006breakers/060119.gif) This
reign of terror wasn’t conducted by
government agents alone. Much of the dirty work was done by mobs and
rioters, who knew they too could act with impunity, even enjoying
Lincoln’s tacit approval. Though he never openly endorsed mob
violence, he did nothing about it and never condemned it.
Lincoln gave the impression he
didn’t even notice it. He kept his own role in it carefully out of view.
He knew that Republican fanaticism was on his side, and he had no need to
sully himself by praising it. A useful partnership between a Republican
government and private initiative (sound familiar?) took care of everything
for him.
Lincoln had a keen sense of the
importance of public opinion. “With public sentiment,” he said in
1858, “nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.” In a
perverse way, his respect for public opinion also taught him the necessity of
controlling it — by persuasion, if possible, but by force, if necessary,
and also, at times, by bribery and patronage. He secretly paid friendly
publishers and sometimes wrote anonymously for them. (During his run for
the presidency, Lincoln’s Wrath notes, he himself held
“secret ownership” of one German-language paper, through
which he cultivated the support of the large body of German immigrants in
the West at that time.)
In West Chester, Pennsylvania, one
brave publisher named John Hodgson stood up to the pressure.
Lincoln’s Wrath is largely his untold story.
After a mob wrecked his press in
August 1861, and Federal officials demanded what was left of it a week
later, Hodgson decided to fight back. He sued the officials in court and
eventually won; they claimed they were only acting under Lincoln’s
orders (sound familiar?) but failed to prove his direct involvement. Like
Macbeth, he couldn’t be tied to the crime; but his moral responsibility
is clear.
Ironically, Hodgson’s paper
was called the Jeffersonian. It stood for the constitutional principles
Lincoln was busy amputating — principles that would have made
Jefferson himself eligible for Republican arrest. Democrats saw their party
as the party of Jefferson and limited Federal power, and the Republicans as
the party of expansive centralized power in the tradition of Alexander
Hamilton, the Federalists, and the Whigs.
In effect if not in fact, Lincoln and
the Republicans wanted to make the United States a one-party system, in
which dissent could be treated as rebellion and treason. Today it often
seems that Lincoln’s party hasn’t changed much.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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