Upside-Down History: The Myth of Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
by Thomas DiLorenzo: Why
the Totalitarians Among Us Love Lincoln
of scholars, meticulously investigating every aspect of [Lincoln’s]
life, have failed to find a single act of racial bigotry on his
~ Doris Kearns-Goodwin,
of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham
will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing
about in any way the social and political equality of the white
and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making
voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office,
nor to intermarry with white people . . . . I as much as any man
am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white race."
~ Abraham Lincoln,
First Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Ottawa, Illinois, Sept. 18, 1858,
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln vol.3, pp. 145-146.
new movie, Lincoln, is said to be based on several chapters
of the book Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns-Goodwin, who was
a consultant to Spielberg. The main theme of the movie is how clever,
manipulative, conniving, scheming, lying, and underhanded Lincoln
supposedly was in using his "political skills" to get
the Thirteenth Amendment that legally ended slavery through the
U.S. House of Representatives in the last months of his life. This
entire story is what Lerone Bennett, Jr. the longtime executive
editor of Ebony magazine and author of Forced
into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream, calls a "pleasant
fiction." It never happened.
It never happened
according to the foremost authority on Lincoln among mainstream
Lincoln scholars, Harvard University Professor David H. Donald,
the recipient of several Pulitzer prizes for his historical writings,
including a biography of Lincoln. David Donald is the preeminent
Lincoln scholar of our time who began writing award-winning books
on the subject in the early 1960s. On page 545 of his magnus opus,
Lincoln, Donald notes that Lincoln did discuss the Thirteenth
Amendment with two members of Congress James M. Ashley of
Ohio and James S. Rollins of Missouri. But if he used "means
of persuading congressmen to vote for the Thirteeth Amendment,"
the theme of the Spielberg movie, "his actions are not recorded.
Conclusions about the President’s role rested on gossip . . ."
is not a shred of evidence that even one Democratic member of Congress
changed his vote on the Thirteenth Amendment (which had previously
been defeated) because of Lincoln’s actions. Donald documents that
Lincoln was told that some New Jersey Democrats could possibly be
persuaded to vote for the amendment "if he could persuade [Senator]
Charles Sumner to drop a bill to regulate the Camden & Amboy
[New Jersey] Railroad, but he declined to intervene"
(emphasis added). "One New Jersey Democrat," writes David
Donald, "well known as a lobbyist for the Camden & Amboy,
who had voted against the amendment in July, did abstain in the
final vote, but it cannot be proved that Lincoln influenced his
change" (emphasis added). Thus, according to the foremost
authority on Lincoln, there is no evidence at all that Lincoln influenced
even a single vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, in complete
contradiction of the writings of the confessed plagiarist Doris
Kearns-Goodwin and Steven Spielberg’s movie (See my review of Goodwin’s
book, entitled "A Plagiarist’s Contribution to Lincoln Idolatry").
First Thirteenth Amendment Gambit
There is no
evidence that Lincoln provided any significant assistance in the
passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives
in 1865, but there is evidence of his effectiveness in getting
an earlier Thirteenth Amendment through the House and the Senate
in 1861. This proposed amendment was known as the "Corwin
Amendment," named after Ohio Republican Congressman Thomas
Corwin. It had passed both the Republican-controlled House and the
Republican-dominated U.S. Senate on March 2, 1861, two days before
Lincoln’s inauguration, and was sent to the states for ratification
by Lincoln himself.
Amendment would have prohibited the federal government from ever
interfering with Southern slavery. It read as follows:
shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to
Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State,, with
the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held
to labor or service by the laws of said State."
held to service" is how the Constitutional Convention referred
to slaves, and "domestic institutions" referred to slavery.
Lincoln announced to the world that he endorsed the Corwin Amendment
in his first inaugural address:
a proposed amendment to the Constitution – which amendment, however,
I have not seen – has passed Congress to the effect that the Federal
Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions
of the States, including that of persons held to service . . . .
[H]olding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law,
I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable"
slavery was already constitutional, Lincoln had "no objection"
to enshrining it explicitly in the text of the U.S. Constitution
on the day that he took office. He then sent a letter to the governor
of each state transmitting the approved amendment for what he hoped
would be ratification and noting that his predecessor, President
James Buchanan, had also endorsed it.
played a much larger role in getting this first Thirteenth Amendment
through Congress than merely endorsing it in his first inaugural
address and in his letter to the governors. Even Doris Kearns-Goodwin
knows this! On page 296 of Team of Rivals she explained how
it was Lincoln who, after being elected but before the inauguration,
instructed New York Senator William Seward, who would become his
secretary of state, to get the amendment through the U.S. Senate.
He also instructed Seward to get a federal law passed that would
repeal the personal liberty laws in some of the Northern states
that were used by those states to nullify the federal Fugitive Slave
Act, which Lincoln strongly supported. (The Fugitive Slave Act forced
Northerners to hunt down runaway slaves and return them to their
writes: "He [Lincoln] instructed Seward to introduce these
proposals in the Senate Committee of Thirteen without indicating
they issued from Springfield [Illinois]. The first resolved that
‘the Constitution should never be altered so as to authorize Congress
to abolish or interfere with slavery in the states.’" The second
proposal was that "All state personal liberty laws in opposition
to the Fugitive Slave Law be repealed."
and see Spielberg’s Lincoln movie if you must, but keep in mind
that it is just another left-wing Hollywood fantasy.
J. DiLorenzo [send him mail]
is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the
author of The
Real Lincoln; Lincoln
Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe,
Capitalism Saved America, and Hamilton’s
Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution
– And What It Means for America Today. His latest book is
Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.
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part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.
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