Rothbard on Lincoln and His War

War Crimes of Lincoln, Grant and Sherman
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The LRC Blog

Thomas DiLorenzo

VERBATIM POST

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Via Bazz

Like the leftists and neocons who are Lincoln cultists, the beltway "libertarians" have taken to smearing and defaming Lincoln critics as "neo-Confederates." In doing so they support the centralized governmental leviathan and the foreign policy of military imperialism that is Lincoln's legacy. That of course is why statists of the Left and the Right idolize Dishonest Abe. I'd like to see if the beltwaytarians have the chutzpah to apply this label to the late, great Murray Rothbard, of Brooklyn, New York, who authored this scathing critique of Lincoln and his war that contained such passages as the following:

"The two just wars in American history were the American Revolution and the War for Southern Independence."

"If the Articles of Confederation could be treated as a scrap of paper, if delegation to the confederate government in the 1780s was revocable, how could the central government set up under the Constitution, less than a decade later, claim its powers were permanent and revocable? . . . [T]hat monstrous illogic is precisely the doctrine proclaimed by the North, by the Union, during the War Between the States."

"One of the central grievances of the South . . . was the tariff that Northerners imposed on Southerners . . . The tariff at one and the same time drove up prices of manufactured goods, forced Southerners and other Americans to pay more for such goods, and threatened to cut down Southern exports."

"The Republicans [in 1861] adopted the Whig program of statism and big government; protective tariffs, subsidies to big business, strong central government, large-scale public works, and cheap credit spurred by government."

"[Lincoln's] major emphasis was on Whig economic statism . . . Lincoln's major focus was on raising taxes . . ."

"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."

"Lincoln was a master politician, which means that he was a consummate conniver, manipulator, and liar."

"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."

"There is no heresy greater, nor political theory more pernicious, than sacralizing the secular. But this monstrous process is precisely what happened when Abraham Lincoln and his northern colleagues made a god out of the Union."

"Sherman's infamous March through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity, of the past century-and-a-half."

"[B]y targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century."

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Rothbard on Lincoln and His War