General Thomas Ewing cleared 3,000 square miles of Missouri from habitation and forced 20,000 civilians from their homes, leaving them homeless, bare-footed and bare-headed with all of their possessions stolen by Union “soldiers.” Ewing bragged of his feat to a Washington reporter, telling him that his action was approved by President Lincoln.

Lincoln’s friend, General Grenville Dodge, announced his policy of starving the entire population of the state of Tennessee. “These people are proud, arrogant rebels,” and will be made to understant that “all they they possess belongs to the US Government.”

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/07/21/how-lincoln-destroyed-the-united-states/

Paul Craig Roberts

The title of Thomas J. DiLorenzo new book, The Problem with Lincoln, is an understatement.  Lincoln was far more than a problem.  He was the worst disaster ever to befall the United States.

Lincoln destroyed the federal republic established by the founding fathers, and he destroyed the Constitution that protected it. He violated every provision of, and every Amendment to, the Constitution.  He then rewrote, in effect, the Constitution and left the 10th Amendment out.

The Lincoln regime was a dictatorship.  Lincoln disregarded US law, the US Constitution, every right of the people, the power and authority of judges, and even exiled a US Representative.  DiLorenzo writes that “freedom of speech was virtually nonexistent in the Northern states for the duration of the Lincoln administration.” Lincoln ordered the arrest and imprisonment of everyone who disapproved of his invasion of the South or made the slightest criticism of him.  There were mass arrests of citizens and news paper editors of northern states.  A minimum of 38,000 citizens of northern states were imprisoned without due process.

Lincoln committed treason against the Constitution when he suspended Habeas Corpus.  No such power resides in the presidency.  Only Congress can suspend Habeas Corpus even in the case of rebellion and invasion.

US Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney ruled Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus was unconstitutional. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley wrote that it may be necessary to teach Taney a lesson. Lincoln had an arrest warrent written for Taney’s arrest, but did not serve it, apparently instead relying on Taney’s awareness of the warrant to bring him into line.

Other judges both state and federal who attempted to uphold laws were beat bloody and dragged off to prision or placed under house arrest and prevented from performing their judicial duties.  Judge Richard Bennett Carmichael in Maryland attempted to enforce due process. Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward sent armed federal soldiers. They pistol-whipped the judge in his chambers, “beat him bloody and unconscious, and dragged him off to Fort McHenry.”   US circuit court judge William Merrick issued a writ of habeas corpus for an underaged youth and was put “under house arrest by force of arms without due process.”  Under Lincoln, there was not only no separation of powers, there was no other power.

Lincoln used army troops to break up meetings of the Democratic Party.  US Senator Thomas A. Hendricks, for example, was prevented from speaking by Union troops with fixed bayonets who threatened “to make a summary disposal of him.”

In other words, life under Lincoln in the North was like life in the Soviet Union during the darkest days of Stalin’s rule.  Life under Lincoln in the South was like Stalin’s destruction of the kulaks.

The white liberal “Lincoln scholars” admit much of this.  And they justify it. For example, Cornell University professor Clinton Rossiter wrote a book, curiously titled Constitutional Dictatorship, a contradiction in terms. Rossiter declares Lincoln to be “a great dictator” whose “amazing disregard for the Constitution was considered by nobody as legal.”  Rossiter celebrates this fact.  Being a “great dictator” is what made Lincoln a “true democrat.”  Another “Lincoln scholar,” Dean Sprague, wrote a book detailing hundreds of acts of tyranny by Lincoln, “and then somehow managed to conclude that Lincoln ‘had no taste for tyranny’ and was a ‘great humanitarian.’”

“This,” DiLorenzo writes, “is what makes someone a Lincoln ‘scholar’—dictatorship is democracy, tyranny is freedom, destroying the Constitution is constitutional, imprisoning political dissenters is benevolent, dictatorship in the right hands is good and noble—and on it goes.”

The most important chapter in DiLorenzo’s book is the fourth one.  In this chapter the war crimes of Lincoln and his generals and army are the subject.  Lincoln has the disgrace of being the first ruler in modern times to unleash indiscriminate war on civilian populations.  From Lincoln came all of Washington’s subsequent violations of the rules of war and the Geneva protocols and conventions—the firebombing of Japanese and German civilian cities, the nuking of two Japanese civilian cities, the atrocities in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the murder of 500,000 Iraqi children justified by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in true Lincoln fashion as “worth it,” the massive deaths from Washington’s and Washington-sponsored illegal invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Washington’s bombings of Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, the persecution and torture of journalist Julian Assange, the torture horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. If the South had won the war, Lincoln, the entirety of the Union high command and the bulk of the Union army could have been legally and justly hung as war criminals.  Indeed, the war crimes of Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and the Union army “paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century.”

Lincoln’s war plan was designed to destroy the South, not just its army. Arson, looting, rape and murder of civilians, destruction of their homes, barns, livestock, and towns by the Union thugs in uniform were the means.  In Missouri vast areas of the state became uninhabited. Union General James H. Lane said: “We believe in a war of extermination. I want to see every foot of ground in Jackson, Cass and Bates Counties burned over—everything laid waste.” Read the rest of this entry »