Behind the Jeffersonian Veneer: the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History is no libertarian.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Thomas Woods - Critical Essay

THOMAS WOODS' BEST-SELLING Politically Incorrect Guide to American History is primarily pitched to conservative readers, but it's also crafted for libertarian appeal. Its rhetoric is strongly anti-statist, pro-market, and opposed to centralization; in interviews, Woods has called himself a "Jeffersonian" championing liberty. Scratch that ostensibly libertarian veneer, though, and you'll find ... something else.

Much of the book's first half is an apologia for the antebellum South and its cause in the War Between the States (Woods' preferred term). Taking the familiar view that the war was fought not over slavery but over competing economic interests, Woods consistently casts the motives of slavery's opponents in the worst possible light: Those who wanted to keep slavery out of the new territories, he claims, mainly wanted to keep those territories all-white. The abolitionist movement is faulted for "belligerent and vitriolic anti-Southern rhetoric," while Lincoln is skewered as a power-hungry, racist hypocrite with little interest in freeing the slaves.

Like most propaganda, this has some kernels of truth. It is hardly a secret that Lincoln was a pragmatist who favored a gradual emancipation and made the preservation of the Union his top priority, or that he shared his era's racist beliefs and toyed with the idea of repatriating blacks to Africa. Yet he also held strong antislavery convictions, publicly and privately voicing the view that excluding blacks from the principles of liberty and equality subverted freedom for all.

In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, challenged on whether he considered a black woman his equal, Lincoln replied, "In some respects she is certainly not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of anyone else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others." That's a Lincoln you won't find in The Politically Incorrect Guide.

Nor will you find, for instance, this statement by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens: "Our new government is founded ... upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition." Woods' narrative dances around a basic fact: Whatever other issues were involved, the Confederacy was dedicated to the preservation of slavery. (Mississippi's declaration of secession stated, "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of...