The Real Lincoln: a New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War.

• Author: Gamble, Richard M.
• Position: Book Review

By Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Roseville, Calif.: Forum/Prima, 2002. Pp. xiii, 333. $24.95 cloth.

Cynics learn through harsh experience to be skeptical of any book promising the "real" history behind a controversial figure such as Abraham Lincoln. It hardly seems possible that there is more to say about someone who has been subjected to such minute scrutiny in thousands of books and articles. Yet Thomas J. DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln manages to raise fresh and morally probing questions, challenging the image of the martyred president that has been fashioned carefully in marble and bronze, sentimentalism and myth. In doing so, DiLorenzo does not follow the lead of M. E. Bradford or other Southern agrarians. He writes primarily not as a defender of the Old South and its institutions, culture, and traditions, but as a libertarian enemy of the Leviathan state. DiLorenzo holds Lincoln and his war responsible for the triumph of big government and the birth of the ubiquitous, suffocating modern U.S. state. He seeks to replace the nation's memory of Lincoln as the "Great Emancipator" with the record of Lincoln as the "Great Centralizer."

In ten concise chapters, DiLorenzo attempts to demythologize Lincoln's reputation as the humanitarian benefactor of the slaves and the judicious statesman who preserved, protected, and defended the Union and the Constitution in their hour of greatest crisis. With the flair and passion of a prosecuting attorney delivering closing arguments to a hostile jury, he exposes Lincoln's embarrassing views on race, his ambition for economic nationalism, his rewriting of the history of the founding of the nation, his cavalier violation of constitutional limits on the presidency, and his willingness to wage a barbaric total war to achieve his ends. DiLorenzo argues that Lincoln opened the gates of war and plunged his fellow countrymen, North and South, into four years of misery and death not to preserve the Union as it was or to free the slaves, but to advance his own, his party's, and his constituency's power. In many ways, The Real Lincoln is a sobering study in power and corruption.

For those familiar only with the deified Lincoln of the copper penny, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., or the portrait on the classroom wall, DiLorenzo's catalog of Lincoln's racial views, for example, will come as something of a shock. The Real Lincoln ventures to cure the selective amnesia Lincoln's defenders have promoted. DiLorenzo...