For God, Family and Republic

Lincoln supposedly said, "The principles of Jefferson are the axioms of a free society." And many think the adoption of the Republican name by the elements of the splintered Whig Party, in forming a new party, was a conscious attempt to resurrect the name of the party of Jefferson. But were the principles of Jefferson, and his esteem for limited constitutional government and frugality really compatible with the Lincoln-Republican agenda? In a recent LewRockwell.com article entitled A President’s Mission To Destroy the Press, Thomas DiLorenzo observed:

Lincoln was in fact the anti-Jefferson. Jefferson’s famous "Principles of ’98," including his Kentucky Resolve of 1798, establish him as the foremost American architect of the states’ rights philosophy. Lincoln commanded an army that killed 300,000 fellow citizens to assure the destruction of that philosophy.

Jefferson opposed central banking and the use of tax dollars to subsidize corporations, especially the hated Bank of the United States; Lincoln championed the Bank throughout his political career, resurrected it with his National Currency Acts, and spent thirty years of his life battling for corporate welfare subsidies to his political supporters in the railroad and road-building industries.

Jefferson was the author of America’s first declaration of secession – the Declaration of Independence – a declaration of secession from the British empire. Lincoln denied that such a right even existed and waged war to destroy the most important principle of the Declaration of Independence.

Jefferson championed the view that the citizens of the states were sovereign, that the central government was merely their agent, and that the union was a compact among the states. Lincoln denied every one of these facts, and waged the bloodiest war in history up to that point to "prove" himself right and Jefferson wrong.

Jefferson’s philosophy of government was one of decentralization; Lincoln did more than any other human being to bring to America the centralized, bureaucratic leviathan state that we all slave under today.

Jefferson was a great champion of free speech; his Kentucky Resolve of 1798 announced that not all American citizens intended to comply with the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to criticize the federal government. In his First Inaugural Address he said, "If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union . . . let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

Lincoln, on the other hand, was the First Amendment’s worst enemy, orchestrating the shutting down of literally hundreds of opposition newspapers in the northern states during the war, along with the destruction of printing presses and the imprisonment of newspaper editors and owners.

Jefferson was a southerner and an agrarian; Lincoln was a corporate trial lawyer from a northern state whose clients included much of the northern business elite, especially the railroad and banking industries. He traveled throughout the mid-west in a private train car accompanied by an entourage of Illinois Central executives.

Jefferson was a founding father and an extraordinarily well-educated man; Lincoln had less than a year of formal education, suffered from mental illness, and probably never even read The Federalist Papers. His library was almost entirely comprised of books on rhetoric and speech making.

Of course, economist and historian Thomas DiLorenzo exposed the Real Lincoln, in his bestselling book The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War.