Lincoln's Hypocrisy

"Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, for the people." - Abraham Lincoln

This statement by Abraham Lincoln, in his famous Gettysburg Address, demonstrates his hypocrisy and false accusation that his war was being fought to preserve a representative government. If he truly supported the idea of democracy and the will of the people being supreme, he would have listened to the voice of the people from the Southern States and allowed them to succeed from the Union. 
 

Lincoln had expressed his fears that representative government would “perish from the earth” if the South had left. His insistence on forcing the Confederate States of America back into the Union was in fact an attack on representative government. The people of the South had cast their votes and decided that the Federal government had infringed upon their constitutional rights; and in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,” they decided to withdraw. 

Lincoln appeared to support the concept of representative government and the power of the people to “institute new Government” when it suited them better. But by not allowing the South to go free, Lincoln went against his own beliefs and words that he delivered to the House of Representatives on January 12, 1848, when he said

Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, and most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. (Lincoln 1989)

When Lincoln called for troops to invade the South, he sought to deny Southerners the right of representative government. H.L. Mencken stated clearly what each side was actually fighting for when he said

It is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination—that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederate who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that veto was so efficient that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary. (DiLorenzo 2002)

When Lincoln started his war to “save the Union,” he in reality was destroying that very Union formed by the States over seventy years earlier. A “Union” is formed voluntarily by a group and cannot be forced together by gunpoint. With Lincoln’s invasion of the South to force them back into the “Union,” it ceased to be a “Union” and became an empire. This War Between the States and Federal victory in 1865 changed our constitutional republic, a “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” into a consolidated empire.

 

Selected Bibliography

DiLorenzo, Thomas J. "The Real Lincoln." 114. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.

Lincoln, Abraham. "Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832-1858." 167. New York: Library of America, 1989.