WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND KARL MARX MOVED TO PERFECT THE SOCIALISM OF ALEXANDER HAMILTON.

The very first public statement that Abraham Lincoln made after being inaugurated as the sixteenth president was an ironclad defense of slavery: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” He then quoted the Republican Party platform of 1860 that said essentially the same thing; pledged his support for the Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution “with no mental reservations”; and supported a proposed constitutional amendment (the “Corwin Amendment”) that would have prohibited the federal government from ever interfering with slavery. In fact, it was Lincoln who instructed William Seward to see that the Corwin Amendment made it through the U.S. Senate, which it did (and the House of Representatives as well).

In the same speech, Lincoln promised a military invasion and “bloodshed” in any state that refused to collect the federal tariff on imports, which had just been more than doubled two days before his inauguration. “[T]here needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority,” he continued. Thus, mere minutes after taking an oath to protect the constitutional liberties of American citizens, Abraham Lincoln threatened to orchestrate the murder of many of those same citizens.

What on earth was he talking about? What would cause a president to wage war on his own citizens whose liberties he had just pledged to protect? Lincoln explained in the very next sentence: “The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using force against or among the people anywhere” (emphasis added). He promised to murder American citizens over tax collection.

This was necessary, in the mind of Lincoln, if he was to deliver on what his party elected him to do, as stated in the quotations at the beginning of this article: to enact a high protective tariff, give away public lands mostly to mining, railroad, and timber corporations, and lavish the railroad corporations, among others, with corporate welfare. This was the old “American System” of Alexander Hamilton, which was endorsed for decades by Lincoln’s Whig Party, and finally the Republicans. The overwhelming majority of Southern congressmen had for decades been ardently opposed to all of these things. But now, they must be forced into it, or so Lincoln thought, for the sake of revenue collection. (At the time, the tariff on imports accounted for more than 90 percent of all federal tax revenues.)

Southerners (as well as Northerners) needed to be forced to pay for the empire of corporate welfare that the Republican Party hoped would keep it in power for decades. (It did: the Republican Party essentially monopolized national politics for the next half century.) That is why there had to be a war, in the minds of Lincoln and the Republican Party. They were perfectly willing to enshrine slavery explicitly in the Constitution, but there would be no compromise over collecting the newly doubled tariff.

This is also why opposition to war in the North had to be brutally repressed, as it was, and a myth of “national unity” invented. Much of the story of how the Republican Party engaged in a Stalinist spasm of political repression is told by historian William Marvel in his book, Lincoln’s Darkest Year: The War in 1862, which I highly recommend. (Marvel is a renowned Lincoln scholar, winner of the Lincoln Prize and the Douglas Southall Freeman Award.)

The Republican Party’s first act of political chicanery was to begin kicking out of the U.S. Senate men like Democratic Senator Jesse Bright of Indiana, who “lacked enthusiasm for Abraham Lincoln’s war against the South,” writes Marvel. Using the excuse that, in the years before the war, Senator Bright “had known and admired [fellow Senator] Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, the Republican Party accused Senator Bright, one of the most senior members of the Senate, of “retroactive treason” and expelled him with a bare two-thirds majority vote.

The Congressional Globe propagandized that “only a traitor would advocate peace,” and newspapers all over the North that were openly affiliated with the Republican Party (as was common during that period of time) quoted this statement. This of course included the German Language newspaper (Illinois Staats-Zeitung) which was secretly owned by Lincoln which proudly published the essays of Karl Marx. As for Northern newspapers that did not support the waging of war on their fellow Americans, the government had already begun to “squelch the most effective . . . criticism by stopping distribution, seizing equipment, and arresting publishers. Unionist mobs had collaborated in that suppression of free speech during the summer of 1861, destroying the offices of antiwar journals and attacking the editors.”

Even “Francis Scott Key’s own grandson understood how dangerous it had become to utter an unpopular opinion in the Land of the Free,” Marvel sarcastically wrote. The grandson of the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a Baltimore newspaper editor who had been thrown into “the bowels of a coastal fort” without any due process for editorializing against the Lincoln administration’s suppression of free speech.

“The party that dominated the United States Senate intended to formalize the concept that meaningful dissent [to the political agenda of the Republican Party] amounted to treason.” After kicking Senator Bright out of office, the leaders of the “Grand Ole Party” then “wished to end their day early in order to prepare for a grand party that had occupied Mary Lincoln’s attention for some weeks.” Marvel writes that White House employees quickly began calling Mrs. Lincoln “the American Queen” who, according to one senator, appeared at the party “looking like she was wearing a flowerpot on her head.” Many of the generals, admirals, Supreme Court justices, and foreign counsels who attended the party, writes Marvel, considered Lincoln to be “a vulgar provincial lacking in either sincerity or statesmanlike qualities.” Later members of his own cabinet would refer to Lincoln as “that baboon down the hall.”

Without bothering to even attempt to amend the Constitution (Article 3 Section 3), the Republican Party in 1861 invented a brand-new definition of “treason.” Treason, to Lincoln and the Republican Party, meant opposition to them. This was very different from the actual definition of treason in Article 3, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort” (emphasis added). As with all of the founding documents, “United States” is in the plural, signifying that the free and independent states (as they are called in the Declaration of Independence) are united in forming a compact of states for their own mutual benefit. The central government was to be their agent.

Treason under the Constitution consists of levying war against “them,” the states. This of course is exactly what Lincoln, and the Republican Party did. Their war on the South was the very definition of treason under the U.S. Constitution. Long before George Orwell’s time, they distorted the meaning of the word to mean exactly the opposite of what the document intended it to mean. As the perpetrators of treason as defined by the Constitution, they accused their political opponents — those who opposed the levying of war on the states — of treason.

Marvel also wrote that on his very first day in office as Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton “would exercise a cool, dictatorial demeanor” as he commenced to enforce the new definition of treason. The U.S. government was failing to recruit enough soldiers for its war despite the fact that it was offering enlistment “bounties” of as much as $415. Despite the totalitarian crackdown on Northern antiwar newspapers, there was still pervasive verbal opposition to the war in Northern cities. Consequently, Stanton “unilaterally abolished” that freedom of speech on August 8, 1862, writes Marvel. Having enacted a policy of military conscription, Stanton “appointed a special judge advocate to deal with dissent and issued instructions for local and federal law officers to imprison anyone who ‘may be engaged, by act, speech, or writing, in discouraging volunteer enlistments, or in any way giving aid and comfort to the enemy . . .’” The vagueness of this order allowed the government to imprison anyone who said anything negative about Lincoln, the Republican Party, or their war on citizens of the South.

“With renewed vigor,” writes Marvel, “U.S. marshals of predominantly Republican pedigree started rounding up malcontents almost all of them Democrats on the excuse that their vocal disagreement with presidential policies discouraged men from volunteering.” Any Northern newspaper writers who dared to criticize the “Grand Ole Party” were treated very roughly. “In August of 1861 . . . a mob of Granite State soldiers attacked the editors of a Democratic Concord [New Hampshire] newspaper and destroyed their office.” “On August 14 Dennis Mahony, the Irish editor of the Dubuque Herald, was arrested by Iowa’s U.S. marshal, H.M. Hoxie a crony of Republican governor Samuel Kirkwood . . . . Mahony had been preaching peace for months . . .” “In jail Mahony met David Sheward, his counterpart at the Constitution and Union, of Fairfield, Iowa.” These men joined in prison “the editors of Illinois newspapers, some Illinois judges, and a few other celebrity dissidents for the long journey to Washington,” where they were thrown into “the Old Capitol Prison.” Apparently, administration critics from “The Land of Lincoln” had to be imprisoned in Washington, D.C. where they could be especially carefully watched.

Irony of ironies: Newspapers affiliated with the Republican Party “crowed over the administration’s latest assault on free speech,” which speaks volumes about the rotten, communistic, totalitarian mindset of the scoundrels who ran the Republican Party of the 1860s. Marvel writes of how “prominent Democrats” all throughout the North were jailed for such things as advising voters to vote for peace candidates; laughing at a local “Home Guard” company; or making “saucy” comments about Lincoln.

Even Democrats running for Congress were imprisoned before election day, as was the case of William J. Allen, a “peace Democrat from southern Illinois” who “went to jail in that mid-August orgy of repression because of opinions expressed during a political campaign.” Allen was running for reelection. Many of his fellow Democrats “were not released [from one of Lincoln’s gulags] until after the fall elections.” Some of them languished in prison “until they relinquished . . . the right to sue their arresting officers for false imprisonment.” Thousands of Northern citizens “felt the hand of some sheriff or provost marshal clutching their shoulders” [figuratively speaking], writes Marvel.

Republican Party thugs were not above beatings and murder of Northern civilians who dissented from the “Grand Ole Party” line. A group of Republican “volunteers in the town of Troy [Kansas] severely beat a citizen whose political observations they resented,” says Marvel. “Political animosity led to the murder of another man in southeastern Missouri.” The local Republican Party-affiliated newspaper editorialized in favor of the murder, writing that the man “had no right to be disloyal to the government” by advocating peace, equating the Republican Party with “government.” The paper also named other local citizens who would make for “acceptable targets.” Such were the origins of the truly Marxist, “Grand Ole Party.”

All of this occurred in just the first few months of the war. During the next several years hundreds of thousands of Northern men would be enslaved by conscription; hundreds of thousands of European mercenaries would be paid to wage war on Americans from the Southern states; hundreds of opposition newspapers would be shut down; a dissenting member of Congress, Clement Vallandigham of Ohio, would be deported; hundreds of draft protesters in New York City would be shot and killed in the streets by Union army soldiers during the Draft Riots there.

This somewhat pervasive “antidraft, antiwar, anti-administration sentiment” led the Republican Party to form “secret societies,” writes Marvel, that would produce a deluge of pro-Republican propaganda for years and years after the war was over. The “Union League” was one such society. One of the things the Republican Party propaganda machine did was to manufacture the myth (i.e., lie) of “national unity” during the war, suggesting that Northerners were united in waging total war on their fellow citizens. The truth is that it was the Republican Party that waged war on the South, not a “united” Northern population. Lest we never forget Senator Bayard’s eloquent attack on Lincoln and the Republicans in his 3-day presentation to the US Senate titled: Executive Usurpation. The myth of “national unity” supporting Lincoln and the Republican Party is a Grand Ole Lie.”

When one examines the history of the “Civil War” through the eyes of the world’s most notorious communist, we are acquainted with a man who hated (as can be seen in his post-war letter to President Johnson) the South out of pathetic ignorance.

Karl Marx declared that the South had in secret prepared to undermine the United States for years, that Jefferson Davis was a “dictator,” that the Confederate Constitution (which outlawed the slave trade) promoted slavery, that the Supreme Court was a tool of slaveholders, and that the South geographically encompassed three-quarters of the Union.

In the autumn of 1861 Marx, the Father of Communism, wrote the following regarding the “American Civil War.”

The war of the Southern Confederacy is, therefore, not a war of defense, but a war of conquest, a war of conquest for the extension and perpetuation of slavery.

It is interesting to observe that virtually all Liberals and a majority of modern-day conservatives would heartily agree with such a statement. This should raise a “red flag” in the minds of those who love liberty. Why is it that the majority of Americans, even those who advocate the free market, agree with the way in which Karl Marx of all people framed the cause of the war? Though Marx and his partner in communism Fredrick Engels lived in Great Britain, they served “as propaganda agents for the Northern cause in Europe.” While most Americans think of abolition of slavery as an end in itself, communists had a completely different view of abolition.” Marx stated in The Civil War in the United States, “Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” After the war was over Marx said in a speech:

“And the successful close of the war against slavery has indeed inaugurated a new era in the annals of the working class. . . Still the Civil War offered a compensation in the liberation of the slaves and the impulse which it thereby gave to your own class movement.”

As one can see, the freeing of the slaves was not an end in itself to the Father of Communism, but rather a means to an end-that end being the revolution of the working class against the proletariat. The War Between the States was a war of centralism vs. federation, of humanism vs. Christianity, of socialism vs. capitalism, and of imperialism vs. popular sovereignty.

After Lincoln’s second inaugural victory, Marx delivered to the 16th president on behalf of the International Workingmen’s Association a letter which stated in no uncertain terms where the allegiance of the communist community lay. The last paragraph of the letter is as follows:

“The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”

Though no conservative anywhere should have a problem with the rescuing of any slave anywhere (Although it may be pointed out that Lincoln never accomplished this task, and the radical republicans enchained all men to civil (taxation) slavery while in the process making the lot of the slave even worse) all of our cerebral senses should stand on end when we hear the words “reconstruction of a social world.” Was Lincoln fulfilling the next step in creating a world in Marx’s image? Sorry for the redundant question.

The answer lies in an idea of strong central government as promoted and administered under George Washington by Alexander Hamilton, then passed on to Henry Clay, and finally making its way into the White House through the election of Abraham Lincoln. The “American System” as it was called is defined by the authors as “nothing less than an attempt to increase the power of the Federal government beyond that which the Constitution authorizes.”

Henry Clay, a politician Lincoln modeled himself after and gave the eulogy at his funeral was an advocate of centralized banking, internal improvements, and protective tariffs all of which promoted a highly centralized, totalitarian state. On occasion these policies are referred to as “State Capitalism,” or a Mercantile system–a system in which the government favors certain businesses and regions over others in exchange for favors and vice-versa.

It goes without saying that it takes a strong central government to impose a system of wealth redistribution. The communist transformation (note: communist and socialist meant the same thing in 1860) of America gained legitimacy under the leadership of the early Republican party due to these policies. If we compare the 10 Planks of the Communist Manifesto to Lincoln’s actions we can see this quite clearly. The Manifesto calls for a “heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” In comparison, Lincoln signed the Legal Tender Act in 1862, and the national currency acts in 1863 and 1864. Using these acts a system of nationally charted banks were created and a federally run national banking monopoly was born. One of the leading supporters for nationalizing banking, (R) John Sherman of Ohio proclaimed, “Nationalize as much as possible [and thereby] make men love their country before their states.” In 1862 Lincoln signed America’s first income tax into law creating the first IRS service.

Another idea supported by both Lincoln and Marx was Federal involvement in education. In 1862, Lincoln signed the Morrill act, named for Senator Justin Morrill who defended it this way: “The role of the national government is to mold the character of the American people.” Instantly money that was made through Federal land grant sales went to funding colleges. It goes without saying that Washington controlled the curriculum. In Carl Sandburg’s six-volume account of the life of Lincoln he highlights something all Americans should find disturbing. When referring to Robert Owen’s (an early American socialist) utopia it is said that “the scheme lighted up Lincoln’s heart.”

The communist connections and participants in Lincoln’s War are too numerous to mention here, so I will mention some of the more influential men and important connections.

After the failed socialist revolutions of 1848 which encompassed most of the European continent, many German, English, Hungarian, Bavarian, etc. atheistic socialists flocked to the United States having been banned from their homelands for treason. Ironically just about all of them wound up in the North (for a number of factors including an already strong progressive movement brought on by Transcendentalists and Unitarians as ardent supporters of the Republican party. During the first GOP convention one of the main objectives of the Forty-Eighters was to assure that “Puritans and native-born Americans” would not control the party. The Germans, being the largest of the immigrant groups, contributed the greatest to Lincoln’s election. Frederick Engels (Marx’s brother in arms) pointed out, “had it not been for the experienced soldiers who had entered America after the European revolution — especially from Germany — the organization of the Union army would have taken still longer than it did.”

The first GOP convention included 19 German American delegates, most of whom were forty-eighters some of whom were personal friends of Marx and Engels. In fact, the GOP platform included protection of voting rights for foreign-born citizens and promotion of the Homestead Act (Vote Yourself a Farm) under the nickname of the “Dutch” (i.e. German) planks. Lincoln valued the German vote so much that he even secretly purchased the aforementioned German newspaper, the Illinois Staats Anzieger before his election. In fact, just about every, if not all, of the German communist participants were at some point journalists for German newspapers in the U.S… It was the “default” vocation for exiled socialists and the media in America is still their playground.

A couple of the more influential German Forty-Eighters (i.e. communist revolutionaries) in the GOP were Carl Schurz who was a GOP delegate, Lincoln supporter, minister to Spain in Lincoln’s administration, General in the Union Army, Secretary of the Interior under Hays, senator from Missouri, journalist, and president of the National Civil Service Reform League (a position he used to disenfranchise Native Americans just as he had the South). Franz Sigel served as a general in the Union Army and became the superintendent of the St. Louis Public School system. It is well worth mentioning that the uniforms of the Third Regiment of Missouri under his command had been customized to resemble the socialist revolutionary uniforms worn in Germany in 1849. Friedrich Karl Franz Hecter who led the German revolution was a key player in obtaining the German vote for Lincoln, he also led a German regiment in the war. August Willich, a personal friend of Marx (Marx described him as a “communist at heart”) recruited more than 1,500 German soldiers and became a Union General. Louis Blenker was General of the 8th New York Infantry and gained a reputation in Northern Virginia as a looter from the way in which he commanded his men to steal from the civilian population. Edward Solomon and two of his three brothers became Generals (the 4th was a Sergeant) in the Union Army, he himself became governor of Wisconsin. Another Edward Solomon (unrelated, who was a bit young to be a forty-eighter yet was still a socialist) became a General under General Grant and was awarded the appointment of governor of the Washington territory from President Grant. Friedrich Kapp, a newspaper man after the German revolution, was an elector for the GOP and became the commissary of immigration in 1867. Fritz and Mathilde Anneka were influential German revolutionaries who were also friends with Karl Marx and supported the Union war effort through speeches and journalism. Mathilde went on to be one of the original radical feminists in the United States. Karl Heizman was also a journalist and became an advocate of terrorism against the South by attacking civilians and women and children (an idea unfortunately implemented). Joseph Weydemeyer was a close associate of Marx’s the Annekes and Willich starting the first Marxist organization in the U.S., the Proletarian League of New York, and starting two socialist newspapers which favored Lincoln. Peter Joseph Osterhaus became a postwar military governor in Vicksburg after serving under General Sherman. Max Weber migrated to New York from Germany to become a General in the Union Army, an IRD agent (modern day IRS), and finally a U.S. consul to Naples.

When we turn our attention to the non-German socialists the connection between the Republican government and socialism becomes even more clear. It is thought that Lincoln himself offered Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian leader of socialism against the Pope the position of commander of Union forces, a position Garibaldi declined upon Lincoln’s refusal to reframe the war as being “anti-slavery.” Two of the members of John Brown’s gang were Forty-Eighters (from Bavaria and Vienna). Frederick Hassaurek from Vienna edited a German newspaper in Cincinnati, campaigned for John Fremont (the first Republican candidate for president), and became a diplomat to Ecuador under Lincoln. Julius Staul, a Hungarian revolutionary, became the US consul to Japan and Shanghai after serving under Fremont in the Union Army as a General. Fremont’s chief of staff was Alexander Asboth, also from Hungary. He went on to become a U.S. diplomat to Argentina. In fact, Fremont is so connected with socialism judging from the men he surrounded himself with that it leaves little doubt that he himself was a socialist. The commander of Fort Delaware (a notorious Union prison camp in which captured Confederates were tortured and killed) was Hungarian revolutionary Albin Francisco Schoepf. Thomas Francis Meagher was an influential Irishmen who helped substantially in the raising and commanding New York’s Irish Brigade. He was also a journalist, lecturer, and not to mention a convicted criminal having been first deported to Australia (penal colony) by Great Britain. Lorez Brentano, another Forty-Eighter became a senator from Illinois and served as a U.S. ambassador to Dresden.

Many of the early republican socialist leaders weren’t foreign at all. John C. Fremont was the first Republican presidential candidate, Senator John Sherman was General William T. Sherman’s brother, General Sherman himself was on a list of “approved communists”, Charles A. Dana who was according to Lincoln the “eyes of the administration” was Assistant Secretary of War and a very close friend of Marx and Engels. Horace Greeley, a committed communist, hired Dana as an editor for his paper The New York Tribune, and included Karl Marx as a columnist.

If we broadened our margins to include Unitarian, Transcendentalist, and other Utopian humanists’ supporters of the Union we would have a very large list of influential socialists indeed.

 Abraham Lincoln said: “The states have their status in the Union and they have no other legal status. If they break from this they can only do so against the law and by revolution.”

At the very least it should be repulsive to hear that Karl Marx and so many of his intimate associates and friends were named among the friends of Lincoln, and it should call into question, by definition just how “Republican” Lincoln was. However, we should call into question the whole origin of the GOP. Are they truly conservative if they look back to Lincoln for inspiration? They were the second party (Federalists) to allow socialists to gain admittance into the U.S. government, which would later usher in the Democrat Party’s progressive era of Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Obama and Biden.

And there we have it—Hamilton to Lincoln and the catastrophe we currently call government.