Lincoln, Abraham

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, and the first Republican President, is generally held in low esteem by paleoconservatives. Jurist Marshall DeRosa notes,

Lincoln's expansive interpretation of presidential powers made him the most imperial president in American history, thereby setting a dangerous precedent for predisposed successors. The incarceration of approximately twenty-thousand political prisoners, the closing of three hundred newspapers, the interruptions of state legislatures, the blockade of the South, the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus, explicit and implicit defense of the Supreme Court, the sanctioning of the creation of West Virginia, private property seizures, and electioneering/voting irregularities have all been rationalized as necessary war measures. ¹

Lincoln has been dubbed the American Caesar, and many conservative observers see his war to supress the secession of the southern states as America's journey across the Rubicon. Lincoln ushered in an unprecedented level of corruption, centralization, and usurpation of lawful authority, in flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution. By his precedents, Lincoln arguably effectuated the wholesale evisceration of the compact nature of the Union and the abdication of the constitutional polity of the American founding fathers under the pretense of saving the Union. The twentieth-century New Deal had its roots in the postbellum Reconstruction of the 1860s. As economists Mark Thornton and Robert Ekelund, Jr. observe:

The flurry of new laws, regulations, and bureaucracies created by President Lincoln and the Republican Party is reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, for the volume, scope, and questionable constitutionality of its legislative output. . . . [I]t should not be too surprising to learn that the term "New Deal" was actually coined in March 1865 by a newspaper editor in Raleigh to characterize Lincoln and the Republicans and persuade North Carolina voters to rejoin the Union. The massive expansion of the federal government into the economy led [historian] Daniel Elazar to claim that "one could easily call Lincoln’s presidency the New Deal of the 1860s."²

Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted upon the Constitution, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to carry through his revolution, for the coercive welfare state to come into being and bring about the conditions against which we are fighting today. Lincoln, I would maintain, undermined the constitutional safeguards of freedom as he opened the way to centralized government with all its attendant political evils. ³