The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas DiLorenzo. Three Rivers Press, 2003. $14.95 — 384 pp.

When I was much younger, my family used to visit Washington, D.C. every two or three years. We stayed with friends in nearby Cheverly in Maryland, driving in and out of the city to visit monuments and museums. For a boy from a small town in Piedmont North Carolina, such visits were always exhilarating, adventures laden with wonders ranging from the prehistoric skeletons of the Smithsonian to the long grassy Mall with its throngs of visitors from around the world. I remember particularly being awed by the Lincoln Memorial, the marble mountainside of steps leading to the memorial, the sheer size of the statue of the great man himself.

In more recent times, I find my visits to Washington tinged with sadness, anger and bewilderment. As I travel about the city, I look at the blocks of office buildings, each building averaging four or five stories in height, and I try to imagine why we need so many people running the country. I think of the monies spent in just one of those buildings each day. I think of the sheer waste of the place and find myself looking on our capital city as a sort of vast, extravagant fireplace that burns a lot of wood but gives very little heat.

The Lincoln Memorial, which I loved as a child, now strikes me as the oddest of shrines to be found in our republic. Lincoln now seems to me to sit inside his Greco-Roman temple like some great antiquarian Jupiter on his throne. The huge figure that overwhelmed the emotions of a child now strikes me as some sort of crude statist attempt to keep commoners like me sufficiently cowed.

Given that shift in my bias, I was probably predisposed to agree with many of the tenets presented by Thomas J. DiLorenzo in The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. Here DiLorenzo, a professor specializing in economic history, presents a Lincoln quite different than the man most of us studied in secondary school.

Writing with an eye toward clarity, DiLorenzo shows us that Lincoln’s real agenda in regard to the federal government was that of Henry Clay and other Whigs. Lincoln, who remained with the Whigs until that party fell apart, giving way to the Republicans, supported Clay’s American system. The chief pillars of Republican and Whig economic philosophy were high tariffs to protect American industry, the re-establishment of a national bank, and the federal sponsorship of certain interior developments. The high tariffs desired by Northern merchants and industrialists were hated by agrarian Southerners because such tariffs meant that, with no advantage whatsoever to their section of the country, the cost of Southern imported goods would be much higher.

DiLorenzo also assaults the Lincoln myth on a number of other fronts. Giving much evidence, he demonstrates that the right of secession was admitted by all the founding fathers and that there would likely be no United States if that right was not understood among those ratifying the Constitution. The armies raised by Lincoln, as DiLorenzo points out, did not invade the South to free the slaves, but to bring these states forcibly back into the Union. Lincoln maneuvered the South into firing the first shots of the war by sending supplies to Fort Sumter, knowing full well that he was forcing the Confederacy to follow through on its promise to open fire if an attempt was made to reprovision the fort.

DiLorenzo has much to offer in terms of criticizing Lincoln’s war policies as well. That Lincoln was a dictator of sorts, abusing the Constitution by such acts as the suspension of habeas corpus, is well known to historians. That Union soldiers murdered and raped Southern civilians, white and black, that they stole and burned and pillaged, is also common knowledge, but DiLorenzo ties Lincoln to those acts, showing that he knew and approved of the policies set by his generals, particularly by Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley and by Sherman on his march across the Confederacy.

What makes DiLorenzo’s book more than mere history is that it paints in stark colors the permanent question that looms always behind the Constitution: What sort of government are we intended to be? To DiLorenzo, and to others on both the left and the right, the answer is clear: we were intended to be a federal republic, a government in which the power resides primarily in the states, not in the central government. In many ways that idea of the government intended by our founders ended on the bloody fields of Antietam, Gettysburg, and Cold Harbor. The states, and by way of the states, our Congress itself, have gone a long way toward surrendering their powers to the executive branch, the bureaucrats on the Potomac, and the Supreme Court.

Whether DiLorenzo’s book and others like it may someday rouse our state governments toward resisting the last intrusions on their power is, by this point, probably unlikely. Nevertheless, the professor has done all of us a great service by allowing us to remember what we once were as a nation and what we were intended to become.

(Jeff Minick is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com.)