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Summary: ESSENTIAL - great, detailed, extensive, myth-crushing.
Review: It was Ilana Mercer who brought this book to my attention through one of her WND columns back in early 2002. She was quite pleased with it, and the Lincoln worshippers saw her article and started dismissing the book as ridiculous before it was even released. I just finished reading the book for the second time and I find it exceptional, and it withstands all the criticism I've seen so far. The Lincoln fairy tale is _irrevocably demolished_ by Professor DiLorenzo. This book disintegrates the dishonest, ahistorical work by Harry Jaffa, _A New Birth of Freedom_ another major work on Abraham Lincoln. I was amazed by how thorough it is, not limiting itself to the Civil War but the entirety of Lincoln's character and mission itself. Lincoln was very devoted to Henry Clay's American System, which defied the Constitution sought to focus more power in the federal government. Lincoln was a protectionist who accelerated the entanglement of business and state and was devoted to nationalizing the money supply. The Civil War was not a war to end slavery, it was about secession. In order to achieve the empire he sought, Lincoln had to destroy the ability to secede. Then it would become a matter of reversing the concept that states created union, so that union created states. Lincoln sought union, empire, economic power, and though purportedly opposed to slavery, he officially meant to safeguard it where it existed. He actually wanted all the slaves sent back to Africa (a point I have not seen addressed by DiLorenzo's critics). It can be shown that Lincoln had NO plan whatsoever to deal with emancipated slaves. In any case, even though slavery ended they were not at all free. The most important quality of this book is that DiLorenzo's findings are _tight_. Some have tried to refute the book (Church of Lincoln boss, Harry Jaffa; Ken Masugi; Richard Ferrier; numerous others...but those are some of the important ones), but their criticisms are either wimpy excuses for Lincoln's actions or distortions of facts. Many of DiLorenzo's findings are ignored entirely. There is something to be said when critics do not address important assertions. I also value the fact that DiLorenzo's background as an economist causes him to point out the ruinous implications of Lincoln's ignorant economic policies. Final point: there is an abusive straw man laid out by Lincoln supporters to expose an 'inconsistency' in defending secession in light of slavery. Let us put things in perspective: secession IS emancipation, just on a different scale. In principle they are no different. After all, what is slavery but a coerced *union* where the strong dominates the weak? To defend secession is to support one microcosm in the grand scheme of emancipation. Lincoln destroyed the threat of secession as a check on federal power -- that is very bad!
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Summary: AT LAST, THE TRUTH THAT WILL INFURIATE DUMBED-DOWN AMERICA
Review: A quick glance at ehe Amazon.com reviews will show that the reviewers have high emotional investment in the issues explored in Dilorenzo's landmark book. The intentional dumbing down of America over the past 50 years has created a fantasy history of Lincon's catastrophic cult and the disaster that accompanied it. Some of the review votes are a case of shooting the messinger who brings an unwelcome truth. Dilorenzo is an economist by training and profession who stumbled onto startling revelations while pursuing what was to be an economics history book. What he found was a plethora of official records, personal letters from industrialists, and documented frauds that were covered up by historians with their own agendas. The truth was buried in make-believe that in time was accepted as fact. Dilorenzo points out how Lincoln was a leading trial lawyer before going into politics with powerful cartel and industrial backing, especially from the fast growing railroad industry. The goal was to build a transcontinental railroad. This could only be done with subsidies funded by the American taxpayers. By electing their man Lincoln, the railroad interests would be assured that these subsidies would be forthcoming. A secondary objective, one that Lincoln was interested in, as his egotistical legacy, was to build an American Empire that would rival that of Great Britain. To raise money for the railroad cartels tariffs were to be tripled, which would ruin the agrarian South. The southern states focussed on the words in the Constitution that said the states would be united "by the consent of the governed." If the governed no longer consented then all bets were off and the states could legally go their independent ways in peace. Loss of the South would frustrate Lincoln and his railroad cartel backers. He decided to hold the states hostage by force, regardless of what the constitution said. This is fact, not fiction. Dilorenzo's research revealed how Lincoln found a way to induce the South to fire on Ft. Sumpter. No lives were lost but Lincoln now had his excuse to send ships with 400 guns to escalate the incident and start a war that would kill well over half a million Americans, in an age when our population was much smaller. Atlanta was unnecessarily destroyed by a cruel and often dead drunk Sherman. The atrocities committed in Lincoln's war are still remembered by many of the old families of Atlanta. Lincoln could have just let the southern states go their own way without bloodshed. Slavery was dying out anyway, and in time a renegotiated agreement could be reached that would reunite the south and the north. They needed each other because the industrial north needed the raw materials of the agrarian south, and vice versa. Virtually all enlightened nations had already foresworn slavery and it would have died out in America in another ten to twenty years, if for no other reason than it was fast becoming uneconomical and inefficient for the slave holders. Lincoln had offered the brilliant Lee command of the north and Lee declined. Lee did not believe in slavery and immediately freed his wife's slaves when they were married. Dilorenzo found documents proving that Lincoln was not really interested in freeing slaves. His Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in the south, and even then it did not apply to southern slaves in areas under control of the northern forces. It was aan economic weapon to use against the Southern enemy and reduce their ability to finance their war effort. This is tough medicine for many modern myth believers to swallow. Dilorenzo documented how Lincoln's war was about industrial greed. It was about ripping the rights of self government from the states and consolidating the power in Washington where it could be better managed by big business. Dilorenzo's book is a real eye-opener, but as the old saying goes, "None are so blind as those who will not see." Read this book if you want the truth. (I expect this review to get blasted.)
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Summary: Thank you Mr. Dilorenzo!
Review: This book has been reamed by probably half the people who have read it and more than likely all the people who haven't read it. Honestly, I warn anyone who wishes to because you're going to have to consider facts that are the complete opposite from what your teachers in grade school taught you. In this book, Dilorenzo proves in his own right that "The Great Emancipator" was no great emancipator, but a man who would do anything to prove that states could not secede from his union. Of course, the key phrase being "his union." There was no specific union, and the book truthfully states that the United States were literally that. America was a collaboration of states under one government. The Constitution itself shows that when states disagree with the government, it can leave it and form its own, which is exactly what the Confederate South did. I could go on and on trying to reprove what is in this book, but reading over the Constitution and the Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln, Dilorenzo hits the nail on the head. This man was ambitious and was no exception to any other president that this nation has ever had, save George Washington in some respects: he clawed his way into office by kissing up to who he needed to and lived out his party's dream when he got there. No president was without flaws, and over the past 150 years, society has excepted Lincoln from this standard. I thank you Mr. Dilorenzo for an amazing, reflective book, and I admire you for standing against the wave of societal pressures. If you haven't read this book, you need to, it could very well change your outlook on most of American history.
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Summary: Tommy W. Allen
Review: It is evident that the amazon.com reviewer section has turned into Pickett's charge or another march of Sherman's troops through the fields of uncritical thinkers. Despite the slander and nuisance reviews from both slants, read the book. I highly recommend it as a civil war buff. History should be done without generlisations, and I think Dilorenzo's method of getting to the presuppositions of history makes it startling for a culture who fancies in being told what to think than looking at the facts with a critical lense. After all, all facts are interpretted facts. You be the judge. A book that will clearly be here for posterity sake, despite the institutionlisation of American education. There are people who still have critical thinking skills and Dilorenzo possess such skills.
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Summary: Libertarians for slavery?
Review: This book is emblematic of one of the more bizarre sights of our day: the current alliance between some libertarians and paleoconservatives (chiefly of a neo-confederate or white racial nationalist stamp). There can be no objections to critical examination of Lincoln or his policies, but this books' rampant falsehoods, omissions and distortions forever exempt it from informed and intelligent controversy. It is, indeed, more like totalitarian propaganda than scholarship. The author rattles the dry bones of state's rights, while studiously avoiding the all-important question: right to do what? --To enslave people? To censor the press and even personal correspondence of any remark deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about slavery, as was the case in the antebellum South? There is something utterly weird about libertarians who cannot (or more likely, will not) recognize that the racial caste system of the Old South prefigured 20th century totalitarianism in its division of human beings between a 'Herrnvolk' oligarchy and 'Untermenschen' chattels. To be sure, there were no extermination camps, but the first steps down a drearily familiar road had been taken before being rudely interrupted by force of arms, the only thing that would stop it. Once more, we are treated to the old chestnut that slavery would have died a natural death had not meddlers like Lincoln interfered. This almost reads like a parody of Marx's prediction that the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would wither away of its' own accord. Libertarian economists such as Mr. Dilorenzo seem so enthralled with their notion of 'homo economicus' that they fail to grasp that the master-race mentality does not care a whit whether or not its' dystopias are cost-effective. (After all, the rulers are usually doing just fine, thank you.) Not only were concentration camps a net economic drain on Nazi Germany, the cost in transport and manpower needed to keep feeding the gas chambers 'til the last possible moment came at the expense of the Wehrmacht. (Perhaps I should have had the tact not to bring up the Nazis; many libertarians and paleoconservatives seem just as eager to ignore or minimize their atrocities and execrate Churchill and Roosevelt.) One leaves a book like this with a kind of wonderment at the bitterness of people whose festering hostility towards American society easily matches that of a defeated KGB officer, a Nazi (or Serbian) war criminal, or an Islamist.
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Summary: Don't Waste Your Time
Review: In "The Real Lincoln", Mr. DiLorenzo blatantly rewrites history, showing a complete disregarding for the facts. Anybody who has even a high school level understanding of the Civil War should be able to pick out the constant historical inaccuracies that fill Mr. DiLorenzo's book. In short, don't waste your time with this garbage.
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Summary: Best book I have ever read exposing the MYTH of Lincoln
Review: This book once picked up is hard to put down. Read at your own risk and be ready to be challenged if your a Union fan. This book from the WBTS will help you understand why things are the way they are today. Lincoln forever changed our form of gov't-- this book will help you understand how.
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Summary: Unbelievably Bad
Review: Easily the most incompentent work of non-fiction I've ever read. The author, Dilorenzo is not a historian. He is an economist by training and a Libertarian gadfly. And it shows: The perposterous thesis is "supported" if that's the word by inaccurate quotes, quotes taken out of context, and sometimes quotes the author attributes to Lincoln that were actually made by people with whom Lincoln disagreed.
Rating: 
Summary: Less a Thesis Than a Lawyer's Brief
Review: Dilorenzo has so many axes to grind he should take up railsplitting. As history the book is a joke: anyone who wants to learn about the real Lincoln should read David Donald's biography. For southern apologists (who can't abide the thought that the CSA was created to protect slavery) and fans of "man bites dog" wacko theories, though, it's not bad.
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Summary: An interesting mixture of fact and ...
Review: DiLorenzo offers some interesting ideas to the reader. The book is a "good read", however biased and misleading.
There are many misplaced quotes and what I call "cut and paste" quotes, where the author adds things into the comments or just plain places them out of their original context and into his own.
For example page page 165 quotes author George Fletcher as such: "Lincoln's casual attitude toward formal constitutional institutions such as the writ of habeas corpus, " is to be applauded, says Fletcher The reader really needs to notice where the quotation marks end. It's hard to say how the original quote really ended...might have ended with "is deplorable" for that matter. There are several such quotes in this books. I don't think the reader should have to be so cautious when reading a historical book, but you certainly must be with this one. I actually pulled out a few other books to back up the information in this one and found some of the stuff to be wrong information! For instance, DiLorenzo blames Lincoln for drawing fire from the Confederates at Ft. Sumner and describes the incident in detail. I looked into the issue in other books and found out that that event happened before Lincoln became Commander in Chief (President)!
On top of that the author blames Lincoln for the secession and it turns out that Jefferson Davis became President of the Confederacy before Lincoln became President of the United States. So... take this book with a grain of salt. It does have some good information in it and is a good alternative view. Unfortunatly, Thomas J. DiLorenzo fails to make a fair and accurate case.
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