To the Editor:
Harold Holzer's article on Lincoln's persecution of the press [and everyone else who dared to disagree openly with his polices] is disingenuous at best. Lincoln negated the First Amendment and in fact nullified the Constitution. To suggest that this was acceptable in "the interest of national security" is to validate every tyrant throughout history. And make no mistake, Lincoln was a tyrant. To "protect the government"—and not the Constitution—as he indicated in his First Inaugural Address, he waged treasonous war upon those States that had exercised their constitutional right to secession, thus driving other States from the upper South also to secede to avoid participating in his treason.
Sadly, this criminal who ended the Great Experiment of the Founding Fathers has been elevated to demi-god status as anyone who has seen his "temple" must realize. Equally tragic is the fact that now the truth about Lincoln is being exposed despite such acolytes as Mr. Holzer, more and more Americans across the political spectrum have determined that while Lincoln was indeed a despot who murdered hundreds of thousands of Americans—North and South, white and black, free and slave, soldier and civilian—he was right to do so! After all, they say, he ended slavery—something by the way that he had no intention of doing as the Corwin Amendment and his own words indicate—and "preserved the Union"—which indeed, he did not. In fact, according to Jeremiah Black, President James Buchana's Attorney General, "…the Union must utterly perish at the moment when Congress shall arm one part of the people against another for any purpose beyond that of merely protecting the General Government in the exercise of its proper constitutional functions." Since waging war on States in the pursuit of their acknowledged constitutional rights is treason under Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution, Lincoln actually ended rather than preserved the original Union brought forth by the Founding Fathers.
Valerie Protopapas
