'Lincoln Unbound' by Rich Lowry

Mr Lowry’s book won’t be on store shelves until 11 June 2013, but from the information available it seems likely that it will simply be another make-believe tale in the long line of fabrications about Pres Lincoln since his assassination, portraying him as an inexhaustible store of sunbeams and happiness for the peoples of the old Union rather than the source of death and murrain that he actually was.

The list of people praising it should be enough to give one pause: Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Bill Bennett, and Rep Paul Ryan, worshippers all of an indivisible, glittering, powerful, and meddling American Empire.

But the words of introduction ‘from the back cover’ are even more dreadful. 

‘. . . the man who would be immortalized as the "railsplitter" never wanted to earn his living with an ax. He educated himself in a frontier environment characterized by mind-numbing labor and then turned his back on that world. All his life, he preached a gospel of work and discipline toward the all-important ends of self-improvement and individual advancement. As a Whig and then a Republican, he worked to smash the rural backwardness in which he was raised and the Southern plantation economy that depended on human bondage.

‘Both were unacceptably stultifying of human potential. In short, Lincoln lived the American Dream and succeeded in opening a way to it for others. He saw in the nation's founding documents the unchanging foundation of an endlessly dynamic society. He embraced the market and the amazing transportation and communications revolutions beginning to take hold. He helped give birth to the modern industrial economy that arose before the Civil War and that took off after it.’

This is astounding!  Anything remotely associated with long established tradition and custom, with the warm and humble bond between man and the natural world that he was made to steward and hallow, and with selflessness, faithfulness, and rootedness is to be rejected for the terror and ugliness of endless revolution, the machine, and self-centredness. 

Here is the great philosophy that will save America!  The philosophy of the president ‘revered today across the political spectrum’!

Do not believe it.  Whatever your state or section, do not believe it.  The future good of the states of this unfortunate union lie in undoing what Pres Lincoln hath wrought.  There are many ways to do this.  One can make a good beginning by reading for himself the truth about what Lincoln really believed and did. 

From politics and history built upon falsehood, Most Merciful Lord, deliver us.