Lincoln's Greatest Failure

"Every other country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war . . . . How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans when the hatred lingered for 100 years."

~ Ron Paul to Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" in 2007

The new Steven Spielberg movie about Lincoln is entirely based on a fiction, to use a mild term. As longtime Ebony magazine executive editor Lerone Bennett, Jr. explained in his book, Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream: "There is a pleasant fiction that Lincoln . . . became a flaming advocate of the [Thirteenth] amendment and used the power of his office to buy votes to ensure its passage. There is no evidence, as David H. Donald has noted, to support that fiction". (Emphasis added).

In fact, as Bennett shows, it was the genuine abolitionists in Congress who forced Lincoln to support the Thirteenth Amendment that ended slavery, something he refused to do for fifty-four of his fifty-six years. The truth, in other words, is precisely the opposite of the story told in Spielberg’s Lincoln movie, which is based on the book Team of Rivals by the confessed plagiarist/court historian Doris Kearns-Goodwin. (My LRC review of her book was entitled "A Plagiarist’s Contribution to Lincoln Idolatry").

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