The Tyranny of Presentism: How Modern Patriotism Conceals the Crimes of Lincoln’s Regime
By Chet McAteer
[WOE TO YOU HYPOCRITES]
Modern Americans are obsessed with “patriotism” and “anti-racism,” yet they proudly defend the very regime that inaugurated the greatest Constitutional coup in American history: the Lincoln administration and its Radical Republican allies.
They recite the slogans of equality and liberty while ignoring the towering hypocrisy of their own historical memory. They claim that Secession was treason, yet they champion men who openly declared their hatred for the Constitution, who sought to destroy the Union they now pretend to adore.
They profess horror at racism, yet they whitewash the virulent, exterminationist racism of the Radical Republicans and the Lincoln‑era North. This is not a defense of Slavery as they often claim with vitriolic shouts; it is a condemnation of the moral cowardice and intellectual dishonesty that now disguise war, tyranny, and racial terror as the triumph of “good history.”
The Declaration of Independence was more than a specific expression of sober and pertinent Principles for that period of history alone; it is timeless. It proclaims:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Even Abraham Lincoln, before consolidating executive power, spoke the same truth in 1848:
“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.”
Yet this same Principle is now denied the South, whose very act of self‑determination is branded “treason” by those who claim to worship the Declaration.
The Northern States, far from being beacons of racial equality, were the cradle of systematic Black Codes that reduced free blacks to a kind of pariah caste.
Illinois, Lincoln’s own State, barred free Black entry and hemmed freedmen in with every legal restriction imaginable. The North’s professed horror at Slavery coexisted with the open desire to purge the nation of its Black population altogether.
Reverend James Mitchell, the Lincoln administration’s Commissioner of Emigration, declared in 1862: “Our republican system was meant for a homogeneous people. As long as blacks continue to live with the whites they constitute a threat to the national life. Family life may also collapse and the increase of mixed breed (This word is unacceptable on Trapperman) may some day challenge the supremacy of the white man.” This was not a passing remark; it was State policy draped in “republican” garb.
Lincoln himself, in the Lincoln‑Douglas debates, spoke with grotesque clarity:
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
Lincoln even mocked the idea that Black men might be imposed on Illinoisans, saying, “There is no danger that the people of Kentucky will shoulder their muskets, and, with a young Nig*er stuck on every bayonet, march into Illinois and force them upon us.”
This was the man now sanctified as a “great emancipator” by a presentist mythology that ignores his own words.
The Radical Republican Party, formed in the 1850s, was born out of a radical, virulent, and explicitly racist ideology. It was not a party of universal equality; it was a party of White Supremacy rebranded as moral progress.
Senator Lyman Trumbull, a Lincoln ally, declared:
“We, The Republican Party, are the white man's party. We are for free white men.” William Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, boasted that the Republican motive was not sympathy for the negro at all, but “concern for the welfare of the white man.” In the same speech he dismissed the African race as a “foreign and feeble element, like the Indians, incapable of assimilation,” and branded blacks an “unwisely and unnecessarily transplanted” exotic “pitiful” growth that “it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.” This was not fringe rhetoric; it was mainstream Republican doctrine.
The North’s abolitionist strain did not exempt it from exterminationist fantasies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, lionized as a liberal sage, wrote that “the Abolitionists wished to abolish Slavery but because he wishes to abolish the Black Man, the Dark Man. The Black Man declines…it will happen by and by, that the Black Man will only be destined for museums, like the DoDo Bird.”
John A. Dix, another prominent Republican, fantasized that a “class of Blacks in the North, thus degraded will not multiply and in a few generations, the process of extinction is performed, nor is it the work of inhumanity or wrong.”
Jefferson Davis responded with horror: “With surprise and horror, I heard this announcement of a policy which seeks, through poverty and degradation, the extinction of a race of human beings domesticated among us.”
Generals of the Lincoln regime articulated the same logic in bloodier terms. William Tecumseh Sherman bluntly declared:
“All congresses on earth can't make the negro anything more than what he is; he must be subject to the white man, or he must amalgamate or be destroyed…Two such races cannot live in harmony except as master or slave.”
On another occasion he predicted that the Indians give a “fair illustration of the fate of negroes if they are released from the control of whites,” and he admitted that “I know Northern men don't care any more for the rights…of the negroes…than the Southerners.”
In 1866 he fantasized about Mexico’s mixed‑race population, proclaiming, “All I can say is that Mexico are not of our system…its inhabitants are a mixture of Indians, Negroes and Spanish that can never be tortured into good citizens and would have to be exterminated before the Country could be made available to us.”
This was the voice of the North’s “heroic” general, now eulogized in textbooks and museums.
The Radical Republicans did not merely hold these views; they candidly declared their contempt for the Constitution itself.
Wendell Phillips, the radical abolitionist, boasted in 1859: “We are Disunionists, we want to get rid of the Union.” He went further: “We confess that we intend to trample underfoot the Constitution of this country.”
In 1860 he declared that the Republican party as “the first sectional party ever organized in this country,” pledged “against the South,” and stated that “it was organized with hatred of the Constitution.”
He repeated: “The Republican party that elected Abraham Lincoln is pledged to the downfall of the Union and the destruction of the United States Constitution.”
William Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, echoed this sentiment, warning that the Constitution was “a great danger” which the North treated as a “sacred ark of covenant” while the Southerners used it as a shield, obscuring the fact that the North was willing to violate its spirit while pretending to worship its text.
Southern politicians, not without their own prejudices, saw plainly what Northern radicals refused to admit: that the Republican project was a conspiracy to disenfranchise the South and remodel the Union by force.
Judge William Duer of New York wrote in 1860 that “The Republican party is a conspiracy under the form, but in violation of the spirit of the Constitution of the United States to exclude the citizens of [Southern] States from all sharing in the government of the country.”
Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s rival, warned as early as the late 1850s that “Many Republicans desire a dissolution of the Union and urge war as a means of accomplishing dissolution,” and in 1861 he charged that “The leaders of the Republican party are striving to break up the Union under pretense of unbound devotion to it. Hostility to slavery on the part of the disunionists is stronger than fidelity to the Constitution.”
After the war, R.G. Horton insisted: “This war was not waged by the North to preserve the Union, or to maintain Republican institutions, but to destroy both.” The Cincinnati Enquirer, only two decades later, lamented that “Republican hate has blasted the fair heritage of our fathers.”
Modern Americans pretend that this history is simple, that the South was “evil” and the North “good,” that the Union was “saved” and equality “advanced.” They wrap themselves in flags and “anti‑racism” slogans while venerating the very men who plotted the Constitution’s destruction and spoke openly of black extermination.
They call the Confederate South “treasonous” while ignoring the disunionist aims of the Republican North. This is the triumph of presentism: the modern mind imposes its own moral mania onto the past, erasing nuance, whitewashing power, and turning war, tyranny, and racial terror into a sanitized fable of progress.
They are not patriots; they are posturing conformists who worship the regime of Lincoln and the Radical Republicans while condemning anything that resembles the South’s attempt to dissolve its political bands.
The Declaration of Independence warned that when a long train of abuses and usurpations reveals a design to reduce a people under absolute despotism, it is their right, and their duty, to throw off such government.
Yet when the South attempts to live by that Principle, it is condemned; when the North does the same, it is sanctified. Such is the cognitive dissonance of modern “patriotism”, a patriotism that worships the Constitution only when it suits the victors in a war of conquest.
In Liberty and Eternal Vigilance,
C.M.McAteer
August 6, 2019
References
- The Declaration of Independence, quoted in as above.
- Abraham Lincoln, Speech to the United States House of Representatives, January 12, 1848: “Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.”
- Abraham Lincoln,
Lincoln‑Douglas Debate, Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858, two passages:
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the White and Black races — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
- Abraham Lincoln speech, September 1858 (Charleston debate): “There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races … A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas…”
- Abraham Lincoln, quoted above: “There is no danger that the people of Kentucky will shoulder their muskets, and, with a young Nig*er stuck on every bayonet, march into Illinois and force them upon us.”
- Republican David Davis: “Republicans distinctly and emphatically disavow negro suffrage, negroes holding office, serving on juries and the like.”
- Senator Lyman Trumbull: “We, The Republican Party, are the white man's party. We are for free white men.”
- William Seward, Speech at Detroit, September 4, 1860: “How natural has it been to assume that the motive of those who have protested against the extension of slavery was an unnatural sympathy with the negro, instead of what it always has really been—concern for the welfare of the white man.”
- William Seward, same speech, September 4, 1860: “The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is a foreign and feeble element, like the Indians, incapable of assimilation, . . . and that it is a pitiful exotic unwisely and unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the native vineyard.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The Abolitionists wished to abolish Slavery but because he wishes to abolish the Black Man, the Dark Man. The Black Man declines…it will happen by and good, that the Black Man will only be destined for museums, like the DoDo Bird.”
- John A. Dix: “A class of Blacks in the North, thus degraded will not multiply and in a few generations, the process of extinction is performed, nor is it the work of inhumanity or wrong.”
- Jefferson Davis’s response to John A. Dix, paraphrased as: “With surprise and horror, I heard this announcement of a policy which seeks, through poverty and degradation, the extinction of a race of human beings domesticated among us.”
- Hilton Helper, quoted fragment: “In the present economy of Nature, there are causes in constant operation, which, it is confidently hoped and believed will ere long exterminate from the fair face of the earth, every one of the non-white drones and sluggards and vagabonds here referred to; and all persons who are not white, are, as an innate and inseparable condition of their existence, drones and sluggards and vagabonds of the worst possible sort…The negro should never, under any circumstances whatever, be permitted to reside in greater proximity to white people…”
- William Tecumseh Sherman, November 7, 1866: “All I can say is that Mexico are not of our system…its inhabitants are a mixture of Indians, Negroes and Spanish that can never be tortured into good citizens and would have to be exterminated before the Country could be made available to us.”
- William Tecumseh Sherman, July 10, 1860: “All congresses on earth can't make the negro anything more than what he is; he must be subject to the white man, or he must amalgamate or be destroyed...Two such races cannot live in harmony except as master or slave.”
- William Tecumseh Sherman, July 10, 1860: “The Indians give a fair illustration of the fate of negroes if they are released from the control of whites....I know Northern men don't care any more for the rights...of the negroes...than the Southerners.”
- Wendell Phillips, 1859: “We are Disunionists, we want to get rid of the Union.”
- Wendell Phillips: “We confess that we intend to trample underfoot the Constitution of this country.”
- Wendell Phillips, 1860: “The Republican party is in no sense a National party; it is a party pledged to work for the downfall of Democracy, the downfall of the Union, and the destruction of the United States Constitution…”
- Wendell Phillips: “The Republican party is the first sectional party ever organized in this country. It does not know its own face and calls itself National, but it is not National, it is sectional. It is the party of the North pledged against the South. It was organized with hatred of the Constitution.”
- Wendell Phillips: “The Republican party that elected Abraham Lincoln is pledged to the downfall of the Union and the destruction of the United States Constitution.”
- William Seward, Secretary of State, Lincoln administration: “We are warned to keep to ourselves what we do not believe. It is as well, frequently, to conceal what we do believe. There is apt to be public damnation in both. We are all bound by tradition to the tail end of a paper kite called a Constitution. This Constitution is to us in the North a great danger. While we are devoting ourselves to it as a sacred ark of covenant we lose sight of the fact that the Southerners are using it as a shield.”
- Judge William Duer, of Oswego, New York, 1860: “The Republican party is a conspiracy under the form, but in violation of the spirit of the Constitution of the United States to exclude the citizens of [Southern] States from all sharing in the government of the country, and to compel them to adapt their institutions to the opinions of the citizens of the free [Northern] States.”
- Stephen Douglas, December 27, 1860: “Many Republicans desire a dissolution of the Union and urge war as a means of accomplishing dissolution.”
- Stephen Douglas, February 2, 1861: “The leaders of the Republican party are striving to break up the Union under pretense of unbound devotion to it. Hostility to slavery on the part of the disunionists is stronger than fidelity to the Constitution.”
- R.G. Horton: “This war was not waged by the North to preserve the Union, or to maintain Republican institutions, but to destroy both.”
- Cincinnati Enquirer, January 15, 1881: “Republican hate has blasted the fair heritage of our fathers.”
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