Lincoln, Robert E. Lee and Trump
Hidden Dimensions of American History on the Eve of the Inauguration
Copyright©2025 by Independent History and Research • www.revisionisthistory.org
[Reading time is approximately 20 minutes]
If one aspires to discover revisionist history, then one must aspire to the values of the revisionist historian — he who refuses to be pressured to choose a “side,” who has no obligation to secular dogma, whose mission, cognizant of the original sin of his own subjectivity, is to ceaselessly struggle to see more and give an account of what he sees with an utter disregard for the consequences.
It is in that spirit that I write this column.
In the January 11 edition of the Wall Street Journal readers encountered the following headline, “Did Trump Just Win a ‘Tectonic’ Election?”
It is subtitled, A “Civil War historian thinks the 47th president could earn a place in history comparable to Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR.”
The article consists of an interview with historian Allen C. Guelzo, conducted by the Journal’s James Taranto. Prof. Guelzo draws parallels between Lincoln and Trump.
The comparison, in the headline, with Jefferson, is unsustainable. Our third president was a champion of the yeoman-farmer. As an occupation, Lincoln had a strong aversion to farming, due in part to the brutal servitude he personally experienced as an agricultural laborer.
Prof. Thomas Di Lorenzo indicates as much in his classic 2002 takedown, The Real Lincoln. Before becoming president Abe was a corporate lawyer with little interest in America’s agriculture.
Furthermore, for anyone to juxtapose a supposedly flattering comparison between any statesman of integrity and Franklin Roosevelt is indicative of the extent to which the gold-plating still adheres to that war criminal.
The heart of Prof. Guelzo’s analogy centers on Lincoln and Trump, one that will probably offend the Trump-lovers who are Lincoln-haters.
In the Wall Street Journal interview, Guelzo goes to the core of an often-suppressed motivation of the soldiers of the Union Army, 1861-1865:
“Most interestingly, Mr. Guelzo characterizes Lincoln’s GOP, like Mr. Trump’s, as a working-class party. ‘People underestimate how deeply threatened workers in the free states felt by the possibility of competition with slave laborers,’ he says. ‘Those weren’t bankers and lawyers. They were 22- and 23-year-olds just trying to get a start—clerking, doing office work, farming. They understood slavery to be a direct threat.”
To be credible, a defense of the Confederate cause must confront the campaign of the Free Soil Party, led by Pennsylvania’s Democrat Congressman David Wilmot, together with one of the preeminent explorers of the American West, John C. Fremont. These statesmen sought to reserve the American West for free labor alone.
I would qualify their demand by specifying “free white labor,” except for the fact that there were black people north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line who were not slaves. The Free Soil Party was dedicated to working against the scourge of cheap labor in general—slaves being the most insidious instrument for the depression of wages with which free people of necessity must compete, if “compete” can even be used in this context.
There Need Not Have Been a Civil War
The Free Soil movement began to coalesce after America’s victory against Mexico, when the foes of cheap labor promoted in Congress the “Wilmot Proviso” which required keeping the territories won from Mexico— California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico—forever free of “slavery” and “involuntary servitude,” with the exception of imprisonment for lawbreakers.
On August 8, 1846 David Wilmot’s “Proviso” passed the House. It would be rejected in the Senate.
Nineteen years and 800,000 dead Americans later, on December 6, 1865, Wilmot’s measure finally became the law of the land by Supreme Court decision, though not in his name. It would be known as the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
This largely untold “Wilmot” factor prompts a meditation on needless catastrophe and the squandering of lives—on the depravity of our human nature, our imbecility, and the pernicious condition of our postlapsarian state.
We look
But at the surface of things; we hear
Of towns in flames, fields ravaged, young and old
Driven out in troops to want and nakedness;
Then grasp our sword and rush upon a cure
That flatters us, because it asks not thought;
The deeper malady is better hid:
The world is poisoned at the heart.
—William Wordsworth, “The Borderers”
No amount of platitudinous rubbish from partisans North or South, can explain or justify the sink of rottenness represented by the pathological drive in American history for cheap stoop labor. This is a truth that is obscured, overlooked and buried.
How many books have been written about Lincoln and the War Between the States? Five hundred? Five thousand? Are the individuals who have read several dozen of them aware that far above any savior-abolitionist “redemption of the ‘Negro,” or lofty, patriotic fidelity to “preserving the Union,” what most passionately drove those boys from Michigan and Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania, New York and Maine, to don the blue, tote a 50 caliber musket and march hundreds of miles into fratricidal combat, was the yearning to see the American West escape the fate of the slaveholding South, and maintain a vast territory where free men and women would live, work and raise a family without competition from slaves.
Guelzo, perhaps without being fully conscious of the implications of his observation, has glimpsed something similar at work in the election of Donald Trump to a second presidential term:
“Guelzo sees the plates shifting: ‘It was not just one of these throw-the-bums-out elections. Really big, vital Democratic constituencies shifted, especially among younger voters. And I think if there’s one really big thing which seems to have emerged out of this election, it’s a really decisive shift from race to class.’ Mr. Trump’s working-class appeal has shaken the Democrats’ support from ethnic minorities.”
“…a really decisive shift from race to class.”
Divide and Conquer
For centuries divide-and-conquer has been an effective strategy for convincing viciously oppressed Southern whites that they and the plantation millionaires who were making a bundle off the cheap labor of blacks in bondage, were united by their “superiority over the colored.”
This hoax was successfully promoted even though the system almost guaranteed that the white working class would be paid depressed wages when contending with skilled black mechanics, carpenters and stone masons who were hired out by their owners for less than whites could afford to work, leading to a condition of white penury in the Southland which was sometimes nearly as crushing as what the slaves experienced. These whites had more in common with blacks in bondage than with the Periclean plutocrats who squeezed them both. The mass realization of that unifying consciousness was the great fear of the ruling class.
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