Lincoln eulogies merely "facet of herd psychology."

Richmond Times-Dispatch, February 23, 1928
LINCOLN EULOGIES MERELY "FACET OF HERD PSYCHOLOGY"

To the Editor of The Times-Dispatch:

Sir:

It would be interesting to read a logical statement of the facts which lead South-
erners to join in the unthinking adulation of Abraham Lincoln. We praise others
for accomplishments and for fixing policies: Washington, Monroe, Jefferson, Mason —
each left us something formative and definite. Lincoln left nothing.

He was not an abolitionist. He said in Congress that any State or group of States
had an inalienable right to secede from the Union and set up separate government.
He said that if he were a Southerner he would not liberate his slaves, and that if
they were liberated they would soon be exterminated. In his first inaugural address
he stated with grave emphasis that he did not intend to interfere with slavery in the
slave States and added, "I believe I have no right to do so and I know that I have
no intention of doing so." In the same speech he said that to send armed forces
into any State "upon any pretext whatever, is among the gravest of crimes."
Notwithstanding these pledges, he sent armed troops into Virginia while it
was still within the Union, invading its neutral soil; and within a year after he
made the pledges he interfered with the institution of slavery.

But, while he is called "The Great Emancipator," he did not liberate the slaves.
He pretended to free them on soil engaged in "treason and rebellion," on which soil
he had no authority to do this or anj'thing else, but in his emancipation proclamation
he excluded all other States, and specially named one-half of Louisiana, all of West
Virginia and seven counties in Virginia, including "the cities of Norfolk and Ports-
mouth," as places where slavery could and did still lawfully exist. Slavery con-
tinued to exist legally in this country until after Lincoln's death.

"Liberty," a Northern magazine, surfeited with the stories of Lincoln's sweet
humanitarianism, is forced to tell us that all this is exaggerated, that Lincoln ap-
proved the "bloodiest campaigns of the war," that he backed Sherman's march to
the sea, "one of the most relentless military movements in history," and that the
terms of surrender he imposed on Lee were harsh and severe.

We are told that if Lincoln had lived, reconstruction would have been less bitter.
There is proof that it would have been otherwise. Mr. Lincoln (U. S. Official
Records) twice telegraphed to General Burnside, asking him if he would bombard
Fredericksburg at night with the "new incendiary shells" which he had on hand, and
in his last telegram he urged Burnside to do so and said he would like to come down
and see the spectacle. But Burnside refused. Lincoln approved the bombardment
of the town with women and children in it and refused to punish the officers who
shelled a refugee train in the depot loaded with women and children.

Abraham Lincoln was a man of power or he would not have gotten to the Presi-
dency. He may have been a great man, one among the first American twenty or
thirty, but to compare him to men like Washington, Jefferson and Monroe, to laud
him as Southern papers and Southern people do, without reason, is merely a facet
of herd psycholog}'. It is following a lead set by irrational partisans immediately
after the war. Lincoln was a man forced into a center of a storm that beat him about
and drove him from one opinion to another; that forced him to speak one thing and

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act its opposite. If he is great, then why does not some ore tell us precisely what
policies he instituted or what things he did that entitle him to the present hymns
of praise?

JOHN T. GOOLRICK.
Fredericksburg, Va.

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Copy of letter sent by air mail to Senator Robinson, care U. S. Senate, Wash-
ington, D. C, February 14, 1928.

February 14, 192S.
Senator Robinson,
Washington, D. C.
Dear Senator Robinson:

I cannot tell you just how surprised I was when I saw in the night's paper that the
leader of the Democratic party was among the "Dixie Senators Honor Lincoln."

Just why a Democrat should be praising Lincoln, the black Republican, is more
than I have ever been able to understand; and why a Southerner should do such a
thing is far beyond my comprehension.

The only thing that I can find as an excuse is ignorance, and I have found so much
of that among our Southern people that it makes me at times almost ashamed to
say that I am a Southerner.

You certainly are not acquainted with the history of that man or his times. When
all the efforts of the Southern Statesmen and Democratic Statesmen cf the North
were trying to pass some measures through Congress to prevent the Union being
ripped wide open, these measures were being defeated by Abraham Lincoln. When
Senator Crittenden, of Kentucky, "than whom do anti-Republican in the country
was better entitled to the respect and deference of the Republicans," was proposing
his resolutions that would prevent the withdrawal of the Southern States, it was
Abraham Lincoln's influence that was defeating them.

When the border States, as a last resort, had called a convention of all the States
to try and devise some plan of settling matters, it was Abraham Lincoln that would
have no compromise and brought about the defeat of the purposes for which this
convention was gathered — the convention that came more nearly represent-
ing the people of the whole country perhaps than any other body that tried to
do anything at that most critical of all times.

It was those speeches that Lincoln made in his triumphal procession from Spring-
field to Washington, couched in ambiguous language, that gave the final touches to
the war that followed. "Such playing with double-edged words — and words that
flung fire among the flax — would have been ridiculed in a debating society, and they
were unpardonable in one whose words must affect the actions of governments, the
motion of armies, and the temper of nations."

When all had been attempted by the South and her friends to avert further se-
cession and the border States had remained in the Union, it was Lincoln's call for
75,000 volunteers to wage war against their brothers of the Southern States that

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drove Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and your State, Arkansas, from the
Union, rather than bear arms against their brothers and thus compel them to bow
their heads to as bloody a tyrant as ever ruled in any republic throughout the his-
tory of the world.

With the oath upon his lips still fresh from swearing to heaven that he would
administer the laws and uphold the Constitution, he went forth to sign orders that
set in motion the sinews of a war that drenched this land of ours in the most bloody
of all wars up to that time. And this is the man that you, as a leader of the South — •
in whom she has placed her confidence — stand up in the Senate and tell the world
that you regard as "immortal" — "whose courage and charity excel that which has
been exemplified by the leadership of armed forces, at any time in the annals of
human history."

I would sooner expect the Belgians to stand in their market places and thusly laud
the German Kaiser and his troops, as to hear you stand, in what should be considered
the most consecrated place in our nation and laud the man who caused as much
sorrow in America as Kaiser Bill ever caused in Belgium.

I would as soon expect to hear the Christians of Armenia stand in the high places
and laud the Turks as to hear you stand before the world and say that the man who
appointed such generals as Sherman and Sheridan and Grant to power, in order to
crush and wreak vengeance upon our fair Southland — tearing women in the throes
of childbirth from their beds and devastating the country far and wide with their
German hordes — was the one to excel in "charity and courage" for all time!

How long will the ignorance of the leaders that we have sent to lead us into the
hands of those who care not for us be endured? And when will we get men who
know their history and have the courage to stand up and tell the world that
a spade is a spade, and the Abraham Lincoln is not what the Republican party
for all these years has claimed him to be, and that they only use him as a smoke
screen to cover up their schemes for the ruin of other sections?

If you will read Korton's Youth's History of the Great War, or Bledsoe's War
Between the States, or Greggs' History of the United States, or President Buchanan's
Administration on the Eve of Rebellion, or Davis' Rise and Fall of the Confederacy,
you will at least get some conception of what you are saying when you stand as our
representative and declare that Lincoln was the sum total of all courage and charity.

If this does not serve to open your eyes, go study Lincoln's records as to stirring
up servile insurrections, turning the slaves loose upon the helpless women and chil-
dren of the South, when he issued his Emancipation Proclamation; how he made
medicines contraband of war, which resulted in the South being blamed for the
"horrors of Andersonville Prison," and refused to let the English people administer
to the wants of our Southern soldiers in the Northern prisons. Finally, have you not
read in the Congressional Records, the record of the Republican party led by Lin-
coln, which culminated in the blackest of black days for democracy, known as the
"Reconstruction Days," and which was so graphically described in the House of
Representatives March 23, 1872, by Dan. Vorhees, for many years Representative
and later Senator from Indiana, under the caption, "The Plunder of Eleven States."

What act that Lincoln ever performed would lead you to believe that had he
lived things would have been different after the war, from what they actually were
during the war? The same leaders that Lincoln had placed at the helm when he
became President were the leaders that took the bits in their mouths and ran riot

over the Southern States during the days of Reconstruction, and all the Republican
party wants now is for the Democratic leaders of the South to O. K. all these
actions of Lincoln, for by endorsing the actions of the hated leader of their party
the Republican party itself is endorsed. Lincoln's party rejoiced at his
death, and his posthumous glorification was simply a vote-getting propo-
sition.

Believing that in an unguarded moment you have been swept off your feet, and
in order to carry your point later, as Shakespeare says, you have "done a little wrong
to do a great right," you have unwittingly stumbled into a very great wrong, out of
which I hope yoa may be some day able to extricate yourself, I am,

Very truly yours,

M. D. BOLAND.

The Evening World.

New York, August 1, 1927.
Dear Miss Carter:

Many thanks for the material you so kindly sent me. I want to use the picture
of the S. C. Legislature. It will interest you to know that the picture of Moses,
"the Robber Governor," I shall use will be taken from the Rogues Gallery of the
Police Department here. I have uncovered an enormous amount of valuable material.
Some in the form of a diary by one of the radical leaders in Congress which has never
before seen the light shows that the Republicans were greatly relieved when
Lincoln was killed. They hated him like poison and only began to "love
him" when it was needful to get the negro vote in the South in 1868 and
afterwards.

I should like any information you may turn up on the bond question, The period
is the darkest and most savage I have ever heard of in any country, I hope to make
it a vivid picture. It will be a complete vindication of the South in Reconstruction,
and will also give more credit than is customarily given to some of the Democrat
leaders of the North, like Hendricks and Voorhees.

With many thanks,
Sincerely,

(Signed) CLAUDE G. BOWERS.
Mary D. Carter,
"The Maples,"
Upperville, Va.

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