Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing (a division of Random House), 2002. xiii + 333 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN: 0-7615-3641-8.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Gerald Gunderson, Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of American Business and Economic Enterprise, Trinity College, Hartford, CT.

Tom DiLorenzo is known for speaking his mind, which is very much the case in his new book, The Real Lincoln, where he takes on one of America's greatest heroes and icons. He argues that Lincoln encouraged the Civil War as a vehicle to increase the role of the Federal government.

This reviewer does not doubt that Lincoln sought ways to expand centralized government and is sympathetic to DiLorenzo's argument that Lincoln's wartime policy improvisations created a precedent for mischief later. The problem is that this book ignores much of the relevant scholarship that has reshaped our understanding of American growth and institutions. Take, for example, slavery, which plays a central role in DiLorenzo's argument. He dismisses it as an inefficient institution, lacking incentives for growth such that it probably would have disappeared if left alone. The standard interpretation now, however, initiated by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's, Time on the Cross, is that American slavery contained powerful incentives for growth that yielded a long-term upward trend in slave prices. Thus, the market certified rising productivity of slave labor as well as boosting the wealth of their owners. There was little prospect that slavery would die economically; that required an outside push. The slave population also grew, keeping pace with that of the (historically exceptionally high) free population. This was achieved by a system of incentives developed within slavery that encouraged the slaves to work and to earn more responsible positions.

American slavery differed from all other major slave holding areas in the nineteenth century. While the populations of others tended to die out and had to supplemented by further imports of slaves, the American population expanded robustly, turning relatively small imports of slaves into, by far, the largest and most valuable supply in the world. American slaves' value was approaching $3 billion by 1860, so that actions that implied only relatively small reductions in slave prices, such as not returning runaway slaves, could produce losses of property in the hundreds of millions.

This wealth explains why emancipation in the U. S. did not take the peaceful course that it did in all other nineteenth-century slave societies. DiLorenzo believes America's exception indicts Lincoln for pressing toward war but that overlooks how much more expensive compensated emancipation would have been in America. The latter also would have been much larger than the cost of fighting the war was expected to be. It is true, as DiLorenzo argues, that the Civil War proved to be much larger and more expensive than compensated emancipation. But the Civil War became much larger than Americans, or most others in the world for that matter, expected. Once committed to war the ex-ante predictions proved much too small. Indeed, the Civil War proved to be a watershed in military history, becoming the first of what military historians call "modern wars." Such wars are an order of magnitude larger than their precedents, such as the American Revolution, putting far more resources -- relative to the economy -- into the war. (The Europeans would not experience the shock of this intensified style of warfare until World War I, which they initially called the World War because they could not imagine there ever be another one like it.)

Ironically, the dramatic increase in the relative size of war probably results from economic growth. Not only were there more resources that could be put into action but also the relative cost of doing so went down as improvements in transportation allowed the military continuous resupply. During the Revolution land campaigns stalled after about two weeks as the horse-drawn supply line dried up. In the Civil War, however, railroads and steamboats kept the reinforcements coming continuously.

A corollary of modern war is that the enemy is not just the opposing armed forces, but also his entire economy because that feeds the resources that keep the conflict going. DiLorenzo criticizes the Northern government for being unduly destructive of the Southern civilian economy but that is the implication of modern war, and one that participants in other such wars soon discovered for themselves.

DiLorenzo believes that Lincoln's wartime attack on slavery was a hypocritical tactic to justify continuing the war. He cites Lincoln's statement at the beginning of the war that the Union -- not slavery -- was the real issue. He also argues that only a tiny share of the population were hard-core abolitionists. One difficulty in making such a judgment is that antislavery sentiment in the North -- as in the rest of the North Atlantic economies -- grew rapidly prior to 1860. In 1840 or even 1850 it was still a minority view, focused at election time, in splinter, noncompetitive political parties. The Republican Party, emerging as a national party, in the 1850s was the first to have a generally understood antislavery cast. This was not a commitment to the immediate abolition of slavery nationally but rather the median Republican voter believed that slavery was wrong and should be nudged toward eventual elimination. As of 1860 that meant attacking the low hanging fruit, slavery in federally controlled territories and the District of Columbia, while refusing to aid recapturing run away slaves. But the eventual intention was clear, enough so that Southern slaveholders saw Lincoln's election as a capitalized reduction in their slave wealth if they remained in the Union.

As with his dismissal of slavery, DiLorenzo doubts that the appeal of the Federal Union really should have had much influence on the conflict. Again we need to recognize the profound effect that economic growth had had since the Constitution was approved some seventy years prior. In 1789, most Americans identified themselves with their state in good part because most of their economic efforts were on their own farms or with neighbors. Of course, most of their home states had already been established for more than a century and had recently been the focus of their resistance to British power. In contrast, by 1860, drastic reductions in transportation costs prompted Americans to become much more economically specialized, buying and selling over greater distances, including across state lines. A high proportion of Americans, such as Lincoln, had moved to new states, including at least a third living in states that did not exist in 1789. American naturally identified with the larger context in which they now operated. Peter J. Parish, in The American Civil War, has captured how mid-nineteenth-century Americans had paired their deference for the Constitutional basis of their society with the concept of Union. Similar to getting rid of slavery, preserving the Union had significant appeal to Northerners and their representative, Abraham Lincoln.

In effect, The Real Lincoln is the latest example of one of the largest topics of American historiography: what caused the American Civil War. Numerous alternative causes have been suggested, many of which were clearly flavored by the dominant concerns of the time they were propounded. For example, in the aftermath of the shockingly high costs of World War I, a group of historians reinterpreted the Civil War as a mistake that could have been avoided had it not been for the bungling politicians of that era. Tom DiLorenzo has returned to a similar theme, the war was unnecessary except for -- in this case -- one conniving politician. But again, as so often in the past, the pattern appears to repeat, the effort to reach a conclusion has outrun its basis in history.

The reviewer, Gerald Gunderson, is editor of the Journal of Private Enterprise. The author, Thomas DiLorenzo (Professor of Economics, Loyola College in Baltimore, MD), serves on the Board of Associate Editors for the Journal.