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Originally Posted by shazeep
wouldn't surprise me; that story is so hard to get the truth of, thru the lens of history. My understanding was that he refused the banksters, and set up wildly popular "Greenbacks?"
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Forgive my typos in the last post. I sometimes get ahead of myself. That last line should have read....
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But Lincoln was actually doing the bankers' bidding with his war for empire.
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Below is an article that tells the truth about Lincoln and the green backs....
Lincoln, Gold, and Greenbacks
By Thomas DiLorenzo
September 24, 2002
When Abraham Lincoln first entered politics in 1832 he announced to Illinois voters that "My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank . . . in favor of the internal improvements system and a high protective tariff." These three things — central banking, protectionism, and what we today call corporate welfare (for the railroad and road-building industries) are what Lincoln would devote the next twenty-eight years to achieving, working tirelessly in the political trenches of the Whig and Republican parties. In doing so he became a master politician, a designation that the founding fathers warned all citizens to be fearful of.
The year 1832 is significant because that was the year of the big showdown over the rechartering of the Bank of the United States between President Andrew Jackson and the bank’s president, Nicolas Biddle. Jackson won the showdown, the bank became defunct, and the Whig Party was created largely in response to it and in response to Henry Clay’s failure to prevail with the "Tariff of Abominations," which would have raised average tariff rates to nearly 50 percent.
A central bank was the potential political lifeblood of the Whig Party, and no one was more devoted to resurrecting it than was Lincoln. As University of Virginia historian Michael Holt writes in his treatise, The Rise and Fall of the Whig Party, during the 1840, 1844, and 1848 elections Lincoln "crisscrossed the state ardently and eloquently defending specific Whig programs like a national bank . . . . Few people in the party were so committed to its economic agenda as Lincoln." In 1848 Lincoln stumped for Zachary Taylor, promising that if he were elected he would revive the central bank. He would continue to criticize Jackson and advocate central banking for the rest of his political career.
In Monetary Policy of the United States Richard Timberlake clearly explained the paramount importance of central banking to the political ambitions of Lincoln and his fellow Whigs: "To the Whigs . . . a national bank was their life — the vital principle — without which they could not live as a party — the power which was to give them power . . . . To lose it, was to lose the fruits of the election, with the prospect of losing the party itself." In other words, the Whigs always intended to use a central bank, and the printing of paper money not backed by gold or silver, as the means of financing massive patronage schemes ("internal improvements") that they hoped would keep them in power indefinitely. This is precisely why the Jacksonians were so opposed to it.
Andrew Jackson and the Bank War
The best published account of the "bank war" between Andrew Jackson and Nicolas Biddle is Robert Remini’s Andrew Jackson and the Bank War. Jackson considered fiat money to be "the instrument of the swindler and the cheat. For Andrew Jackson, hard money — specie — was the only legitimate money; anything else was a fraud to steal from honest men." (Remini, p. 19). Jackson also believed that the doctrine of states’ rights meant that a central bank was unconstitutional. This view was quite pervasive, especially in the South. As Timberlake writes (p. 83): "The states . . . . were properly jealous and fearful of encroachment by the federal government. Since a central bank would necessarily be a federal bank and would maintain and operate state branches from a distant center, proponents of states’ rights found opposition to a national bank almost mandatory."
Jackson suspected that a central bank would be controlled by Northern bankers and would be used to manipulate politics. Remini does point out that the strongest support for the bank came from New England, whereas the fiercest opposition came from Southern politicians like Jackson.
Jackson had good reason to fear political manipulation by a central bank. The first president of the Bank of the United States (BUS) was Navy Captain William Jones, who had no banking experience and who had just gone personally bankrupt. Murray Rothbard blames him for the Panic of 1819 in his book of the same title, which is cited by Remini.
The Second BUS was run by Nicolas Biddle, who continued to politicize the bank in many ways, including granting low-interest loans and "consulting contracts" to politicians who would support the bank’s expansion. Jackson’s Treasury Secretary, Roger B. Taney (the future chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) complained of the bank’s "corrupting influence" and "its patronage greater than that of government" for good reason. As Henry Clay biographer Maurice Baxter wrote in Henry Clay and the American System, Clay (Lincoln’s political role model) left Congress for two years in 1822 after having incurred $40,000 in personal debt to become general counsel of the BUS. His income from this caper "apparently amounted to what he needed" to pay off his personal debts, writes Baxter. "When he resigned to become Secretary of State in 1825, he was pleased with his compensation."
Another prominent Whig, Daniel Webster, did not even bother resigning from Congress before collecting bribes. He simply demanded a "retainer" from Biddle "If it be wished that my relation to the Bank should be continued."
Biddle proved Jackson’s charges of political corruption to be correct when, during the 1828 election he spent more than $100,000 of the bank’s money in support of Jackson’s political opponents; promised BUS money to friendly politicians to spend on "internal improvements" schemes; paid for the reprinting of Henry Clay’s speeches in support of the BUS; and paid for newspaper ads that promoted himself and the bank and attacked Jackson.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a central bank was constitutional, but it is important to keep in mind that, prior to the War for Southern Independence, it was not at all universally agreed that the federal government itself should be the arbiter of the limits of its own powers. That is, Supreme Court decisions were viewed by many, including President Andrew Jackson, as mere opinions and not Holy Writ, as they are today. As Jackson said in response to the Court’s decision:
To this conclusion I cannot assent. Congress and the president as well as the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution . . . . the opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the president is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the executive when acting in their legislative capacities.
For the next several decades the political battle would continue over central banking, with such advocates of a more centralized and omnipotent state as John Quincy Adams, Webster, Clay, and Lincoln on one side, and John C. Calhoun and the Jacksonians on the other. As Remini writes, "Calhoun argued in favor of a system that would convert the United States to the gold standard exclusively."