Most serious historians will agree that the best book about the politics of that war is Ludwell Johnson’s North Against South: An American Illiad. But they almost never refer to it while talking about the war. Johnson’s key point about Lincoln’s politics (as Thomas DiLorenzo also points out) is that Lincoln was not a Republican; he was a Whig. Big difference.

The Whig party wanted to convert the U.S. from a decentralized federal-republic (as laid out by the U.S. Constitution), in which each state was free to establish its own priorities, into a nation-state with an all-powerful central government. As their first big move, the Whigs wanted to use that government to tax the citizenry heavily to speed up the industrialization of the U.S. They did not care one way or the other about slavery. Nevertheless, the Whig party broke up in 1854 because of regional differences between its Northern and Southern wings, resulting from the regions’ conflicting views about slavery.

Along came the (Northern-based) Republican party, which picked up the Northern Whigs, but also the Free-Soilers and the abolitionists. The Republicans were still interested in consolidating power in a national government, but they were more interested in arresting or ending slavery in the U.S.    Lincoln the Whig joined the Republican party because it was then the only game in town for him. But as the president, Lincoln did not even call his party the Republican party; he called it the Union party.

The wartime U.S. Congress was dominated by the newly-elected Radical Republicans. They soon saw that if the North won the war, they would soon be out of a job. After the war, the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic party would reunite, and then they would badly outnumber the (Northern) Republicans. But if—--after the war--—the Republicans could free the Southern slaves and give them the (Republican) vote; and if they could force a military occupation of the postwar South to prevent the Southern Democrats from voting (i.e., via Reconstruction), the Republicans would then outnumber the Democrats after the war, and they could keep control over the federal government into the distant future (as actually happened).

Accordingly, the Radical Republican Congress demanded that Lincoln change the primary focus of the war from “preserving the Union” to “ending slavery”--—so as to prepare the Northern public for what would happen after the war. Unaccountably (to the Radical Republicans), Lincoln refused.

Lincoln had his own postwar plans--—as evidenced by the fact that as soon as the North would conquer a Southern state, Lincoln (who could do so using his “war powers”) would arrange for that state to be readmitted to the Union as quickly as possible, under favorable terms, with a state government consisting largely of local Cotton Whigs (the Southern wing of the pre-war Whig party). It seems evident that Lincoln intended to resurrect both wings of the Whig party after the war (with himself at its head, of course), strongly enough to outnumber the Democrats. Having won the war, the Northern Whigs would then have no reason to remain in the Republican party, if given the choice. Lincoln would leave the Radical Republicans to wither on the vine.

The Republicans weren’t quite sure what was going on, but they knew that Lincoln was blocking their plans. A battle royal between Lincoln and the Radical Republicans ensued behind the scenes--—for control of the war, control of the U.S., and control of the postwar South. Ludwell Johnson recounts the details of that no-holds-barred struggle in his book. (I recap them in my book, The South Under Siege 1830 – 2000.) It’s quite a story. For a long time, Lincoln singlehandedly outmaneuvered the Radical Republicans—--in most cases preempting Congress’s legitimate powers.

But the Radicals had an ace in the hole: wartime atrocity propaganda. Throughout the war, the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Liberty Leagues invented out of whole cloth reams of tales about the torture and mutilation of Union soldiers by Confederates on the battlefields and later in the prisoner-of-war camps, and handed them to the Northern news-media, which printed them verbatim. Gradually this false propaganda infuriated the Northern public against the South so badly that toward the end of the war, the Northern public began to demand that the Southern slaves be freed, so the white Southerners could be punished suitably by being forced to live on terms of equality with the freed blacks.

Lincoln--—the perfect politician--—realized that the Radical Republicans had taken that hand; so toward the end of 1864 he proposed the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, to free the slaves. No one knows what Lincoln’s next move against the Radical Republicans would have been—--except that surely there would have been one, and it would probably have been another dazzler; but before he could make it, he was assassinated.

Basically, the blacks really owe their blood-purchased freedom to the Radical Republican Congress, not to Lincoln (abolition was inevitable regardless). And the noble cause for which they were freed and given the vote was to perpetuate the Republicans in power in Washington. Not a hint of this is mentioned by the Lincoln historians in the two-hour PBS TV program, “Looking for Lincoln.” Instead, in their new storyline as described by Professor Gates, Lincoln the initial cynic gradually becomes a True Believer in black civil-rights.

Claremont’s [Lincoln] court historians have spent decades performing intellectual somersaults to "explain" why Lincoln supposedly had to destroy the Constitution in order to save it; why he opposed equality but believed that "all men are created equal"; how a "great humanitarian" could micromanage a vicious and bloody war on civilians for four long years; how he "saved" the Union by destroying its voluntary nature; and myriad other myths. ---Thomas DiLorenzo, from his essay "Claremont’s Court Historians"