The Union Leagues Created Racial Animosity

by Al Benson Jr.

The Union League, both during and after the War of Northern Aggression is one of those groups you will seldom see mentioned in the ‘history” books. In all my growing up time I never saw the merest mention of them in any history book I came across. Public school history books ignored them. Oh you read about the Ku Klux Klan and how bad they were, but nary a word about the Union League. Proof that the winners get to write the “history” books!

The Union League is not mentioned because most of its actions had a negative impact on the country–so negative that to include them in any real history book would cause many to question the pristine purity of Yankee intent. And again, I don’t impute the term “Yankee” to all Northern folks. Anyway the intent of the Union League was so negative that they were just not mentioned, just dropped from the historical narrative. In fact, if you had not had the Union League with its radical intent, you might not have even had the Ku Klux Klan. at least not in the form it took.

The Abbeville Institute, http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org had this to say, in part, about the Union League: “The Union League is one of the most cryptic of civil war and reconstruction topics even though it was a wellspring of tyranny…According to historian Christopher Phillips the leagues ‘demanded undiluted loyalty to the wartime policies of Abraham Lincoln.’ Western Loyal Leaguers (a kissin’ cousin to the Union League) believed there was no such thing as loyal opposition. Voters either supported Lincoln or they were traitors. ‘Western Loyal Leaguers fought dissent with much more than words. In central Illinois one woman claimed the Republicans ‘were forming vigilance committees to identify every man and woman not loyal to Lincoln’…In 1865, Leaguers tarred and feathered seven Ohio women including one who was a widow of a recently deceased Union soldier…”

The article continued “At the end of the war, league chapters were opened in the South to serve as rallying points for whites that had opposed the Confederacy…The new goal of the Southern leagues…was to make sure the blacks registered to vote and voted Republican…The Union League recruited members with a cult of secrecy and exaggerated promises…” Just like politicians today, promise them all manner of goodies during Southern “reconstruction” and then not deliver on any of it.

Often League members couldn’t read or write and so just voted the way they were told to. Members were indoctrinated, and basically brainwashed, into believing that their interests “were perpetually at war with the Southern whites that were falsely accused of wanting to put blacks back into slavery…” In this way the Union League fostered racial animosity. The lasting harm of this horrible lie is that it has existed and persisted right down to our day. Only now it is being perpetrated by socialist Democrats. How many times have you heard, from some well-paid black demagogue “Vote Republican and they’ll put you back in chains.” It’s all bovine fertilizer, but unfortunately it fools many blacks who have not bothered to do any homework because its so much easier to just pull the Democrat lever down in the voting booth!

According to https://heritagepost.org the Union League in the South was formed to establish the black man’s party and “so bend the negroes by secret organization to the Republican party, so they could be detached and taken entirely from under the control of the white people of the South. The Union League is the right arm of the Republican Party…the League taught in practice that the white men of the South were enemies of the negroes , and it excited the latter to deeds of disorder and interference in every way with the whites…”

In other words, the League fostered racial animosity that continues down to our day, and is even promoted by some in Congress. Do you begin to see why the activities of the Union League are continually omitted from our “history” books? One more bit of our history “down the memory hole” as it were. If you want a little more about the Union League check out a book by John Chodes called Washington’s KKK: The Union League. I believe it was published by Shotwell Publishing, Columbia, South Carolina and can be found at Amazon.com

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Abraham Lincoln–Hero Of The Left–And Unfortunately The Right

by Al Benson Jr.

Those who have done research on Abraham Lincoln and his socialist proclivities realize he has been embraced by socialists, communists, and other left-wing types. This is common knowledge among many people. What is not always common knowledge, though, is that Lincoln, with all his socialist connections, is somehow still an icon of the right. That fact displays the large probability that those on the right have been taught bad history and had their historical understanding tampered with, which weakens their position.

Lincoln’s love affair with the left has been noted in an article on 2/20/23 on http://www.jacobin.com which notes that Abraham Lincoln is a hero of the left. The article states: “From Karl Marx to Eugene Debs to 1930s American Communists, leftists have regarded Lincoln as a pro-labor hero who played a crucial role in vanquishing chattel slavery. We should celebrate him today as part of the great radical democratic tradition.” If what this writer says is true, then Lincoln would have loved China Joe Biden and what he is doing to the country now.

The writer does not claim Lincoln was a socialist, but nonetheless, he grasped the “general concept” of socialism: the primacy of labor over capital and of liberty over property. The article continued: “Proclaiming ‘communism is 20th century Americanism’ leaders increasingly paired Lincoln with black abolitionists including Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, and Sojurner Truth…” If only those people had been aware of Lincoln’s racist turn of mind they might have taken a different tack. Their “hero” would probably have balked at being placed in the company of black abolitionists.

In actuality, Abraham Lincoln never freed a single slave. His “Emancipation Proclamation only applied to slaves in the Confederate States and it left slaves in slave states still in the Union in bondage. There were five slave states in the Union, including West Virginia, that the proclamation did not apply to. The slaves in those states were technically not freed until the passage of the 13th Amendment, which came months after Lincoln departed this mortal coil. So Lincoln was not really opposed to slavery–unless it was Confederate slavery. He was okay with Union slavery. All the hype about him being the “Great Emancipator” is something we could label as “specious humbug.”

Most on the left, and many on the right, don’t like to hear the truth about Lincoln. In an article on http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org for 3/14/22 Dr. Boyd Cathey observed: “Since then (1981) criticism of Lincoln is not acceptable, not tolerated by mainstream conservatives. Instead the conservative establishment now heralds such neo-Reconstructionist historians as Allen Guelzo or even Marxist Eric Foner (a favorite of Karl Rove). Any dissent from the virtual cannonization of Lincoln with contemporary American society comes from mostly Southern traditionalists and their allies…”

Dr. Cathey is right. When I wrote for the old National Educator newspaper back in the 1980s and 90s I did a series of articles on Lincoln and his socialist connections. The people that complained the loudest were patriotic conservatives who were ticked off at my telling the truth about their patron political saint. They didn’t want to be exposed to the blemishes of their “conservative” hero! They refused to be confronted with the facts! Many staunch conservatives today still think today he actually freed the slaves!

In an article by Claude S. Fischer on 4/5/2011 on http://www.madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com it was noted that “During just one term (plus 45 days) Lincoln managed to do the following, ‘socialist-communist acts: taxed the wealth creators…exploded deficit spending…led a federal takeover of currency and banks…forced people to work for the federal government…indulged in government giveaways to special interests…expropriated private property for redistribution…”

Joe Biden would have loved him except for his party label. But, you have to remember that in the mid 1800s the Republicans were socialists and the Democrats were conservatives. Today, both parties are socialist–Council on Foreign Relations socialists!

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Think Only The South Had Slaves–Then You’ve Believed The Lie

by Al Benson Jr.

The slavery question in this country has been carefully crafted so that most people who read about it hear only the arguments put out by the winning side and never get the entire story. The “news” media and many pseudo-historians have a vested interest in making sure it stays that way. Historical fiction sells books that keep people from learning the truth.

An article on http://www.tracingcenter.org has observed: “A central fact obscured by post-Civil War mythologies is that the Northern U.S states were deeply implicated in slavery and the slave trade right up to the war. The slave trade in particular was dominated by the Northern maritime industry. Rhode Island alone was responsible for half of all U.S. slave voyages. James de Wolfe and his family may have been the biggest slave traders in U.S. history, but there were many others involved. For example, members of the Brown family in Providence, some of whom were prominent in the slave trade, gave substantial gifts to Rhode Island College, which was later named Brown University…”

The article continued: “The North also imported slaves, as well as transporting them and selling them in the South…While the majority of enslaved Africans arrived in Southern ports…most large colonial ports served as points of entry, and Africans were sold in Northern ports, including Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Newport, Rhode Island. While the North gradually began abolishing slavery by law starting in the 1780s, many Northern states did not act against slavery until well into the 19th century, and their laws only provided for gradual emancipation, allowing slave owners to keep their existing slaves and often their children.” This isn’t what your “history” books told you is it–if they even mentioned it?

An article on http://www.library.providence.edu noted this commentary by Joanne Pope Mellish, Associate Professor Emerita, History Department, University of Kentucky, “Most Americans think of slavery as a solely Southern institution. In fact, the American slave trade was centered in New England, and enslaved people labored throughout the New England colonies from the mid-1600s through the American Revolution with slavery legally existing in Rhode Island until 1842…A few enslaved people still labored in New England on the eve of the Civil War–long after militant abolitionists had declared war on Southern slavery…” So you have to wonder, if this was the case, were those militant abolitionists really interested in doing away with slavery–or were they more interested in the destruction of the Southern states, with the slavery issue as a cover for their true agenda? For those who may not be able to pull up the above mentioned article by Professor Melish, she has written a book on this subject, “Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ In New England 1780-1860.” It was published back in November of 2000 and you can check it out on http://www.amazon.com

Several years ago three honest reporters from Hartford, Connecticut, I think it was, wrote a book about how the North profited from and promoted the slave trade. I borrowed a copy from a friend and read it. It contained much information that has been carefully concealed over the years about the Northern complicity in the slave trade. This is not something the self-righteous Yankees want generally known–and when I talk about self-righteous Yankees I am not referring to all Northern folks.

But if you have bought the fiction that only the South was involved in the slave trade and that righteous Yankees fought a war to free the slaves then you have bought a specious lie that has no more truth in it than does belief in the tooth fairy. This whole erroneous tale is designed to make Yankees look good and all Southern folks to look bad and you should do enough homework on your own to give the lie to this tale. The truth is out there if you are willing to look. It has been covered up but you can still find it with a little digging. So do a little homework and you can tell the pseudo-historians where to go!

The Great Unanswered Question

by Al Benson Jr.

I and others have asked this question for years now and have yet to even have that acknowledged. Many of us will continued to ask it until we get some sort of answer from the politically correct minions of the viewpoint that the War of Northern Aggression was fought to end slavery. If the War was fought to end slavery then why did the North not start by abolishing slavery in those states that ended up remaining in the Union, some through no fault of their own.

There were four slave states that ended up in the Union–Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, and Delaware–and when West Virginia seceded from Virginia and ended up back in the Union it did so as a slave state. So that would have been five states in the Union where slavery could have been abolished if that had been the real reason for the War. Yet that didn’t happen. So we have to conclude that because it didn’t happen the real reason for the war was not freeing the slaves but something else.

The tariff question naturally comes to mind, due to the fact that the South paid over 80% of the tariffs for the entire country while the North got most of the benefit from that. The North would have been in pretty sad financial shape without the South to foot most of the bill for all the internal improvements made up north. But the politically correct don’t even want to discuss this. The tariff issue is a “dead letter” to them, meaning they can’t get any traction from that issue to promote their racist agenda to blame the South for slavery. So tariffs are ignored and the slavery issue played up to inflame the passions of black folks who are much better off in this country than they would be had their ancestors remained in Africa. It’s a classic “divide and conquer strategy” to separate the races and prevent them having an honest dialogue with one another. Were they to get together and talk, they would soon discover that the Deep State is screwing everybody in this country and the Establishment can’t have that.

Gene Kizer Jr. in his authoritative book Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States has observed that: “Clearly the North did not instigate a war to end slavery. The focus on slavery as the primary cause of the War Between the States–even indirectly–is a fraud of biblical proportions and it prevents real understanding of American history. Pulitzer Prize winning historian and Lincoln scholar David H. Donald, back in the 1960s, was concerned about the overemphasis of slavery asthe cause of the war. He said the Civil Rights Movement seems to have been the reason for stressing slavery as the cause of the war.”

Given the origins of the Civil Rights Movement that would not be surprising. Years ago now, journalist Alan Stang wrote a book called It’s Very Simple–The True Story of Civil Rights. In that book Mr. Stang delved into the leftist credentials of many in the Civil Rights Movement. Some have concluded that Lincoln didn’t have the authority to free any slaves in the Union states which is probably true. Well if he had no authority to free slaves in the Union, where in heaven’s name did he get the “authority” to free them in the Confederate States??? Lots of questions that need to be answered here and yet the politically correct and minions of Wokeism continue to ignore them because they realize they have no answers that make any kind of sense. So they continue to rant and rail about the War being fought to “end slavery” when they know all that is so much bovine fertilizer. Their fondest hope is that you don’t realize the fertilizer content of their absurdities.

The Faith (or Lack Thereof) of Abraham Lincoln

by Al Benson Jr.

I’ve written about this subject before, but not recently, and people nowadays seem to have a tendency to forget much of what they once learned. Our attention span as a people seems to be about seven minutes–the time between commercials on most television stations. What went on beyond the last commercial we often don’t remember too well. And for something we learned yesterday, forget it. It’s long gone!

What made me think of this was something I saw on the internet while looking for something else. I came across a site that said of Abraham Lincoln that he was the first “republican, Christian president.” Knowing what I know about Lincoln that almost made me choke!

Lincoln was supposedly raised in a strict Baptist family. There has even been some question in some circles about his ancestry. Some have claimed he was born in North Carolina where his mother was a servant of the Enloe family. I saw a short booklet about that once. Don’t know if that’s still among my research material or not.

Be that as it may, Lincoln never joined any church. As a young man he was noted as a skeptic and even noted for ridiculing Christian preachers and revivalists. Many who knew him for years like William Herndon and Ward Lamon rejected the idea that he was a believing Christian. Even his wife also said, at one point, that “Mr. Lincoln was not a technical Christian.”

James Adams 1783-1843, called Lincoln a deist. Lincoln was reported to have authored a manuscript that challenged orthodox Christianity and was taken from the ideas of unbeliever Thomas Paine. Some writers have pooh-poohed this but I have read enough about it to think it may well be true. Supposedly a friend after reading it, took it and threw it into the stove, telling Lincoln it would ruin his political ambitions–and in his day it would have. Today, in our apostate age, he might have gotten by with it, but not back then.

According to http://www.thegospelcoalition.org they say of Lincoln: “Well, the truth of the matter is that he was not. He was exposed to Christian influences all his life. He worked with Christian people…but Lincoln never joined a church, never was actively involved in any kind of Christian organization, in fact, had only most minimal religious profile in his own day.” When someone asked his law partner, William Herndon, about Lincoln’s religious faith, Herndon replied to the man “The less said about that the better.”

Donnie Kennedy and I had a chapter in our book Lincolns Marxists about how a freethinker viewed Lincoln. The freethinker was Col. Robert Ingersoll. This freethinker led the charge in defending Lincoln against the charge of being a Christian and instead argued that he was a freethinker. Freethinkers include atheists and agnostics. Christians they are not. I even read one place, and I did an article on this, where Lincoln was reported to be a Rosicrucian. But, then too, some evangelicals have claimed him. All the research I have done over the years has led me to the conclusion that Lincoln was far removed from the orthodox Christian faith.

When a Socialist Became the Secretary of the Interior

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

I have noted in recent articles the impact that socialists and communists had in the history of this country well before the twentieth century–going all the way back to the 1840s. Lots of historians–so called–will seldom, if ever, acknowledge this. Even less will they make mention of the basic socialist foundations of the “conservative” Republican Party. This is history we are not supposed to be taught. And mostly, we aren’t. We have to find this out for ourselves by doing the homework.

One thing that does aid us is that more and more, the socialists are not bashful in admitting their impact on our earlier history. Where the historians ignore it, the socialists brag about it. Donnie Kennedy and I, when we wrote our book Lincoln’s Marxists, the first edition of which was called Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists found this to be true. Incidentally, the first edition of our book is still available.

I just recently came across an article entitled https://worldhistory.us/american-history/impact-of-the-forty-eightors-on-the-amer… that was quite frank in what it admitted. It was published in August of 2018. In part it noted: “For the German-American Forty-Eighters, the best political instrument to ply their revolutionary ideals was the new Republican Party…As a result, the German Forty-Eighters became a significant voting bloc in the Republican Party.

Another German Forty-Eighter, Carl Schurz, a farmer and abolitionist from Wisconsin, helped pave the way for Lincoln’s presidential victory…Schurz mobilized a large part of the German-American vote for Lincoln in the general election…Unfortunately, the German-American reputation as fighters suffered during the course of the war. Schurz, who was awarded with a command by Lincoln, led German-speaking units at the battles of Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. His soldiers retreated pell-mell in those battles.” Germans supplied around 750,000 of the Union’s 2.5 million soldiers. That was in the neighborhood of 30%. Not all of those were Forty-Eighters, but a fair number were.

The article opines that the War of Northern Aggression would have happened whether the Forty-Eighters were there or not but it says “…the outcome might have been a bit different.

As for Carl Schurz, his propensities for socialist activities continued and he ended up becoming the Secretary of the Interior in the Hays administration. Pretty lofty position for a German socialist to occupy in the federal government. In our book Lincoln’s Marxists we provided a bit of information about Schurz and his time in the Interior Department. It was not Schurz at his best.

But even more harm was done by his wife, Margarethe Meyer Schurz. It was she who introduced the idea of kindergartens into America. She was a disciple of Friedrich Frobel, the founder of the Kindergarten movement. It is worth noting that, when the socialist revolutionaries were driven out of Germany and legitimate government was restored, kindergarten were banned in that country. When I first started this blog back in November of 2011 I did an article dealing with the socialist origins of the kindergarten movement. Like so many other socialist agendas it came into existence in the 1800s, not the 1900s in this country. And our children are not the better off for it. Yet, along with the rest of the public school movement we seem to have embraced it.

Now, with Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project, along with the whole transgender movement some are beginning to see what the public schools have been doing to their children and lots of them don’t like it. Let us hope they realize they need to get their kids out of those indoctrination centers we call public schools.

It should, by now, have begun to dawn on people that a lot of the problems we have in this country were introduced here by European socialists of one stripe or another. And when they arrived they found home-grown American socialists who were more than willing to aid them in the destruction of our God-given liberties. That’s what socialism is really all about.

Communist and Socialist Influence In the “News Media” Since the 1840s

by Al Benson Jr.
Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

How many think the “news” media has only been a problem for the past few decades, from sometime around the 1950s until now? If this is what you believe then you have already swallowed half of their lie. In fact, the “news” media–so called–has been a propaganda organ of the Deep State from sometime in the 1840s. And always with a leftist slant!

If you are doing the homework you can begin to notice this in the late 1840s with some of the coverage given to the 1848 socialist and communist revolts in Europe by Horace Greeley’s paper the New York Tribune. Articles by Charles A. Dana for Greeley’s paper purported to cover what was going on at that time in Europe. What they didn’t tell you was that Dana was actually participating in those socialist revolts and then sending back “news” that made them look good. This is a tactic that has been used by the Left ever since then and it must work because lots of naive people seem to buy into such gobbledygook

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This was particularly noticeable in the left-of-center coverage given to abolitionist/terrorist John Brown. The book John Brown’s War Against Slavery by Robert E. McGlone observed that: “To call the role of abolitionist correspondents in Kansas is to compile a list of John Brown’s admirers and disciples: James Redpath, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Addison Williams, Richard J. Hinton, Richard Realf, John Henry Kagi, and others. Just twenty in 1855 when he came to Kansas, Scottish-born James Redpath was a correspondent for three Republican papers, including Greeley’s New York Tribune.”

And he continued: “Englishman Richard J. Hinton, another reporter for Eastern newspapers, arrived in Kansas in June 1856. He soon joined Brown’s ‘army’ and later claimed he would have been at Harpers Ferry had he been properly informed on the date of the attack. Richard Realf reported for Eastern papers and rode with (James) Lane before volunteering to serve under Brown. John H. Kagi, Brown’s second in command at Harpers Ferry reported on Kansas for the Washington National Era..Kagi was the associate editor of the Topeka Tribune…”

Then there was leftist Unitarian Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the man who was “always ready to invest money in treason.” McGlone tells us that “His ‘letters from Kansas’ ran in several Eastern and Midwestern newspapers over the signature ‘Worcester’.” Do you begin to get the idea that John Brown was top-heavy with “news” correspondents? Obviously the political and theological Left had big plans for Brown and his agenda or he would not have rated this much “news” coverage.

But McGlone hasn’t told you everything. Whether that was on purpose or not I can’t say, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt. To fill in some of the missing bits of info, we need to go to Arthur Thompson’s book To The Victors Go The Myths And Monuments. Mr. Thompson can always be depended on to give some what most of the rest leave out. He notes, of Brown that: “Brown also had veteran 48ers Charles Kaiser, August Bondi, and Charles W. Lenhardt who rode with him in Kansas, and the Chartist (English socialist) Richard J. Hinton. Many short histories of Brown leave out any reference to the majority of the aforementioned men. Brown was admired by Emerson, Thoreau, Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, Dr. Samuel Howe, and Frederick Douglas Frederick Douglas was close enough to Brown that Brown confided in him the location of what would become the raid on Harpers Ferry. After the raid, Douglas also fled temporarily to Canada for fear that he would be prosecuted for abetting. The official story is that he was worried about guilt by association. Actually, evidence captured at the time in the possession of John Brown implicated Gerrit Smith, Joshua Giddings, and Douglas…The membership in a wide variety of conspiratorial organizations just among the men who rode with Brown indicates a broad-based influence within the Left.

So you can see that the Left had plans to use Brown and his agenda for their own purposes. Brown was the cannon fodder for part of their leftist revolution in this country. So please, you folks on the left, please don’t continue to bleat about how communism was no problem in this country until Roosevelt. You are trying to defraud us of 100 years of your active agenda in this country in the hope that we will not pick up on it. Sad to say, for you, it isn’t working anymore.

When a Communist Was the Assistant Secretary of War

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Many may look at the title of this article and complain that “this has never happened in this country.” Sorry to disappoint you, but it has–and it wasn’t in the 20th century when we had a carefully orchestrated “Cold War.” It was in the 19th century, back when they try to tell us that communism didn’t exist here. They lied to us. It did exist here, but we are not supposed to realize that fact. It doesn’t bode well for the fake historians.

The man this article is about was not a Communist Party member. But he was a communist in this worldview and he ardently supported what they were doing.

By now, those of you that have followed history know who I am writing about–Charles Anderson Dana–the assistant secretary of war under Edwin M. Stanton in the Lincoln administration. Dana was a promoter of the communist worldview going back to the days before the socialist revolts in Europe in 1848.

An interesting article on https://djdnotice.blogspot.com for October 1, 2014 said of Dana that: “Brigadier General Joseph Weydemeyer of the Union Army was a close friend of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels in the London Communist League (Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, close friend of Marx, published with Joseph Weydemeyer a number of Communist journals and also ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ commissioned by Karl Marx. As a member of the Communist/Socialist Fourier Society in America, Dana was well acquainted with Marx and Marx’s colleague in Communism, Fredrick Engels. Dana, also, was a friend of all Marxists in the Republican Party, offering assistance to them almost upon their arrival on the American continent.) So there were Marxists in the early Republican Party. Reading most of our current “historians” who would’ve guessed?

Dana was also an author of some note (all the better to propagandize you, my dear). He is reported to have written a book Stanton’s Reporter: Charles A. Dana in the Civil War. He also wrote Proudhon and His Bank of the People,: Being a Defence of the Great French Anarchist,… There’s more to the title but I am not going to print the rest out here. It’s long enough for a short paragraph.

Another book mentioned in the research I located was written by Carl J. Guarneri and is called Lincoln’s Informer: Charles A. Dana and the Inside Story of the Union War. I don’t know where this author is coming from but his book shows there is still interest in Dana. The book Horace Greeley And Other Pioneers of American Socialism by Charles Sotheran notes, on page 291 that “Horace Greeley selected the best managing editor the Tribune ever had, from among the Brook Farm Socialists. This was Charles Anderson Dana, the present editor of the New York Sun. For those who may not know, Brook Farm was a socialist experiment in communistic living that eventually went belly-up as most socialist experiments do. It has been described as a “Unitarian, Humanitarian, and Socialistic experiment.”

Arthur Thompson in his informative book To The Victors Go The Myths And Monuments has noted on page 198 of that book that: “Charles Dana was a vice president of the National Convention of Associations. He was a member of the Proudhonian Club, nicknames the 48ers of America, composed mainly of Americans who had participated in the revolution of 1848-49 in Europe. In 1848 he spent eight months in Europe covering the revolutions for the New York Tribune, and he shared Marx’s views. Dana wrote that the purpose of the uprisings was ‘not simply to change the form of government, but to change for form of society.’ He did more than report. Dana is but one example of reporters who participated in revolutionary activities and then posed as impartial observers…This has long been a tactic of the Left, and continues to this day.” In other words, Charles Dana was part of the 19th century’s “Fake News” media. And let us never forget that it was him who hired Karl Marx to write for Greeley’s newspaper.

So here we have Charles A. Dana, writer, socialist revolutionary, and eventually Assistant Secretary of War under Edwin Stanton. And if you think Stanton was not aware of all this then you gravely underestimate Mr. Stanton. He knew! As sharp and shrewd as Stanton was he would have known all of this and still he pegged Dana as his chief informant. That should tell you something about Stanton as well as Dana. Dana was the perfect example of communist infiltration of the US government in the 19th century. We had plenty of that in the 20th century. I begin to wonder how much the 20th century infiltrators learned from Charles A. Dana.

Communism in America? Go Back to 1850

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

I recently came across an article on https://www.historynet.com that was not new, but was interesting. It was originally published back in 2012, in June of that year, in Civil War Times. I used to read this magazine, but it had been my experience that it did not deal overly much with issues like this, as that was not politically correct at the time (and still isn’t).

Sarah Richardson wrote the article and it dealt with an interview it seems she had with Robin Blackburn, the author of the book An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln. Blackburn is a British historian and former editor of the New Left Review so no one can accuse him of being a paranoid right winger. He brought out some interesting points about Lincoln and Marx. Richardson noted of Lincoln that “Up until the age of 21 he was working without payment for his father. On some occasions his father would hire out his son’s services and even then didn’t hand over the wages.” Blackburn seemed to think this may have affected Lincoln’s views on slavery. It’s possible but it’s hard to say for sure. Although we know from some of Lincoln’s later comments on slavery it was not a major issue in his invasion of the South. He claimed to be preserving the Union (though it was going to be a preservation by force). But he said at one point that if he could preserve the Union by freeing some slaves and not others, he would do it and if he could preserve the Union by freeing none of the slaves he would do that. And his “Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 freed only slaves in Confederate territory. It freed no slaves in Union-held territory.

But the American connection to Marx goes further than Lincoln. Richardson’s article stated: “Marx himself was only 30 when he was caught up in the 1848 revolution, and he edited one of Germany’s main revolutionary newspapers. At that time, he was visited by Charles Dana, an American journalist and managing editor of the New York Daily Tribune. Dana later hired him as the Tribune’s European correspondent, A lot of his research for the Tribune ended up in his famous book Das Capital, published in 1867.”

Donnie Kennedy and I, in our book Lincoln’s Marxists, the first edition of which is still available under the title Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists dealt with Mr. Dana and his communist proclivities at some length. Mr. Dana was a prime mover and shaker in the movement to promote communism in this country in the 1850s. Arthur Thompson, author of the very informative book To The Victors Go The Myths And Monuments also deals with Charles Dana on page 198,givng more info on Dana’s leftist background.

The Tribune published, over the years, something like 450 of Marx’s articles, with at least 300 published under his name, though some researchers claim his helper, Engels, wrote quite a few of these because Marx was just too lazy to write when he often needed to, so Engels stood in the breath often while Marx was daydreaming about ways to save the world (for communism).

After the revolts of 1848 ended, thousands of the leftist revolutionaries involved fled to this country. Many of those kept in contact with Marx and continued their leftist activities by writing for German-language papers in this country, which, over time, eventually influenced many Germans here toward a Marxist point of view.

Richardson noted that “There were about 200,000 German-Americans who fought for the Union, and about 40,000 were in units that had the Germain language as the medium of command.” So these people were over here, supposedly to help the North “free the slaves, and they couldn’t even speak the language. Bet your “history” books never mention any of this! And besides, the idea of leftists fighting to “free” anyone from anything is just ludicrous All you have to do in our day is look at the countries that were enslaved under communism and you begin to understand the communist concept of “freedom.” You are “free” to do what the communists tell you to do or they shoot you or put you in a “re-education” camp” until you see things their way. And if you don’t, then they shoot you!

Richardson then notes that Dana, who had been responsible for getting Marx to write for Horace Greeley’s paper became the assistant secretary of war in 1862. He remained in close contact with good buddies of Marx like Joseph Weydemeyer who later became a general in the Union Army. And also mentioned “Another member of the Communist League in Germany in the 1840 was August Willich, who became a Union general.”

And she made another interesting point from her interview with Blackburn She said “Worth noting, too, that Marx and Lincoln were both influenced by German philosophy–in Lincoln’s case, as transmitted by such writers as Theodore Parker.” Parker was a noted Unitarian. And all the stuff I have read about him never mentioned anything about any German connections–but it now seems there were some.

We have got to begin to realize that communism in America was alive and well in the early 1850s here and that we have been lied to by those faux-historians that tell us you never had a problem with communism in America until the Roosevelt years. Let’s wake up and begin to do the homework ,lest we be victimized even further in our own day.

Lincoln & the Forty-Eighters

by Al Benson Jr.

Member, Board of Directors, Confederate Society of America

Yesterday, March 2nd, I did an interview with Cliff Kincaid for one of his you tube presentations. It was mostly on Donnie Kennedy’s and my book Lincoln’s Marxists. Hopefully I was able to give Cliff my take on the communist influence in this country in the years both before and after 1848. I don’t do a lot of these interviews so I am always concerned that I do not do well enough on them. Cliff had read our book and so was mostly in agreement with the history of socialism in this country that we presented.

However, in doing some preliminary research for this interview, I read an article by a man who claimed that Marx’s influence on Lincoln was pretty minimal and he took to task a writer who dared to disagree with that. He claimed that Lincoln just reading Karl Marx’s articles in utopian socialist Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune would not have been enough to reinforce Lincoln’s views on socialism. While I don’t totally agree with that, I got the impression he was trying to soft-pedal Lincoln’s socialist worldview–something Lincoln-lovers dearly want to hide.

In doing more research on this I came across an article by a John Nichols published in the International Socialist Review https://isreview.org that was quite informative. The socialists do not hesitate to identify with Lincoln as he was, in a sense, one of them. Mr. Nichols noted, in part, that Greeley’s Tribune was one of the papers delivered to Lincoln’s law office in Springfield and that Lincoln was “Keenly aware of the rising tide of liberal, radical, and socialist reform movements in Europe, a tide that would peak–at least for a time–in the ‘revolutionary wave’ of 1848 and its aftermath, the young congressman joined other American Whigs in following the development of that year’s ‘Springtime of the Peoples’ which saw uprisings against monarchy and entrenched economic, social and political power in Germany, France, Hungary, Denmark and other European nations. For Lincoln, however, this was not a new interest.” That was an interesting comment there at the end. It indicated that Lincoln was familiar with the socialist upheaval going on in Europe.

Nichols continued: “Long before 1848, German radicals had begun to arrive in Illinois, where they quickly entered into the legal and political circles in which Lincoln traveled. One of them, Gustav Korner, was a student revolutionary at the University of Munich, who had been imprisoned by German authorities in the early 1830s for organizing illegal demonstrations.” Korner ended up in Illinois where “Within a decade he would pass the Illinois bar, win election to the legislature and be appointed to the state Supreme Court. Korner and Lincoln formed an alliance that would become so close that the student revolutionary from Frankfurt would eventually be one of seven personal delegates-at-large named by Lincoln to serve at the critical Republican State Convention in May 1860, which propelled the Springfield lawyer into that year’s presidential race. Through Korner, Lincoln met and befriended many of the German radicals who, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, fled to Illinois and neighboring Wisconsin. Along with Korner on Lincoln’s list of personal delegates-at-large to the 1860 convention was Friedrich Karl Franz Hecker…” He gets prominent mention in Lincoln’s Marxists.

And Nichols also noted: “The failure of the 1848 revolts, and the brutal crackdowns that followed, ;led many leading European radicals to take refuge in the United States, and Lincoln’s circle of supporters would eventually include some of Karl Max’s closest associates and intellectual sparring partners, including Joseph Weydemeyer and August Willich…Lincoln did not merely invite the 48ers to join his campaigns, he became highly engaged with their causes.”

So what do Nichols’ comments here tell you about where Lincoln was really at? It would appear that the 48er influence on Mr. Lincoln, due to his socialist proclivities, was much stronger than most writers would have us believe. When theologian James Henley Thornwell referred to “Red Republicans” back in the 1850s it would seem he knew what he was talking about. Wonder how much he knew about “Honest Abe.”