Lincoln's Unconstitutional Actions

[L Verge]

I remember teaching 8th graders outside of D.C. in the late-1960s, a turbulent time for civil rights movements, forced busing in my county, etc. Along came a magazine article (I think in Ebony) about Lincoln being a white supremacist. The author was someone I had never heard of - Lerone Bennett. It got a lot of attention at first, and then Mr. Bennett appeared to have slipped off of radar, probably because he had dared criticize Lincoln's views on race.

The next time I heard the name Lerone Bennett was in the early-2000s when I was now in the "Lincoln field" and on the Board of Advisers for The Lincoln Forum. Mr. Bennett would be a featured speaker at that year's annual conference in Gettysburg. I have to admit that he was an impressive speaker, and he now had a book on the market, Forced into Glory, that was creating quite a stir for its anti-Lincoln content.

Then, shortly thereafter, we started hearing about another anti-Lincoln author and book with Thomas DiLorenzo and The Real Lincoln. It appeared to me that DiLorenzo and his book created more of a fuss than Bennett had - perhaps because he was a white man finding fault with Lincoln, and Bennett had the race card protecting him (personal opinion here). I also found out that DiLorenzo was not a historian; he was/is an economist and based his criticisms on a wider variety of issues than Bennett. Unfortunately, after attempting to read both of these authors' books, I decided I wasn't smart enough to make sense of it all!

That said, here's a link to a C-Span/Brian Lamb interview with DiLorenzo, if you are interested: https://www.c-span.org/video/?204650-1/q...-dilorenzo