Vol. 41, No. 18
12/01/2025
The Lincoln Dictatorship
AT A GLANCE
• Abraham Lincoln was a dictator by any standard.
• Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and imprisoned his political opponents.
• Lincoln censored the free press.
• Lincoln waged total war on the civilian population.
In his oddly named 1948 book Constitutional Dictatorship, Cornell University historian Clinton Rossiter devoted an entire chapter to “the Lincoln dictatorship.” In it he wrote that “Dictatorship played a decisive role in the North’s successful effort to maintain the Union by force of arms.... One man was the government of the United States…. Lincoln was a great dictator…. This great constitutional dictator was self appointed.”
By using the phrase “constitutional dictator” (and not as a joke), Rossiter was certainly not referring to the U.S. Constitution, but something more like the now-defunct Soviet constitution, which did in fact call for a dictator. This can hardly be said to have been “great” from the perspective of the American constitutional tradition.
Generations of Marxists and other left-wing American historians celebrated, praised, and made myriad excuses for “the Lincoln dictatorship.” In Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution, James McPherson praised the highly centralized government that was created by this “revolution” and approvingly quoted Republican Congressman George W. Julian of Indiana as celebrating, in 1867, the “strong arm of power, outstretched from the central authority here in Washington.” In Lincoln at Gettysburg,leftist historian Garry Wills swooned (figuratively speaking) over how Lincoln supposedly “remade America” into some type of socialist state devoted to egalitarianism (just like the Soviet Union) by using Jefferson’s “all men are created equal” language in his Gettysburg Address. The neoconservative “Straussians” — adherents to the ideas of 20th-century political philosopher Leo Strauss, beginning with the late Professor Harry Jaffa — also embraced this Stalinist interpretation of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
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