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But the indictment doesn't end with simple incompetence: Lincoln quickly becomes guilty of the far greater crime of subverting the Constitution. Lincoln imposed "severe repression" of basic civil liberties; rushed to invade Virginia on May 24, 1861 with "a medieval disregard for individual rights"; licensed Nathaniel Lyon, an "insubordinate, self-righteous psychopath," to break up a neutrality the federal department commander; and allowed an incompetent political appointee to march an army of drunken hoodlums down to Bull Run, where the Confederate army handily sent them fleeing in panic and desertion. He bestows an irrational favoritism on Ulysses S. Grant, who "had fallen into every unforgiveable mistake a commander could make" at Shiloh, and probably owed his victories at Ft. Henry and Ft. Donelson more to "the gallantry of his men than … his own sound management." Throughout these two dreary years, Unionists act "hypocritically" as "mobs" bent on "curbing free expression," the Lincoln administration descends into "tyranny," and the Confederates appear "less as an army of rebels than as a posse of aggrieved citizens" whose love for the Union was only overmatched by "the spirit of independence that had driven the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798." Not until the Confederacy introduces conscription and compulsory re-enlistment can it be said that Jefferson Davis, fully as much as Abraham Lincoln, "broke faith with soldiers" and betrayed "a culture steeped in the doctrine of personal liberty."
The most damaging proof of Lincolnian perfidy is the debacle at Ball's Bluff, or rather the unhappy fate of Charles P. Stone, who commanded the federal division whose units were so roughly handled there on October 21, 1861. Despite Stone's energetic safe-guarding of Washington that spring, and despite the evidence that the failure at Ball's Bluff was largely due to the inexperience of the officer in charge, Col. Edward Dickinson Baker, and the confused signals sent by army commander George B. McClellan, Stone was fingered as the man responsible. The fingering came all the more easily since Stone was a Democrat who had aggravated Radical Republicans in Congress by dutifully returning runaway slaves to their masters below the Potomac. The war—at least in 1861— was not about freeing slaves, nor did Stone show much enthusiasm for a war which would. By December, irritated Republican members of Congress were demanding an investigation of Stone, and in February, it led to his arrest and imprisonment—without charges—for more than six months. [2] The order for Stone's arrest came from McClellan, but for Marvel, it really came from "a government that had dispensed with the rule of law." [3]
But the perfidy does not stop there. Lincoln creates "fragmented departments largely to satisfy the dignity of influential politicos who never should have worn major generals' stars in the first place," and thus opens serve to "prolong" the war. Meanwhile, competent officers deluge "headquarters clerks … processing thick sheaves of resignations" in order to get away from the madness. Options of this sort were unavailable to the enlisted men, however, who could only fill their letters home with pleas to friends and siblings not to follow them into the army. For "thewealthy, military service remained an amusing fantasy"; to the unemployed, it was the lesser of two evils; to the men in the ranks, the army meant high rates of mortality—and impoverishment and starvation for the families they left behind. Through it all, Lincoln relentlessly tramples down every barrier to total control. He federalizes the state militia, permits the secretary of war "unilaterally"to abolish freedom of speech, then tries to shift responsibility for the disappointing course of affairs onto God for having "orchestrated the confrontation that pened the struggle." The Emancipation Proclamation gets a grand total of five pages, liberally sprinkled with asides which indict Lincoln as "either vacillating or sly for openly reneging on his best-known campaign promise."
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