Most Americans are unaware that President Abraham Lincoln implemented a much more centralized and authoritarian government than the one he inherited. He overthrew the original union, which was very libertarian in policy, eradicating a union of consent and replacing it with a centralized state—a dictatorship set above the people. The government would no longer serve us, but we were to serve it. Not just the federal government, but the states as well, became vastly more authoritarian because of Lincoln.

Few of our modern governmental abuses occurred before Lincoln—he originated big government, and our current nationalist and democratic views of both the Constitution and centralized government’s power. Ludwig von Mises Institute President Thomas DiLorenzo described Lincoln as “The founding father of big government.”

Lincoln invaded the Southern states without congressional consent and blockaded ports without declaring war. In 1863, the Lincoln administration passed the “Indemnity Act,” which placed men in power outside of the restraints of law.

In Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo wrote that Lincoln’s expansion of federal power caused him to be “denounced” by his contemporaries as “the architect of a new, more expanded and intrusive federal government,” or at least as the prophet of a “highly centralized, (i.e., monopolistic) form of government that can better expand the welfare state, regulate the economy, or adopt socialism.” Guelzo continued, “Lincoln was certainly no libertarian.”

Lincoln disagreed with Thomas Jefferson’s view that the government that governs least governs best. Or, as Jefferson stated in his first inaugural address, “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”

This was often how antebellum America’s central power operated, until Lincoln and his party platform. The Republican Party transformed our country.

Guelzo writes how Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, created spy networks to determine how citizens would vote, used soldiers to interfere with elections, and deported and arrested legislators who spoke against him, including Indiana State Senator Alexander Douglass and U.S. Congressman Clement Laird Vallandighram from Ohio. Governors, congressmen, newspaper editors, lawyers—many were imprisoned for speaking out against him. He shut down major newspapers, including the New York World, the New York Journal of Commerce, and the Chicago Times. He arrested around 14,000 civilians in the North and used military force to influence elections. Guelzo attempts to defend Lincoln’s unconstitutional actions, but admits:

“For in every one of the complaints of the Lincoln-haters, stretching back to 1861, there is invariably an element of truth. Union soldiers did interfere with elections, especially in the contested districts…nineteen members of the Maryland legislature were arrested…before the legislature was due to meet for fear that their votes would top the state over into secession…suppressed democrat votes.”

Lincoln was concerned Maryland might side with the South, so he put it on military lockdown. General Nathaniel Banks was sent to search for secession legislators. General Benjamin Butler threatened to bombard Annapolis if they met to discuss it. In Lincoln Reconsidered, Lincoln scholar David Donald writes, “Lincoln told the general to take any steps required including the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and, if necessary…the bombardment of their cities.” They used color-coded ballots so pro-peace voters in Maryland could be spotted and arrested. Donald quotes a Delaware senator as saying, “If I wanted to paint a despot, a man perfectly regardless of every constitutional right of the people, I would paint the hideous form of Abraham Lincoln.”

When these and other actions were declared unconstitutional by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, Lincoln simply refused to obey the decision. In Lincoln Unmasked, DiLorenzo tells us that before being deported by Lincoln, Vallandigham accurately describes Lincoln’s purpose for war:

“Overthrow the present form of Federal-republican government, and to establish a strong centralized government in its stead…national banks, bankrupt laws, a vast and permanent public debt, high tariffs, heavy direct taxation, enormous expenditure, gigantic and stupendous peculation…No more state lines, no more state governments, but a consolidated monarchy or vast centralized military despotism.”

When asked about supporting internal improvements that were not constitutional, Lincoln stated in 1847 that he would not modify his stance just because they were not constitutional. Lincoln and the Republicans instituted national control of banking, internal improvements, subsidized railroads, and a drastic rise in taxation, all in part to create “national loyalty.” Donald recorded the following actions taken by Lincoln:

“Without Congressional appropriation or approval, he entrusted 2 million dollars of government funds to his private agents in New York in order to pay for ‘military and naval measures necessary for the defense and support of the government…he authorized the arbitrary arrest of suspected secessionist and other enemies of the government…civil rights throughout the North were drastically curbed…exercised power ‘almost as free from restraint as a dictator or a sultan.’ It required but a line from the President to close down a censorious newspaper, to banish a Democratic politician, or to quell suspected members of the state legislature…Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation of amnesty and pardon marked another major expansion of presidential powers.”

Guelzo wrote, “Even had there been no civil war, it is safe to say that Lincoln’s administration would still be regarded as a hinge presidency in American history, if only for the way his economic policies.”

In “War is Good Business,” published in America’s Civil War Magazine, David Goldfield wrote:

“The republican dominated congress passed a series of measures that transformed the national economic landscape for all time…significantly expanded the role and fiscal reach of the government and helped create a national economy that dwarfed its predecessors…When Lincoln took office, the main role of the federal government was to deliver mail…by the end of the war, the government-supported an army of a million men, a national debt of 2.5 billion, distributed public lands, printed a national currency, and collected an array of internal taxes…with the south absent….republicans passed the pacific railway act…created a country more closely resembling a national state than a dispersed region…the Lincoln administration gave away 158 million acres to railroads, passage for the first time in American history of a progressive income tax-raising 55 million during the war, the government also floated large bond issues, printed 150 million I greenbacks. The national bank act of 1863 resurrected the Hamiltonian idea of a national banking system.”

DiLorenzo demonstrates that during the war, Lincoln violated the Geneva Convention rules for war. He had entire towns destroyed, civilians murdered, animals killed, food taken, and houses burnt. He waged war against non-combatant civilians, confiscated private property, burned hundreds of churches, and the blockade withheld medicines. In his essay “Just War,” libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard condemned Lincoln’s actions by writing the following:

“The North…broke the 19th-century rules of war by specifically plundering and slaughtering civilians, by destroying civilian life and institutions so as to reduce the South to submission. Sherman’s famous march through Georgia was one of the great war crimes, and crimes against humanity of the past half century and a half. Because by targeting and butchering civilians, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman paved the way for all the genocidal horrors of the monstrous 20th century.”

In The Real Lincoln, DiLorenzo goes through every grievance brought up by the colonists in the Declaration of Independence and shows Lincoln guilty of all of them. He justly concluded, “Lincoln and his administration committed every one of the acts of tyranny for which Jefferson condemned the king. On this score Lincoln was an even worse tyrant than George the Third was.”

In his first inaugural address, Lincoln referred to the Union as a “national government.” His opinion was that “No State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union.” And that if citizens attempted to leave said nation, the government had the right to kill them until they submit, a drastic change from former Northern politicians. For example, in 1788 Alexander Hamilton opined:

“To coerce the states is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised…A complying state at war with a non-complying state. Congress marching the troops of one state into the bosom of another?…Here is a nation at war with itself. Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself? a government that can exist only by the sword?

It seems that libertarianism and Lincoln do not mix; rather, Lincoln can be considered the libertarian’s worst nightmare among American presidents, for he helped undermine the original Union’s libertarian nature and instituted an oppressive central government in America.