Warmongering Republican Mercantilists (Sound Familiar?)

Warmongering Republican Mercantilists (Sound Familiar?)
by Thomas DiLorenzo

It appears that the Republican Party has always had a proclivity to start wars to camouflage its mercantilist quest for booty. From Pulitzer prize-winning Lincoln biographer David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (Vintage Books, 1947/89), pp. 105-106:

In 1861 "[t]he Radicals [Republicans] intended to enact a high protective tariff that mothered monopoly, to pass a homestead law that invited speculators to loot the public domain, and to subsidize a transcontinental railroad that afforded infinite opportunities for jobbery."

"Secession and the withdrawal of Southern Congressmen from Washington gave the Radicals a chance to enact their program, but an early end of the fighting might imperil the schemes. Ben Wade was, therefore, willing to see the war continued for thirty years, and Charles Sumner proclaimed: 'I fear our victories more than our defeats. There must be more delay and more suffering . . . . We are too victorious.' When peace did come, it must be under terms that would never permit Southern and Western agrarians to challenge the Radical-fostered industrial supremacy."

Historians don't consider Lincoln to have been a "Radical," but he was in fact their front man: His job was to attach his signature to their central banking, high tariff, and corporate welfare legislation, which of course he did in the first twelve months of his adminsitration. James McPherson approvingly refers to all of this as "a blizzard of legislation" that created the "blueprint for modern America."