Missouri state rep shares article calling Abraham Lincoln a ‘tyrant’

A Republican in the Missouri House of Representatives celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s birthday by sharing a blog post that calls the 16th president the “greatest tyrant and despot in American history.”

Warren Love, an Osceola Republican, shared the post, which concludes with a lament that “John Wilkes Booth did not act four years earlier,” on his Facebook account. Stephen Webber, the chair of the Missouri Democratic Party, took a screenshot of Love’s post that he shared on Twitter.

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The article, “The Terrible Truth About Abraham Lincoln and the Confederate War” was written by Michael Hutcheson, a conservative blogger in Atlanta with 73 followers on Twitter. Hutcheson is the kind of writer who thinks it’s clever to state, “I oppose Barack Obama because he’s black” only to then expose the “true” racists — the “blindly loyal supporters of Obama who ignore all of his disastrous policies and their terrible consequences,” etc., etc.

When he initially shared Hutcheson’s essay, Love cut and pasted a passage from the article in his status update without putting the words in quotation marks. Love said he would edit the Facebook post to make it clear the words were the writer’s, not his.

Love told The Pitch that he regularly shares articles about presidents and other famous figures on their birthdays. He said the Lincoln article “showed a side of Lincoln that a lot of people never really see, or don’t realize that a lot of those events happened under his tenure.”

In his essay, Hutcheson argues that Lincoln waged a “reign of terror”:

Lincoln was the greatest tyrant and despot in American history. In the first four months of his presidency, he created a complete military dictatorship, destroyed the Constitution, ended forever the constitutional republic which the Founding Fathers instituted, committed horrendous crimes against civilian citizens, and formed the tyrannical, overbearing and oppressive Federal government which the American people suffer under to this day.

Asked if he believed Lincoln was a tyrant and a despot, Love said: “I believe there are people that do. I believe there’s a lot of things about Lincoln that have not been taught in history, but I don’t know if there was anything in that article that was actually untrue.”

Love said there are many different viewpoints of the Civil War. In his essay, Hutcheson argues that it’s “absurd” to believe the South seceded to protect slavery. This is a position rejected by serious scholars. “The South was preoccupied with state’s rights because it was preoccupied first and foremost with preserving slavery” as Colonel Ty Seidule, a historian at West Point, explains in a video that went viral in 2015.

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But as Love sees it, the people who don’t get it are the people who don’t want to think about the role that tariffs and other issues played in the Civil War.

“I feel so bad, especially in the last few years, that people have bought into things that they really have not checked out and seen really if they’re right or if they’re … I guess some people call it fake news,” Love said.

Love rejected a suggestion that he’s flirting with racism by wanting to frame the war in terms of state’s rights and other issues. He said he’s definitely not a racist. “I’m a person that I want to tell all the history,” he said.

As for Lincoln, Love credited him with keeping the country together. But he suggested the price need not have been so high. “We can’t rewrite history,” he said. “But would he have done it differently? I would have liked to have thought so. But the way it turned out, it was a devastating era in our history, and nobody can ever change it.”

Love betrayed a grudge against the Union. He said a print of George Caleb Bingham’s politically charged painting of General Order No. 11 hangs on his office wall. He also mentioned the Sacking of Osceola, a Jayhawker initiative led by Gen. Jim Lane. “He was funded by the federal government of Abraham Lincoln,” Love said.

“It was a horrendous time,” Love added. “I just know my history better than most people.”