A President's Mission To Destroy the Press by Thomas DiLorenzo

A President's Mission To Destroy the Press by Thomas DiLorenzo:

"Jefferson's philosophy of government was one of decentralization; Lincoln did more than any other human being to bring to America the centralized, bureaucratic leviathan state that we all slave under today.

Jefferson was a great champion of free speech; his Kentucky Resolve of 1798 announced that not all American citizens intended to comply with the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to criticize the federal government. In his First Inaugural Address he said, 'If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union . . . let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.'

Lincoln, on the other hand, was the First Amendment's worst enemy, orchestrating the shutting down of literally hundreds of opposition newspapers in the northern states during the war, along with the destruction of printing presses and the imprisonment of newspaper editors and owners.

Jefferson was a southerner and an agrarian; Lincoln was a corporate trial lawyer from a northern state whose clients included much of the northern business elite, especially the railroad and banking industries. He traveled throughout the mid-west in a private train car accompanied by an entourage of Illinois Central executives."