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Lincoln Über Alles: Dictatorship Comes to America. By John Avery Emison. (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Company, 2009. Pp. 320. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-58980-692-4.)
In Lincoln Über Alles: Dictatorship Comes to America, John Avery Emison challenges the history of secession and racism and the belief that Abraham Lincoln was a great president. Throughout the book Emison forcibly defends the South and argues that secession was legal in 1861 and remains legal. Indeed, it would provide a valuable check on the "Leviathan-like" federal government he decribes (p. 14). Emison's argument is legal and historical. The South, he claims, was merely exercising the right the colonies had exerted in breaking away from England. The colonies had predated the federal government and therefore were sovereign. Secession, not specifically prohibited in the Constitution, was a right reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment. Military force, not justice, the author...