Excerpt:
"The Lincoln administration ushered in myriad economic interventions that only a few years earlier were considered illegitimate and unconstitutional. Consider just a few of the major ones. There was central banking with the National Currency Act, a precursor to the Federal Reserve’s monetary monopoly. The first income tax was invoked. Although it was ended after the war, it established a precedent that eventually led to the permanent establishment of the tax.

Military conscription was mandated for the first time. Massive regulation and regimentation of the wartime economy became a “model” for socialist planners during the post-war years as they successfully argued for regulating business in peacetime as they had during the war. Tariffs rose three-fold and remained historically high for decades. Massive, federally funded “internal improvements” (i.e., pork-barrel spending projects) were initiated, as were the first government-funded old-age pensions. Although all citizens paid federal taxes in the post-war era, only Union veterans qualified for the pensions.

Immediately after the war the public-school monopoly, which had been started in the North, was imposed on the South by federal military dictatorship. Compulsory, statist brainwashing—including false histories of the misnamed Civil War*—became universal. And government at all levels ballooned as Americans were taught to believe in the oxymoronic phrase, “government problem solving.”

The horrors of waging total war against civilian populations was legitimized as federal armies marched through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in 1864, burning every house, farm, and business in sight, and terrorizing helpless women and children. General Grant famously ordered cavalry officer Philip Sheridan to render the valley so barren that a crow flying over it would have to pack its own lunch.

Sheridan’s terror campaign was so successful that to this day residents still speak of “The Burning.” After the war Sheridan, Sherman, and Custer went on to finish off the Indians, administer the occupation of the South for a dozen years, and reorganize the voluntary local militias into a federally funded (and controlled) “national guard.”

The great historian of liberty, Lord Acton, understood the implications of this assault on constitutional liberty. In a November 4, 1866, letter to Robert E. Lee he wrote, “I saw in States Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy.... I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.”"